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 2

She was not looking for him at a quarter to midnight. She went into the supper room because the blue jug in the retiring room had been dry for an hour and every servant in the building had gone down to eat, and she had four minutes before another lady came in with a hem.

Twenty candles of the thirty had gone out. There was cut ham on the long table and a trifle that had become soup, and a smell of cold gravy, and at the far end, with his back to her, the Duke of Fenwood, entirely alone, doing nothing at all.

She stopped in the doorway. There was no way to cross that floor that did not make a sound.

“There is water in the blue jug,” he said, without turning. “I have already looked.”

“Thank you, your grace.”

He turned round.

His eyes were grey — the colour of the estuary at Bledlow in February — and his face was younger than she had expected and much more tired. He looked at her box, and at her hands, and at her face last.

“You are the one from the passage. With the box.”

“Yes, your grace.”

“You have been in that chair since eight.”

She had. She had not supposed that any person on the other side of that door had registered it, and the fact that this one had went through her oddly, like cold water on a tooth.

“There is generally work, your grace.”

“What work?”

“A flounce trodden through. Two hems let down where the ladies have grown. A shoulder seam pulled apart at the armhole. And a sleeve where a lady caught her bracelet in it and cried, because it was new.”

“And you make them right.”

“I make them so that nobody can see where they went wrong. It is not quite the same thing.”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The place where one would have been if he had had one about him that night.

“Say that again.”

She had spoken to perhaps four men of the quality in her life. She had never spoken to one at midnight.

“I make a thing look as though nothing ever happened to it. That is all mending is, your grace. The tear is still there. You simply cannot find it.”

“Does it always hold?”

“No.”

“When does it not?”

“When it is put under any weight.” She heard her own voice come out level, which she had not expected. “A mend will bear ordinary wear for years. It will not bear being pulled. If you pull, it goes at the mend — because the mend is the only part of the cloth that has already been broken once.”

The town clock struck midnight somewhere beyond the wall. He turned his head toward the sound the way a man turns toward a voice calling his name from another room.

“Twelve,” he said. “That will do, I said. Midnight.”

He set his glass down precisely in the middle of a ring of wine.

“Good night. You should be paid double for this evening. You will not be.”

He went out past her. She heard his boots the whole length of the passage and then the front doors and then, on the gravel, a carriage going north, out of the town, toward Farcourt.

She did not tell anybody. There is a species of thing a woman in her position learns not to say aloud, because the telling of it turns immediately into something else in other people’s mouths. Not Mrs. Lockley. Not Bess, who talked. She put the water in the blue jug and went back to her chair and mended a shoulder seam, and at two o’clock she walked home.

Three weeks later a letter came to the shop from Farcourt, by the hand of their steward, who writes like a man being charged by the word.

Mrs. Lockley read it twice, standing at the counter, and then she turned it round and put it in Catherine’s hand without a word.

It asked for a woman who could take a measure and who could be patient, at Farcourt, on Thursday the second of October. His late grace’s and her grace’s mourning was to be laid aside at Michaelmas, by direction. Lady Ellen Rushmir had grown three inches and had nothing that was not black. Everything was to be finished by the eighteenth of November.

And there was a second paragraph, shorter, with the pen pressed harder.

Mrs. Marfleet of Bristol — the late Duchess’s own sister — had moved out of her house into a house in Clifton and had petitioned the Court of Chancery for the care of the child.

The child was a ward of the court now, Mrs. Lockley said, and the court was a room in London with a man in it who had never seen Farcourt and never would. What he would have instead was a report.