And it was at that moment, with the tape at the child's shoulders, that Catherine looked past her into the doorway.
The Duke of Fenwood was standing in it. She did not know how long he had been there—long enough. He had one hand on the doorframe, and he had not come in. The expression on his face was one she had seen once before, on a man standing in the market square in the hard winter watching a baker carry a tray of loaves in past him. It was not grief; it was closer to hunger.
He saw that she had seen him. He took his hand off the frame. "Go on," he said. "Please."
And he stood in the doorway for the rest of it, four minutes, without saying one word more, while his brother's daughter stood on a stool in an old black frock with her chin up, telling a dressmaker the number of her own waist.
Patrick Rushmere went down the back stairs afterwards rather than the front. He did that in his own house, and he knew he did it.
The letter from Mr. Startin had come on Tuesday, and was still on the desk in the estate room, weighted down with a piece of drainage tile, because he had read it six times and had not yet been able to answer it. Startin was a good man and wrote like one, which meant he told the truth in the plainest available words:
The petition of Mrs. Marfleet will be heard in the Michaelmas sittings or shortly after. The Master will not decide on affidavit alone in a matter concerning the person of an infant. He will direct an inquiry, and a gentleman will attend at Farcourt to see the house and the child and report. I am to tell you frankly what that gentleman will look for: he will look for the ordinary furniture of a family life, and he will make his judgment in one evening upon what he can see, hear, and be told at your own table.
And then the paragraph that Patrick had read the most:
Your position is not weak in law. Your brother's will named you and named no other. It is weak in appearance. You are unmarried. You have not dined in company since you came into the title. And you are known in the county chiefly as a man who is not known. Mrs. Marfleet has a husband, a house in Bristol, a pew, and a great deal of natural feeling. If you will forgive me, she has a life, and you have an estate.
He stood in the estate room with his hands on the back of a chair. The room was the only one in the house he used. It had a desk, four ledgers, a map of the property, and a window that he opened every morning in all weathers. It had a chair with a broken arm that he had mended himself with wire, because he had spent nine years in a country where a man mends his own chair. He knew every field in that map by its rent and its drainage, and had walked all of it in fourteen months. He had put £900 into new ditching on the low ground and had got the mill going again. There was not a tenant on the property who would say a word against him.
He could not sit in a room with a stranger for four hours.
That was the whole of it, and there was no arrangement of words that made it better. He had gone to the Michaelmas assembly precisely in order to try it, because Startin had written, "You must be seen," and had lasted an hour and a half counting the doors. The only conversation in that whole building that had gone anywhere at all had been four minutes in a cold supper room with a woman mending other people's clothes.
Patrick sat down at his desk and looked at the wall for a while. Then he rang—a thing he almost never did—and asked Mrs. Tapscott what the dressmaker's assistant was paid for a day's work at Farcourt, and to say nothing to anybody about the question.
Mrs. Tapscott, who had been in that house since he was a boy, looked at him for slightly longer than was strictly respectful.