Catherine put down her pins.
"And now," said Mrs. Marfleet, "I hear that in October he sat down for five hours with a woman he paid, in the room where my sister used to sit, and talked—a thing he could not do for me in sixteen months, and I am her blood." Her voice cracked in the middle of the word, and she brought it back with an effort that was terrible to watch. "You may imagine how that struck me. He is asking a hired woman to teach him how to be a father." She said it quietly. "That is the whole of my case, and I shall put it in exactly those words."
"Then you will be putting a true thing to a wrong use," Catherine said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"He did not hire me to teach him anything, ma'am. He hired me because he was afraid he had forgotten how to be in a room, and he wanted to find out on a Thursday with a dressmaker rather than on the eighteenth with a gentleman from London." She met the older woman's eyes. "You have been honest with me, so I will be honest with you: he did not choose me over you. He could not do it with you, ma'am, because you are her blood. You are the whole of what happened, sitting in his hall in your violet gown every six weeks. I am nobody. That is my only qualification, and it is why it worked."
The room was very quiet. Mrs. Marfleet turned away to the window with her gloves crushed in her hand.
"I buried three of my own," she said to the glass. "Two before they were a year old, and one at four days. I do not speak of it. I am telling you because you have been decent with me, and because you will think otherwise that I am a woman collecting a child the way one collects china." She drew a breath. "I was not sent for. Do you know that two men rode north to Northumberland that night, and nobody in this house sent a man west to me? I came on the Thursday because I read it in a newspaper in my own morning room. In a newspaper."
She put her hand up to her face for a moment.
"He was in a field," Catherine said. "They sent to him because he was the heir and there were papers to be signed. Nobody thought about the sister. That was not cruelty, ma'am; it was a house with its head off."
"I am aware of what it was." Mrs. Marfleet's voice was steady again. "It does not make the not being sent for any different in the middle of the night, which is when a thing of that kind comes back." She drew her gloves on, finger by finger, the way a woman does when she is finishing a conversation she has decided has gone far enough. "I shall not withdraw. I am not a wicked woman, and I am not a fool. I think that house will make that child into a ghost, and I mean to prevent it. And I would rather be hated in three counties than stand one day at Nell's grave and think I might have spoken. On the eighteenth, I shall be in that room, and I shall tell Mr. Sherard the truth as I see it."
"I would think less of you if you did not," Catherine said.
Mrs. Marfleet stopped at the door. "You are not at all what I was told," she said. "That is not a compliment. It makes the whole thing worse."
He came to Wormsley on the eleventh.