It was a short note, carried up to the house by the boy who brought the vegetables, and left, as arranged, in the hollow of the third stone from the left in the kitchen garden wall, where Cecilia's maid would fetch it. It read:
My lady, I have decided. I mean to ask her on Sunday after church, by the lych-gate, as you advised. I am more afraid of this than of any frost. Pray write me what you think I should say. — S.H.
It was the sort of note that any person in the world could have read with perfect equanimity, had they known the whole story: that Samuel Hale had been courting Miss Hannah Cole, the vicar's niece and the village schoolmistress, for the better part of a year; that he was too shy to speak, being a man who could talk easily to plants and with great difficulty to anything else; and that Lady Cecilia, who had been writing letters to the young woman at his request to put in a good word, had taken a warm and rather maternal interest in the whole affair.
But the note did not come to Cecilia's maid.
The kitchen boy who had been told to fetch it, and who was paid a shilling a month by Mr. Gerard Hartley to report anything unusual at the wall, brought it instead to the east wing.
Gerard read it twice, smiling a little. Then he took a pen and made a very small, very careful addition to the foot of the paper, in a hand that closely matched the gardener's, and sealed it again with a drop of fresh wax.
I cannot bear it any longer. Come to me tonight, after the household sleeps.
Then he went looking for his cousin.
He found the Earl in the library, as he had expected, standing at the window with a letter in his hand that he was not reading. It was the seventeenth of June. In four days it would be Lucian's birthday, a day he never marked and nobody ever mentioned, and Gerard, who had made a study of the man, knew that he was always at his lowest in the days before it.
"My dear fellow," he said, and shut the door behind him. "I have found something which I would give a great deal not to have found. I hesitated a long time. But I could not, in conscience, keep it from you."
He held out the note.
Lucian took it. He read it. And Gerard, watching his face, saw it go very still, then very pale, then very hard, the way a river goes still before it freezes.
"Where did you get this?"
"It was in the wall. The old place, you know, where the servants leave messages. I would not have looked, but the boy seemed so guilty."
"It is Hale's hand."
"I believe so. I cannot be sure."
"And the other?" Lucian's voice had gone quiet. "Pray write me what you think I should say. She writes to him."
"It would appear so."
The Earl crumpled the paper in his fist. He stood quite still, his chest rising and falling, and Gerard, who had expected rage, was a little startled to see instead something that looked almost like a child's face, stricken and bewildered, before the stone came down over it again.