We keep a book of everyone who comes to this house. It goes back to my husband's grandfather. Everyone signs it. Everyone, and I should be so sorry to leave you out. The room understood before Beatrice crossed the carpet.
Edmund saw Lady Cresa's face change. He saw her look at her own mother quickly and find no help there. He said, "That is enough." "It is a visitor's book," Edmund, said. Augusta, "It is not the rack." Beatrice came to the table. She took up the pen.
She turned it once in her fingers to feel the nib the way a person does who uses a pen every day of her life and the small competence of that gesture went through the room like a draft under a door. She wrote. It took her a moment. She set the pen down and stepped back and the footman turned the book out of habit so the duchess could see. Augusta looked at the page.
Nobody at that table saw Augusta Vain's face do what it did then, before or after. Nothing dramatic, only a very slight tightening at the corner of the mouth, the expression of a woman who set a trap in a doorway, and heard it close on her own foot, because the hand on the page was upright and even and beautifully spaced, the loops closed, the line running true, better than her own, better than anyone's in the room. Beatrice Anne Harrow, and underneath, in the same faultless hand, in the column headed of what place? Ravensmere born here same as the horse. Lord Mobrey laughed out loud, a bark of pure delight entirely on her side and turned it into a cough against his napkin.
Augusta closed the book. You write very prettily, she said. Who taught you to write, Miss Harrow? Your elder son stewarded your grace. He wanted the yards ledgers kept in a clear hand, and my uncle's hand was not clear.
I kept them from the age of 10. She paused. I keep them still. Ledgers. Augusta let the words sit.
So you have numbers as well as letters. I have both. How remarkable. And yet the whole village calls you simple. Augusta lifted her glass pleasantly and said it to the table rather than to the girl, which is how such things are always said.