"You are not a man who cannot talk. You are a man who cannot talk about nothing. Those are two different afflictions, and only one of them is serious."
At 10:00, the fire wanted making up, and he made it up himself, which no duke in the county would have done. A man who has been an agent knows the difference between a fire and a bonfire.
Kneeling there with the tongs in his hand, with his back to her, he said: "I was in Northumberland when they came for me."
Catherine's needle stopped.
"Two men rode up from the ford at Bledlow that night, and Petherick sent a letter by the mail at six o'clock in the morning, and it reached me on the Friday at noon. I was in a field." He set a coal in place. "I had not seen my brother in five years—not from any quarrel. He wrote twice a year, and I answered twice a year. He was ten years older than I, and he had this. I had a horse, a dog, a very good cottage with a slate roof. I thought—I truly thought—that I had the better bargain, and that we both knew it."
"Your Grace—"
"Let me get to the end of it. I have never said it in order before." He put the tongs down. "I came south in two days. When I got here, they had them in the chapel. The sister had not come from Bristol, and the man from the undertakers wanted to close the lids because of the weather. I would not let him. Two nights I sat there. I have been asked since what I was thinking, and I have never answered, because the answer is that I was not thinking anything at all. I was waiting for it to be a mistake."
The fire ticked. Somewhere above them, a floorboard went, the way old houses do.
"Then they brought the child down," he said. "She had a cold, and that was why she had not been in the carriage. Her mother had said she may not come out with that cough, and it was a nuisance at the time, and that is the whole reason my brother's daughter is alive. She stood in the chapel door in her nightgown and looked at me—a man she had seen perhaps four times in her life—and said, 'Are you the uncle?'"
"What did you say?"
"I said, 'Yes.'" He was still looking at the fire. "And she said, 'Then you had better come upstairs, because they have all been crying and nobody has put me to bed.' So I went up."
Catherine sat with the bronze-green merino in her lap and did not say a single word, because there was nothing on this earth to say. And she had understood something about him that she suspected nobody else alive had understood: he had not failed to become the master of that house; he had refused to, in case it turned out to be a mistake. And it had gone on so long that the refusing had become the house.
"Your Grace," she said at last, "may I ask another question out of my place?"