Then she lifted the case and crossed the marble entrance hall on the soft soles she had chosen for this hour. She let herself out by the side door that opened onto the kitchen garden. The latch made a single click. She closed it behind her without looking back.
The gravel bit into her boots. The air carried the smell of bruised mint from the bed she had brushed against. She walked the lane beyond the garden, ran along the lower edge of the park, and met the post road a quarter mile down. If her letter to the city had been read by the right person, a hired shayes would be waiting under the alder trees.
If not, she would walk to the village. She had counted the miles, and the coins in the inner pocket of her cloak—enough for a meal and a bed and a ticket onward, not a penny more. The shayes was there. She saw the shape of it dark against the slightly less dark of the trees.
She heard the horse blow softly through its nose, a small white cloud of breath. The driver was a thin man wrapped to the eyes in a muffler. He inclined his head a quarter inch, which in the language of men hired by the granddaughters of dangerous grandfathers meant: I know who you are. Get in.
She got in. The door shut. The horse stepped forward at the first chirrup. The wheels turned.
Marlbridge House, three stories of pale stone set into a hollow of beech and oak, fell behind. Adelaide sat very straight, her hands folded in her lap, and did not permit herself any expression until the road turned and the house was gone from the window. Then briefly she allowed one. Not a tear.
A small movement at the corner of her mouth downward. The kind of movement a person makes when she has tasted something unexpected and is deciding whether to swallow it. She swallowed it. The post road ran along the top of a long shallow ridge.
In the dark before dawn, one could see only the lamp at the front of the shayes swinging on its iron arm, throwing a yellow wedge of light onto the verge. Adelaide watched the wedge of light. She thought about the order of operations. The packet of papers in her case would go first, to a man in the city named Pelum who kept an office above a printer shop.
Pelum had loved her father and owed a debt that could not be paid in coin. He would be expecting her by mid-morning. The ledger pages would go by an older route to a woman on the canal, a friend of her mother’s, the only person she trusted to know what to do with a column of figures written by a steward who believed no one would ever count them. The letter on the candle dish would by then have been read four times by the man it was addressed to.
Once in confusion, once in disbelief, once in anger, and once finally in a stillness she would have given a great deal to witness. She knew him well enough now to know the order. She had not known him three weeks ago. The shayes rocked gently.
The horse was a good one. The lamp swung. Once a fox crossed the road ahead, paused in the wedge of light, looked at the shayes with the level, uninsulted gaze of a creature who knew its own size, and then went on. Adelaide watched it go.
She thought: That is the correct attitude. By the time the first gray came into the sky behind them, they had made eight miles. The driver spoke without turning his head. They would stop at the Wheat Sheaf in Cold Harbor for the horse.
There would be tea inside if she wanted it, and a man at the bar who would not be looking at her, and she was not to look at him either. All of this had been arranged. Adelaide said thank you. The driver did not answer.
The Wheat Sheaf was a low stone building with a badly repainted sign. The yard was already awake. Adelaide stepped down without assistance and walked into the inn straight-backed, unhurried, gloves still on. The man at the bar did not look at her.
She did not look at him. She ordered tea and a roll and sat at a small table near the window where she could see the yard. The tea was strong and bitter. The roll was warm.
She ate in small bites because a woman who bolts her food in a strange inn is a woman who has not slept, and she did not wish to advertise that. While she ate, she allowed herself to think about him. Not about the laugh. The laugh was done.
She thought instead about the night before, about the way he had come into the room late, stopped in the doorway, looked at her for a long moment. She had pretended to be asleep. He had crossed to the bed, sat on the edge, not touched her. He had said her name quietly twice in the voice he used only when he believed no one was listening.
When she did not answer, he rose, poured the glass of water, set it on the table, blew out the candle by the door and left the one on the dish because she did not like full dark—a fact she had mentioned exactly once four nights previously, and which he had retained. Then he got into bed beside her, careful not to disturb the coverlet, and went to sleep with one hand resting lightly against the small of her back, as though to be sure she was still there. She had lain awake under that hand for an hour. She had thought that a man who laughed in a long gallery and slept with his hand against a woman’s back did not yet know what he believed.
She had thought it was unkind of him to be both of those men at once. Then she had risen. Then she had written the letter. Then she had counted to three.
The tea grew cool. The driver appeared at the door and inclined his head. Adelaide rose, left a coin on the table exactly the price of the tea and the roll and a small kindness to the maid, and walked out into the yard. A new horse, a gray, was already harnessed.
She climbed back into the shayes. Cold Harbor fell behind. At Marlbridge House at that same hour, the kettle whistled. A maid carried hot water up the back stairs.
The steward read his correspondence in his small office and noticed nothing yet. In the bedchamber on the second floor, the Duke stirred, reached, and found nothing where there had been something. He opened his eyes. He looked at the smooth coverlet, at the glass of water exactly as he had left it.
He sat up. He did not call for anyone. He saw the corner of the letter under the candle dish. He did not at first move to take it.
He sat on the edge of the bed in his shirt, looking at the letter the way a man looks at a door he has not yet opened. He reached out. He lifted the dish. He took the letter.
He unfolded it. It was very short. I heard you in the gallery on the 15th. I have taken from your house only what was already mine.
By midday, a number of people in the city will know things they did not know yesterday. They will have learned them from records you yourself caused to be kept. I am not angry. I am not even particularly surprised.
Do not come after me. If you do, do not come with flowers. Come with the truth about the arrangement in the front hall. Bring it in your own hand.
Then we shall see. Yours with more regret than is convenient. A. He read it once.
He read it a second time. He set it down on the coverlet very carefully. He rose, crossed to the window, drew the curtain aside. The drive below was empty.
A blackbird on the lawn declined to comment. He stood there a long time, his hand against the cold pane. He did not yet know about the ledger, about Pelum, about the woman on the canal. He knew only that he had laughed.
He remembered now exactly what he had said. He had said she was just for fun. He had said it because the men around him were the kind to whom one said such things, and because he had not yet admitted even to himself that it was no longer true. He had let the others carry the rest.
He remembered also that he had not joined the cruder part. He had been faintly proud of himself at the time. He understood now that the small abstention was not going to be enough. He turned from the window, rang for his man, dressed without speaking, went down the back stairs to his study, closed the door.
He sat in the half-dark, looking at the row of ledgers on the shelf opposite. By noon, the letter had said, a number of people would know. He had perhaps four hours to decide what kind of man he was going to be for the rest of his life. The shayes by then had crossed the river and turned south onto the city road.
The morning had filled in, soft and damp, the sky the color of unbleached linen. Adelaide had begun to permit herself small unguarded movements. She loosened the strap on the case. She took off one glove and flexed her stiff hand.
She let her shoulders drop. She thought about Pelum, about the brown ribbon. She thought also about the glass of water and the hand at the small of her back. She thought: I will not think of that again until this is finished.
I will allow myself to think of it once more on the night this is finished, and then I will decide. The city ahead lay under a low brown smudge of its own smoke. Somewhere in that smudge, on a narrow street above a printer shop, a man named Pelum was setting out two cups and a pot of tea because he had received a letter and prepared for it. Somewhere on the canal a woman who had been a friend of her mother’s was unlocking a small writing desk.
Somewhere in a coffee house near the exchange, a clerk was unfolding a list of names over breakfast. Adelaide took a long breath. It came easier than she expected. She had been holding for three weeks a great many things she had not known the weight of until she set them down.
She had set them down on a candle dish in a bedchamber in Marlbridge House. She had walked out by the kitchen garden in the cold. She had counted to three. She was not a woman who had been wronged.
She was a woman who had been underestimated, which was a different and more useful thing. By midday, she would no longer be either. By midday, she would be the granddaughter openly of the grandfather she had been keeping in reserve. By midday, the Duke, sitting in his half-dark study counting his ledgers, would understand that the diversion he had laughed about had been a woman who walked into his house with a list and a memory and a particular interest in one column of figures, and had walked out with all three intact, and with one thing more she had not planned to acquire and had not yet decided what to do with.
The shayes approached the first tollgate. Adelaide drew her cloak more closely around her shoulders, not for warmth, but because it was the gesture of a woman who had arrived somewhere. She glanced once at the case at her feet. The silver thimble lay inside its small twist of paper.
She did not need to see it. She knew where it was. She had known every minute of the last three weeks. She thought of the Duke briefly, the way one thinks of a person standing in another room of a building one has already left.
By tomorrow morning, if I have measured you correctly, you will be standing in a doorway somewhere asking me to stay. I have not yet decided what I will say. That is on the whole a more honest position than the one I held last night. The tollgate opened.
The shayes moved forward. The city took her in. And there for the moment we will leave her, and we will leave him in his half-dark study learning at last the price of a single careless laugh.