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 5

Mrs. Lockley did not shout, which was somehow worse.

“A guinea. For an evening sitting with your work.”

“With my work.”

Mrs. Lockley set the flat iron back on the stove with great care, which in that workroom was the equivalent of another woman throwing it.

“A guinea is not a wage. A wage is three shillings and a dinner. And nobody in Wormsley has ever told a story about three shillings and a dinner in their lives.”

“He was perfectly plain about it.”

“I am sure he was. I have no doubt whatever of that man’s plainness, which is the only thing about this that gives me any comfort at all.” She sat down. She did that about as often as she raised her voice. “Now attend to me. You will not be ruined that evening. You will be ruined afterward, in this town, by degrees, by women who will not say a word to your face. I know it. You do not know it. You are two and twenty.”

Catherine sat down opposite her. She had never once done it before.

“I sat on the floor at the assembly and mended a flounce while two women talked over my head about another woman’s ruin. Nobody in that building looked at me all night except him. He asked me what I did, and he listened to the answer.”

She kept her hands still in her lap.

“I am not a fool. I know what he is, and I know what I am, and I know exactly what this town will make of a guinea. I am going anyway.”

“Your mother had that same voice.” Mrs. Lockley stood and took the iron up again. “Twice in her life. Both times she was right, and both times it cost her.” She turned the iron over in her hand. “Wear the grey. Take the good scissors. And Catherine — be home by one, and walk in at the front of this shop, not the back. If you creep, they will know there is something to creep about.”

On the Thursday, from the turn of the avenue, the front of Farcourt had two squares of yellow light in it, like a face that had opened its eyes.

The drawing-room shutters were open and there were candles in the windows. Catherine counted nineteen of them afterward, out of pure nerves.

There was a fire, and a chair on each side of the hearth, and a small table beside each chair. On one, a decanter and a glass. On the other, where nobody could possibly have put it by accident, stood a branch of three candles arranged for close work.

He had thought about the light for a woman who would be sewing and had not mentioned it, and he did not mention it now.

The dinner was very bad. Two men were kept in the room to serve it and had been given no instruction about their faces. Was the road from Wormsley dry. Would she take wine. A silence of twelve seconds while the soup was taken away. There were four and a half hours left of it.

“Your grace. May I say something out of my place?”

“I should be obliged.”

“Send the men away.”

He looked up.

“They are standing behind you. And every time you begin, you hear a man breathe, and you stop. I have been in service in one way or another all my life, and I know that sound. There is nobody in this house who does not already know exactly what I am and what you have paid me. Their being here is not protecting either of us. It is only making a play of it.”

One second. Two. Three.

“Both of you. Go and have your supper. Leave the dishes and shut the door.”

They went. The room doubled in size.

“Better,” he said, considerably.

“Now what?”

“Now nothing, your grace. We eat the mutton.”

They ate the mutton in a quiet that lasted three or four minutes and was not agony.

“That was easier,” he said at the end of it, in the tone of a man noting a measurement.

“Yes.”

Neither of them made anything of it.

At eight they went through to the drawing room, and the evening changed.

Catherine brought out Lady Ellen’s pelisse in bronze-green merino — the child had chosen it herself out of nine patterns, after twenty minutes of the most serious deliberation Catherine had ever witnessed in a human being. She threaded a needle, set the branch of candles where she wanted them, and began to fell the lining down the front edge.

The little steady sound of it went into the room and stayed there.

He sat in the other chair with a book he was not reading.

“I did not know that it made a noise.”

“What does? Sewing? I have been in rooms with women sewing all my life, and I thought it was a silent occupation.”

“It is not. There is the thread and the needle going through, and every so often a little sound like a coal settling.”

“That is the thimble on the eye of the needle.”

“Is it three times in each stitch if the cloth is heavy?”

She did not look up. “You could hear from the passage how many women in my mother’s workroom were behind on their work.”

“How?”

“Because a woman who is behind sews faster than she can breathe, and it goes ragged.”

He was quiet for a while after that, and it was a different quality of quiet.

Catherine did what she had spent five years learning to do in fitting rooms: she left a gap without letting it turn into a hole.

“You were nine years in Northumberland,” she said.