The Duchess bent, picked up her shears, and turned back to the roses without a word.
VIII.
Edmund Lisle was buried in the churchyard of St. George the Martyr in the Borough, a few streets from the prison where he had died, under a small slab that Honora's mother had paid for by selling her wedding pearls. It gave his name and his dates. There had not been money for more words.
Honora went there on Sunday afternoon, as she went every time she was in London, and found the Duke of Hartsmere standing before it with his hat in his hands.
"Haverstock told me where it was," he said, before she could speak. "Forgive me. I did not know where else to find you that was not your godmother's parlour, and I did not want to talk about money in front of a volume of sermons."
She came and stood beside him. The slab was green at the edges. Someone—she did not ask—had laid a handful of primroses on it.
"I had your message," Julian said. "About Lowfield. And Miss Prestwick's figures. She is alarmingly good at sums."
"She always was. Nobody let her be."
"I begin to think that is the trouble with most of the people I know." He turned his hat in his fingers. "You are right. I cannot pay Prestwick and pay you and keep Lowfield all at once. So I have been working out what is mine to sell. The house in Grosvenor Square can be let; the Russians are still asking. The hunters at Melton, all eleven. The shooting box in Perthshire, which I have visited twice. My father's snuffboxes, which I have always loathed. It will take six years, not eight, if I live like a curate and Prestwick is patient. He says he will be. I think he is more interested in being proved right than in being paid."
"And my father's name?"
"That is the part that costs nothing," said Julian, "and is the hardest." He looked at the slab. "At the next meeting of the trustees, Haverstock will enter into the minute-book a full account of my father's notes of hand, and the estate's acknowledgment of them, and a statement that Edmund Lisle's dismissal was unjust. I shall sign it. At Michaelmas I shall go up to Hartsmere and say it at the audit dinner, in the same hall, to the same tenants, those that are still living. And I shall say it at White's, where the story about canal shares was told most often, I suspect. That will be the least pleasant."
"Your friends will think you mad."
"Some of them. The others will think it a capital joke that the Duke of Hartsmere is poor. I find I can bear it." He was quiet a moment. "My mother has not spoken to me since Wednesday."
Across the churchyard a woman in a shawl was tidying another grave, and a dog slept on a tomb in the thin sun.
"I do not know," Honora said carefully, "whether you are doing this for my father, or for yourself, or for me."