"Three shillings the day, Your Grace," she said when she came back. "And her dinner."
"Thank you."
"May I ask what Your Grace intends?"
"No," he said, "because I do not know yet. And if I say it out loud before I know it, I shall not do it."
The fitting was on the sixteenth of October, and they gave her the small room at the end of the north passage because it had a good cold light and a long table. It had been the late Duchess's morning room. Nobody said so, and Catherine knew it within a minute.
The workbasket was still on the little table by the chair, with a piece of white work in it, a needle still in the piece, and the thread on the needle going brown: sixteen months. Somebody dusted round it every week. She did not touch it. She set out her pattern papers at the other end of the room and got on.
He came in at 4:00, when the light was going, and stood just inside the door without coming any further, like a man who had learned the place where he was not the master.
"Miss Hathstone."
"Your Grace."
"I want to ask you something, and I'm going to do it badly," he said. "I have thought for a fortnight about how to do it well. There is no well."
Catherine put down her shears.
"On the eighteenth of November, a gentleman is coming from London," he said. "Mr. Sherard, on the business of the court. He will look at this house, at my brother's daughter, at me. He will sit at my table from seven until midnight, and afterwards he will write down what he found." He paused. "My solicitor tells me that the whole of it will turn on that evening, and I have decided to believe him."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"I cannot do it." He said it the way another man might report a fallen tree across a road. "I can talk to a tenant. I can talk to a mason. I spent nine years talking to men about water and rents and lime, and I was thought a civil enough fellow in Northumberland." His jaw moved. "I have not sat at a table in company since the June before last. I have found that I cannot begin, and that if a silence goes past a certain length, I would sooner walk out of the room than break it. I have walked out of rooms in my own house."