"You have said it," Helena said. The earrings did not move. "Do not expect a blessing. A hall does not convert me. I buried one son, and this is not how I meant to keep the other. Lawyers will test the marriage. I will pay them for the people who eat under this roof, not for your feelings. Until I can put a judgment in a cousin's hand, she is not mistress here. I will not present her, and I will not call endurance affection."
"I did not ask to be presented," Mara said.
She set the basket on the table where cards were left, work laid on top of ceremony, and did not apologize for the placement.
"I will not take the blue room," she said. "I will not put on the bodice upstairs and play duchess for people who like a scandal easy to sketch. My name is Mara Elling. The needle stays mine. If I remain, I remain a woman who sews, and I will not answer to a false name so your guests can be comfortable. If you want a wife, that is the wife you have. If you want a lady made out of my silence, say so here, and I will take the road."
Edmund's face tightened. The ease he might have hoped for was not in the room, and he had the sense not to chase it.
"I want the wife I married," he said. "Not a softer figure to stand in for the woman I refused at dinner, and not a secret on a back stair. I will tell the lawyer what I told this hall. I will not ask you to forgive the receipt. I believed it because it let me mourn one loss instead of two, and that was cowardice. I will not ask my mother to make the year kind. She will not. We may live in fewer rooms than this house prefers. I am saying so where it can be repeated."
Mara nodded. The nod was not pardon. It was the acceptance of a sentence she had heard clearly.
"Then hear me in the same place," she said. "I will not be embraced in a hall as if the attic were a dream you woke me from. I will work. I will speak to you in daylight, with the door open. I will not pretend these months were a test I am grateful to have passed. You do not get the eleventh of April back by being brave on a Wednesday morning."
"I know," he said.
Helena looked at them as if they had chosen a draft on purpose. "Then live with it," she said. "Do not come to me after luncheon for a gentler ending. Sir Walter will not be our friend, and the cousin will smell blood before supper. Mrs. Adel, pay her as a seamstress and use the name she has given. Anyone who keeps the other name will answer to me for the lie. That is all the shelter I intend to be seen giving. Do not thank me."
"I was not going to," Mara said.