"This is not straight," she said. "Do it again."
There were other people who might have said it as a correction. The duchess said it as a sentence. Her mouth barely moved. The earrings moved more.
Mara kept her eyes on the floorboards, where a knot looked like an eye that had given up. Her voice, when she found it, was the voice she had practiced for this house, low and without edges.
"Yes, your grace."
"You were recommended as clever with light cloth. Cleverness that cannot keep a line is only a story someone told to be rid of you." The duchess turned the muslin, found the place again, and made a small sound that was not quite a sigh. "I will not have my household dressed as if it were guessing. Unpick it. The whole seam. If you have used good thread on a bad line, that is your loss."
"Yes, your grace."
She reached for the skirt, and the duchess yanked it out of her hands. The pull was not large. It did not need to be. The muslin hissed free, a pin leaped, and the little porcelain dish of buttons smashed on the hearth with a sound like teeth. White buttons ran under the dress form and toward the mirror.
The duchess did not look at the dish. She looked at Mara's hands, which had closed on nothing, and for a moment her gaze snagged. Mara felt it the way one feels a draft. She turned the ring inward with her thumb, too late, a guilty little motion, and hated herself for the guilt more than for the lateness.
"Clean that," the duchess said. "Then do the seam again. I am going down. When I come back I will not be in a temper to teach a grown woman what straight means."
She gathered the muslin over her arm as if it had offended her personally and turned toward the door. The blue of her went out of the bright part of the room. Her heels struck the passage. She was already speaking to someone unseen, Mrs. Adel or a footman, the words too far to catch and too sharp to be kind. For a few breaths the sewing room belonged again to the north light, the spilled buttons, and the woman who was not supposed to have a husband's name in a box under her bed.
Mara did not chase the buttons at once. To move too fast after a humiliation looked like argument. She sat on the low stool, and her thumb found the band and rubbed it once, the old chapel gesture, from when the chaplain spoke too fast and Edmund's glove creaked. The gold was warm. It had no business being warm in this house.
She heard the stride before she understood it.