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 7

He came back and stood in the doorway. He looked as though he had been running, though he had only walked thirty feet.

“Stay,” he said.

Catherine put the needle carefully into the cloth. “Your grace.”

“Stay,” said Patrick Rushmir. “On the eighteenth, when Sherard comes, sit in that chair with your work, and let there be a sound in the house.”

He stopped. He was the sort of man who could not leave an untrue thing standing, even when it served him.

“No. That is not all of it, and I would rather say it badly now than have you discover it later. I do not want you here for Sherard.”

“Then for what?”

“I do not know,” he said. “That is the honest answer, and it is not a good one. I have had one evening in sixteen months in which I was a man in a room instead of a thing in a house. When the clock struck, I found I would have given a great deal for it not to be midnight.”

He put his hand flat on the door frame.

“Go home, Miss Hathstone. Mrs. Tapscott has the guinea, and the gig is at the door. I have no right whatever to have said any of it, and I am aware of it.”

Catherine stood up. Her hands were quite steady, which surprised her, because nothing else about her was.

“Your grace,” she said, “I will come on the eighteenth. Not for the fee, and I would be obliged if you would not offer me one. A woman can be paid for an evening, or she can choose to give one. She cannot do both at once, and I find I would rather do the second.”

She was at the door before he spoke again.

“Miss Hathstone.”

“Your grace.”

“Thank you for the clock,” he said.

“I did not touch your clock.”

“No,” said the Duke of Fenwood. “You asked me who gives the order.”

Wormsley had it by Saturday. It came out of the Farcourt stables, as such things always do, by way of a groom’s sister who was in service at the Kitsons’, and by Monday morning it had acquired a guinea, and by Tuesday a good deal that had never happened at all.

Mrs. Ganthorp came into the shop on the Wednesday to cancel the pelisse. She was perfectly pleasant about it, and the pleasantness was the art of the thing. She stood at the counter in her good bonnet and said she had thought better of the colour, and of course she would settle for the cutting out already done, and she settled to the penny, and she never once looked toward the workroom door where Catherine was standing with a hem over her arm.

“The colour,” said Mrs. Lockley, when the door had shut.

“Let it alone, ma’am.”

“I shall not let it alone. That is nine guineas walking down the market square in a bonnet I trimmed myself.” She put both hands flat on the counter. “Two more will go this week. Lady Kitson will not, because Lady Kitson has never in her life done what Mrs. Ganthorp did first.”

Catherine stood in the middle of the shop.

“I will go,” she said. “Today you will say you turned me off, and in six weeks it will be somebody else’s turn to be talked of.”

“Sit down, Catherine Hathstone. In my shop, which I have kept for twenty-two years and buried a husband to keep.” Mrs. Lockley’s voice was not loud. “Do you know what your mother did for me in the winter of the year ninety-seven? I had the influenza and four gowns promised for the Bledlow ball. She sat in that room nine nights with her own baby asleep in a drawer, and never took a farthing beyond her wage. When I offered it she said a thing I have remembered for twenty years. She said, ‘You will want it more in the spring.'”

She straightened.

“You will not go. If four households leave me over a girl who sat in a room with her work, then they may leave. I shall be poorer, and I shall still have a shop, a name, and my supper. Now go and finish that child’s pelisse. It is due at Farcourt on Friday, and it is the best thing you have made in five years.”

Catherine went into the workroom, shut the door, and cried for about ninety seconds, quietly. Quietly was permitted.

Mrs. Adelaide Marfleet came to Farcourt on the ninth of November.

She came by her right and nobody disputed it. She was the child’s aunt, her only near relation on her mother’s side, and she had come every six weeks since the funeral in a hired chaise from Bristol. She was a tall woman of forty-four in expensive violet, with Isabelle’s mouth and none of Isabelle’s ease. She had married a wine merchant of a good Bristol family, and she had a house on a hill above the city, and she was — as Mr. Startin had written with such painful accuracy — a woman with a life.

She found Catherine in the north room with the child on a stool.

“Aunt,” said Lady Ellen. “This is Miss Hathstone. She made Mama’s blue.”

“Did she?”

Mrs. Marfleet stood in the doorway with her gloves in her hand. “Turn round, Nell.”

The child turned. The pelisse was on her, bronze-green, finished that morning, the collar standing exactly as it should and the front edges falling straight as a plumb line. Mrs. Marfleet looked at her sister’s daughter for a long moment.

“Well,” she said. “You are not to be sent to Bristol in a black frock. At any rate, go up to Hollowby, my love. I want a word with this person.”

The child went in the way children go when they have learned that the word person means the tone will change as soon as the door is shut. It did.

“I know who you are,” Mrs. Marfleet said. “You are the guinea.”

“I am the dressmaker, ma’am.”

“You are the guinea. And you may spare me the modesty, because I have had it from three separate sources.” She came into the room. “Do you know what I have done these sixteen months? I have sat in that hall with the clocks stopped and taken that child on my knee and asked what she has been doing. And she says, ‘Nothing, Aunt,’ because it is true. I have written to the Duke of Fenwood eleven times. He has answered eleven times, in four lines, on the estate paper, always civilly, always about arrangements. Not one of them told me a single thing she said or did or wanted.”

Catherine put down her pins.

“And now,” said Mrs. Marfleet, “I hear that in October he sat down for five hours with a woman he paid, in the room where my sister used to sit, and talked a thing he could not do for me in sixteen months. And I am her blood.”

Her voice cracked in the middle of the word and she brought it back with an effort that was terrible to watch.

“You may imagine how that struck me.”

“Ma’am, he is not asking a hired woman to teach him how to be a father.”

“That is the whole of my case, and I shall put it in exactly those words.”

“Then you will be putting a true thing to a wrong use.” Catherine met her eyes. “He did not hire me to teach him anything, ma’am. He hired me because he was afraid he had forgotten how to be in a room, and he wanted to find out on a Thursday with a dressmaker rather than on the eighteenth with a gentleman from London. You have been honest with me, so I will be honest with you. He did not choose me over you. He could not do it with you, ma’am, because you are her blood. You are the whole of what happened, sitting in his hall in your violet gown every six weeks. I am nobody. That is my only qualification, and it is why it worked.”

The room was very quiet.

Mrs. Marfleet turned away to the window with her gloves crushed in her hand.

“I buried three of my own,” she said to the glass. “Two before they were a year old, and one at four days. I do not speak of it. I am telling you because you have been decent with me, and because you will think otherwise that I am a woman collecting a child the way one collects china.”

She drew a breath.

“I was not sent for. Do you know that two men rode north to Northumberland that night, and nobody in this house sent a man west to me? I came on the Thursday because I read it in a newspaper in my own morning room. In a newspaper.”

“He was in a field,” Catherine said. “They sent to him because he was the heir and there were papers to be signed. Nobody thought about the sister. That was not cruelty, ma’am. It was a house with its head off.”

“I am aware of what it was. It does not make the not being sent for any different in the middle of the night, which is when a thing of that kind comes back.”

She drew her gloves on, finger by finger, the way a woman does when she is finishing a conversation she has decided has gone far enough.

“I shall not withdraw,” she said. “I am not a wicked woman, and I am not a fool. I think that house will make that child into a ghost, and I mean to prevent it, and I would rather be hated in three counties than stand one day at Nell’s grave and think I might have spoken. On the eighteenth I shall be in that room, and I shall tell Mr. Sherard the truth as I see it.”

“I would think less of you if you did not,” Catherine said.

Mrs. Marfleet stopped at the door.

“You are not at all what I was told,” she said. “That is not a compliment. It makes the whole thing worse.”

He came to Wormsley on the eleventh of November.

That in itself was an event. The Duke of Fenwood’s carriage stood in the market square outside a linen draper’s for a quarter of an hour, and every soul in Wormsley found business at a window. Mrs. Lockley took one look out of the shop door, went upstairs, and shut herself in the cutting room, which was the most useful thing anybody did in Wormsley that day.

He asked Catherine to walk out with him, and they walked in full view along the churchyard path, where the whole town could see them and nobody could hear.

“Startin has written down what he calls the single fact of the case,” he said. “The master will not take a child from a settled household, and a household is settled when there is a mistress in it. If I were married by the eighteenth, or under an engagement that could be sworn to, Mrs. Marfleet’s case falls to pieces in a morning.”

Catherine kept walking, because stopping would have been an answer of its own.

“Miss Hathstone.”

He stopped anyway.

“Will you marry me?”

The rooks went over the churchyard. She had thought about the possibility for perhaps eight days, in the way one thinks about the sea when one has never seen it. She had never got as far as imagining it beside a churchyard wall at two in the afternoon.

“Why?” she said.

“Because it would settle the question of the child.”

He heard it as he said it. She watched him hear it.

“No,” he said at once. “That is not — ”

“It is what you said.”

“It is what I said.” His hands had come out from behind his back. “It is not untrue, and that is my difficulty. I have thought of nothing else for eight days, and I cannot get the two things apart in my own head. And I am not going to stand in a churchyard and pretend to you that I can.”

“Then I will get them apart for you, since I have had less to think about.”

Her voice was perfectly level and her hands were shaking, so she put them behind her, and that was how the two of them stood there, three feet apart.

“You want me because a house with a woman in it reads better in a report. And you want me because on a Thursday in October you found that you could breathe. Both of those are true. Only the second is a reason to marry, and it is not the one you led with.”

“Catherine — do not.”

It came out harder than she intended.

“You have not called me that before, and if you do it now, I shall not be able to say the rest.”

He shut his mouth.

“I have spent my whole life,” she said, “making things look as though nothing ever happened to them. I can take a gown that has been turned, and stained, and let out for a child, and send it into a ballroom looking like four guineas of new silk. No woman in that room will find the mend.”

She was breathing hard now.

“I will not be a mend, your grace. I will not be the thing you put over the hole in that house so the gentleman from London cannot see it. Because a mend holds for ordinary wear, and it goes the moment it is pulled. And I told you that in the supper room at midnight, and you have not thought about it once since.”

“That is not true.”

“Then what have you thought?”

“That I have never in my life met anybody who says the actual thing.” His voice had risen and he brought it down. “That I did not know I was lonely until a woman sat in my drawing room for five hours with a piece of green wool. That when the clock struck twelve I stood in the hall with the key in my hand and could not make myself go back through that door, because going back through it meant it was over. And that I am about to lose my brother’s daughter, and I cannot tell which of those two facts is making me say this badly. Until I can, you are entirely right to refuse me.”

“Yes,” said Catherine. “I am.”

A cart went past on the other side of the wall. The carter looked at them for as long as his horse allowed.

“I will not come on the eighteenth,” she said.

“You said you would.”

“I said it before the whole of Wormsley knew what you had paid me, and before your solicitor decided that the shape of your household is the case. If I am sitting in your drawing room with my work when Mr. Sherard walks in, what does the aunt say? She says, ‘There she is.’ She says it in three words, and she is not even lying.”

She straightened her cuffs, which did not need it.

“You will do it alone. You will sit at that table from seven until midnight with a stranger, and you will find that you can, because you have already done it once. And if you cannot — then the fault was never in the house. And you had better find it out before that child is old enough to be told about it.”

She left him standing in the churchyard.

She got as far as the shop door before she understood that she had refused a duke in front of the town. That would be the second story, and between the two of them her name was now a thing that would be said in Wormsley for thirty years.

She went in at the front, as she had been told, with her chin up.