Mara stood up. The stool scraped. She was not tall, but the standing changed the room, because she did it without permission and without a sob.
"You keep calling it mercy," she said. "I would like a different noun. I came into this house because my father's breath was worth more than my pride for one winter. The winter is over. He is not well, but he is not in a lime-washed room. Tom is dull and alive in his port. You have had your purchase. You do not get the rest of my life as interest."
"If you leave," the duchess said, "you leave with nothing. I will not be blackmailed by a departure."
"I have my needles," Mara said. "I have the lines in a tin under my bed, unless you have already taken them, in which case Mr. Poulter's clerk is not so dead as Mr. Keene hoped, and my brother can still remember a morning in April. I have this ring. I am not a fool about courts. I know a duke's lawyers can make a poor woman's truth look like a scheme. I am not asking you to crown me. I am telling you I will not answer to a name you bought."
Edmund said, "The lines are still there?"
"They were this morning."
He nodded once, as if some part of him that had been floating had found a floor. "Then I will see them. Not to doubt you. To put my hand on the thing I let other people narrate."
"You will not go to the attic," the duchess said. "You will wash your face, you will remember the star you are wearing, and you will come to the library. Sir Walter's man is not the last of the day's messengers. If you are going to set fire to your name, you will do it after I have shown you the accounts, not before, and not in front of a girl who has already been careless enough to wear a ring in my workroom."
Mara felt the old heat in her wrists, the desire to throw a truth so hard it left a mark. She held it. Careless was a word people used when a secret had become inconvenient to its owner.
"I was careless," she said. "The cord broke. I meant to be a coward until evening. You were early, your grace. That is the whole of my plot."
Helena studied her. She looked like a woman who had been young in rooms where a mistake could not be sewn over. "I do not enjoy this," she said. "I buried a husband who left the estate with its pockets torn out, and a son who might have carried it. Cruelty is a tool. Habit is the other. I yanked the cloth because the seam was wrong and because I was already angry about the cousin and about Beatrice's room. I did not know the ring was there until you tried to hide it. Do not hand me a villainy I have not earned."
It was the most honest thing Mara had heard her say. It did not make her kind. It made her real, which was harder to hate cleanly.