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 4

Catherine was quick.

She measured her at the window in the good light and said every measurement aloud as she took it, because there is nothing in the world so unbearable to a child as being discussed over her own head. Neck to waist behind, twenty-two and a half inches. Three inches more than the black frock had allowed. The frock had been pulling the child’s shoulders forward for half a year, and not one person in that great clean house had noticed.

“You have grown out of everything you have,” Catherine said. “That is not carelessness. It is only what nine does.”

“Aunt Marfleet says I am neglected.”

The tape stopped for half a second and went on.

“Does she?”

“She said it in the hall in the summer, to Mr. Pethick. She said, look at the child, she is neglected. And she was crying when she said it. And then she gave me a work box with a mother-of-pearl lid.”

A pause.

“I do not like the workbox. I like my aunt. Those are two different things and everybody keeps making them one.”

“So they do,” Catherine said. “Turn round, please. Chin up.”

And it was in that moment, with the tape at the child’s shoulder, that Catherine looked past her into the doorway.

The Duke of Fenwood was standing in it.

She had no idea how long he had been there. Long enough. One hand was on the door frame and he had not come in. The expression on his face was one she had seen once before, on a man standing in the market square in the hard winter watching a baker carry a tray of loaves in past him. It was not grief. It was closer to hunger.

He saw that she had seen him. He took his hand off the frame.

“Go on,” he said. “Please.”

He stood there for the whole of the rest of it — four minutes — and did not say one word more. His brother’s daughter stood on a stool in a black frock two sizes too small with her chin up, telling a dressmaker the measurement of her own waist, and her uncle watched from the door like a man at a window in the cold.

He went down the back stairs afterward instead of the front, and he knew he did it.

The letter from Mr. Startin had come on the Tuesday and was still on the estate-room desk, weighted down with a piece of drainage tile, because he had read it six times and could not answer it.

Startin was a good man and wrote like one, which meant he told the truth in the plainest available words.

The petition of Mrs. Marfleet will be heard in the Michaelmas sittings or shortly after. The master will not decide on affidavit alone in a matter concerning the person of an infant. He will direct an inquiry, and a gentleman will attend at Farcourt to see the house and the child and report.

I am to tell you frankly what that gentleman will look for. He will look for the ordinary furniture of a family life, and he will make his judgment in one evening upon what he can see, hear, and be told at your own table.

And then the paragraph Patrick had read the most.

Your position is not weak in law. Your brother’s will named you and named no other. It is weak in appearance. You are unmarried. You have not dined in company since you came into the title. And you are known in the county chiefly as a man who is not known. Mrs. Marfleet has a husband, a house in Bristol, a pew, and a great deal of natural feeling. If you will forgive me — she has a life, and you have an estate.

The estate room was the only room in the house that he used. A desk, four ledgers, a map of the property on the wall, and a window he opened every morning in all weathers. There was a chair by the fire with a broken arm, and he had mended it himself with wire, because he had spent nine years in a country where a man mends his own chair.

He knew every field on that map by its rent and its drainage. He had walked all of it in sixteen months. He had put nine hundred pounds into new ditching on the low ground and got the mill going again, and there was not a tenant on the estate who would say one word against him.

He could not sit in a room with a stranger for four hours. That was the whole of it, and there was no arrangement of words that made it better.

He had gone to the assembly because Startin had written you must be seen, and he had lasted an hour and a half, counting the doors. The only conversation that had gone anywhere in that entire building was four minutes in a cold supper room with a woman mending other people’s clothes.

He sat and looked at the wall for a while.

Then he rang the bell, which he almost never did, and asked Mrs. Tapscott what a dressmaker’s hand was paid for a day’s work at Farcourt, and told her to say nothing to anybody about the question.

Mrs. Tapscott, who had been in that house since he was a boy, looked at him slightly longer than was strictly respectful.

“Three shillings the day, your grace. And her dinner.”

“Thank you.”

“May I ask what your grace intends?”

“No. Because I do not know yet, and if I say it out loud before I know it, I shall not do it.”

On the sixteenth of October they gave Catherine the small room at the end of the north passage, because it had a good cold light and a long table.

It had been the late Duchess’s morning room. Nobody said so, and Catherine knew it inside a minute. The work basket was still on the little table by the chair, with a piece of white work in it, and a needle still in the piece, and the thread on the needle gone brown. Sixteen months. Somebody dusted round it every week.

She did not touch it. She set out her pattern papers at the other end of the room and got to work.

He came in at four, when the light was going, and stood just inside the door.

“Miss Hathstone.”

“Your grace.”

“I want to ask you something, and I am going to do it badly. I have thought for a fortnight about how to do it well. There is no well.” He looked at the floor, and then at her. “On the eighteenth of November a gentleman is coming from London. Mr. Sherard, on the business of the court. He will look at this house, at my brother’s daughter, at me. He will sit at my table from seven until midnight, and afterward he will write down what he found. My solicitor tells me that the whole of it will turn on that evening, and I have decided to believe him.”

“Your grace—”

“I am not finished, because if I stop, I shall not start again.” He took one step in and stopped. “I cannot do it. I can talk to a tenant. I can talk to a mason. I spent nine years talking to men about water and rents and lime, and I was thought a civil enough fellow in Northumberland. I have not sat at a table in company since the June before last. I have found that I cannot begin, and that if a silence goes past a certain length, I would sooner walk out of the room than break it. I have walked out of rooms in my own house.”

He said it the way another man might report that a tree had come down across the road.

“I should like to hire you for one evening. Here. Seven until midnight, the same hours. You would sit in the drawing room and bring your work. Since I do not suppose you can sit for five hours with your hands empty any more than I can, you need not entertain me. You need not be clever. I want to find out whether I can be a man in a room with somebody in it for five hours. And I would rather find it out where it does not signify.”

He took a breath.

“A guinea. That is not a wage. It is a fee, and I am aware of the difference. You may refuse. If you refuse, the order for my niece’s clothes stands exactly as it is, and I will not mention this again to you or to anybody.”

Catherine stood very still with her hand on the cold table.

She thought about a sixpence on the corner of a wash stand. She thought about a man counting doors at a Michaelmas assembly, one and a half hours of it, at the far end of a room full of people who had talked about him for sixteen months. She thought — and did not want to think — about a needle gone brown in a piece of white work ten feet away.

“You have said what it is not. May I ask what it is? Am I to be a lady in your drawing room, your grace?”

“No.”

“Then what? A person?”

“There is the difficulty.” He said it without any self-pity, which was the only reason it was bearable. “I have not had one in a room since June of last year. There has been staff, and my brother’s child, and men about drains. I do not know whether the fault is in the house or in me, and I cannot find out alone.”

“And if you find that it is in you — then I shall know it by midnight on a Thursday, instead of on the eighteenth, in front of a gentleman from London, with my brother’s daughter asleep upstairs.”

Catherine looked at him for a long moment.

“Thursday, then.”