SHE STAYED LATE TO TEACH THE STABLE GIRL HER LETTERS—UNAWARE THE DUKE WAS WATCHING

The lamp in the schoolroom had burned down to a small blue flame, and Miss Ren Holloway did not notice until the shadow of her own hand fell wrong across the slate. She looked up. The window showed her a square of black glass, and faintly her own tired face inside it. Beyond the glass, somewhere in the stable yard, a horse shifted its weight and blew out a long breath.

 A dry wind moved along the eaves. October had come in hard this year at Ashevail Park. All dust and yellow leaves and no rain for 6 weeks, and the whole estate smelled of dry hay, dry oak, and the warm bitter smoke of the tallow lamps the housekeeper still preferred to use because wax candles cost too much for a school room. Ren rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand.

 The clock on the mantle said a quart 10. She should have been in her narrow bed under the eaves an hour ago. Instead, there was a child sitting across from her on the low wooden bench, small and thin and stubborn, with hay in her hair and a piece of chalk held wrong between her fingers. “Try again, Dela,” Ren said.

 And her own voice sounded softer than she felt. “Just the one letter. The one we did last.” Dela Marsh, 11 years old and a stable girl since the age of seven, bit the inside of her cheek and pressed the chalk to the slate. The chalk broke. A small white piece skitted across the wood floor and stopped near the leg of the desk. I can’t, Dela said.

 It came out flat, not crying. I told you I can’t. You can. You did it three times yesterday. Yesterday was different. How was yesterday different? Dela did not answer. Her eyes went to the window and stayed there. Ren watched the girl’s face in the lamplight. There was a smudge of something dark along her jaw, and her hands were red at the knuckles from the cold pump water, and her wool jacket was too big at the shoulders and too short at the wrist.

 She had come to the school room straight from the last feeding of the horses. She always did. She smelled of horse and leather and the sharp green smell of the meadow hay they had cut in August and that they were now feeding out because the pasture was so dry. Dela Ren said look at me. The girl did not look at her.

 Yesterday was not different. Ren said you were tired yesterday too. You were tired the day before that. You will be tired tomorrow. The letter does not care if you are tired. Dela’s mouth twisted. That’s a mean thing to say to a person. Perhaps it is, but it is true. And I would rather tell you a true mean thing than a kind lie.

 Kind lies do not teach anyone to read. That got a small crack of a smile, quickly hidden. Dela picked up another piece of chalk from the little wooden tray. This one was longer. She held it the way Ren had shown her, between the tip of the thumb and the side of the first finger, and she made a shape on the slate that was almost almost the letter B. “There,” Ren said.

“There it is.” Dela looked at it. Her whole face changed. Just for one second, she stopped being a girl who had already been told at 11 that she was not the sort of child who ever learned to read and became a girl who had just made a B. That’s a bee, Dela said, cautious. That is a bee. That is my bee. It is yours.

Nobody else’s. Dela let out a breath that had been in her chest longer than the breath itself. The horse in the yard blew again. Somewhere down the corridor, a floorboard settled with a soft, dry creek. Ren was for one small held moment aware of the whole big sleeping house around them and of the two of them alone in the yellow ring of the lamp and of the way the child’s shoulders had come down a little from where they usually rode up near her ears.

Neither of them heard the door. It did not open. It was already open. It had been open perhaps for some minutes. In the hallway, just past the threshold, in the dark part where the lamplight did not quite reach, a tall man stood without moving, one shoulder against the doorframe, his arms folded, and watched.

His name was Alistister Vain, the fifth Duke of Ashevail, and he had not intended to be there at all. He had come down the corridor to fetch a book from his father’s old study, which lay two doors past the school room, and he had heard a voice through the halfopen door. A woman’s voice, then a child’s, then the small clatter of chalk on wood.

 He had stopped without deciding to stop. He had listened and when he had heard the girl say that is my bee and had heard the quiet and showy way the governness had said it is yours nobody else’s he had found he could not quite move on he did not step in he did not clear his throat he watched he watched Miss Holloway in her plain gray wool dress that had been mended twice at the elbow lean forward and set the piece of chalk back in the tray he watched her push a strand of brown hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist because her

hand had chalk dust on it. He watched her mouth make a small shape that was not quite a smile, as if she were pleased about something and had decided not to say so in case it made the girl proud instead of steady. Now the next one, Ren said. Do you remember what comes after B? C, Dela said. She said it like a challenge. Show me.

 The child made a C. It was crooked and too big, and it wandered off the edge of the slate. It was all the same, a sea. Good, Ren said. The Duke did not speak. He watched for another slow minute. Then he stepped back very quietly, one foot at a time, until he was in the deep shadow of the corridor, and he turned and walked away.

 And neither the woman nor the child in the schoolroom knew he had ever been there. That night, in his own dressing room, with his valet already sent to bed, and only one lamp burning on the table beside the shaving basin, the Duke of Ashevail sat down on the edge of a lowleather chair. He did not undress. He put his elbows on his knees and looked at his own boots.

 He had inherited this house 6 months ago. He had inherited with it a great many people, most of whom he did not know. He had inherited a stable yard and a home farm and a school room that was meant for children who did not exist because he had not yet married and had no sons to teach.

 He had inherited a governness who had come from the previous Duke’s household in Somerset and who was according to the housekeeper. Clever enough, your grace, but she keeps herself to herself. He had until tonight no clear picture of her in his mind at all. He had a clear picture now. He thought about the way she had said, “Kind lies do not teach anyone to read.

” And he thought about the child’s raw red knuckles. And he thought about the hour of the night. And he thought about what a governness with no children to teach might be doing at a quart 10 with a stable girl and a broken piece of chalk in an empty school room. He did not think about her face, particularly.

 He had not seen it very well. He thought about the tone of her voice, which had been dry and low, and about the way she had not at any moment, made a show for the invisible watcher she had not known was there. He got up, he put out the lamp, he went to bed, and did not sleep for some time.

 Two mornings later, in the small breakfast room that faced the east lawn, the Duke was informed by his aunt that Miss Halloway was unfortunately not going to be with them much longer. She isn’t. the Duke said. Mrs. Otin Vain, his father’s youngest sister, buttered a piece of toast with the calm hand of a woman who had made every important decision in the household since her nephew was 14, and who did not intend to stop now.

 There are no children, Alistister. There is no reason to keep a governness. It is an expense that made sense in your father’s time when your cousins were still here. It does not make sense now. I have told her at the end of the quarter she must find a new situation. I have written her a very fair character.

 She is quite young enough to place elsewhere. She will be perfectly well. The Duke did not answer at once. He looked at the lawn. The grass was brown at the tips from the long dry autumn. And the gardener had set out three wooden buckets under the drain pipe at the corner of the stable roof in the hope of rain that had not come.

 Aunt Otelin, he said, how long has she been with us? 4 years. And where will she go? That is, I would think, her business. Mrs. Vain set down her knife with a small precise click. Alistister, it is a governness. It is not a matter for a duke to concern himself over. The Duke, who had heard versions of this sentence from his aunt about many other subjects since the age of 14, poured himself another cup of tea and said nothing.

 She took his silence for agreement, as she often did, and moved on to the question of whether the new gamekeeper’s wife was suitable for the parish committee. The Duke drank his tea and watched the buckets under the drain pipe, and thought about a girl who had said, “That is my bee.” He did not go to the schoolroom.

 He did not send for the governness. He did, however, 3 days later, in the middle of a long conversation with his steward about the state of the stable yard, ask a question that surprised the steward and would have surprised the governness if she had heard it. Peragrin, he said, “How many children work in the yard?” “Mr. Peragrin Kolam the steward a lean man of 50 with a face like a wet Sunday considered three your grace two boys one girl the girl Marsh’s daughter Dela been here since she was seven her mother’s dead her father does the harness work

and she does what waters the horses sweeps the yard runs errands she’s a small hand small hands are useful in a How old is she? 11, I think. Might be 12. Marsh would know. The Duke drank his tea. Peragrin waited. Because the Duke was clearly not finished, and it was the steward’s business to know when a duke was not finished.

 Can she read? The Duke asked. The steward blinked. Read your grace? Read letters words? I would not know your grace. I would think most likely no, her father cannot, nor her mother when she lived. Peragrin waited longer. That will be all, the Duke said. Thank you. The steward went away with the distinct feeling that something had been said that he had not entirely understood.

 And this was a feeling he was beginning to have with increasing frequency around his new master, and he was not sure yet whether it made him nervous or hopeful. Ren Holloway learned that she was being dismissed on a Tuesday in the little sitting room off the housekeeper’s parlor from Mrs. Vain herself, who did the thing kindly, but without wasting time.

 You have been a great asset to this household, Miss Halloway. The character I am writing for you is warm. You may look at it before I seal it. You have until the 21st of December. I understand that is Christmas week, which is not ideal, but it gives you 8 weeks. and 8 weeks is more than most households provide.

 I do hope you will find something suited to your talents.” Ren sat with her hands in her lap. She had a piece of chalk dust still on her left thumb. She had come straight from the school room. “Thank you, Mrs. Vain,” she said. “May I ask a question?” “Of course.” The stable girl, Dela Marsh, I have been teaching her her letters in the evening.

 She is very close to reading her first small sentences. Might I be permitted to continue with her until the 21st? Mrs. Vain’s face did a small polite thing that meant she was about to say no as pleasantly as possible, Miss Halloway. That is very good of you. But the school room is not a place for the stable girl. It never has been.

 Her father can have her taught in the village if he wishes. I doubt he does. It is not, I think, an appropriate use of the school room or of your remaining time. I would prefer you use your evenings to correspond with prospective households. Ren’s face did not move. She had had a great deal of practice at not moving her face. I understand, she said. I am glad.

May I ask one further thing? Yes. Does the Duke know I am being dismissed? Mrs. Vain’s brows lifted by exactly the width of a hair. The Duke does not concern himself with the household staff, Miss Halloway. He has larger matters to attend to. I make these decisions on his behalf as I always have.

 Of course, you may go. Ren stood. She thanked Mrs. Vain again. She walked down the corridor with her back very straight and her hands very still and her breath very shallow. And she did not until she had reached her own small room at the top of the east staircase and closed the door behind her allow her face to do anything at all.

Then she sat on the edge of her bed. She looked at the piece of chalk dust on her thumb. She rubbed it off with the pad of her other thumb until her thumb was pink. She had been dismissed once before from a household in Bath at the age of 20 for reasons that had not been her fault and that she had not been permitted to explain.

 She had been 8 months finding another position. In those eight months she had learned exactly how much a woman with no family, no husband, and no fortune was worth on the open market of English households, and the answer was very little, unless she was very quiet, very useful, and very willing to be paid less than she was owed. She was 24 now.

 She was not going to cry. She was, however, going to continue teaching Demarsh her letters. Mrs. Vain had said she should not use the school room. Mrs. Vain had not in fact forbidden the lessons. There was a difference. Ren Halloway had lived her whole adult life inside such differences. She would move the lessons to the tack room in the stable after the last feed when Dela was already there anyway. She would bring her own slate.

She would bring her own chalk. She would use the lantern the grooms lit for the night check. She would not, if she could help it, be seen. Six evenings after that, in the tack room at the far end of the stable, with the dry wind rattling the shutter of the small window, and the smell of leather oil and horse, and the last of the summer’s hay all around them, Ren sat on an upturned bucket, and watched Dela Marsh spell the word cat on a slate resting across the girl’s knees.

 “C,” Dela said. “Cat? Yes, that’s a word. That is a word. That’s the first whole word I ever wrote. It is. Dela looked at the slate. She looked at Ren. She looked at the slate again. Miss, she said, “Am I going to lose you?” Ren had not expected the question. She did not answer for a moment. In the stall closest to the tack room, a big gray mare shifted her weight and put her nose against the low wooden wall and blew, warm and slow, so that the wall itself seemed to breathe.

 Where did you hear that, Dela? The kitchens. Mrs. Fen told Cook that Mrs. Vain is sending you away at Christmas. She said it’s a pity because you’re the only one in the house who’s kind to the yard children. She said you’ll get a place elsewhere though because your character will be very warm. Ren was quiet. Is it true? Dela said. Yes. Because of me? No.

 Not because of you. Because I’m slow. No. Because you stayed late? No, Dela looked at the slate. Then why? Because there are no children in this house, Dela. And a house without children does not need a governness. It is a very ordinary sort of reason. It is not because of anything I did wrong.

 It is not because of anything you did wrong. It is just that houses run on numbers, and the number of children in this one is nothing. Dela thought about this. There’s me, she said at last. Yes, I’m a child. Yes, I’m just not the right sort. Ren could not answer that quickly. She reached out and took the slate. She held it flat on her palm.

Dela had made the word cat with letters that leaned in three different directions, and she had made it with the whole strength of her hand pressed down through the chalk, so that the letters were nearly cut into the slate itself. “You are exactly the right sort,” Ren said. “Just not the sort that houses count. That’s a mean thing to say.

 It is, and it is true. Dela smiled, small and bitter and 11 years old. You’re the meanest teacher a person could have, she said. I know. Don’t stop. I will not stop until the 21st of December. That is 8 weeks. That is a great many evenings. That is enough time for you to read a whole page of a book to me before I go.

And I intend for you to do it. Do you hear me? Yes, Miss Good. The mayor in the next store blew again. The dry wind moved the shutter. A single yellow leaf came in through the crack under the door and skidded across the tack room floor and stopped against the toe of Ren’s shoe. Ren looked at it. It was oak.

 It had come from the great old oak at the corner of the drive, which had not dropped a leaf until the middle of October this year, because the weather had been so unnaturally dry, and now the whole avenue was ankled deep in curling, brittle brown. “Cat,” Dela said again to herself, as if to fix it. “Cat,” Ren said.

 The Duke of Ashevail had by the end of the second week developed a habit he did not entirely approve of in himself. Every evening after the household dinner, he found some reason to walk through the yard. On the first evening, the reason was that he wished to see the gray mare. On the second, he wished to speak to the headgroom about the horse’s winter feed.

On the third, he had simply gone out. He had told himself he was walking off the port. He was not walking off the port. He had drunk very little port. He had gone out because he had noticed on the first evening that a thin yellow line of lamp light showed at the shutter of the tack room after the rest of the stable had gone dark, and he had wondered.

 On the fourth evening he walked slowly past the tack room window and heard through the shutter the low, steady voice of Miss Halloway and the smaller, uncertain voice of the stable girl. He heard the word cat. He heard the word hat. He heard the woman laugh once, quietly at something the child had said.

 It was the first time he had ever heard Miss Halloway laugh, and it made him stop for a full second in the middle of the cold gravel yard before he walked on. On the sixth evening, he came back to his study, sat down at his desk, and wrote a short note. He did not send it. He put it in a drawer.

 He looked at the drawer for a long time. Then he shut it. He was a man who did not, as a rule, waste words. He was also a man who had learned young during a very short and very bad first marriage to a woman his aunt had chosen that the wrong word said quickly could cost a person everything. His wife had died in the second year of that marriage of a fever before either of them had been able to work out what to do with one another, and he had not spoken to a woman since with anything more than courteous distance.

 He was at the age of 32 aware that this could not continue forever. He was also aware that his aunt had a list of eligible young women in her writing desk and that the list had been in the writing desk since the day of the previous Duke’s funeral and that she would produce it at Christmas. He did not want the list.

 He wanted, he found, to know how Miss Halloway had come to be teaching a stable girl to read at 10:00 at night in a school room for children who did not exist. he asked the housekeeper casually over the matter of a broken window on the north side on a morning 3 weeks in. Mrs. Fen, Miss Halloway, she has been with us how long? 4 years.

 Your grace, where was she before? A household in Bath, your grace. There was some trouble. Not of her making, if you’ll allow me to say so. The son of the house, I understand, made a nuisance of himself, and the wife took against her rather than against him. She was let go without a character. Your father’s cousin took her on as a favor.

 She came to us when the cousin died. Ah, she is very quiet, your grace. Very correct. She teaches Miss Marsh in the tac room now in the evenings since Mrs. Vain thought it improper for her to use the school room for that purpose. She thinks I do not know. You do know? Yes, your grace. You have not stopped her. No, your grace. Why not? Mrs.

 Fen, who had been housekeeper at Ashevail for 29 years, and had known the Duke since he was a small boy, who could not reach the door handle to the still room, allowed herself the smallest possible pause before she answered. Because I have watched that child, your grace, since she was 7 years old, since her mother died, Miss Halloway is teaching her to read.

 That is a thing that will not be taken from her, whatever else is taken from her later. and I did not myself feel any duty to prevent it. The Duke set down his cup. Thank you, Mrs. Fen. Your grace. He did not that day or the next day or the day after that do anything at all. He walked in the yard. He read the report from the home farm. He wrote three letters, none of them to Miss Halloway.

 He rode out to the edge of the estate on the gray mare and looked at the brown fields and thought about the price of grain if the winter stayed dry. He also, without telling anyone, went one afternoon into the village and stopped at the shop of a man named Sillis Ro, who bound and sold books, and he ordered a small parcel to be sent to the stable, not to the house, in a plain wrapping with no note.

 The parcel contained one thing, a child’s first reading primer, cheaply made, with pictures of a cat, a hat, a rat, and a mat on the first page. There was also tucked between the pages a second slate, a new one, small enough for a girl’s lap, and two whole sticks of good white chalk, not the broken stubs the schoolroom got.

 The parcel arrived on a Thursday. The headgroom, a man named Barnaby Trail, looked at it. It was addressed to Miss D. Marsh, care of the stable, Ashevail Park. There was no sender. Barnaby had four daughters of his own, and knew a kindness when he saw one. He carried the parcel down the aisle of the stable, past the stalls, and put it on the top of the wooden bench in the tack room where Dela would find it that evening.

 He did not ask any questions. He had lived at Ashevail for a long time. He knew who owned the yard. Dela found the parcel at 7:00 that night. She was alone then. She undid the paper with hands that shook because parcels did not in her experience come for people like her. She took out the primer. She took out the slate.

 She held the slate in both hands. She read carefully out loud to the empty tack room the words on the first page. Cat, hat, rat, mat. She got each one right. She sat down on the upturned bucket and cried briefly and silently and then wiped her nose on her sleeve. And by the time Ren came in 10 minutes later, Dela was sitting with the primer open on her knees and a face so shining that Ren stopped in the doorway.

 “Miss,” Dela said. “Look.” Ren looked. “Someone sent it.” Dela said, “Who? There’s no name.” Ren picked up the paper. She turned it over. She looked at the string. She looked at the way the corners had been folded. She thought about the paper, which was better than the paper the shop in the village used for its ordinary parcels. She did not say anything.

 Is it from you? Dela said. No. Then who? Ren, who had a suspicion but did not intend to speak it aloud to an 11-year-old girl on the strength of a suspicion. Set the paper down. A friend of yours, she said. You have more friends than you know. Dela held the slate against her chest as if it might be taken back.

 I don’t want to give it back, she said. You will not have to. How do you know? Because whoever sent it did not want to be thanked. That is a person who intends for you to keep it. Dela, who was 11 and stubborn but not slow, thought about this for a moment. Miss, she said, is it the Duke? Ren did not answer that either.

 The trouble began, as trouble usually began at Ashevail, with Mrs. Otto in vain. In the fifth week of Ren’s remaining time, on a cold, clear evening, when the frost had at last come, and the yard was crisp with rhyme, and the horse’s breath rose in slow white plumes, Mrs. Vain was passing through the west corridor when she happened to look out of the window and saw a thin figure in a gray wool cloak walk from the servant’s door across the yard in the direction of the stable with a slate and a book held tight against her chest. Mrs. Vain recognized the

cloak. She had seen it a great many times. She did not follow. She was a woman who did not need to follow. She rang for the housekeeper. Mrs. Fen, what is Miss Halloway doing in the stable at this hour? Mrs. Fen, who had been expecting some version of this question for 4 weeks, folded her hands in front of her apron.

 She teaches Miss Marsh her letters, ma’am, in the tack room. After the last feed, it is a quiet arrangement. I forbade her the school room for such a purpose. Yes, ma’am. I did not, however, expect her to move the arrangement to the stable. No, ma’am. You knew. Yes, ma’am. Mrs. Vain was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was cold and very quiet. And Mrs. Fen, who had known Mrs.

Vain for 29 years, was suddenly reminded that the woman had never in all that time forgiven anyone who worked around her rather than through her. You will fetch her to me. Now, bring her to the small sitting room. You may then return to your duties. Yes, ma’am. Ren came from the stable with her cloak still on and her hands still cold. She was not surprised.

 She had known from the first evening in the tack room that the arrangement would not last. She had in fact been more surprised that it had lasted 5 weeks. Mrs. Vain was standing at the window when Ren came in. She did not turn around at once. Miss Halloway. Mrs. Vain, I made myself, I thought, quite clear on the subject of your use of the schoolroom for the stable child.

 You did, ma’am, and your response was to move the practice to the stable. You forbade the schoolroom, ma’am, not the lessons. Mrs. Vain turned around. She was a small woman. She had a small, pale face and small, pale eyes, and a mouth she used very carefully. She looked at Ren for a long moment.

 Then she said the thing that Ren would remember later as the moment she stopped feeling anything at all. Miss Halloway, you are a woman with no husband, no family, and no prospects. Teaching another woman with no husband, no family, and no prospects how to write her name on a slate. There is nothing at the end of this road for either of you.

 You are wasting the child’s time and your own, and you are stealing the estate’s oil to do it. I have written you a warm character. I will not do so again. If you continue this arrangement between now and the 21st of December, that character will be rewritten to reflect the fact that you disregard the instructions of the mistress of the house.

 I trust that is quite clear. Ren did not move. She had been prepared for anger. She had been prepared for cold dismissal. She had not quite been prepared for the last sentence, which was not anger, and was not dismissal, but was instead the exact careful shape of a threat delivered by a woman who had done it before.

 You are wasting the child’s time and your own. Mrs. Vain had said, “And you are stealing the estate’s oil to do it.” Ren felt in a distant sort of way her own hands go cold inside her cloak. I understand, Mrs. Vain. Do you? Yes. Then you will stop this evening. There will be no lesson tonight. There will be no lesson tonight. Good. May I go? You may.

Ren walked out. She walked past Mrs. Fen in the corridor. She walked out of the servants’s door. She walked across the yard in the cold clear starlight with the frost crunching under her thin shoes. And she did not this time go to the tack room. She went to her own room. She climbed the east staircase. She sat down at the small writing desk under the window and she opened her writing box and she took out a sheet of paper. She did not cry.

 She wrote out in her neat clear hand a letter to a household in Kent that had some weeks ago expressed interest in a governness. She sealed it. She addressed it. She set it on the corner of the desk to go out with the morning post. Then she sat and looked at the letter for a long time and thought about Dela Marsh in the tack room waiting with the primer open on her knees and about how the child would understand when Ren did not come exactly what had happened.

 She had promised the girl she would not stop until the 21st of December. She was going to have to break that promise. She sat with the breaking of it for a long time. Then she blew out the candle. Down the corridor in the great study at the end of the east wing, the Duke of Ashev was not blowing out his candle. He had that evening been on his way through the servants’s passage on some pretext.

 He had begun to invent pretexts more freely, and had passed the small sitting room, and had heard through the closed door the exact clear voice of his aunt saying, “You are wasting the child’s time and your own, and you are stealing the estate’s oil to do it.” He had stopped. He had stood outside the closed door for the whole rest of it.

 He had heard every word. He had heard Ren say, “I understand, Mrs. Vain.” He had heard her go. He had not gone in. He had gone instead to his study, and he had sat down at his desk, and he had at last taken out the note he had written three weeks ago, and never sent, and he had read it, and had torn it in half, and had thrown the pieces into the fire.

 He watched the paper curl and blacken. He was, he realized, angry. He was not often angry. He was angry now. He was angry at his aunt for the exact and precise cruelty of what she had said, and he was angry at himself for the exact and precise cowardice of the last three weeks in which he had walked past the tack room window every evening and had not once walked in.

 He got up, he rang the bell. Peragrin Kolam, who had been about to go to bed, came instead to the study, holding his hat because he had thought he was leaving. Peragrin, your grace. Sit down. The steward sat down. I have decisions to make, the Duke said. I would like you to make some notes. Yes, your grace. First, Dela Marsh. Age 11.

 She is at present a stable hand. From tomorrow morning, she is not. Your grace. She will be moved into the house as a junior of some kind. Whatever Mrs. Fen thinks proper. Light indoor duties only. She will continue her lessons in the schoolroom in daylight four afternoons a week. Her father is to be informed and his agreement asked.

 If he requires assurance about her wages, tell him they will not decrease. Tell him also that when she is 14, she will be offered the choice of a further place in the household or an apprenticeship in the village. That will be her choice, not his and not mine. Are you writing? I am writing your grace. Second, Miss Ren Holloway, at present the governness of this house.

 She is not to be dismissed at Christmas. Her contract is to be renewed for one year with a rise in salary of 1/3. Her duties will now include the teaching of any child on the estate whose parents wish it. She will have the use of the schoolroom without qualification for that purpose. If there is any question as to expense, address the question to me, not to Mrs. Vain.

Peraggreen’s pen paused. your grace. Forgive me, Mrs. Vain will. I am aware. Yes, your grace. Third, Mrs. Vain. My aunt has been mistress of this house since I was 14 years old, and I owe her a great deal. She will continue to have the use of the West Wing for as long as she wishes. She will continue to be treated by the household with every courtesy.

 She will not, however, from tomorrow morning. Be making any decisions about the employment of persons at Ashevail Park. Any such decisions come to me. You will make that clear to her without discourtesy. If she wishes to hear it from me, she may at any time come and hear it from me. Yes, your grace. Fourth. Have you got all that? I have.

Your grace. Good. Go to bed. Peraggreen stood up. He looked at the Duke. He had known him since the Duke was seven. Your grace, he said. May I say one thing? You may. Your father would have done this 5 years ago. It has been my private opinion for some time that certain arrangements in this house have been permitted to stand longer than they should. I am glad to see it.

 The Duke looked at his steward. Thank you, Peragine. Good night, your grace. Good night. Peraggreen left. The Duke sat for another long time at his desk, and then he went at last to bed. He did not that night tell Miss Halloway anything. She did not know when she woke on the Wednesday morning that any of it had happened. She dressed quietly.

 She braided her hair. She picked up the letter to Kent from the corner of her desk and went down to the front hall to put it in the post basket. She was crossing the front hall when a footman came out of the corridor with a message. Miss Halloway. The Duke’s compliments. He asks if you would come to the small library at 10:00.

Ren stopped. The letter was in her hand. The Duke? Yes, miss. Do you know what it concerns? I do not, miss. Thank you. The footman withdrew. Ren stood in the hall. She looked at the letter to Kent. She thought about putting it in the basket anyway. She did not. She put it back in her pocket and she went upstairs and she washed her face with cold water from the UR and she came back down at 5 minutes to 10 and she was for the first time in 4 years at Ashevail aware of the beat of her own heart under her ribs. The small

library was on the east side of the house. It had two windows and a fire that had been lit early because the frost had lasted through the night and the room was cold. There was a low table, two chairs, and one large writing desk under the north window. The Duke stood at the writing desk. He was in dark gray. He had a book in his hand.

 He put it down when she came in. Miss Halloway, your grace, please sit down. She sat down. She kept her hands in her lap. He did not sit. He stood by the desk. He looked at her for a moment, plainly without hurry. I owe you an apology. He said, “Your grace, for 3 weeks, I have known that my aunt was dismissing you. I did nothing.

 Last night I heard her speak to you in a way that I would not permit anyone in my household to speak to a person under my roof. I did nothing then either in the moment, and for that I apologize.” Ren did not know what to say. She looked at her hands. “I do not require an apology, your grace. You do not require it.

 I offer it.” That is a different matter. He waited. She looked up. Miss Halloway, he said, “I have made certain arrangements this morning. You will hear of them from Mr. Kolam and from Mrs. Fen during the course of the day, so I will not enumerate them all. There are, however, two I wish to tell you myself because they concern you directly.

” Yes, your grace. The first, you are not dismissed. Your contract is renewed for a year with a raise. Your duties will now include the teaching of any child of the estate whose parents wish it. The school room is yours. Ren felt something in her chest do a small, painful, unexpected thing. She did not let it reach her face. Your grace.

Thank you. The second Dela Marsh will no longer be worked in the yard. She will be brought inside as a junior in the house on light duties, and she will continue her lessons in the schoolroom in daylight, four afternoons a week. Ren, who had been holding herself very carefully together since the previous evening, felt her hands go all at once, cold and then warm.

 Your grace, you do not need to thank me for that either. It is what should have been done 3 years ago. She looked at him. She looked at his face for the first time, properly in the four years she had lived at Ashevail. He had a plain, tired, serious face. He had gray eyes and a small line at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a scar.

 He looked, she thought suddenly like a man who had spent a great many years being told to do things by other people, and who had this morning quietly stopped. “Your grace,” she said. “May I ask a question?” “You may.” “Why?” He considered the question. He did not rush. He was, she noticed, a man who was not afraid of a silence.

 May I answer plainly? Please. Some weeks ago, I passed the school room in the corridor at a quart 10 at night. The door was open. I stopped because I heard your voice. I stood there for perhaps 5 minutes. I heard you tell a stable girl that kind lies do not teach anyone to read.

 I heard her make the letter B and I heard you tell her it was hers, nobody else’s. I did not come in. I did not speak. I went to my own dressing room and I sat on a chair and I thought about it for a long time. In the 4 months since I inherited this house, I had not heard from anyone in it. A single sentence as useful as either of those. I thought that night that I should like the person who said those sentences not to be dismissed. Ren was quiet.

 That is why he said it is not a large thing. It is not a romantic thing. It is what I would call a practical thing. It should not have taken me 3 weeks. You sent the parcel, she said. He did not deny it. I did. Dela thought it might be you. Dela is a clever child. Yes, they looked at one another.

 The fire in the small library ticked and settled. Outside the north window, the frost was beginning to melt on the sill in a small clear line where the sun had reached it. Ren was aware suddenly of all the small ordinary sounds of the house, a door somewhere, a step in the corridor, the clock on the mantle, and of the way the Duke standing very still by the desk made all of them fit around him instead of the other way about.

Your grace, she said, there is a letter in my pocket. Yes, it is addressed to a household in Kent. I wrote it last night. It offers me as a governness to their daughters. I was going to put it in the basket this morning. Ah, I would like your permission to burn it. He looked at her. The corner of his mouth did a small thing that might on a different face have been the beginning of a smile.

 Miss Halloway, he said, you do not need my permission to burn a letter you wrote yourself. No, your grace, but the fire is there. Yes, your grace. She stood up. She took the letter out of her pocket. She walked in her plain gray wool dress across the small library to the hearth. She knelt down. She put the letter on the low coals and watched the corner curl and blacken and go.

 She stayed on the hearth a moment longer than she needed to. The paper had gone. The room was still cold. Her knees were cold on the stone. She was aware without turning that the Duke had not moved from beside the desk and that he was watching her and that neither of them was going to say anything else for a small measured space of time.

 She stood up. Your grace, Miss Halloway. Thank you. Please do not thank me again today. It becomes unnecessary quickly. Yes, your grace. She curtsied. She went to the door. She paused with her hand on the door. Your grace. Yes, Dela is at present in the tack room. I did not go last night. She will have thought I was not coming today either. Then go now.

 May I use the school room? Miss Halloway, the school room is yours. Yes, your grace. She went out. She closed the door behind her quietly, and she walked down the corridor in her plain gray wool dress and her thin shoes, and by the time she reached the yard, she was walking so quickly that Mrs. Fen, coming out of the still room with a jar of preserves in her hand, stopped to watch her go.

 Dela was in the tack room. She was not doing anything. She had the slate on her knees and the primer closed on the bench beside her. She looked up when Ren came in. Her face went carefully blank in the way that only children who have already been left by people before know how to make a face go.

 Miss, she said, Dela, get your things. Miss, get your things. All of them. The slate, the primer, your cloak, your boots, everything. We are not doing the lesson here today. Dela did not move. Are you leaving? No. Am I leaving? Yes, not the estate. You are leaving the yard. You will not be working in the yard anymore.

 You will be brought inside as a junior of the house, and you will have your lessons in the school room in the afternoon, 4 days a week, in daylight at a proper desk. Now, get your things.” Dela’s whole face did a thing that Ren was not prepared for. She started to cry. She did it silently with her hands still in her lap and her face perfectly still and only the tears going down.

 Miss, she said, “Is this real?” “It is real.” “Who did it?” “The Duke did it.” Dela was quiet. Then she said, “Very small. It was him with the parcel. Yes, he was watching us. He heard us once in the school room the night you made your first bee.” Dela thought about this. She thought about it in the slow, careful way of an 11-year-old girl who did not yet know what to do with a piece of luck.

 Miss, she said, “Am I allowed to say thank you to him? You will not have to. He will not want to be thanked, but you may. If you want, I want, then you may. Now, not now. Get your things. We are going to the school room.” Dela got her things. She held the slate against her chest with both hands. She followed Ren out of the tack room, out of the stable, across the yard, in through the servants’s door, up the little staircase, and into the school room. She stopped on the threshold.

 The school room was exactly the same as it had always been. The low bench, the wooden desk, the lamp on the mantle, the window with the black autumn glass, and now faintly a square of pale morning sun coming through it and lying across the floor in a stripe. Ren watched Dela look at it. Sit down, she said.

 Dela sat down. Ren opened the primer at the first page. Cat, hat, rat, Matt, read it to me, she said. Miss, I read it already on my own. Read it to me anyway out loud in this room. In daylight, Dela read it. She read it slowly and clearly in the flat, determined voice of a child who did not quite yet believe that she was allowed to have this, and who had decided to do it before anybody changed their mind.

 Cat, hat, rat, Matt, Ren, who had been very steady all morning, felt her own eyes go hot for the first time. Mrs. Otin Vain came to the small library after lunchon. She had been informed by Mr. Peragrin Kam without discourtesy of certain changes in the arrangements of the house. She had, according to Mrs. Fen’s later account below stairs gone quite white and then quite pink and then quite white again.

 She came to the small library. She stood on the far side of the desk. The Duke stood up when she came in. Aunt Otelin Alistister, please sit down. I will stand as you wish. I have been informed by your steward that certain arrangements are now to be made through you rather than through me. Yes. Might I ask why I was not consulted? You may. The Duke did not go on.

 He did not at any point in the exchange that followed raise his voice. He did not at any point disrespect her. He also did not at any point retreat, he said in a level even voice, that he was grateful for the many years in which she had managed the house on his behalf, that he intended for her to be comfortable at Ashevail for the rest of her life, and that from that morning the household staff were his responsibility rather than hers.

 He said that he had heard the previous evening the exact words she had said to Miss Halloway, and that he considered them the kind of words that a mistress of Ashev did not in his household address to a person in his employee. He said this without heat. He said it as if he were reading a bill. Mrs. Vain’s face did not change. You heard me. I did.

 You were listening at a door. I was passing a door. I stopped. And this is your response. This is my response. She was silent for a long moment. Alistister, you are making a great deal out of a governness. I am making a great deal out of the household in which I now live. You will regret this. Perhaps that will be my regret to have. She looked at him.

 She looked at him for a very long time. He did not look away. At last she gave, without saying so, the smallest possible bow of her head, the sort of bow that a woman of her generation gave when she had been beaten by a man of his generation, and did not intend to acknowledge it aloud, and she went out.

 The Duke stood for a moment at the desk. He was again a little surprised at himself. He had not known when he had rung the bell for Peraggreen the night before that he was going to be a different man in the morning. He had not thought of it in those terms. He had thought of it in terms of a girl making a bee in a schoolroom and a stable child crying quietly over a parcel wrapped in plain paper and a woman writing a letter to Kent. She did not want to send.

 He sat down at the desk. He picked up the pen. He wrote in his own hand a short note to Mr. Silus Rogue in the village. The note was an order for six more primers, two of the alphabet blocks that the shop kept for children in the town school, a box of good white chalk, and one small blackboard on a wooden stand to be delivered to Ashevail Park, care of the schoolroom, at Miss Halloway’s earliest convenience.

 He signed the note, he sealed it, he rang the bell. That evening, the Duke walked out into the yard, as he had done every evening for a month. He walked past the stable. He walked past the tack room. The tack room shutter was dark. He walked on. He did not go to the schoolroom. He had already been there once invisibly, and once was enough.

 He walked to the edge of the yard where the gravel gave way to the grass of the home paddic, and he stopped there for a while with his hands in his coat pockets, and looked out across the pale grass under the moon. The frost had come back. The whole field was pale silver. Somewhere out in the dark, the gray mare was breathing in and out, warm and slow.

 Overhead, the stars were extremely clear. Ren Halloway found him there. She had not come out looking for him. She had come out to walk because Dela had gone home to her father’s cottage, and the school room was quiet, and Ren had a great deal in her chest that would not sit still. She was in her grey wool cloak and her thin shoes and her hair braided plain down her back.

She came around the corner of the stable and saw him and she stopped. He heard her stop. He turned. Miss Halloway, your grace, you are not walking in those shoes. I am not going far. You are going as far as I am. Where do you intend to go? To the end of the yard and back. Then walk with me. She hesitated.

 She did not, she realized, want to say no. She walked with him. They walked without speaking to the corner of the paddock. They stood there. The frost crunched under her thin shoes, and she felt the cold come up through the soles and settle in her ankles, and she did not tonight. Mind it, your grace, Miss Halloway.

I did not thank Dela today. She has already, I understand, tried to thank you. She sent a note through Mrs. Fen. What did it say? He smiled. It was a small real smile and it made his face look for a moment exactly the age he was. It said in her own hand, “Thank you for the parcel and for the school room. I made a cat today from Dela Marsh.

” The word cat had a small circle around it. Ren laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it. She had not laughed properly in a long time and it made her cough at the end and her eyes went hot again. That is a very fine note, she said. I have put it in the drawer of my desk. Your grace.

 Yes, I do not know how to be in this house from tomorrow. How so? I have been the governness of a house with no children for 4 years. I have been very careful. I have been very quiet. I have been very small. It is what I know. Ah, I do not know how to be a woman with a school room that is hers. I do not know how to be a woman who is not at all times one week from being dismissed.

 I am afraid I will do it badly. He was quiet. Miss Halloway, he said, “You will do it exactly as you did the letter B. Once, then again, then again. That is all any of us do.” She looked at him. She looked at his face in the moonlight. He was not looking at her romantically. He was not looking at her at all in the way a man in a story looked at a woman.

 He was looking at her the way one adult looked at another when he had at last decided to see her. Your grace. Yes. Do you know what you have done? I have moved a child from a stable into a house. Yes. And I have kept a governness who was already keeping herself. Yes. That is all I have done. That is not all you have done.

 He looked out over the pale field. Miss Halloway, he said. May I say one further thing. Yes. When my aunt sees fit to produce a list at Christmas of young women I am to consider for marriage, I intend to decline the list. Ren did not answer. I do not, he said, have any particular plan in place of the list.

 I mention it because you told me a moment ago that you were afraid you would not know how to be a woman in this house who was not one week from being dismissed. I would like you to know that whatever you become in this house in the year that comes will not depend on any list of any kind held by any person. She looked at him.

 Her breath came out in a small white cloud between them. Your grace. Yes, that is a very great deal to say without saying anything. It is. I will remember it. I hoped you would. They stood a while longer. The mayor in the field blew softly once and then again. Somewhere far off, a fox called. The frost went on being silver. He did not offer her his arm.

 He did not take her hand. He did not do any of the things a man in a story would have done. He walked her back across the yard. At the servant’s door, he stopped. Good night, Miss Halloway. Good night, your grace. She went in. Winter came in earnest in the third week of November, and the school room in the daylight hours was full.

 There were, by the end of the second week, seven children at the low benches. There was Dela, of course, in a plain, clean dress that the housekeeper had cut down for her from something in the mending basket sitting nearest the front. There was the headgroom’s youngest daughter. There were the two boys of the man who kept the home farm.

 There was the small, solemn son of the lodgekeeper. There were two children from the tenant cottage at the bottom of the drive, whose father had. When Perigrin Kolam had written down to ask him, taken off his cap, and stared at the steward for a full minute before he said quietly, “Yes, sir. Yes, please, sir.” Ren taught them their letters in the morning and their numbers after the noon meal, and she read to them in the last hour of the short winter afternoon from whatever book she could find on the shelves of the small library that a child could

bear. The Duke, whose library it was, had told her, without ceremony, to take whatever she wanted. She took at first the ones that had been read least. She had begun cautiously to take the ones that had been read most. Dela learned to read in 7 weeks. She read her first whole page aloud from a book about a boy and a dog and a river on a Tuesday afternoon in early December in front of the other six children and Ren and standing quite still in the doorway with his coat still on and snow on the shoulders of it because he had come

straight in from the yard the Duke. He had not intended to be in the doorway. He had come to the schoolroom to leave a message for Miss Halloway from Peraggreen, and he had heard through the door the exact clear voice of the stable girl reading one word at a time about the boy and the dog and the river. He had stopped.

 He had, unlike the first time, waited only a minute. Then he had opened the door and come in. Dela saw him. She did not stop. She read to the end of the page. She closed the book. She looked at him. Your grace, she said. Miss Marsh, I read a whole page. I heard. It was about a boy and a dog and a river. So I gathered.

 I did not do it perfectly. You did it. Yes. Your grace. The Duke of Ashevail in his snowshouldered coat looked at the child and then at the six other children and then at Miss Halloway who was standing at the front of the schoolroom with chalk dust on her thumb and he did a thing then that none of the children ever forgot and that Ren Halloway remembered for the rest of her life.

 He came to the front of the schoolroom. He stopped in front of Dela. He bent down so that his face was on a level with hers and he said, “Miss Marsh, I am very glad.” Then he stood up. He nodded at the other children. He looked once and briefly at Ren, and something in his face was not any different from the way it had been all winter, and something in it was completely different, and neither of them looked away for a small, measured space of time, in which the six other children, without knowing why, went very quiet. He gave Miss Halloway

her message from Peraggreen. He went out. The lesson ended a quarter of an hour later. The children put on their coats. They went out into the snow. Dela stayed. She stood by the window and watched the Duke cross the yard toward the stable with the snow blowing sideways around him in small hard flakes. Miss, she said. Yes, Stella.

 Is he going to marry you? Ren, who had been putting the primer back on the shelf, did not turn around. That is not a question a child asks Stella. I know it isn’t. I asked it anyway. Ren smiled in spite of herself. I do not know, Dela. Do you want him to? Ren was quiet for a long moment.

 I want, she said at last, to teach you to read a whole book cover to cover before the spring. I want the other children to learn as much as they are willing to learn. I want, if it is possible, to be here in this school room next winter and the winter after. If that is here, then the rest is here also.

 If it is here somewhere else, then the rest is somewhere else. I do not tonight need to know which. Dela thought about that. That is a mean answer. I know you are the meanest teacher a person could have. I know that, too. They looked at each other. The snow blew sideways past the window. Somewhere in the house, a bell rang for tea. The lamp on the mantel had not yet been lit for the evening, and the school room was full of the last blue light of a short winter day. Dela went to the door.

 She put her hand on the door. She stopped. Miss Yes. Dela. C A T cat. H A T hat. R A T R M A T M. That’s how it started. That is how it started. Dela opened the door. She went out. She left it without meaning to half an inch open behind her, so that the sound of her boots going down the corridor came softly back into the room for a long moment, and then at the far end the click of the servant’s door, and then only the small dry ticking of the frost on the window glass.

 Ren stood in the schoolroom for a while. She looked at the low bench where Dela had sat. She looked at the slate on the desk with the word river still on it in a child’s careful slanting hand. She looked at the window and faintly at her own face in the blue white glass. She looked older than she had 4 months ago. She looked, she thought, less afraid.

She picked up the chalk. She wrote in her own neat, clear hand at the top of the blackboard the Duke had ordered from the village the six words she meant the children to learn the next morning. Then she blew out the small stub of the schoolroom candle, and she took her cloak from its hook, and she went down the corridor and out into the yard, where the snow was falling now in slow, steady white flakes, and the yard lamps had been lit, and the whole of Asheville Park was pale and hushed, and for the first time in a very long time, felt to

her like a place a person might stay. She did not, that night, walk to the paddic. She did not need to. Somewhere across the yard, in the tall window of the small library, a single lamp was burning. It had been burning, she had noticed lately, at exactly the hour she walked back from the school room. It burned until she was safely inside the servant’s door. Then it went out.

Tonight, when she reached the door, she paused with her hand on the latch, and she looked up once at the window. The lamp burned. She went in. behind her. Some minutes later, the lamp in the small library was set down, and a hand drew the curtain, and the light softened and dimmed, and at last was gone, and only the snow was left in the yard, coming down slow and steady on the tracks of her boots, filling them in until by morning there would be no sign at all that anyone had walked there, except for the small round shape. near

the servant’s door where she had stood and looked up, which the wind, being kind that night, left alone until the sun came for it.