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 6

“What did you do there? Not the title of it. The days.”

He was silent for a moment, and then he began, and once he had begun he did not stop for forty minutes.

He talked about a bog on a hillside above Hexham that had been thought worth nothing for two hundred years, and the two months he spent walking it with a spade to find where the water came in. He talked about the day they cut the first main drain and the whole hill began, quite audibly, to run. He talked about the seventeen families on that ground, and what their rent had been before and what it was after.

He talked like a man let out of somewhere.

“I am boring you very badly,” he said at last.

“You are not. You have said more in forty minutes than in the whole of the rest of my acquaintance with you, and none of it was about the weather.” She turned the work. “May I make an observation?”

“Yes.”

“You are not a man who cannot talk. You are a man who cannot talk about nothing. Those are two different afflictions, and only one of them is serious.”

At ten the fire wanted making up, and he made it up himself, which no duke in that county would have done. A man who has been an agent knows the difference between a fire and a bonfire.

He was kneeling there with the tongs in his hand, with his back to her, when he said it.

“I was in Northumberland when they came for me.”

Catherine’s needle stopped.

“Two men rode up from the ford at Bledlow that night, and Pethick sent a letter by the mail at six in the morning, and it reached me on the Friday at noon. I was in a field.”

He set a coal in place.

“I had not seen my brother in five years. Not from any quarrel. He wrote twice a year and I answered twice a year. He was ten years older than I, and he had this. I had a horse, a dog, and a very good cottage with a slate roof. I thought — I truly thought — that I had the better bargain, and that we both knew it.”

“Your grace.”

“Let me get to the end of it. I have never said it in order before.”

He put the tongs down.

“I came south in two days. When I got here they had them in the chapel. The sister had not come from Bristol, and the man from the undertakers wanted to close the lids because of the weather. I would not let him. Two nights I sat there. I have been asked since what I was thinking, and I have never answered, because the answer is that I was not thinking anything at all. I was waiting for it to be a mistake.”

The fire ticked. Somewhere above them a floorboard went the way old houses do.

“Then they brought the child down. She had a cold, and that was why she had not been in the carriage. Her mother had said she might not come out with that cough, and it was a nuisance at the time, and that is the whole reason my brother’s daughter is alive.”

He looked at the fire.

“She stood in the chapel door in her nightgown and looked at me — a man she had seen perhaps four times in her life — and said, ‘Are you the uncle?'”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes.”

He was still looking at the fire.

“And she said, ‘Then you had better come upstairs, because they have all been crying and nobody has put me to bed.’ So I went up.”

Catherine sat with the bronze-green merino in her lap and did not say a single word, because there was nothing on this earth to say. And she had understood something about him that she suspected nobody else alive had understood.

He had not failed to become the master of that house. He had refused to — in case it turned out to be a mistake. And it had gone on so long that the refusing had become the house.

“Your grace,” she said at last, “may I ask another question out of my place?”

“You have asked four.”

“Why are the clocks stopped?”

He turned round on the hearthrug and looked at her.

“Because we stopped them, as is proper.”

“And who gives the order to start them?”

Nothing. The fire. The settling coal. Nineteen candles.

“The master of the house,” said the Duke of Fenwood, “gives that order.”

At a quarter past eleven the door opened about four inches, and Lady Ellen Rushmir came into the drawing room in her nightgown, with her hair down her back and her feet quite bare.

“Nell.” He was on his feet. “It is eleven o’clock.”

“I know. I heard the house.”

“You heard?”

“There is talking downstairs.”

She looked from her uncle to Catherine and back, with the terrible directness of nine years old.

“There has not been talking downstairs since Mama. Mrs. Tapscott says the drawing room is shut, and it is not shut. I came to see who it was.”

Catherine set her work aside and got up. “It is only me, my lady. I am mending your pelisse.”

“At night.”

“At night.”

Lady Ellen came the whole way in over the cold floor and stood at Catherine’s chair and put her hand on the bronze-green wool and stroked it once.

“That is my green,” she said. “I chose it.”

“You did.”

The child stood there and did not ask for anything. She simply stood in the middle of a lit room at a quarter past eleven at night with her hand on a piece of cloth, with the fire going and two grown people not sending her away. It was so obviously the best thing that had happened to her in sixteen months that Catherine had to look very hard at her own stitching.

“Uncle.”

“Yes.”

“Is she coming again?”

The Duke of Fenwood stood on his own hearthrug in his own house and did not answer for four full seconds.

“I do not know,” he said. “That is not for me to say by myself.”

Nell considered this, and evidently found it satisfactory, which told Catherine a good deal about what the child had been told in her life.

“Good night,” she said, and went out. They listened to her feet going up the stairs, both of them, without pretending otherwise.

The house had no way of telling the time in it. Catherine had not understood, until she had sat in that drawing room for five hours, what stopped clocks actually do to a room. There is no quarter hour and no sound at the half. The evening does not move. It only gets later, and you find out how much later by looking at the candles.

He took out his watch at some point after the child had gone, and looked at it, and did not say what it said.

At last he stood up. “Miss Hathstone.”

She looked up with the needle in her hand.

“It is midnight.”

“Then I am done, your grace. Seven until midnight.”

“Yes.”

He went out. She heard his boots cross the hall and stop.

Then a sound came back through the open door that she could not place for a second, because it no longer existed in that house.

The small dry clatter of a clock case being opened, and the ratchet of a key.

Eleven turns. She counted them without meaning to.

Then the hall clock at Farcourt began to strike twelve for the first time in sixteen months, into a house where every soul was awake and pretending to be asleep.