Chapter 10: All the Night Through

The letter was three lines long.

*Clem. The wrist is slow. The doctor says six more weeks in the sling.*

*I have an idea of coming up to see the work. Father.*

I read it twice at the window of the blue room.

Then I folded it into my apron pocket, and went down to dinner, and ate a great deal of mutton without tasting any of it.

The duke watched me across the table.

Barnabas watched the duke.

The duchess watched them both, and said, at the end of the second course, "Everard, you are staring."

"I am looking at the salt."

"It is behind you."

"Then I'm looking in the wrong direction," said Everard, and the Dowager made her dry bark of a laugh.

At half past ten I went up to my room and sat on the edge of the bed.

I was thinking about my father's handwriting.

I was thinking about the six weeks, and the cottage on the home farm, and the long shaky *C* of my own name.

Then I put on my shawl and went along the east corridor.

I did not knock.

I turned the handle and went in.

He was standing at the window in his shirt with a glass of water in his hand.

He turned when I came in, and he put the glass down very carefully on the sill.

"You didn't knock," he said.

"I thought you said I wouldn't have to knock loud."

"I did say that."

I shut the door.

"I'm frightened," I said.

That was not what I had come to say.

I had come to say something clever.

But he crossed the carpet and took me in his arms.

I put my face into his shoulder and said it again.

"My father's old. He's not mending. I've been so busy being angry at you that I forgot what I'm angry about."

"What are you angry about?"

"That I'm the only one holding up the trade, and nobody's allowed to know it."

He held me.

He didn't say anything clever either.

After a long while he said, "Tell me about your mother."

So I told him.

She had died the winter I was fifteen, of a lung fever, in the back bedroom over the shop.

My father had gone deaf in one ear that same winter, and neither of us said so.

I started going out to the clients' houses with him to hold the tools.

Then I turned the pegs.

Then one afternoon, because he couldn't hear a note I could, I finished the job.

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