"It is what I said." His hands had come out from behind his back. "It is not untrue, and that is my difficulty. I have thought of nothing else for eight days, and I cannot get the two things apart in my own head. And I am not going to stand in a churchyard and pretend to you that I can."
"Then I will get them apart for you, since I have had less to think about." Catherine's voice was perfectly level, and her hands were shaking, so she put them behind her, and that was how the two of them stood there, three feet apart. "You want me because a house with a woman in it reads better in a report, and you want me because on a Thursday in October you found you could breathe. Both of those are true. Only the second is a reason to marry, and it is not the one you led with."
"Catherine, do not—"
"It came out harder than she intended. You have not called me that before, and if you do it now, I shall not be able to say the rest."
He shut his mouth.
"I have spent my whole life," she said, "making things look as though nothing ever happened to them. I can take a gown that has been turned, stained, let out for a child, and send it into a ballroom looking like four guineas of new silk. No woman in that room will find the mend." She was breathing hard now. "I will not be a mend, Your Grace. I will not be the thing you put over the hole in that house so the gentleman from London cannot see it. Because a mend holds for ordinary wear, and it goes the moment it is pulled. And I told you that in the supper room at midnight, and you have not thought about it once since."
"That is not true."
"Then what have you thought?"
"That I have never in my life met anybody who says the actual thing," he said. "That I did not know I was lonely until a woman sat in my drawing room for five hours with a piece of green wool. That when the clock struck twelve, I stood in the hall with the key in my hand and could not make myself go back through that door, because going back through it meant it was over." His voice had risen; he brought it down. "And that I am about to lose my brother's daughter, and I cannot tell which of those two facts is making me say this badly. Until I can, you are entirely right to refuse me."
"Yes," said Catherine. "I am."
A cart went past on the other side of the wall; the carter looked at them for as long as his horse allowed.
"I will not come on the eighteenth," she said.
"You said you would."