"Yes, your grace." A pause. Mrs. Adel was not a fool. She had been housekeeper long enough to smell a fire before she saw smoke. "Shall I take the skirt?"
"Leave it."
The housekeeper's steps retreated. Somewhere a maid laughed and was cut off by a sharper voice. The house went on being a house. That was the indecency of it. Buttons lay on the hearth. A duke stood in a sewing room in his dead brother's star, looking at a sewing woman as if she had returned from a grave he had agreed to let stay closed. The duchess watched the look until she was certain she had not invented it.
"Edmund," she said. She did not say Your Grace. She did not say my lord duke. She used the name she had used when he was the second son and his feelings were a private inconvenience rather than a public danger. "You were to come to me in the library. Not to wander the upper rooms like a man looking for an old coat."
He swallowed. Mara heard it. She kept her eyes on her thumb and the gold.
"I was told," he said, and his voice was wrong, scraped raw, "that the seamstresses were up here. I was told a hem had been sent up from the town and that you were displeased. I came to say the tailor in the village could take the work if the house was overburdened." It was a lie so thin it shamed the air. He seemed to hear the thinness himself. He stopped. "Mother."
"You will not call me that in front of the servants when you cannot control your face," the duchess said.
"She is not a servant."
The words fell out of him. He looked horrified that they had chosen this moment to be brave. Mara's head came up then, because she would not have her position in the world corrected by a man who had not corrected it when it might have saved her a winter.
"I am employed in this room," she said. Her voice was steady, which cost her more than the curtsy had. "If there is another word for it, I have not been paid under that word. Your grace, the seam is to be done again. I should be allowed to do it."
The duchess turned her head slowly, as if a chair had spoken a full sentence.
"You forget yourself, Anne."