He set down the clay pot, with its torn stem, very gently on the grass. He straightened. He took off his hat and held it against his chest. And he said, in a low, level voice that carried to every corner of the lawn:
"Is that an order, my lord?"
The Earl blinked.
It was not what he had expected. He had expected, he realised later, one of three things: that the man would refuse, that he would plead, or that he would strike him. He had been prepared for any of them. He had not been prepared for the quiet question, or for the way it was asked, without insolence, without fear, as a man might ask the time. And the question hung in the air between them, and he found, to his horror, that he did not know the answer.
"I asked," said Samuel Hale, "whether it is an order, my lord. Because if it is, then I will obey. I am your servant. I have eaten your bread six years, and you have every right to command me. If you say eat it, I will eat it, here, before the Duke and the vicar and all your guests."
He paused. His voice did not change.
"But I should like you to know, before you say it, what it is you are ordering."
"Hale," said the Earl hoarsely.
"That orchid came from Brazil in the year thirteen, on the last ship my father ever sailed. It was the only one of thirty that lived. He died of fever on the way home. I have kept it six years, as your mother asked me to. She asked me to keep it alive until it bloomed, and said she would like to see it from wherever she was." He turned his hat once in his hands. "It bloomed the night before last, at a quarter to three in the morning. I was sitting beside it. Her ladyship was with me."
A murmur went through the crowd. Cecilia had put her hand over her mouth.
"I wept," said Samuel Hale. "I am not ashamed of it. If you order me, my lord, I will eat it, and it will be the best way I can think of to end what my father began. But I will tell you honestly that I do not know what else to say to you. You are my master. You have the right. I only ask that you say it aloud, and say plainly that it is an order, so that I may know it, and so that everyone here may know it too."
The silence was so absolute that the Earl could hear a blackbird singing in the laurels.
He looked down at the flower in his hand.
It was shivering slightly. That was the odd part. He had thought it would be heavy, but it weighed nothing at all. A trembling white thing in his big, cold fingers, with its pale petals already beginning to curl at the edges where he had torn it from its life.
He looked up, and he saw the faces.
They were all watching him. Every one. The Duke, red with fury and dismay. The vicar, aghast. A girl of about eighteen, clutching her mother's arm, with eyes like saucers. Mrs. Pemberton and Finch at the edge of the lawn with their hands pressed to their mouths. And at his side, his wife, white to the lips, with her hand against her mouth and tears running silently down her face.
He saw himself, suddenly, through their eyes. A tall man in a blue coat standing over a kneeling servant with a flower torn from its stem, shaking with a rage he could not even name. A tyrant. A brute. His father, in a younger body, saying show nothing, show nothing, show nothing.
And he understood, with the lurid clarity of a man looking into a mirror in a dark room, that there was nothing here to be proud of at all.