A grim flicker crossed the duchess's face, the nearest thing to respect she was willing to spend. She went up the stair without touching her son. At the landing she looked back once. The look was the one from the sewing-room door: severe, suspicious, already counting what could be saved. Then she was gone into the gallery.
The hall loosened. Keene followed the duchess because following was what remained of his office. The footmen discovered errands. Mr. Hoby said the accounts would not care what anyone was called, and left to prove it. Mrs. Adel faced Mara without sweetness.
"Mara, then," she said. "The gray bodice still needs a lining. If you are here to work, the work is upstairs. If you are here to be a symbol, I have no place for you in the linen room, duke or no duke."
"The lining," Mara said. "I will come up."
Edmund did not follow her. She had not invited him. He stood beside the table with his hand near where the basket had been, and he did not offer to carry it.
"May I speak to you later," he asked, "not as a speech?"
"At four," she said. "In the sewing room. The door stays open. Bring the lawyer if you must. Do not bring destiny. I have no seam that will take it."
"I will bring what is left of the truth," he said. "It is smaller than it was yesterday."
"Good," she said. "Smaller is harder to counterfeit."
She carried the basket herself. At the landing she saw, through an open door, the duchess already at her writing table, pen moving, spine straight, not calling anyone home. On the stair she did not feel chosen by heaven. She felt like a woman who had slept in her clothes and had a lining to set before the north light moved. Her thumb found the plain gold band and rubbed it once, not as a charm, as a thing that had survived being seen. Below, Edmund was speaking to Mrs. Adel about wages and about a room that was neither the attic nor the blue chamber, a plain room with a lock of Mara's own. He looked up. She did not smile. He did not ask her to.
No one in the house was forgiven. The duchess would not become kind by evening, and the son had not earned an absolution by finally using his voice where the servants could hear it. The seam upstairs was waiting. For the first time since Mara Elling had entered Ashbourne, it would be sewn under a name that belonged to her.