Prologue

August 1803, The Rose Garden

The two gentlemen had been the better part of an hour at the table under the trellis, and the paper between them was signed and sanded and signed again, and Cordelia Marchmont, who was ten years old and had been made to wear her good stockings for the occasion, considered the whole proceeding the dullest thing that had ever been done to her on a fine afternoon.

“I do not see why I am wanted,” she said, “if no one will tell me what is in it.”

“You are wanted,” said her father, without looking up from the blotting of his own name, “because it concerns you, and a person ought to be present at the things that concern her, even when she is too young to be told the half of them. Stand up straight. You are slouching at the Duke.”

“I am not slouching at the Duke. I am slouching at the table. The Duke happens to be behind it.”

The old Duke of Ravensmere, who was a wide kind man with a laugh that came up out of him like weather, put his hand over his mouth. His shoulders gave one treacherous shake.

“She has your tongue, John,” he said, when he had command of himself.

“She has her mother’s, which is worse, and she has had the loan of mine on top of it, which is past all bearing. Cordelia. Come round the table.”

She came round the table. The boy came round the other side of it at the same moment, pushed by a look from his own father, and the two children fetched up facing one another in the heat with the roses going over behind them and a bee working the trellis and both fathers watching with the particular gravity of men who have arranged a thing they are very pleased about and do not mean to show how pleased.

The boy was twelve and had grown, that spring, faster than his coat had been able to keep up with, so that a quantity of wrist showed at each cuff, and he held himself as though he had been told a great many times that morning to hold himself well and had not yet found anything to do with his hands. He looked at Cordelia. Cordelia looked at him. She had known him four days, which was long enough to have formed several opinions, and she was on the point of forming another when he produced, from the pocket of the disgraceful coat, a small twist of paper, and unwrapped it with the care of a person handling gunpowder, and there was a ring in it.

“It is for you,” he said. “You are to have it. They have settled it between them, so there is no use either of us arguing, I have already tried.”

“What is it for?”

“It is for later.” He frowned, as though later were a country he had heard described and did not much fancy the journey to. “When we are grown. They have written it down so that nobody forgets. You are to keep it until then.”

Cordelia looked at the ring. It was a small, plain thing: a single seed-pearl in an old, worn setting, with no glitter to it anywhere, and nothing of the grandeur she would have chosen for herself had anyone been so unwise as to consult her. She looked at it a moment longer and found, to her great surprise, that she liked it the better for its plainness, though she could not at once have said why.

“Why this one,” she said. “Your grandmother’s box must have a hundred in it, and they will all of them be finer than this.”

The boy went a slow and painful red from his disgraceful collar upward.

“Because the fine ones did not look like you,” he said, all in a rush, as though the sentence had got away from him before he could stop it, “and that one did, and now I wish I had not said so, and you are not to repeat it to anyone as long as you live.”

It was, Cordelia decided on the instant, the most interesting thing anyone had ever said to her, and she resolved to think about it a great deal later, in private, where she could take it apart and see how it worked. For the present, she held out her hand, because it seemed to be expected, and he took it, and his own hand was damp-warm and not quite steady, and he pushed the ring onto her finger, where it was at once too large and went round and round and threatened to come off altogether.

“It does not fit,” she pointed out.

“It will fit when you are grown. That is rather the point.” He turned the ring on her finger until the pearl sat uppermost, and held it there with his thumb so it should not fall. The holding of it brought their two heads close together over her hand, and his ears, she observed with interest, had gone as red as the rest of him. “There. Now it is done. You are not to lose it.”

“I do not lose things.”

“You will lose this if it falls off in the grass, and then where shall we be?” He looked at her with sudden twelve-year-old severity. “I had to scratch the year inside it with my own penknife, so that we should both remember which August it was, and I made a very poor job of the four, and I am not doing it twice. So you are to keep it safe, and not climb anything while wearing it.”

“I shall climb whatever I please while wearing it.”

“You shall not.”

“I shall, and you cannot stop me. It will be on my hand, not yours, and a thing on a person’s own hand is that person’s own business.” She considered him. “Is that what the paper says? That I am to be looked after?”

The boy hesitated and glanced towards the two fathers, who had drawn a little apart and were pretending to admire a rosebush, and deceiving nobody. Then he looked back at her and told her the truth, because under the disgraceful coat and the red ears, he was a truthful boy.

“More or less,” he said. “That is the gist of it. I am to look after you when we are grown, and you are to…well. They did not say exactly what you are to do. I think you are only to let me.”

“Then they have made a poor bargain on your side,” said Cordelia, “for I do not need looking after, and never have, and I am not going to begin merely because it has been written down and sanded. You may tell them I said so.”

“I am not going to tell them anything of the kind. They are very pleased with themselves, and it would be a pity to spoil it.” But he was smiling now, the redness leaving him by degrees; a real smile, the kind that comes to a boy when he has stopped minding a thing and begun, in spite of himself, to be glad of it. Cordelia, who missed very little, did not miss it.

“You may look after me if it makes you happy,” she allowed, with the enormous condescension of which only the very young are capable. “I shall not stop you. I only say that you will find there is very little of it to do, and then you will be left standing about with nothing to look after, like a shepherd whose sheep have all wandered off, and it will serve you right for agreeing to such a foolish arrangement in the first place.”

“I shall risk it,” said the boy.

And her hand, which had been pulling restlessly against his the whole while, eager to be off to the orchard and the trees and the long bright afternoon that was being so shamefully wasted on paper and sealing wax, went suddenly still in his. It remained there, for no reason she could afterwards have named, for the length of three slow circuits of a bee about the trellis.

She let it be still.

He held it, and did not say anything more, having for once in his twelve years the sense to leave a thing alone.

The roses nodded behind them. One of the fathers said something low to the other that neither child caught. The afternoon lay wide and gold and unhurried about them, as though it meant to remain that exact afternoon forever, and had no notion of the years that were coming, or of the single cut cord along which all of it would one day be carried away into darkness.

The old Duke came back to the table and rubbed his hands together.

“That is the most important quarter of an hour’s work this family has done in twenty years, and the two principals in it are about to expire of boredom, which is exactly as it should be. Go on, the pair of you. Off with you. There is an orchard beyond the south wall with a tree that wants climbing, and I give you both my leave to ruin every stitch you have on.”

They did not need telling twice.

The boy let go of her hand, and she snatched up her skirts without a thought for her good stockings. Together they flew down the gravel towards the green door in the south wall, the girl in front and the boy a stride behind and gaining.

And the ring on the chain that was not yet a chain, the ring on her too-small finger, held fast beneath the curl of her own fingers the whole way so that it should not, after everything, be lost in the grass.

Chapter One

“Eight pence the pound, Miss Marchmont, and I’ll thank you not to look at me as though I had named a sum to ransom a bishop.”

Cordelia Marchmont, who had been looking at Mr Hatchwell precisely as though he had named a sum to ransom a bishop, rearranged her face into something more diplomatic and set her basket on the counter. She had been buying her sugar from this man since she was tall enough to see over the edge of it, and in all that time she had never once paid the first price he named, because the first price he named was a kind of greeting between them, a thing said for form’s sake, the way other people said something about the weather.

“Eight pence is a Tuesday price,” she said. “It is the price you give to strangers and to people you dislike, and I flatter myself I am neither.”

“It is the price the sugar costs me, miss, which is a different matter entirely from what I think of the person buying it.”

“The brown sugar from Bristol last spring was seven pence, and the duty has come down since. I read it in the paper.”

“You read a great many things in the paper, and you carry every one of them into my shop and lay it on my counter like a winning hand of cards.”

“And yet you never fold.”

“And yet I never fold,” he agreed, and she could see that he had begun to enjoy himself, which was the first sign of a successful negotiation and very nearly the only part of her morning she had looked forward to.

The truth, which neither of them would have said aloud for any sum he cared to name, bishop or otherwise, was that Mr Hatchwell had been carrying her on credit since the autumn. He had twice sent his boy up to the Hall with small mercies dressed as accidents, two oranges that were going to spoil, a half-pound of butter that would only have gone to waste, and Cordelia had accepted them with a level face because to refuse would have shamed them both. There was a debt between them that had nothing to do with sugar, and they conducted the business of sugar with such ceremony precisely so that they need never look at the other thing directly.

“Seven pence,” she said.

“Seven and three farthings, and you will take a half pound of currants besides, for they are past their best and I would sooner you had them than the mice.”

“Those currants are not past their best. I can see them from here, and they are as plump as a curate at Christmas.”

“Then we shall agree they are past their best between the two of us, and let the currants keep their own counsel.”

She took the currants, because there was no graceful way to refuse, and because Henry would be home from Eton at Christmas, and Henry loved currants past all reason, and Mr Hatchwell knew it, and the knowing of it was the whole of the gift. She counted the coppers onto the counter one at a time, and he let her do it without hurrying her, which was a courtesy of its own.

“You will tell Master Henry I asked after him,” he said, folding the paper round the sugar.

“I shall tell him you robbed me blind and threw in the currants out of guilt.”

“That will do nicely,” said Mr Hatchwell, and looked, for the length of a breath, as though he might say something kinder, and thought better of it, and wished her good morning instead.

***

She walked home up the lane that led to Marchmont and to nowhere else, and she kept her mind off money until she was through the side door, because thinking about money where anyone might see her was a luxury she could not afford, and composure was very nearly the only one she had left.

Mrs Birling took the sugar in the kitchen without remarking on the smallness of the parcel, which was a kindness Cordelia noticed and loved her for, and the currants were put by in the dry larder against Henry’s homecoming, and then there was nothing more to be done in the kitchen and no further reason to put off going upstairs.

Her mother had given her the key to the study six weeks before, the day before the end, folding it into Cordelia’s palm with fingers that had already begun to forget their own strength. There are letters, she had said, and nothing else, because by then explaining had become too large a thing for the breath she had left.

Cordelia had not opened the desk in the six weeks since. She had told herself it was for want of time, and that was a lie, and she had known it was a lie even as she told it. Her father’s study still smelled faintly of her father, of pipe smoke and old paper and the particular dust of a room where a man has done his thinking, and she had not been able to walk into it and find him so nearly present and so entirely gone.

This morning, she had thirteen shillings and four pence in the house and a bill at Mr Hatchwell’s she could not pay, and grief, she was discovering, was a thing one could only really afford on a full stomach. She went up the stairs, and she put the key in the lock, and she opened her father’s desk.

The papers inside were ordered the way her father had ordered everything, which is to say not at all, and she went through them sitting on the floor, because somewhere around the second drawer her legs had stopped taking an interest in holding her up. There were receipts. There was a bundle of her own childhood drawings, kept for reasons she would now never be able to ask him about, which undid her rather more than the receipts had. And at the bottom of the deepest drawer, tied in a faded blue ribbon, there was a packet of letters in an unfamiliar hand, each signed at the foot with a single word. Ravensmere.

They were friendly letters, unremarkable, between two men who had been close at school and had grown sentimental in middle age about the notion of binding their families together. They spoke of a rose garden, and of August, and they mentioned, more than once and by name, a little girl called Cordelia and a boy two years older, and the hope that the two of them might one day suit.

Beneath the letters lay a contract, drawn up by a country solicitor, dated the fourteenth of August, 1803, and signed by her father and by the late Duke of Ravensmere. In the corner, in a clerk’s careful hand, ran a note recording the lady at ten years of age and the gentleman at twelve, the agreement to hold upon the mutual consent of both parties at the gentleman’s coming of age.

Cordelia had been ten years old in the August of 1803. She put her hand to the chain at her throat, where it had hung beneath her gown for thirteen years, and felt the small hard shape of the ring through the muslin, the pearl ring she had worn on her own finger for a fortnight that summer before her mother had drawn it gently off and threaded it onto a chain and told her it was to keep. All this time, she had believed she was the only person alive who remembered, and here, in faded ink, was the proof that she had once been promised to someone in writing, by men who had since had the discourtesy to die and leave her holding the page.

There was a second packet, newer, tied in a ribbon she recognised at once as her mother’s. It held four letters in her father’s own hand, each addressed to the present Duke of Ravensmere, and not one of them had ever been sent. The first, from 1814, asked with great civility whether His Grace meant to honour the understanding between their fathers. The last, written when his hand had already begun to fail, ran to four lines and asked only after the young man’s health. There had been no reply to any of them, and there had been no reply because they had never been posted, and why her father had written them and never sent them was a question he had not lived long enough to answer.

Folded beneath them was a single scrap of paper, the writing on it gone large and uncertain in the way his writing had gone in his last year. For Henry, it said. Nothing else. He had left no instruction to go with her brother’s name, and no will anywhere that she had found, only the name itself in that large failing hand, set down before he could no longer hold the pen. Cordelia turned the scrap over twice, as if the back of it might prove more forthcoming than the front, and it did not.

She sat on the floor of the study for a long while after that, doing the only arithmetic the papers allowed her to do. Her father was dead, and her mother too. Her brother was fifteen and away at school and wholly her responsibility, and their uncle held what money there was and had made it perfectly plain that he regarded both his wards as expenses to be discharged at the first decent opportunity. She had thirteen shillings, a contract no one had honoured, and a note that said for Henry and appeared to mean nothing at all.

And she had, in Yorkshire, a duke. A duke who had once been a boy of twelve in a rose garden, and who had, as like as not, forgotten he had ever stood in it.

It made a thin enough foundation for a future, and a great deal more of one than she had owned an hour before, and she had long since stopped being sentimental about the size of the materials she was handed.

She went down to the morning room and took out paper and wrote to the Duke of Ravensmere.

***

The letter cost her three attempts and most of the afternoon. She kept all pleading out of it, since a woman who pleads has told the reader he is permitted to refuse her; and she held a good deal back besides, because a woman who lays out the whole of her case in a first letter keeps nothing for a second. She named herself as the daughter of his late father’s old friend, referred him to the contract of 1803 without enclosing it, and asked, with as much composure as she could press into the words, whether he might do her the honour of a reply.

The seal she used was her father’s. She carried the letter to the village herself the next morning, and Mr Tipps at the post office weighed it in his hand, observed that Yorkshire was a very long way off, and she agreed that it was. Then she went home and waited, which is the hardest of all tasks a person can be set, and one women in her situation are set rather more often than most.

Her uncle Reginald arrived on the seventh day, well before any reply could have come, in the brisk manner of a man who had arranged her future to suit himself a good while before he troubled to come down and acquaint her with it. He came in a hired chaise, with a case of papers and the general air of a man much inconvenienced by other people’s failure to die solvent; drank her tea; and declined the sugar, remarking that one ought to be sparing with what one could not easily replace, which she understood to be aimed at her and declined to feel.

“I have had a conversation with Mr Pettigrew,” he said.

“I do not believe I have the pleasure of knowing Mr Pettigrew.”

“You will. He is a gentleman of Hampshire, of comfortable means, with an estate near Salisbury and a settled wish to marry. He has agreed to look at you at Christmas.”

“To look at me.” She set down her cup with a care that cost her more than she allowed him to see. “As one looks at a horse.”

“As one looks at a prospective wife, Cordelia, which is a great deal more than a girl in your position has any business expecting. I will thank you to be sensible about it.”

“How old is Mr Pettigrew?”

“Six and fifty.”

She kept her face still over the small cold lurch the number gave her, and let a moment pass before she trusted her voice with the next question.

“And how many wives has he buried?”

Her uncle paused. She watched him weigh a lie, and then watched him conclude that she would discover the truth regardless. “Three, though the third was not widely announced,” he admitted, “and he would take it as a courtesy were the matter not raised.”

“I am sure he would.”

“He is respectable. He is willing to take you with the very little your father left and the still less your mother added to it, and he asks remarkably few questions about either, which, in your circumstances, you might learn to regard as a virtue rather than an insult. Think of him, Cordelia, as generosity wearing a somewhat elderly face.”

“And if I would rather not be looked at by Mr Pettigrew, at Christmas or in any other season?”

“Then you are at perfect liberty to support yourself,” her uncle said, rising and gathering up his case with the satisfaction of a man who has concluded a piece of business to his own advantage, “and I wish you joy of the attempt. The arrangement stands. He comes at Christmas. I advise you to be civil to him, grateful to me, and silent in general; three accomplishments your mother unaccountably neglected to cultivate in you.”

He left in the morning. Cordelia stood in the cold hall and listened to the chaise wheels die away down the lane, and thought about being looked at by a man of six and fifty who had buried three wives and preferred the third not be mentioned. Then she went upstairs to read over a letter that no one had yet troubled to answer.

She walked to the village every morning after that. Mr Tipps came to dread the sight of her, she could tell, though it was no fault of hers that he did. He was a kind man with nothing to give her, and there is a particular wretchedness in being kind and empty-handed at the same moment. Each morning, he searched his bag with rather more care than the bag required; each morning, he shook his head; and each morning, she thanked him as though he had done her a great service, which, in a manner of speaking, he had.

On the fourteenth morning, he left the bag shut.

“There is nothing, Miss Marchmont,” he said, very gently. “I am sorry. There is nothing, and I do not think now that there is going to be.”

“No,” she said. “I do not think there is going to be either.”

She had known for some days what she must do, and Mr Tipps’s gentleness only carried the knowledge from one room of her mind into another. A letter could be ignored, lost, burnt, set aside by a secretary, never put before the man at all. A woman on a doorstep was harder to overlook, and if Cordelia had any gift whatever, it was for being difficult to overlook.

That afternoon, she sold her mother’s garnet brooch at the inn for three pounds and seven shillings, which was a great deal less than twenty-six years of Sunday wearing had made it worth, and precisely the price of one inside seat on the northbound coach.

That night, she packed two gowns, her father’s Don Quixote, her mother’s drawstring pouch, the contract, the letters, and the half-pound of dried apricots she had been hoarding against Christmas. She wrote to Henry at school to say she had gone north on family business, that he was not to worry, and that he was on no account to mention her absence to their uncle. For Mrs Birling, she left a note saying she had gone to York, and that anyone who asked was to be told Mrs Birling did not know where, which had at least the merit of being true.

The coach left at six, in the dark, and she was on it: in the grey wool that was her best gown, the old pearl ring on its chain beneath her high collar, and three pounds and a few shillings standing between her and whatever Yorkshire turned out to be. She watched Marchmont slide past the window until the village was behind her. Then she put her hand to the chain at her throat, kept her eyes on the road, and spent no part of her remaining composure on a backward look.

Chapter Two

“Three days on the coach from Hampshire, and not so much as a maid with you. You will forgive me for saying it, miss, but that is a great deal of road for a young lady to put behind her alone.”

Mr Hodge, who had kept the Greyhound at Ravensmere for twenty-two years and had formed in that time a settled body of opinion about which travellers would give him trouble and which would give him none, set her trunk inside the door and considered her with the frank, unhurried attention of a man entitled by long service to his own conclusions.

“It is a great deal of road,” Cordelia agreed, “and I have come to the end of it with very little to show for the journey beyond a firm conviction that I never wish to see the inside of a mail coach again as long as I live.”

That earned her a smile, which she had angled for, because a landlord who smiles at you on the first evening is a landlord who will be slower to put you out on the last.

“There is a fire in the parlour and a room above it, two shillings the night, and supper at seven if you will have it, though I will warn you the supper is whatever Mrs Hodge decides it is to be, and you will get no vote in the matter.”

“I have not had a vote in anything for some weeks, Mr Hodge. I find I have very nearly stopped missing it.”

He laughed at that, a short, surprised bark of a thing. “Then you will do well enough up here, miss, for the north settles a great many things for a body before ever they are awake to argue them, the weather the worst of the lot.” He picked the trunk up again, and she understood that she had been, in some small way she could not yet make use of, accepted.

“And how long will we have the pleasure, miss?”

“That depends upon a gentleman, which I am aware is a mortifying thing to confess to one’s innkeeper within a quarter hour of arriving, and I will thank you not to require me to explain it any further than that.”

“I will not require anything of the sort.” He set the trunk on the bottom stair, and a slower, more careful note came into his voice. “Though if your gentleman is up at the Hall, miss, I would counsel you against pinning your hopes to a swift reply. It is a full house this autumn, what with the Dowager in residence, and Lady Helena Stanford and the whole of her people besides, and that door is slow to open even for them as are looked for.”

“I am not, as it happens, looked for.”

“No, I didn’t suppose you were,” said Mr Hodge, with the gentleness of a man who had just understood a good deal more than he had been told.

***

She had set out from Marchmont with three pounds and a handful of shillings and arrived at Ravensmere with appreciably less, the road having taken its tolls in the ordinary way, in turnpikes and indifferent suppers and a bed at Doncaster she had paid for and scarcely used.

Somewhere north of there, she had given away one of her three handkerchiefs to a clergyman’s wife who wept through an entire stage over a son in the navy and could not say why she wept, and Cordelia, who could not have said why either, had not asked for it back, though it had been her best, with her mother’s initials worked into the corner. She was learning that grief travelled. It got onto coaches and sat down beside strangers, and the only courtesy a person could offer it was a clean handkerchief and the tact not to ask after its business.

She slept that night with the abrupt totality of a body that has stopped negotiating, and woke to a thin bright morning, and put on the grey wool that had been her best gown for three years and would have to go on being her best gown for a good many more. The bonnet she settled over her hair was older still, made over twice with her own hands from one that had been her mother’s, and she understood precisely what it was and precisely what it told the world about her circumstances, and she tied its ribbons beneath her chin with a steady hand, because there was nothing else to wear and no one else to wear it.

The chain lay where it always lay, beneath the high collar, the ring warm from the night against her breastbone. Cordelia pressed her palm flat over it once, as if to steady herself by the small hard shape of it, and went below.

The woman at the inn was setting out a tray of cups.

“Ravensmere Hall?” she repeated, looking up. “You’ll be wanting the north road, miss.”

“How far?”

“Two miles, if you do not mind the climb.”

“I have come from Hampshire,” said Cordelia. “I shall try to survive two miles of Yorkshire.”

The woman’s mouth twitched. “Then keep to the road past the church, and do not take the first lane, whatever anyone tells you. It looks shorter and is not. You will see the house before you reach it.”

“That sounds difficult to miss.”

“It is meant to be.”

Cordelia thanked her, adjusted her gloves, and went out into the morning.

***

The road climbed the whole of the two miles, up out of the snug grey village and onto a shoulder of open country where the wind had opinions. By the time Ravensmere came into view at the head of its long approach, it was a great deal larger than anything she had thought to prepare herself for.

She had grown up in a house one could comfortably shout across. Ravensmere had been built to be looked at from a distance, and to make the person looking aware of the distance. It succeeded with her entirely. By the time she had walked the length of the drive, she was conscious of the full smallness of herself: her bonnet, her card, and her three-years’-best gown.

Still, she climbed the three shallow steps to the door, because she had not come the length of England to be daunted by an arrangement of stone.

The footman who opened the door was young and very correct.

“Your business, miss?”

Cordelia offered her card. “I wish to see the Duke of Ravensmere.”

He took it from her gloved hand and read it without expression. Then his eyes flicked to her bonnet. It was a small thing, that glance, over and done in under a second. Cordelia had spent the walk up the drive bracing herself against a great many possibilities, and had somehow not thought to brace against this particular one.

The footman’s eyes went down to the made-over bonnet and came back up again. In the space of that one downward flick, he arrived, without malice and without the smallest hurry, at a complete and settled opinion of her. She watched him arrive at it, and could do nothing in the world to prevent him.

“His Grace is not receiving this morning, miss.”

“I have not asked to be received.” She kept her voice level, because level was the one coin she had left, and she meant to spend it with care. “I have come a very long way on a matter that touches His Grace’s own family, and the name written on that card will mean something to him. I ask only that you carry it up and let him decide for himself whether he is at home to it.”

The footman looked again at the card. He looked again at the bonnet. The second glance finished whatever the first had begun.

“His Grace is not receiving,” he said, in precisely the tone he had used before.

“Will you at least carry up my name and let him refuse it himself?”

“His Grace is not receiving, miss.”

The door had already begun to move, without violence, without so much as discourtesy: the slow, even swing of a heavy thing closed by a man who had decided she was not a person to whom anything further was owed.

The warm wedge of the hall narrowed in front of her and went out like a pinched candle, and then the cold painted wood stood an inch from her face, and a bolt settled home on the other side of it with a small, final, well-oiled sound.

Cordelia stood on the top step for the length of three slow breaths. Then she turned and went down the steps and walked back along the half mile of drive with her head up and her bonnet level, on the chance that someone was watching from a window, because if she was to be turned from this door like a pedlar, she would at the very least be turned from it like a pedlar with a straight back.

Somewhere inside that house was the boy of twelve from the rose garden. She put one hand briefly to the chain beneath her collar and kept walking.

***

Two floors above the door that had just closed, in a morning room that took the southern light, the Dowager Duchess of Ravensmere was not aware that anyone had called, and would not have thought it worth being made aware of. Some weeks earlier, she had given instructions that callers of a certain description were to be turned away without reference to her. The instructions were being followed, which was the entire purpose of instructions, and the Dowager had a great respect for purpose.

She had a clearer recollection of the letter.

It had arrived a fortnight since, in an unfamiliar hand, and she had opened it as she had lately taken to opening a good many things meant for her son. A man who had come home from the war with patches gone dark all across his memory, and one whole part of his past put out entirely, could not reasonably be expected to judge which letters deserved his attention and which were only the world trying its luck against a wounded duke.

She had not cared for the opening lines. There was in the thing a quiet certainty of being owed something that she had met before in people who wanted money, or position, or a foothold in a family higher than their own. She read far enough to place it among the three without troubling to learn which, then crossed the room and gave the letter to the fire.

It had taken very little time to burn, being only paper. She watched it with the perfect calm of a woman who believed she was sparing her son from precisely the species of person who composed such letters, then returned to her own correspondence and thought no more about it.

A signature she had not recognised had gone into the grate, and ash, in the Dowager’s long experience, asked nothing further of anyone.

***

Cordelia walked the two miles back to the Greyhound and did not cry, partly because crying wanted either privacy or company and she had neither, and partly because despair, like grief, was something she could not afford just now.

She sat in the parlour through the short grey afternoon and made herself think instead, which was harder work than weeping and a good deal more to the purpose.

Mrs Hodge brought tea without being asked for it and set it down beside her.

“Thank you,” Cordelia said.

Mrs Hodge looked at her for a moment too long. “The Hall did not receive you, then.”

“No.”

“I am sorry for it.”

“So am I.” Cordelia wrapped her hands round the cup, though the tea was too hot to drink. “Tell me, Mrs Hodge, does the Duke ever leave the Hall?”

The woman’s brows rose. “Leave it?”

“I begin to suspect the front door has no intention of admitting me.”

“The front door has no intentions of its own, miss. The people behind it have a great many.”

“That was very much my conclusion.”

Mrs Hodge gave the smallest approving nod, as though Cordelia had passed some local examination. “His Grace is seen at church, now and then.”

“Church.” Cordelia lifted her head.

“When he is well enough for it. The Dowager likes him seen there. A duke ought to be seen in his pew, she says, and I daresay a duchess would know.”

“And the vicar?”

“That would be the Reverend Mr Lyndon. A kind enough old soul, and lonely with it, which to my mind is the most useful thing a clergyman can be to a person newly come to a place. He has buried the half of this parish and christened the other half, and he sups up at the Hall of a Tuesday whether the Hall has the appetite for him or no.”

“And has the Hall the appetite?”

“The Hall has little appetite for anything it has not invited a fortnight beforehand, miss. But the Dowager holds that a duke must be seen to keep his vicar, and so up Mr Lyndon goes of a Tuesday, and is fed, and is thanked, and is sent home again. He bears the whole of it a deal better than I should in his shoes.”

Cordelia looked down at the tea, and the answer, once spoken near enough, became plain. A letter could be burnt. A caller could be turned from the step. But a duke did not live only behind his own front door. He went to church. He had a vicar. And a vicar held one privilege granted to very few people alive: the right to put a thing into a great man’s hand of a Sunday and call it the plain business of his soul.

“Does Mr Lyndon receive callers?” she asked.

“He receives anybody at all, miss. That is his whole trouble in life, and the saving of a good many besides who had nowhere else to carry their troubles. Were you wanting the church, then?”

“I was wanting the church,” Cordelia said, and discovered, a little to her own surprise, that saying the words had put something back into her that the closing of the door had taken out. “In the morning. I have a letter to write tonight, and a far better notion than I had this morning of where to put it.”