Mrs. Marfleet had gone white.
"I have no place here," Catherine said. "I know exactly what I am. I have come because I am the only person alive who knows why he did it, and he will not tell you, because he does not know how to say a thing about himself in a room."
"Miss Hathstone," said Patrick.
"Your Grace, I refused you in a churchyard in front of the town, and I have no interest whatever in your house. Let that answer for me." She turned back to Mr. Sherard. "He did not hire a woman to make a show for you. He hired a stranger to find out whether he could still sit in a room with one, because he had not done it since they brought his brother up out of the ford. He stopped it at midnight, paid me, sent me home. Then he went into his own hall and wound the clock that had been stopped for sixteen months. Every servant in this house lay in bed and listened to it strike twelve."
The room was entirely still.
"Sir," said Catherine, "you have come to find out whether this is a fit house for a child. You are the only man in England who can make him say it. Ask him what he was waiting for."
Mr. Sherard looked at her for a long moment. Then he sat down, put the cap on his pen, and said, "Your Grace, what were you waiting for?"
And Patrick Rushmere, at his own table, with his hands flat on the cloth, said: "For it to be a mistake."
Nobody moved.
"I did not stop the clocks," he said. "They were stopped for me, properly, as is done. But I never gave the order to start them. And I have known for a year that I was the only man who could, and I did not do it because starting them made it true. My brother is dead. I am not the Duke of Fenwood by any right that makes sense to me. I have been the agent of this property for sixteen months and have been very good at it. I have not once been the master of this house. The master of this house went into the ford at Bledlow, and I have been keeping his chair warm in case there has been an error." He looked up. "The child has grown three inches, and nobody noticed until a dressmaker measured her. That is my case, sir, and it is not a good one."
It was Mrs. Marfleet who made the first sound; it was very small.
Catherine crossed the room, took the marbled ledger out of her box, and put it in the older woman's lap, open at the fourth page from the front.
"Ma'am," she said, "that is your sister's blue."