She told the rest without looking at either of them, because the rest was a corridor she had walked so often in her head that other people's faces made it harder to see.
In June her father signed a bond he did not understand. In July the money was called in. In August Gareth Vale, duke for less than a year, died of a fever in Bath, and the second son became the only son at a distance. Tom brought the newspaper home folded small. Mara read the name Vale three times before she understood that the husband who had not written was now a duke. She was fool enough, she said, to think the title would make him freer to answer.
It made him visible. Visibility is not freedom.
Mr. Keene arrived in September with clean gloves and a face like a closed ledger. He did not threaten her with a pistol or a scene in the street. He refused tea and laid out the next year. The marriage was irregular. The chaplain was dead, and dead men make poor witnesses. The clerk could be encouraged to forget. Tom's hand was on the bond beside their father's. The county jail had a room that smelled of lime, and Samuel Elling's lungs were already losing. If she wished to call herself a duchess, she might do it there, to the walls.
If, on the other hand, she was a sensible woman, there was a place.
"Not a bribe," Keene had said, as if the word could disinfect the thing. "A provision. You will come to Ashbourne under a name that pulls on nothing. You will sew for wages. Your father's bond will be bought and burned. Your brother will have a clerkship far enough off to become dull. You will not write to the duke. You will not wear any token. You will not be badly treated unless you mistake yourself for a guest."
"And the duke?" Mara had asked.
Keene had looked at a stain on the parlor wall as if it were the duke. "His grace has been informed that you preferred a settlement and a disappearance. He is in mourning and in a foreign station. He will not overturn his mother's arrangement for the sake of a spring he can be taught to call a mistake. If you love him, you will prefer his future to your vanity."
She hated him most for that sentence, because it was built to fit a good woman's mouth. She packed the gray dress, the marriage lines, the ring on its cord, and her needles. She told her father the wages were certain. He was too ashamed to ask where. Tom asked, and she told him in the yard while the cart was loaded. He wanted to refuse the clerkship and could not, because someone had to stay unruined. They had not forgiven each other for that. Their rare letters did not use the word marriage.
"I have been Anne Brant since the first Monday in November," she said. "I sleep in the attic with Nell and with a girl who coughs. I sew what I am given. I have unpicked this hem twice already this week, your grace, and it was straight both times. You do not always come up here because a line is wrong. You come because a woman in your house has a straight back and you prefer them curved."
The duchess drew in a breath. "You will not take me apart in my own sewing room."
"I know the habit," Mara said. "It is not the same as evil. I am not calling you a witch in a story. I am saying you are afraid, and you have made your fear into my name, and I am done wearing it."