Caroline Vane did not move at all.
"And I am not going to ask you anything about it," said Hannah, "not now and not ever. And if you tell me it was the fashion, I shall say, 'Yes, miss,' and I shall mean it. But I have got two hundred miles' worth of thinking behind me and I am going to say the one thing and then I shall stop. Whatever it was, miss, it was there in the March, because nobody arranges in March to have their arms covered in June."
The room was extremely quiet. Caroline Vane got up and went to the window and stood there with her back to the room for about a minute and a half. Then she pulled her left sleeve up to the elbow and held her arm out and did not turn round.
"Since I was fifteen," she said.
They talked for four hours. Hannah Poole never wrote down one word of it and never repeated one word of it to anybody in fifty years, including the Duke of Marchford, including Mrs. Gill, and including the woman she eventually married into a family with. What she said about it on the four or five occasions anybody asked was always the same: that she had gone to Bath to give a young lady a book and had come back having promised her two things, and that she had kept both.
The first promise was that the book went to Mr. Sturges at Lincoln's Inn and stayed there, not to be used. Caroline Vane was extremely clear about that and did not shift on it in twenty years. There was to be no prosecution, no commission, no letter to her mother, no proceeding of any kind, because, as she said to Hannah in that room in Henrietta Street, quite calmly, "Having thought about it for seven weeks, the only thing in England that would come out of a proceeding was that everybody would know, and she would rather have the £11,000 a year and her own name and no husband than be a woman that everybody knew about."
"That is not justice, miss."
"No," said Caroline Vane. "It is what there is."
So, the fitting book went into a deed box at Lincoln's Inn with a note on it in Mr. Sturges's hand, and it sat there for thirty-one years, and Sturges's partner sent it to Hannah in 1862 when the firm gave up the room.
The second promise was the one that mattered, and it was Caroline's idea and not Hannah's. She never went home. She stayed at Henrietta Street with her aunt, and in the November of 1830, she came of age in the fullest sense, her own fortune—which was her grandmother's and had never been her father's or her brother's—being £11,000 in the funds and entirely her own from her twenty-third birthday. She took a house in Bath in the spring of 1831 and did not marry, and never did.
And in the September of 1831, she wrote to Mrs. Gill of Duke Street—who by then had lost the lease and the house and was working at fifty-one out of two rooms in Poland Street with two girls instead of four—and offered to buy the business.
Not to own it. The terms were drawn by Mr. Sturges and were peculiar, and Caroline Vane insisted on every one of them. The capital was hers. The name over the door was Gill's. The whole of the profit was Mrs. Gill's and Miss Poole's, and Miss Vane's name appeared nowhere in any document that any customer would ever see.
"Because if my name is on it," she said in the letter, "then it is a ladies' charity and it will fail in two years. And if it is Mrs. Gill's name on it, it is a house that has been in that trade one-and-thirty years, which is what it is."
Gill and Poole of Conduit Street opened in the March of 1832 and was there for forty-one years. They kept the books. That was the thing that outlasted everything else. Every gown, every fitting, date and measures and what wanted doing next time, in order in a press. And after 1832, there were three girls, and then five, and then nine. And every one of them was taught in her first week by Hannah Poole herself to write down what interrupted a fitting, and never to write down what she thought about it.
There were, over forty-one years, eleven occasions. Hannah kept a private count and never told anybody the number until 1871. Nine of them came to nothing that anybody could point at. Two did not, and both of those were dealt with quietly. And in one of them, a woman left a house in Hertfordshire in 1849 with her three children and a fitting book in a work bag. And Hannah Poole always said that this one had paid for the whole of the rest of her life.
She married the Duke of Marchford in the June of 1834, four years to the month after Vine Court. He asked her three times. She refused the first two in 1832 and 1833. And her reason both times was the same, and she never varied it: that Gill and Poole was two years old and would not survive its head fitter becoming a duchess, and that she was not going to be the woman who was pulled out of a business she had built to be married, and that he could wait or not as he pleased.
He waited.
On the third occasion in the April of 1834, he came to Conduit Street and asked her in front of Mrs. Gill deliberately. And Mrs. Gill said, "She has trained four girls, Your Grace, and I shall be here till I die, and you may take her."
And Hannah Poole put her face in her hands and said, "Ma'am, that is not for you to say."
And Mrs. Gill said, "It is entirely for me to say, and I have been waiting eleven months."
Edmund Vane was never touched by anybody. He married in 1833 and had four children and lived until 1871, and died in his own bed at Bruton Street. And no proceeding of any kind was ever brought against him and nothing was ever said in public by anyone. What happened instead—and it took about eleven years, and Hannah could never decide whether it was justice or merely weather—was that his sister did not speak to him, and his sister's aunt did not speak to him, and a duchess in London who had once been a dressmaker's girl was perfectly civil to him at four public occasions across two decades in a manner that eleven people noticed and nobody could describe. He was never received at Marchford House. He was never refused either. He was simply never asked for thirty-seven years, and he understood it by about 1840, and Hannah knew he understood it because in that year he stopped attempting it.
Caroline Vane died at Bath in 1868. She left the whole of her fortune to found a lying-in hospital, and £1,100 to Hannah Poole, Duchess of Marchford, with a direction that it was to be spent on nothing sensible. Hannah spent it on a house at Lyme for the use of any woman in the trade who wanted a fortnight by the sea, and it was still going in 1901.
And once in a while, in the evenings, her husband would look up from whatever he was reading and ask the thing he never quite stopped asking. "If you had gone the other way out of that vestry, down the passage and into the street with the rest of them?"
And Hannah, Duchess of Marchford, would put down her pen. "Then you would have got up off those stones after about a quarter of an hour," she'd say, "and gone home and been told for the rest of your life that a girl of two-and-twenty jilted you at St. Bride's and nobody ever knew why. And Caroline would have been fetched back from Bath by the 9th of July because there would have been nobody at all who was there."
"And you?"
"I should have gone back to Duke Street and finished the sleeves on Mrs. Ellerby's blue," said Hannah Poole. "And I should have thought about that girl's collarbones about once a month for the rest of my life, and I should never once have told anybody why."