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 3

Somebody was going to come down and look at that house and write down what he saw, and on what he wrote, the child would be sent to Bristol or left where she was.

“That is the whole of it,” Mrs. Lockley said. “A gentleman from London, one evening at their own table, seven until midnight. He will look for the ordinary furniture of a family life, and he will make his judgment on what he can see and hear and be told in that one evening. And what will he see? A house with the shutters up and the clock stopped. A duke who has spoken to nobody in sixteen months, and a little girl who won’t say good morning to a stranger.” She folded the letter. “And a man in London will read it over his breakfast and think quite reasonably that the aunt sounds a very sensible woman.”

“Sixteen months,” Catherine said. “The county says fourteen.”

“Then the county is wrong, and she has had to live it, so she can count.”

“Thursday,” Mrs. Lockley said. “Wear the grey. And Catherine — take your book.”

Farcourt stood four miles north of Wormsley at the end of an avenue of limes that somebody was still keeping in order.

That was the first thing Catherine noticed, and it was the thing she kept coming back to afterward. The avenue was swept. The verges were cut. The park wall had been repointed within the year and the lodge windows were clean. And every shutter on the front of the house was closed.

Thirty-two windows in warm brown stone, the colour of a loaf, with the October light lying full across them. Behind every pane, the inside face of a white shutter folded across and barred.

“They have not opened the front rooms since the funeral,” Mrs. Lockley said, from the seat beside her. “Don’t stare. It gives them the advantage.”

The house was not derelict, as the county had it. The house was immaculate. The floor of the great hall was polished, the chairs square, and there was no cobweb in the corners and no soot on the hearth and no dead lamp anywhere. There was no flower, no glove left on a table, no hat, no letter, no work put down, no book left face down on a chair. The whole vast hall smelled of beeswax and cold stone and nothing else.

Nothing in it suggested that a living person had crossed it since it was built.

Mrs. Tapscott met them at the foot of the stairs — a small dry woman of sixty, with a face like a closed account — and answered every question Mrs. Lockley put to her with perfect economy, and while she was answering, Catherine looked up the stairwell at the tall case clock on the landing.

It stood at twenty past six.

“They are all like that,” Mrs. Tapscott said, without turning round, in the voice of a woman who has answered this before and will answer it again. “The one in the hall, the one on the stairs, the two in the drawing room, and the stable clock. Twenty past six, which was the hour the man came up from the ford. We stopped them that night, as is proper.”

A pause of exactly one beat.

“Nobody has given an order about starting them.”

“Fourteen months, Mrs. Tapscott,” Mrs. Lockley said.

“Sixteen.”

The nursery was at the top of the house on the east side, and it was the only room they passed that had its shutters open.

Somebody had thought about that, at least. There was a fire and a carpet and books and a doll’s cradle and a globe on a stand with the paint worn off Africa. And at the window, with her back to the door, stood Lady Ellen Rushmir.

She was nine and small for it. A black frock, a black ribbon, black stockings, and dark hair brushed with more duty than love. She did not turn when the door opened. She did not turn when Mrs. Tapscott said her name. Her forehead was almost touching the glass and one hand was gripping the other wrist.

The whole room arranged itself around that small black back like a family standing round a bed.

“The women have come about your clothes,” Mrs. Tapscott said.

“Nothing.”

“She will not stand for it. She would not stand for the shoemaker in July, nor for the hairdresser. We have tried firmness.”

“How very unusual,” Mrs. Lockley said.

Catherine did not go to the child and did not say her name. She set her box on the table, and opened the paper, and opened the packet of pins, and then took out the folio with the marbled cover and the corners worn white, and laid it square in the light.

Then she began to turn the pages as though she were alone in the room.

A ledger being turned makes a heavier sound than a book.

Behind her, Mrs. Lockley began to ask Mrs. Tapscott about the linen cupboards, which was a kindness, and was meant as one.

Catherine turned: a striped dimity, and under it, in pencil, a curtain at the Bledlow parsonage, made a morning dress, wore it two seasons. She turned: a black bombazine made for one funeral and let out for another. She turned: an infant’s green coat that had been a Christmas coat and became two spencers, because a child outgrows the middle and not the arms.

The child’s feet made no sound on the carpet. What Catherine heard was her breathing, arriving at her elbow.

She did not look down. She turned one more page.

“That is a book of pieces.”

The voice was very small and very clear and entirely flat.

“It is.”

“Why?”

“Because I cannot remember eight years of cloth in my head. And if I forget what a gown used to be, I might cut it wrong the second time.”

Lady Ellen Rushmir had her uncle’s eyes and her mother’s solemnity and the terrible directness of nine.

“What are the little writings?”

“Three lines under every piece. What it was, what it became, who wore it.”

Catherine took her hand off the page so the child could see.

“I never write anything else in it.”

“Why not?”

“Because the rest is not mine to write down.”

The child looked at her for a long moment with a face that had nothing childish in it at all. Then she put her own flat hand down on the page.

“Turn them back.”

They turned back together, five years of Wormsley a finger’s width at a time, until Lady Ellen’s hand stopped four pages from the front.

The scrap of cloth there was blue. A deep, quiet blue, faded along one edge where it had stood at a window, with fine cording worked round the neck in the same colour, so that you had to hold it to the light to see the pattern at all.

“That is my mother’s. Yes — you are not to say it is not, because I know it. She had it at Christmas, and she had it when the man came to paint her, and she had it the night the small voice stopped, closed, and started again somewhere safer. It is my mother’s.”

“It is your mother’s. She sent it to us in the November of the year fifteen, because the sleeves were an old shape and she did not want a new gown. I took the sleeves out and cut them narrow, and made the cording round the neck to use up the stuff. She came herself for the fitting and stood on the stool without one complaint, which very few ladies do.”

“What do the three lines say?”

Catherine read them aloud, because they had been written to be read aloud.

“Was a blue silk, London made, sleeves of the old shape. Became a blue silk with narrow sleeves and a corded neck. Worn by her grace the Duchess of Fenwood.”

She stopped.

“There is a fourth line under it. I broke my own rule the once.”

“What does it say?”

It said: She took her own shawl off the chair and put it round my shoulders because the room was cold.

The nursery was very quiet. At the other end of it, Mrs. Lockley had stopped talking about the linen cupboards some time ago.

Lady Ellen Rushmir stood with her hand flat on the page, her chin set exactly like a woman of forty determined not to make a noise in front of strangers.

“You may measure me,” she said. “If you are quick.”