"There were no irregularities in my father's accounts," she said. "Every penny he ever handled for Hartsmere is written down, in his hand, and I have the book. He was dismissed because he could not be paid, and he could not be paid because of debts that were not his. He died in the King's Bench prison in the winter of the year four. Gaol fever, they said. I was ten."
The music swelled towards its close. She felt the Duke's hand go rigid at her waist.
"Whose debts?" he said.
"Ask your mother."
"I am asking you."
The last chord sounded. The couples around them broke apart, laughing and bowing. Honora stepped back out of his hold and sank into a curtsey as correct as anything Miss Tuttle had ever drilled into a row of little girls.
"Thank you for the dance, Your Grace," she said. "You were right. I did not chase you. I have spent twelve years trying very hard not to think of you at all."
She walked away before he could answer. She did not go towards the supper room. She went to the card room, where Mrs. Fairleigh was triumphantly fleecing the admiral, and asked in a voice that only trembled at the very end whether they might please go home.
On the way out she did not look up at the balcony. She did not need to. She could feel, all the way to the head of the stairs, exactly where the Duchess was standing.
III.
The note came at nine the next morning, while Mrs. Fairleigh was still in her curl-papers and Honora was mending a glove at the window of their lodgings in Half Moon Street.
It was written on thick paper, hot-pressed, sealed with a single lozenge of black wax. There was no salutation. The Dowager Duchess of Hartsmere will receive Miss Lisle at eleven o'clock. A carriage will be sent.
"Well," said Mrs. Fairleigh, reading it over Honora's shoulder through her lorgnette. She was seventy, very small, deaf when it suited her, and had been Honora's mother's godmother before she was Honora's. "Twelve years of returned letters, and now she sends a carriage. You must have frightened her very much."
"I danced with her son."
"Yes, my love. That is what I said."
The carriage was black and plain, with no arms on the panel. Honora understood the courtesy and the warning together: she was to be brought, and she was not to be seen being brought. She sat in it with her back very straight and her reticule on her knee. Inside the reticule, instead of two shillings and a handkerchief, there was now a small book bound in brown calf, its corners worn round with handling.