"It is."
"Why?"
"Because I cannot remember eight years of cloth in my head," Catherine said. "And if I forget what a gown used to be, I might cut it wrong the second time."
Lady Ellen considered that. She had her uncle's eyes and a look of great and permanent seriousness. "What are the little writings?"
"Three lines under every piece: what it was, what it became, who wore it." Catherine moved her hand off the page so the child could see. "I never write anything else in it."
"Why not?"
"Because the rest is not mine to write down."
The child looked at her for a moment with an expression that had nothing childish in it whatever. Then she put her hand flat on the page and said, "Turn them back."
They went back through five years of Wormsley, a finger's width at a time: a green sarsenet that had been a Christmas gown and was made into two spencers; a black bombazine made for one funeral and let out for another.
On the fourth page from the front, Lady Ellen's hand stopped.
The scrap was blue—a deep, quiet blue, a little faded along one edge where it had been at a window. A line of very fine cording was worked into it in the same color, so that you had to hold it to the light to see the pattern at all.
The child did not say anything for a long moment. "That is my mother's," she said.
"Yes."
"You are not to say it is not, because I know it. She had it at Christmas, and she had it when the man came to paint her, and she had it when—" The small voice stopped, closed, and started again somewhere safer. "It is my mother's."