"Kezia," she said. "Oh, Kezia. The living."
"I am aware of the living, Aunt."
"You are not aware of anything; you never have been, you go about with your head full of court rolls and geese—the living is in his gift, Kezia, and so is the curacy at Coldwell, and so is—Barnabas, she has insulted the patron of the living to his face in his own stable—"
"He did not seem insulted," said Kezia. "He seemed—" She stopped, because she did not know what he had seemed. Sorry, Matthew would have said. Properly sorry. "He apologised. For not telling me. He said he had let me talk because it was the first honest account he had heard of himself since May."
"Well, that is something," said her uncle.
"It is not something. It is the whole of the injury. He knew, Uncle. He stood there and drew me out. He asked me what I would say to the Duke if I could say one thing, and I told him, and all the while he was the Duke. If I had been a man he would have—I don't know what he would have done. But I am a woman, so he did the other thing, and listened, and it is worse." She put the toast down. "I will not apologise to him, Aunt, before you ask. He owes the apology, not I. He has made it, and I have not decided whether to accept it."
Aunt Letitia opened her mouth, and closed it, and looked at her husband with an expression of mute appeal.
Dr. Barnabas Thorley folded the Stamford Mercury in four and laid it beside his plate. He was a long, stooping, mild-faced man of sixty who had taken a double first at Cambridge in the reign of a previous king and had been, ever since, quietly bewildered that intelligence had so few practical applications.
"My dear," he said, "did he deceive you? Or did he merely fail to interrupt you?"
"Is there a difference?"
"There is a great deal of difference. The first is a sin of commission. The second is one I commit every Sunday in the vestry when Mr. Quarrendon explains the parish rates." He took off his spectacles and rubbed them. "I do not say it excuses him. I say only that you have been angry at this man for four months, and this morning he gave you, by your own account, rather more of himself than he has given anyone else in the county. That may be worth thinking about before you decide what to do with it."
"And then there is the tithe," said Aunt Letitia, in a lower voice.
Kezia turned. "What has the tithe to do with it?"