Arthur drew out the chair across from her and seated himself, slow and unthreatening, as a man sits who does not wish a frightened creature to run.
"You have spent your free hours reading the trial of a ruined family," he said, "the same family whose embroidery you wear upon your sleeve. I think the time for riddles has passed, do not you?"
For a long moment, she said nothing. Her gaze moved over his face, weighing him, measuring some risk she had carried alone for ten years. When at last she spoke, her voice was steady, but it had changed. The soft deference of the maid was gone, and beneath it was something older and finer.
"My name is not Clara," she said. "Or it is now, because it had to be. I was christened Genevieve. Lady Genevieve of Crestwood." She drew a breath. "I am the only one left."
Arthur kept very still. "I had begun to suspect as much."
"My father was Lord Crestwood. When I was nineteen, men came to our house with papers and soldiers and a charge of fraud—that he had cheated his creditors and emptied the family coffers into his own pockets." Her chin trembled, then firmed. "It was a lie. My father never stole a farthing in his life. But the court did not care for the truth. They took everything: the estate, the title, the name. The shame of it broke him within the year. My mother followed soon after."
She looked down at her worn cuffs.
"I was passed among distant cousins until they tired of me, and then I went into service as Clara, where no one would know the face of a dead lord's daughter."
"And you came here," Arthur said slowly, "to Ashworth. By chance? By choice?"
She lifted her eyes to his. "They said many things of you, Your Grace: that you are cold, that you are proud. But every soul I asked said the same of one thing: that you are fair. That you would sooner lose friends than bend a judgment you believed unjust." A faint, bitter smile touched her mouth. "I had nowhere left to turn. So I took a maid's post in the house of the fairest man in the county, and I waited, and I hoped for some chance to put the truth before you. I never dreamed it would be a spilled cup of tea."
The hall was silent, save for the soft settling of dust.