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 8

Mr. Sherard came down on the eighteenth of November and was at Farcourt by six.

He was a mild, grey, unhurried man of fifty who had done this work for thirty years and had long ago stopped being impressed by houses. He looked at the child, and at the nursery, and at the accounts of what had been spent on her, and he asked Mrs. Tapscott a great many questions and wrote down the answers.

At seven they sat down: Mr. Sherard, and Mrs. Marfleet in her violet, and the Duke of Fenwood at his own table.

It went as Patrick had known it would. He answered what he was asked, correctly, in four or five words, exactly as he had answered eleven letters in sixteen months. He heard himself do it and could not stop. Twice he began a sentence about his brother and put it down again.

Mrs. Marfleet spoke well, and quietly, and without one word of malice, which was infinitely worse than if she had raged.

By nine the whole table had gone into the particular silence Patrick had been afraid of since June of the year before last. Outside the door the pendulum of the hall clock went on, patient as a heartbeat, marking off the exact length of his failure.

Catherine had told herself all day that she would not go. She sat in the workroom that afternoon with a hem in her lap and did not sew a stitch of it, because she kept hearing her own voice in the churchyard, telling him he would find it out alone or he would not find it out at all. But as the light went out of the window she understood that she had been wrong about one part of it. She had told him to discover whether the fault was in the house. She had never once, in all her thinking on the matter, believed for an hour that it was. And a woman who already knows the answer has no business letting a man walk into a room alone to lose everything for want of the one thing she could tell him, not when a stranger from London was about to write it down and call it the truth. She had her cloak on before she had properly decided to put it on.

At twenty minutes to ten there was a commotion in the hall.

Catherine Hathstone had walked the four miles from Wormsley in the dark with her workbox under her cloak, and she came into that drawing room with the hem of her skirt wet to the knee.

“Miss Hathstone,” said Mr. Sherard, rising, because he was a courteous man and did not yet know what she was.

“Sir.” She stood in the middle of the carpet. “My name is Catherine Hathstone. I am a dressmaker’s hand at Wormsley, and I made that child’s clothes. In October the Duke of Fenwood offered me a guinea to sit in this room from seven until midnight with my work, and I took it. Everybody in this county knows it, and you would have had it from somebody before your chaise reached the turnpike, so you may have it from me.”

Mrs. Marfleet had gone white.

“I have no place here,” Catherine said. “I know exactly what I am. I have come because I am the only person alive who knows why he did it, and he will not tell you, because he does not know how to say a thing about himself in a room.”

She looked at Patrick for the first time.

“Your grace. I refused you in a churchyard in front of the town, and I have no interest whatever in your house. Let that answer for me.”

She turned back to Mr. Sherard.

“He did not hire a woman to make a show for you. He hired a stranger to find out whether he could still sit in a room with one, because he had not done it since they brought his brother up out of the ford. He stopped it at midnight, paid me, and sent me home. Then he went into his own hall and wound the clock that had been stopped for sixteen months. Every servant in this house lay in bed and listened to it strike twelve.”

The room was entirely still.

“Sir,” said Catherine, “you have come to find out whether this is a fit house for a child. You are the only man in England who can make him say it. Ask him what he was waiting for.”

Mr. Sherard looked at her for a long moment.

Then he sat down, and put the cap on his pen, and said, “Your grace, what were you waiting for?”

And Patrick Rushmir, at his own table, with his hands flat on the cloth, said: “For it to be a mistake.”

Nobody moved.

“I did not stop the clocks. They were stopped for me, properly, as is done. But I never gave the order to start them. And I have known for a year that I was the only man who could, and I did not do it, because starting them made it true.”

He looked up.

“My brother is dead. I am not the Duke of Fenwood by any right that makes sense to me. I have been the agent of this property for sixteen months and have been very good at it. I have not once been the master of this house. The master of this house went into the ford at Bledlow, and I have been keeping his chair warm in case there has been an error.”

The fire moved. Nobody else did.

“The child has grown three inches and nobody noticed until a dressmaker measured her. That is my case, sir, and it is not a good one.”

It was Mrs. Marfleet who made the first sound. It was very small.

Catherine crossed the room, took the marbled ledger out of her box, and put it in the older woman’s lap, open at the fourth page from the front.

“Ma’am,” she said. “That is your sister’s blue.”

Adelaide Marfleet looked down at a finger’s width of faded silk and put out one hand and touched the cording. She read the three lines under it. And then the fourth, written by a girl of nineteen in the November of the year fifteen.

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

“She always did that,” Mrs. Marfleet said. “All her life she did it to me when I was — ”

She did not finish it. She sat in a strange drawing room with her sister’s gown under her fingers and wept without any noise at all, the way women of forty-four weep in company.

The Duke of Fenwood got up, went round the table, and put his hand on her shoulder. It was the first time in sixteen months that anybody in that family had touched anybody at all.

The door opened four inches. Lady Ellen Rushmir came in over the cold floor in her nightgown with her hair down her back and looked at the four of them.

“There is talking downstairs,” she said.

Then she came the whole way in, past her uncle, past the gentleman from London, and stood at Mrs. Marfleet’s knee and put her small hand flat on the open page, on the blue, next to her aunt’s.

Mr. Sherard sat very still and did not write anything down.

He wrote afterward, in a report that is still folded in a deed box at Farcourt, that he had been thirty years about that work and had learned to distrust everything a house showed him after seven o’clock, and that he had never before seen the whole question of a suit answered by a child crossing a carpet.

The petition was not tried. Mrs. Marfleet withdrew it in the January, on terms she wrote out in her own hand, and they were not soft ones.

Lady Ellen Rushmir was to go to Bristol from the first of May to the end of July every year until she was seventeen. There was to be a letter every week from Farcourt, and it was not to be four lines on estate paper. It was to say what the child had said and done and wanted, or Mrs. Marfleet would know the reason why.

Patrick signed it without reading past the first clause.

Three months of every year. He never afterward pretended it had not cost him, and Catherine loved him for the not pretending rather more than for the giving.

He came to Wormsley on the fourth of February, and this time he did not ask her to walk out where the town could see. He came into the shop, took off his hat, and stood among the bolts of calico like any other man in the county.

“It is settled,” he said. “The child stays, and the aunt is satisfied. My solicitor has gone back to London, and there is not one legal reason on this earth for me to be standing in this shop.”

Mrs. Lockley went upstairs to the cutting room and made a great deal of noise on the way.

“Miss Hathstone.” He turned his hat over in his hands once. “There is no report and no gentleman coming. There is nothing whatever to be settled by it. Will you marry me?”

Catherine stood with her hands full of unbleached calico.

“Say the reason,” she said.

“Because I have been a man in a room with you,” he said. “And I have not been a man in a room with anybody else since I was five and twenty. Because you are the only person who ever asked me who gives the order. And because I would like, for the rest of my life, to come into a room and find that somebody is working in it.”

One second. Two seconds. Three.

“Yes,” said Catherine Hathstone.

They were married in the April at Bledlow, in a gown she made new out of cloth Lady Ellen chose after twenty minutes of the most serious deliberation in England. Not turned. Not remade. New — because she had spent five years making other women’s old silk look like nobody’s history, and she was not going to be married in a mend.

Some doors in that county never opened again. Mrs. Ganthorp was ill for twenty years whenever the Duchess of Fenwood was expected, and there are two houses within nine miles of Farcourt whose cards have never come. Catherine found, to her own surprise, that this troubled her about as much as a flat cello.

What she missed, and went on missing, was the workroom. She said so once at forty, and Nell laughed at her for it.

Their son was born in the March of the year twenty-one, in the room with the good north light. It had been the late Duchess’s morning room, and was by then the sewing room of the house, with fourteen girls in it on a Tuesday, learning fine work at eight shillings the week.

The white work in Isabelle’s basket was never finished. Catherine could have done it in an afternoon. It lies in a glass frame in the upstairs passage, with the needle still in it and the brown thread, and underneath, in a small hand, three lines and no more, begun by Isabelle, Duchess of Fenwood, on the twelfth of June. Was not finished. Is not to be.

The clocks at Farcourt are wound on Sunday mornings, all five of them, by Lady Ellen when she is at home, because her uncle gave her the keys on her tenth birthday and never took them back. She winds the hall clock eleven turns, and she will not let anybody else touch the stable clock at all.

And on Michaelmas night the drawing-room shutters at Farcourt stand open with candles in the windows. From the turn of the avenue, the front of the house has two squares of yellow light.

The Duchess sits in the chair by the fire with her work and the branch of three candles at her left hand. There are nine gowns in that house that she made with her own hands, and four she has made twice. She does not need to see them. She knows the sound of them.

And there is not one soul under that roof who does not know her.

THE END.