She threaded up, set the branch of candles where she wanted it, and began to fell the lining down the front edge. The little, steady sound of it went into the room and stayed there. He sat in the other chair with a book he did not read.
"I did not know," he said after a while, "that it made a noise."
"What does?"
"Sewing. I have been in rooms with women sewing all my life, and I thought it was a silent occupation." He turned his head. "It is not. There is the thread, and the needle going through, and every so often a little sound like a coal settling."
"That is the thimble on the eye of the needle. It is three times in each stitch if the cloth is heavy." She did not look up. "You could hear from the passage how many women in my mother's workroom were behind on their work."
"How?"
"Because a woman who is behind sews faster than she can breathe, and it goes ragged."
He was quiet for a while after that, but it was a different quality of quiet. She did what she had spent five years learning to do in fitting rooms, which was to leave a gap without letting it turn into a hole.
"You were nine years in Northumberland," she said. "What did you do there? Not the title of it—the days."
And the Duke of Fenwood, who had counted the doors at the Michaelmas assembly, talked for forty minutes about drainage. He talked about a bog on a hillside above Hexham that had been thought worthless for two hundred years, and the two months he spent walking it with a spade to find where the water came in. He talked about the day they cut the first main drain, and the whole hill began quite audibly to run; about the seventeen families on that ground, and what their rent was before and after. He talked like a man let out of somewhere.
"I am boring you very badly," he said at last.
"You are not. You have said more in forty minutes than in the whole of the rest of my acquaintance with you, and none of it was about the weather." Catherine turned the pelisse. "May I make an observation?"
"Yes."