A duke who has not sat in company for sixteen months hires a dressmaker’s hand for one evening — seven until midnight — to discover whether he can still remain in a room with another living soul. He chooses her because she is nobody. He is wrong.

PART 1

The cello in the gallery was flat, and it had been flat for five years, and nobody in that building had ever said so.

Catherine Hathstone knew it by ear, from below, from the wrong side of a door. She sat in the retiring room off the passage with her workbox on her knees and her back to the wall, and through the half-open door came the flat cello, and forty voices, and the scrape of dancing feet on a floor that had been chalked at four o’clock by a man she had watched do it, because she had been there since six.

She had made nine of the gowns in that room. Four of them she had made twice.

That was the whole of Catherine’s place in the world, and she had stopped minding it the way you stop minding a stone in your shoe that has been there long enough. She heard the cello flatten. She knew which of the ladies laughing under the chandelier had put the same silk through her hands three seasons running, and she knew which of them had been let out at the waist and which had been let out at the waist twice. She knew all of it. Nobody knew her.

The room she sat in had a looking-glass, two chairs, a wash stand with a blue jug, and the smell of tallow and violet powder. There was a pin in the lid of her box and a pair of scissors on a black ribbon and, in the small compartment at the front, her mother’s silver thimble, worn thin on one side from thirty years of pushing. She had a gown across her lap before the door opened, because a woman who is paid sixpence a night to sit where the ladies come is never idle when the door moves. It is the first thing you learn and the last thing you forget.

Miss Ganthorp came in at ten with a lilac flounce in her hands and her chin up.

“I have trodden on it,” she said.

The flounce had been trodden on by a man with feet like a dray horse, in a country dance, twice, and there was a two-foot tear through three thicknesses of silk, and Catherine looked at it for the length of one breath.

“Eight minutes, miss.”

She knelt on the boards. She did not offer Miss Ganthorp a chair, because Miss Ganthorp would not have sat in it — ladies stood in the retiring room and went on with the conversation they had been having in the other room, over your head, while your hands worked under their hems. The needle went in and out and the thimble clicked on the eye, and above her two women talked about a third who was thirty feet away, in the ballroom, wearing a gown Catherine had made in the spring.

It had been her mother’s wedding silk once. The family had come down and could not buy new without the county knowing they could not buy new, so they had sent the old silk to Mrs. Lockley’s, and Catherine had spent four days making the join invisible — matching the weave, turning the breadths, cutting the new panel on the cross so the light fell the same way off both. In daylight you had to look twice.

Nobody had looked twice.

She had not told anybody about that gown and she never would, and kneeling there with her wrist against the cold boards she thought about it anyway, the way you press a bruise.

“Where is it?” said Miss Ganthorp.

“Three inches above the hem, miss. Left side.”

“I cannot see it.”

“No, miss.”

Eight minutes. She stood, and folded the flounce, and handed it back, and the work was gone — not hidden, gone. The tear was still there. That was the thing nobody ever understood.

Mrs. Ganthorp came for her daughter and looked at Catherine the way one looks at a dog that has done a trick, and said something pleasant, and then laid the sixpence on the corner of the wash stand rather than into Catherine’s hand.

Catherine picked it up.

She had learned a long time ago not to mind that particular thing, and she still minded it, and both of those were true at once, and she had long since stopped regarding the contradiction as interesting.

The violets and the tallow and the flat cello went on.

At eleven o’clock the passage changed sound.

The fiddle had been going over the top of everything, and she heard the moment it faltered — one beat, two — and then the feet stopped, not all at once, in a wave, from the far end of the room toward the door, and forty voices dropped half a tone together like water finding a new level. Catherine’s needle stopped on its own. She had never once in five years heard that building go quiet in the middle of a dance.

Ruth Hollowby, the vicarage girl, put her head round the retiring-room door with her cap crooked.

“He’s come. Fenwood. He’s come here.”

“Tonight?”

“On foot into the yard and up the front steps. Fourteen months he has not been out of that house, and he has come up the front steps at eleven o’clock at night.”

Catherine did not move. Through the open door, down thirty feet of corridor and candlelight, she could see the doorway of the ballroom with its whole shape changed — the set broken open, the stewards arriving at a run with their faces like boiled cloth, and the room bending around something in the middle of it.

She stood up, because the whole building stood up. She went to the passage with her needle still on its ribbon at her waist, in the black stuff Mrs. Lockley’s hands wear to an assembly so as not to be a colour.

The Duke of Fenwood was tall, and he did not stoop, which somehow made him look worse rather than better, because a tall man who stoops has decided to be sorry about it and this one had not. His hair was cut close and dark at the temples. His coat was superfine and cut in London and had not one thing on it to look at. He stood with his hands at his sides in the way of a man who does not know what to do with his hands.

Nobody had seen him in fourteen months. Nobody in that room had ever seen him at all, except the stewards, who had seen him at a christening nine years ago when he was a younger son with a horse and no particular future.

He danced once, with Lady Kitson’s second daughter, correctly and without any pleasure at all — one figure, one turn, four bars of the flat cello — and then bowed and gave her back to her mother and stood at the edge of the floor with his hands behind his back.

“He hasn’t smiled,” Ruth Hollowby whispered. “Not once. Not at anybody.”

Catherine heard that, and it was not the thing she noticed.

The thing she noticed was that between the figures of the dance, when the line stood still and the music held, he looked at the doors. Twice. The long way round the room, over the heads, to the two tall doors at the far end, and back.

It was the way a man looks at a door when he has promised somebody he will stay until a particular hour, and he is counting.