"She's mending it, my lady." Mrs. Byrne arrived to see what the commotion was, keeping her voice even. "Nail caught it. Nobody's fault."
"I did not ask whose fault it was." Lady Prudence came the rest of the way down, unhurried, and studied Agnes the way she might have studied a smear on a window. "I asked why a widow with a stable-yard child is permitted this near the front hall at all." She laughed then—three short, practiced beats, like a bell struck and stopped. "I suppose poverty does teach a certain usefulness. A pity it teaches nothing else."
Agnes did not look up from the hem. Her hands did not shake. "I've nearly finished, my lady." She kept her voice plain and level. "It will hold."
"I did not ask if it would hold. I asked what you imagined you were doing coming through that door in that apron in front of guests who have never had to look at hands like yours."
The gallery had gone quiet. Miss Marsh, to her credit, looked miserable and said nothing, and her mother studied the ceiling with great interest.
It was Mercy, arrived unnoticed at the top of the stair in her nightgown again, who broke the silence in the clear, carrying voice children use without meaning to: "My mother's hands saved a horse," she announced. "Nobody thanked her for that, either."
Lady Prudence's mouth thinned. "Take the child up," she said to no one and everyone. "And you," to Agnes, "finish and go. And do not let me pass the green baize door again."
Agnes finished the hem. Her stitches were straight and small and would not show under the silk. And when she rose, she did not curtsy, and she did not answer the second insult any more than the first, because she had learned long before that winter that arguing with a woman like Lady Prudence only fed her, and silence starved her faster.
She gathered Mercy at the stair and went. And it was only in the dark of the back passage, out of anyone's sight, that her hands finally shook—once, hard—before she made them stop.
Tom was in the stable yard when she crossed it, carrying feed sacks he did not need to be carrying at that hour, and he saw her face before she saw him, and something in him went cold and still in a way it had not gone in a very long time.
"What happened?"
"Nothing, sir." She did not slow. "Nothing that hasn't happened before."
"That isn't an answer."
"It's the only one I've got tonight." She looked at him then, and there was no self-pity in it at all, only a flat, tired honesty. "I mend the hems and I don't get asked to the dances. That's the whole of the arrangement, and I knew it before I took the position. I'd thank you not to make more of it than it is."
He wanted, badly, to tell her who he was in that moment—to walk back through the front door and put a stop to it with three words.
He did not.
He had watched cruelty wear fine manners before, and he knew that the fastest way to make a woman like Lady Prudence hate a laundress permanently was to let the laundress be seen defended by the duke. So he said nothing, and hated the saying of nothing, and went back to the stable with the feed sacks he had never needed, and began, that same night, to plan how a man in his position might quietly end a cruelty without ever admitting he had been close enough to watch it happen.
The week that followed was the coldest of the winter, and not on account of the weather.
Lady Prudence made good on her word: Agnes was barred from anything past the baize door, her wages docked a shilling for the ruined hour at the mending. And word came down through the housekeeper's room—careful and indirect, the way such things always traveled—that her position might not be wanted come the spring quarter.
Nothing was said outright. It rarely was in a house like that one; it did not need to be. Mrs. Byrne fought it where she could, and lost more than she won, because Lady Prudence, in the young duke's continued and unexplained absence from his own drawing-room, had made herself mistress of the house in all but name, and no housekeeper's word carried further than a relation's did.
Agnes did not weep over it. She sat by the loft window one night, with Mercy asleep behind the curtain, and toted up on the back of an old laundry list exactly how many shillings stood between herself and a room in the mill town two counties over, where a cousin of her dead husband's kept a boarding house and might, if pressed, find her washing to do.
It was not much of a plan; it was the only one she had.
"We'll manage," she told Mercy the next morning, braiding the child's hair with hands that did not shake, even though the sentence cost her something to say. "We always have."
"Is it because of the lady with the laugh?"
Agnes went still a moment. "Where did you hear that?"
"You go quiet whenever she's spoken of. You go quiet the way the yard goes quiet before it snows." Mercy said it without guile, the plain observation of a child who watches her mother more closely than her mother knows. "I don't like her."