Catherine stood in the middle of the shop. "I will go," she said. "Today. You will say you turned me off, and in six weeks it will be somebody else's turn to be talked of."
"Sit down, Catherine Hathstone, in my shop, which I have kept for twenty-two years and buried a husband to keep." Mrs. Locksley's voice was not loud. "Do you know what your mother did for me in the winter of the year ninety-seven? I had the influenza and four gowns promised for the Bledlow ball. She sat in that room nine nights with her own baby asleep in a drawer, and never took a farthing beyond her wage. When I offered it, she said a thing I have remembered for twenty years. She said, 'You will want it more in the spring.'" She straightened. "You will not go. If four households leave me over a girl who sat in a room with her work, then they may leave. I shall be poorer, and I shall still have a shop, a name, and my supper. Now go and finish that child's pelisse. It is due at Farcourt on Friday, and it is the best thing you have made in five years."
Catherine went into the workroom, shut the door, and cried for about ninety seconds, quietly. Quietly was permitted.
Mrs. Adelheid Marfleet came to Farcourt on the ninth of November. She came by her right, and nobody disputed it: she was the child's aunt, her only near relation on her mother's side, and she had come every six weeks since the funeral in a hired chaise from Bristol. She was a tall woman of forty-four in expensive violet, with Isabelle's mouth and none of Isabelle's ease. She had married a wine merchant of a good Bristol family; she had a house on a hill above the city; and she was, as Mr. Startin had written with such painful accuracy, a woman with a life.
She found Catherine in the north room with the child on a stool.
"Aunt," said Lady Ellen. "This is Miss Hathstone. She made Mama's blue."
"Did she?" Mrs. Marfleet stood in the doorway with her gloves in her hand. "Turn round, Nell."
The child turned. The pelisse was on her—bronze-green, finished that morning, the collar standing exactly as it should, and the front edges falling straight as a plumb line.
Mrs. Marfleet looked at her sister's daughter for a long moment. "Well," she said, "you are not to be sent to Bristol in a black frock, at any rate. Go up to Holloway, my love. I want a word with this person."
The child went in the way children go when they have learned that the word "person" means the tone will change as soon as the door is shut. It did.
"I know who you are," Mrs. Marfleet said. "You are the guinea."
"I am the dressmaker, ma'am."
"You are the guinea. And you may spare me the modesty, because I have had it from three separate sources." She came into the room. "Do you know what I have done these sixteen months? I have sat in that hall with the clocks stopped, and taken that child on my knee, and asked what she has been doing. And she says, 'Nothing, Aunt,' because it is true. I have written to the Duke of Fenwood eleven times. He has answered eleven times in four lines on the estate paper, always civilly, always about arrangements. Not one of them told me a single thing she said or did or wanted."