He almost smiled, and didn't. At the door he said, "When you told her to do the seam again, she said yes. She has been saying yes to this house longer than any of us deserved. Remember that, if you are tempted to call her the danger. The danger has been obedient. That is why you did not see it until I did."
***
Sir Walter Holme was large, well fed, and sure that good humor was a kind of intelligence. His daughter Beatrice was twenty, in a pale silk that had never been asked to survive a day's work. She was not unkind. She was unused. She looked at Edmund with the cautious hope of a girl who has been told a duke is a serious thing and is relieved, against her will, to find a human face.
Mara did not see them arrive. She heard the servants change pace, and Nell's whisper that the young lady was like a picture and that her maid already disliked the blue room. The muslin seam was straight. Mara had made it straighter than anger required, because excellence was the one discourtesy left to her. She bit the thread and pressed the cloth until it lay as if it had never argued.
Mrs. Adel came up herself.
"You are wanted," the housekeeper said. She was spare and fifty, and her eyes touched the ring and fled. "Not at dinner. In the small parlor after the first course. Bring the underskirt and stand while she looks at the seam. Do not speak unless spoken to. Those are her words. Mine are these: if you mean to run, run before you go down. After that, running will have an audience."
"I am not running in the middle of a seam," Mara said. "Tell her grace the line is straight."
"Tell her yourself. And child—" Mrs. Adel stopped. The word had escaped her, and she looked angry at it. "I do not know what you are to this family. I know Nell came downstairs with a face like a broken plate. I will not have the girls punished for your honesty. If there is a storm, let it break on people who are paid more than they are."
"That is fair," Mara said.
She washed her hands. She did not take off the ring. She folded the muslin over her arm and went down the servants' stair, which was narrower and more honest than the other stair, and smelled of cabbage and polish. At the bottom a footman looked through her as footmen are trained to do, then looked again, because something in the set of her mouth made the training slip.
The small parlor was dim, lit for waiting rather than comfort. Through a half-open door she could hear the dining room: silver, Sir Walter's laugh, Beatrice's lighter answer, the duchess's voice performing ease. Edmund's voice was in there too, low, the voice of a man counting his sentences before he spends them.