"It is midnight," he said.
"Then I am done, Your Grace. Seven until midnight."
"Yes."
He went out. She heard his boots cross the hall and stop. Then a sound came back through the open door that she could not place for a second, because it no longer existed in that house: the small, dry clatter of a clock case being opened, and the ratchet of a key. Eleven turns—she counted them without meaning to.
Then the hall clock at Farcourt began to strike twelve for the first time in sixteen months, into a house where every soul was awake and pretending to be asleep.
He came back and stood in the doorway. He looked as though he had been running, though he had only walked thirty feet.
"Stay," he said.
Catherine put the needle carefully into the cloth. "Your Grace—"
"Stay," said Patrick Rushmere. "On the eighteenth, when Sherard comes, sit in that chair with your work, and let there be a sound in the house." He stopped then, because he was the sort of man who could not leave an untrue thing standing even when it served him. "No. That is not all of it, and I would rather say it badly now than have you discover it later: I do not want you here for Sherard."
"Then for what?"
"I do not know," he said. "That is the honest answer, and it is not a good one. I have had one evening in sixteen months in which I was a man in a room instead of a thing in a house. When the clock struck, I found I would have given a great deal for it not to be midnight." He put his hand flat on the doorframe. "Go home, Miss Hathstone. Mrs. Tapscott has the guinea, and the gig is at the door. I have no right whatever to have said any of that, and I am aware of it."
Catherine stood up. Her hands were quite steady, which surprised her, because nothing else about her was.
"Your Grace," she said, "I will come on the eighteenth."