"I said it before the whole of Wormsley knew what you had paid me, and before your solicitor decided that the shape of your household is the case. If I am sitting in your drawing room with my work when Mr. Sherard walks in, what does the aunt say? She says, 'There she is.' She says it in three words, and she is not even lying." Catherine straightened her cuffs, which did not need it. "You will do it alone. You will sit at that table from seven until midnight with a stranger, and you will find that you can, because you have already done it once."
"And if I cannot?"
"Then the fault was never in the house," she said. "And you had better find it out before that child is old enough to be told about it."
She left him standing in the churchyard. She got as far as the shop door before she understood that she had refused a duke in front of the town. That would be the second story, and between the two of them, her name was now a thing that would be said in Wormsley for thirty years.
She went in at the front, as she had been told, with her chin up.
Mr. Sherard came down on the eighteenth of November and was at Farcourt by 6:00. He was a mild, gray, unhurried man of fifty who had done this work for thirty years and had long ago stopped being impressed by houses. He looked at the child, at the nursery, at the accounts of what had been spent on her, and he asked Mrs. Tapscott a great many questions and wrote down the answers.
At 7:00 they sat down: Mr. Sherard, Mrs. Marfleet in her violet, and the Duke of Fenwood at his own table.
It went as Patrick had known it would. He answered what he was asked, correctly, in four or five words, exactly as he had answered eleven letters in sixteen months. He heard himself do it and could not stop. Twice he began a sentence about his brother and put it down again. Mrs. Marfleet spoke well, and quietly, and without one word of malice, which was infinitely worse than if she had raged.
By 9:00, the whole table had gone into the particular silence that Patrick had been afraid of since June of the year before last. Outside the door, the pendulum of the hall clock went on, patient as a heartbeat, marking off the exact length of his failure.
At twenty minutes to ten, there was a commotion in the hall.
Catherine Hathstone had walked the four miles from Wormsley in the dark with her workbox under her cloak, and she came into that drawing room with the hem of her skirt wet to the knee.
"Miss Hathstone," said Mr. Sherard, rising, because he was a courteous man and did not yet know what she was.
"Sir." She stood in the middle of the carpet. "My name is Catherine Hathstone. I am a dressmaker's hand at Wormsley, and I made that child's clothes. In October, the Duke of Fenwood offered me a guinea to sit in this room from seven until midnight with my work, and I took it. Everybody in this county knows it, and you would have had it from somebody before your chaise reached the turnpike, so you may have it from me."