It concerned a name, not Nora's name, her father's, and what her father had done quietly and without public knowledge in the last year of his life. Part six. The East Garden meeting on Thursday morning lasted longer than either of the previous ones. The Duke had arrived first again. He was standing near the stone wall, but he had brought nothing with him this time.
No cup, no papers, nothing to occupy his hands. He was simply there in the pale morning air, waiting. Nora came down the path at the same time as a groundsman named Old Robert, who had been tending the Ashvale gardens for 34 years, and had seen enough to be unsurprised by anything. He nodded to her as he passed with his barrow, as though young women coming to meet the Duke at dawn was a completely ordinary feature of the gardens daily life. She stood beside Calder at the wall, not across from him this time, beside him.
Lord Harwick knows that I told you, she said. I expected that, he said. He has not finished. She looked at the bare rose stems. There is something else.
I do not know what it is yet, but I could see it in the way he spoke to Lady Mirabelle at breakfast. They shifted to a second position. The Duke was quiet for a moment. You read the rooms very well. I have had a lot of practice reading rooms where I was not the main subject.
She paused. When you are the extra person, the one who is there to be useful and not to be noticed, people stop performing for you. You see what is actually happening. He turned to look at her. Does it bother you?
Having spent years being an extra person. She thought about it honestly, rather than reaching for the comfortable answer. "It used to," she said. "When I was younger, it felt like a verdict. Like the room had looked at me and decided I was not worth its full attention. " She paused.
"Now, I think it was training for something. I just did not know what until recently. " He was looking at her with that steady, focused attention that she had noticed he gave to things he was genuinely interested in. Not performing interest. Actually having it. "Calder," she said.