"Well?" said Mrs. Oddie, coming out of the still-room with a jug in her hand.
"Miss Thorley was there," Matthew said, without opening his eyes. "Talking to him. I think—Mrs. Oddie, I think she didn't know."
Mrs. Oddie set down the jug. She was a broad, short woman of fifty with forearms like a laundress and a face that had kept the secrets of three generations of Carricks without ever once appearing to strain. She had been housekeeper at Wendlebury for nineteen years. She had not, so far, been required to see the new one, and she had been preparing herself for it the way one prepares for a tooth to be drawn.
"Didn't know what?"
"Who he was. She was telling him." Matthew opened his eyes. They were wet, to his mortification. "She was telling him about the common. And Mother's cow. Not by name, but—Mrs. Oddie, she said he was unbearable. To his face. And I came along and bowed, and she—"
"Ah," said Mrs. Oddie.
"I didn't mean to shame her."
"You didn't. She did that for herself, poor lamb, and he helped her, by the sound of it." Mrs. Oddie considered. "What did he do? When she found out?"
Matthew thought about it. "He looked sorry," he said. "Properly sorry. Not the way gentlemen do."
"Hm," said Mrs. Oddie, and picked up her jug again, and went up to see what kind of man had come to live in her house.
* * *
He was standing in the blue dressing room in his stockinged feet when she knocked, looking at the copper bath as if it were a horse he had been told was quiet and did not believe it. He had pulled off the borrowed shirt. There was a long white scar along his ribs on the left side, old and puckered, and the bruise of a kick, new and purple, on his upper arm. He reached for the shirt again when he saw her, and she said, "Don't trouble on my account, Your Grace; I've seen a man's back before," and he left it.
"Mrs. Oddie," he said.