He stood, and held the book out to her. She took it.
"Will you lend it to me?" he said. "For one day. There is someone I must show it to."
She looked at him—at the mud on his boots and the shadows under his eyes and the hand, ungloved now, that was not quite steady.
"No," she said. "You do not need it. You knew the hand. Go and ask her, Your Grace. I do not think she will lie to you. She never lied to me. She only declined to say anything at all."
V.
His mother was in the library when he came in, sitting very upright beneath the portrait of his father, with a branch of candles and a ledger and no book at all.
Julian Marchbank, fifth Duke of Hartsmere, had stood in that doorway at fourteen in his school clothes, newly fetched from Eton, while she told him in a perfectly level voice that his father was dead and that he must now be a man. He had not known then what it meant. He was beginning to suspect that he did not know now.
"You have been to Half Moon Street," she said.
"I have seen the book."
She closed the ledger. "Then you have seen your father's hand. I am sorry for it. I had hoped you need never see that side of him."
"I saw that side of him every day of my childhood, Mamma." He did not sit. "I had not seen yours."
The Duchess folded her hands. "Ask what you came to ask."
"Is it true?"
"That your father pledged his steward's name for his gaming debts? Yes. That I knew it when the moneylenders came? Yes. That Edmund Lisle came to me and begged me to say so, and I would not? Yes." She did not flinch. "I let the trustees believe he had overstepped. That much was even true; he had no business putting his name to such sums. And I let the rest of the world believe whatever it liked."
"Why?"
"Because your father left debts of sixty-three thousand pounds," his mother said, "and an estate that brought in nine thousand a year, of which four went in interest already. Because if I had acknowledged Edmund's eleven thousand, I must have opened every book in the house to the trustees, and the trustees must have gone into Chancery, and Chancery would have ordered the sale of every acre that was not entailed. The Lowfield farms. Thornby. The mill at Ashby Cross. Thirty-one families. There was a cotton man from Manchester called Gedge who had been sniffing round Lowfield for two years. He wanted the water for a mill and the land for his workers' rows. He would have cleared every tenant off it by quarter day." She leaned forward very slightly. "I did not let that happen. I went to your father's creditors myself, one by one, in my widow's weeds, and I made them wait. I sold my jewels and wore paste. I let this house to the Russian ambassador for three Seasons and lived at Hartsmere on mutton and turnips. I paid them, a little and a little, for twelve years, and I kept every acre and every family on it, and I handed you an estate at one-and-twenty that the whole county calls the best-run in Derbyshire."