Chapter Fifteen
“You had better read this before you do anything else this morning, miss. I am sorry to be the one carrying it, and I am feeling even worse still that I read the direction on it before I could help myself.”
Mrs Garnett stood in the schoolroom doorway with a letter held at arm’s length, the way one holds a thing one would rather not be touching at all.
The seal was broken, and the arms pressed into the wax were ones Elinor knew before the paper reached her hand.
She had dusted them off a hundred frames in the gallery.
They were the late duchess’s arms, the arms of the family that had given Honoria to this house and never quite forgiven the house for losing her.
“It is from the boy’s grandmother.”
“The Dowager Marchioness, aye. It came by a private rider before light, miss, and not by the post, which tells you the lady had no mind to wait for the post.”
Elinor read it standing, because some letters are not to be read sitting down, and because the seal had already been broken by the hand it was addressed to, which told her the duke had read every word of it before she had so much as risen.