"He asked you only to acknowledge the debt as the estate's. Not to pay it all at once. Only to say it was not his."
"I remember." The Duchess did not look away. Honora had expected her to look away. "And you came yourself, a month later. You knelt on my carpet and asked me to let your papa come home. You had a blue sash. You had tied it yourself, very badly."
The room was quite silent except for the fire. Honora found that her hands were shaking and pressed the book harder against herself to still them.
"You said," she managed, "that he had made his choice, and you must make yours."
"Yes."
"Was it worth it?"
The Duchess was quiet for so long that a coal fell in the grate. Then she opened a drawer in the desk, took out a folded paper, and laid it on the blotter between them.
"That is a draft on Coutts's for three thousand pounds," she said. "It is made out to you. With it, and what I understand you earn, you may take a house in any town in England you please, and live in it like a gentlewoman, and never teach another child the use of the globes. In return, you will go back to Bath, and you will not speak to my son again, and you will burn that book."
Honora looked at the paper. She did not touch it.
"You are offering to buy the one thing you would not pay for twelve years ago."
"I am offering you a life," said the Duchess, "in place of a gesture. Your father's name is a gesture now. A dead man cannot be harmed or helped by it. My son can."
"How? By learning his father was a gamester? I imagine half London knows that already."
"By learning what it cost to keep his house standing." For the first time something cracked in the Duchess's voice, a hairline flaw in porcelain. "You think this is about pride. You think I sat in my drawing room and let an honest man rot because I could not bear the embarrassment. You are very young, Miss Lisle, and you have had a great many years to make me into a simple thing. I am not a simple thing. Neither was your father. Take the money."
Honora put the daybook back into her reticule and drew the strings closed.
"No," she said. "Thank you."
"Then what will you do?"