She had seen those faces look at her that same afternoon when she took the swarm, and they had looked at her with wonder. Now they looked at her with something else, and it was worse than if they had laughed.
She went up to bed, and at a little after three, there was a scratch on her door, and Lady Livia came in with her maid behind her holding a candle. Lady Livia had not taken off her ball gown. She did not sit down. She simply nodded to the maid, and the maid went to the foot of the bed where Isabel's small old trunk stood, lifted the lid, and put her hand under the folded linen at the top.
When she brought it out again, the pearls were in it. They hung down from her fingers in the candlelight, the whole long, milky rope of them swinging a little.
"I put them in the red case," Isabel said. "You know I did."
"I know nothing of the kind," said Lady Livia. She said it quite gently. "Here is what I know, Isabel: in the morning, I shall be very distressed at breakfast. His Grace will insist on a search. The pearls will be found here among your stockings, and my maid will say she saw you come out of my room. And I shall say with tears in my eyes that I never would have believed it of you. And then His Grace will have to send for the justice, because it is his house, and that is what is done. You know what happens to servants who steal pearls? They hang, or they are sent across the sea. And nobody—not one person in that hall tonight—will believe a companion over me."
Isabel sat on the edge of her bed in her nightgown and looked at her. She was not crying. She had learned a long time ago that tears were exactly what people like Lady Livia wanted. "Why?" she said.
"Because he looked at you," said Lady Livia. And for the first time that night, her voice was not pleasant at all. Then it smoothed over again, like water closing over a stone. "Or you can be gone before the house wakes. I shall find my pearls in my own case, where my foolish maid overlooked them, and I shall say you were called away to a sick relation. Nobody will think twice about it. Companions come and go. That is the choice. I really think you ought to take it."
She took the pearls from her maid and went out, and the maid went after her with the candle, and Isabel was left in the dark.
She sat there a long time. She thought about the justice, and the rope, and the sea, and she thought about the faces in the hall. And then, a little before four, she heard a step in the passage outside. It was not a servant's step: it was slow and uncertain, and it came along the bare boards of the attic passage where no gentleman had any business to be, and it stopped outside her door.
She got up. She went to the door in her bare feet and stood behind it with her hand on the latch. She could hear somebody breathing on the other side. For a long, long moment, neither of them moved.