He did not make a speech, exactly. He told them plainly, as a man reads out the terms of a lease, what his father had done, and what his mother had done, and what had been done to Edmund Lisle in that same hall thirteen Michaelmases before. He told them that the estate was poorer than they had been led to think; that the London house was let and the hunters sold; that there would be no new carriages and no rise in rents; and that if any of them had ever believed Mr. Lisle a thief, they had been misled by the family they paid their rent to, and he was sorry for it.
There was a long silence when he sat down. Then old Hesketh, who must have been eighty and whose barn had burned in the year one, got slowly to his feet at the bottom table, raised his tankard, and said in a cracked voice: "To Mr. Lisle. He abated my rent."
And the hall rose, all of it, with a scrape of benches like the sea, and drank.
Honora did not cry until afterwards, in the cold stone passage by the buttery, where nobody could see her except, it turned out, the Dowager Duchess, who had come out for air.
They stood a little apart. Through the open door the tenants were clearing the tables.
"I shall not take the quarterly money any longer," Honora said, when she could speak. "His Grace's repayment will be more than enough, in time. I mean to take a house in Bakewell and open a school. For girls. Arithmetic, as well as French."
"That would please your father," said the Duchess. "He used to say that girls were taught to sew and expected to keep accounts, and it was a wonder any household in England survived."
"I do not know whether I forgive you," Honora said. "I have tried. Some days I think I have, and then I remember the newspaper in the window pane."
"I should think less of you if you had." The Duchess looked out at the dusk. "I do not forgive myself. We may as well be unforgiving together, Miss Lisle. It is something to have in common."
It was not a reconciliation. But when the Duchess went back in, she touched Honora's arm, very briefly, in passing, and Honora let her.
* * *
The fiddlers had come from Bakewell, and the dancing was in the great barn by the home farm, under lanterns hung from the beams, with the doors open on the dark and the smell of hay and apples everywhere. There were no chandeliers and no golden columns. There was a fiddle, a flute, and a boy with a drum, and fifty people stamping through Sir Roger de Coverley as if they meant to bring the roof down.
Honora stood by one of the great oak posts that held up the barn and watched, and was nearly happy.
"Miss Lisle," said the Duke of Hartsmere, beside her. "You have found a pillar."
"It is the most reliable gentleman in the barn."