Katherine Hathstone had made nine of the gowns in the Wormsley assembly rooms that Michaelmas night. Four of them she had made twice.
She could not see them all from where she sat. She did not need to; she knew the sound of them.
The retiring room was a narrow closet off the passage with a looking glass, two chairs, a jug of water going cold, and a smell of tallow and violet powder. Catherine had the chair nearest to the door because that was where the light fell. Her workbox stood open on her knees: needles in the lid, a paper of pins, her scissors on their black ribbon, and in the small compartment at the front, her mother's silver thimble, worn thin on one side from 30 years of pushing.
Mrs. Locksley had sent a hand to every assembly for 22 years. Hems come down. Flounces are trodden through by men who cannot count. A lady who has paid four guineas for a gown will not sit out half an evening for one torn breadth, and she will remember for years whose girl mended it: sixpence for the night, and supper if the servants remembered.
Catherine had been the hand for five years.
The door to the ballroom stood a little open at the end of the passage. Through it came the smell of hot wax and hothouse flowers, the shuffle of thirty pairs of feet, and the two fiddles and the cello that Wormsley had instead of an orchestra. The cello was flat and always had been, and every year the stewards paid the man a guinea and never said a word about it.
That was the thing about Catherine's place in the world: she heard the flat cello, and she knew which of the ladies laughing under the chandelier had put the same silk through her hands three seasons running. She knew all of it. Nobody knew her.
At 10:10, the door banged and Miss Gauthorpe came in on one heel with her mother behind her, holding up two feet of a lilac flounce in her fist.
"Trodden," Mrs. Gauthorpe said, "by a man with feet like a drayhorse. Can it be saved?"
"Let me see it, ma'am."
Catherine knelt on the boards. She did not ask Miss Gauthorpe to sit because Miss Gauthorpe would not have sat. Ladies stand in the retiring room and go on with the conversation they were having in the other room.
The tear was clean. It had gone with the grain, three inches above the hem. And the lilac was a soft Italian net that would take an invisible repair if the light was poor. The light in the ballroom was poor: fifty candles, and Wormsley thought itself splendid.
"Eight minutes," Catherine said.
"Eight. You hear that, Mama?"