Hartsmere House stood on the north side of Grosvenor Square, a great pale face of stone with too many windows. She was taken in by a side door and up a back stair—another courtesy, another warning—and shown into a room at the back of the first floor that overlooked the garden. It was not the drawing room she remembered. That had been at Hartsmere itself, in Derbyshire, with lilies on the pianoforte. This was a small sitting room, very orderly, with a writing desk heaped with ledgers and correspondence, a good fire, and no flowers at all.
The Dowager Duchess was standing at the window. She wore grey this morning, the grey of a pigeon's breast, and she did not turn round at once.
"Sit down, Miss Lisle."
Honora remained standing. After a moment the Duchess turned and looked at her, and Honora saw, in the clear morning light, what the chandeliers had hidden: the fine cross-hatching of lines at the eyes and mouth, a weariness beneath the severity, a woman of fifty or so who had not slept.
"You have grown very like your father," the Duchess said.
"So I am told."
"He was also in the habit of standing when he had been asked to sit." The Duchess crossed to the desk and lowered herself into the chair behind it, which put the desk between them like a counter in a shop. "I shall be direct, since I imagine you would prefer it. What do you want?"
Honora had rehearsed this too. She found that the rehearsed words had gone; what came out instead was simpler.
"I want my father's name back."
"Your father is dead."
"His name is not. It is in the mouths of every steward and land agent between Derby and Sheffield as the name of a man who robbed his employer. It was in the mouth of the attorney who refused my mother a lease in Bath. It was on the lips of the vicar's wife who would not let her daughters sit beside me at Sunday school. It is in your trustees' minute-book, where you had them write that he had exceeded his authority and that the family was much disappointed in him." Honora heard her own voice, low and even and relentless, and was distantly surprised by it. "I want it written down, in the same book, that he did nothing of the kind. I want it said in the same rooms where the other thing was said. I want your son to know."
"My son," said the Duchess, very quietly, "is the only thing in this world I have done well."
"Then he can bear to hear the truth."
"The truth." The Duchess laid both hands flat on the ledgers before her. They were long hands, beautiful once, the knuckles beginning to thicken. "You have a book, I suppose. Edmund always wrote everything down."
Honora drew the brown calf book out of her reticule but did not put it on the desk. "His daybook, from the year ninety-eight until the year three. Every sum he raised on his own name at the late Duke's request, and the date, and the purpose. Newmarket. Brooks's. Watier's. A house in Marylebone I will not describe. And pinned to each page, the late Duke's own note of hand, signed Hartsmere, promising to make it good." She held the book against her breast. "Eleven thousand four hundred pounds. My father stood surety for all of it, because your husband asked him to, and because your husband's trustees were not to know. When your husband died, the moneylenders came to my father. And my father came to you."
"I remember," said the Duchess.