The Duchess stopped in front of her.
Honora did not curtsey. She could not have moved if the ceiling had come down.
"Miss Lisle," said the Dowager Duchess of Hartsmere, in a voice pitched to carry to the back of the card room, as it had once been pitched to carry down from a balcony. "I have been remiss. I should have spoken to you a fortnight ago, and twelve years before that." She drew a breath; Honora saw her gloved hands tighten on her fan. "Your father, Mr. Edmund Lisle, was steward at Hartsmere for nineteen years. He was dismissed under a cloud of my making. He went to prison for debts that were my husband's, because I chose to let him go rather than open my husband's books. He was the most honest man I have known. My son has had the account of it entered in our trustees' records, where anybody may read it. I have come to say it where people will hear it. I beg your pardon, and your father's, though I know he cannot give it and you need not."
Nobody in the room breathed.
Then the Duchess curtseyed—not the slight inclination of a duchess to a nobody, but a full curtsey, slow and deep, the curtsey of a woman to a woman she has wronged. Her knees, Honora thought distantly, must ache. She rose without assistance.
Honora found that she had no words. She had imagined this for twelve years, and in all her imaginings she had known exactly what she would say, and it had been magnificent. Now there was nothing in her mouth but salt.
"Thank you," she said at last. It was all there was.
The Duchess inclined her head. For a moment their eyes held: two women who stood too straight and had done their sums alone in the dark.
"I go back to Hartsmere in the morning," the Duchess said, lower now, for Honora alone. "My son tells me you may come at Michaelmas. I shall not ask you to stay at the house. But the steward's house by the beck is empty. The walnut tree is still there."
She turned and walked back up the long floor and out through the doors, and did not look back. A moment later, as if a spell had broken, the musicians struck up again, too loudly, and the room filled with talk like water rushing into a lock; and Lavinia Prestwick pushed straight through the crowd with her fan, took Honora's cold hands in both of hers, and held them very hard.
X.
Michaelmas came in with rain, and then, on the day of the audit, cleared to a high blue sky and a wind that smelled of wet stubble and woodsmoke.
Honora had been at Hartsmere a week, in the grey steward's house by the beck, with Mrs. Fairleigh, who complained daily of the damp and was plainly enjoying herself enormously. The house was smaller than she remembered and the walnut tree was larger. In the yew hedge by the gate there was an old wren's nest, long abandoned. She did not show it to anyone.
The audit dinner was held, as it always had been, in the great hall at long trestle tables, the tenants in their Sunday coats and the smell of roast beef and ale thick under the hammerbeam roof. Honora sat at the end of the high table between Mrs. Fairleigh and the vicar. The Dowager sat at the other end, in grey, and spoke to no one, and ate almost nothing.
When the cloth was drawn, the Duke stood up.