He took it standing, white about the mouth. He did not defend himself. It was the worst answer he could have given her, and the only honest one he had.
Farrant finished the business that same week. He had watched the garden too, from better windows. On the Thursday he came upon the three of them at the flagstone, said not a word, smiled, and went in. That afternoon, sent for to sign for her fortnight's wages, Jacintha stood in the steward's room and watched Farrant tear a spoiled page of his own notes in two, twist the halves, and drop them into the spill-box by the grate — idle housekeeping, waste paper on its road to the fires.
She would have occasion to remember it.
By evening the household had its orders, in writing: the stray cat about the offices was vermin within the meaning of the standing rule. Gathercole the butler would see the animal drowned before quarter-day. Mrs. Kedge the housekeeper came for the saucer herself, without one word of relish, because she followed the keys and the keys were Farrant's. It went to the china cupboard, and the scullery step stood bare for the first time in two years.
The order went out without crossing the Duke's desk: from the steward's room while Clifford was ten miles off at the tenant court, and down through Mrs. Kedge and Gathercole, as every order in that house had gone since January.
Gathercole was sixty-six and had carried the old Duke to his grave. He slow-walked the order one full day, on the grounds that a sack could not be found, and was afraid, visibly, mortally, to slow-walk it two. "Miss," he said, stopping her by the servants' stair, and got not one word further, and she took his meaning entire.
And that evening Gooseberry vanished. The step was bare and the ledge was bare; the flue-top was cold, the currants empty.
Jacintha went out into the blue summer dusk to search, dismissed already and past caring who saw her, and was barely across the kitchen yard when the Duke fell in beside her without a word, in his shirtsleeves. He had learned of it within the hour, on coming home to a bare step, and had come down at a run. Two years of watching had spent themselves at last, and this was what remained: a man who came down the stairs.
"You will not find her by calling," Jacintha said. "You cannot call a cat. You have to think as she thinks."
"Then think aloud, and I will follow."
"Warmth." She stood still in the darkening yard, working it. "She is a small animal in a house that has been made cold on purpose, and she has spent all summer mapping the exceptions. The scullery ledge — cold since they raked the fire out. Her Grace's hearth — the door is kept shut now. She knows where this house is still alive better than anyone in it. So: where is the last warm place she has not shown me?"
They ran the great cold house through their hands room by room, and the kitchen chimney answered it: the one fire even Farrant could not order out, its warm brick spine climbing up through the walls.
"The still-room passage," Jacintha said slowly. "The old flue cupboard. The chimney passes behind it — the back wall is warm as a loaf on baking days. And the door has hung ajar off its hinge since spring."
The cupboard was low and deep. The Duke knelt and drew the crooked door wide while Jacintha crouched at his shoulder, and warm air came out of it, carrying the smell of dust and paper. The nest filled the back corner. A summer's industry: dozens upon dozens of stolen paper spills, carried one by one down two corridors in a small determined mouth, trodden and turned and pressed into a round bed the exact shape of a sleeping cat. And in the middle of her hoard lay Gooseberry, asleep, sleek side rising and falling, one white paw curled over her nose.
Jacintha lifted her out. The cat woke cross, ears pinned, offended from nose to tail-tip at the liberty, and struggled once and then hung in Jacintha's arms radiating the dignity of the wronged. Jacintha held the warm ungrateful weight of her and laughed, and the laugh broke in the middle.
"Miss Pinnock," the Duke said. His voice had changed. He was still kneeling, and he had gone very still. "Look at the bed."
The pressed circle where the animal had slept was made of twisted spills, and the spills were of two papers: the housemaid's plain white, and, threaded through it a dozen deep, sheets of a heavy laid rag-paper, written over in ink. He drew one out and untwisted it with the care of a man opening a wound. Jacintha, the cat in one arm, took another. She had seen that hand every day for three years, on the backs of pictures, in the flyleaves of the Dowager's books. Small, upright, unmistakable. The old Duke's.
They untwisted spill after spill in the last light of the passage window, and the sheets went on and on in that dead upright hand, and then the Duke stopped breathing, because the sheet in his hands bore three names below a signature, and the signature was his father's, and the line above it was dated: this tenth day of October, one thousand eight hundred and sixteen.
The page was creased, and torn a little at one edge where a larger tearing had been begun and abandoned, and it was whole. Under the pressed circle lay a stiff creased wrapper, too thick to twist and so left flat, docketed across the front in a clear and entirely living hand: Papers removed from His late Grace's desk, February 1817.
Someone had torn these pages and dropped them into the still-room spill-box to be twisted up for fire-lighters, on their way to the kitchen grates a handful at a time. In an ordinary winter that road would have ended in February. It had not, because a house ordered to lay fires in two rooms only goes through very few spills: by his own economy the man who threw the paper away had put out nearly every fire that could have burned it. And a small thieving animal, wanting a warm bed, had carried what was left off the road one spill at a time all summer, and slept on it.