She went to Grosvenor Square at seven the next morning, on foot and alone, which no young lady should ever do, and she did not go to the front door or the side. She went round by the mews, through the garden gate the under-gardener had left open for the dung cart, and found the Dowager Duchess exactly where she had somehow known she would be: in the narrow walled garden behind the house, in an old grey cloak, cutting the dead heads off the roses.
The Duchess did not seem surprised. She snipped one more faded bloom into her basket and laid down the shears.
"Haverstock," she said. "He was always too fond of your mother."
"Why did you pay us?"
The Duchess looked at the roses. They were small, old-fashioned, very pink; a city garden's roses, sooty at the edges.
"I went to see him," she said. "Your father. In the King's Bench, in the December. I went in a hackney, veiled, like a woman in a novel. He had a room on the third floor with a broken pane stuffed with newspaper. He was already coughing." Her voice stayed perfectly level, the way water stays level over a great depth. "I told him I could not acknowledge the debt; that if I did, I lost Lowfield. I offered to pay him privately, whatever I could find, if he would take it and keep silent. He would not. He said a debt paid in secret would leave his name exactly where it lay, and his name was the only thing he had to give his daughter." She paused. "So I promised him the other thing. That his wife and child should not want, as long as I lived. He thanked me. He was always courteous. He died five weeks later."
Honora stood with her hands clenched in the folds of her cloak.
"You kept us from starving," she said. "You did not keep him from dying."
"No."
"You could have paid his creditors. Quietly. He need never have known it was you."
"I could have tried," said the Duchess. "I had perhaps four hundred pounds in the world that winter that was not already promised. I did not think it would be enough. I did not think he would be dead by January. I was wrong. I have been doing that sum too, Miss Lisle, every night for twelve years, and it never comes out." For the first time she looked directly at Honora, and her eyes were wet and furious. "Do not imagine you can hate me more than I have managed on my own account. You have not had the practice."
The bells of St. George's began to ring for early service. A sparrow dropped onto the gravel between them and looked from one to the other.
"I do not want your hatred or your money," Honora said at last. "I never did. I wanted you to say it out loud."
"I have just said it."
"To me. In a garden. At seven in the morning." Honora's voice shook, and she let it. "Say it where he was shamed."