Catherine picked the sixpence up off the washstand. She had learned a long time ago not to mind that particular thing, and she still minded it, and both of those were true at once.
At 11:00, the whole passage changed its sound. She heard the shift before she understood it: the fiddles going on, the feet stopping, forty voices dropping half a tone at once—the way a room drops when somebody unexpected comes into it.
Ruth Holloway, the nursery maid from the vicarage, stuck her head round the retiring room door with her eyes very wide. "He's come," she said. "Fenwood. He's come here. Standing in the doorway this minute. Mr. Petherick brought him in. The stewards have gone the color of a boiled cloth." Ruth was breathing quickly. "Fourteen months and never once out of that house, and he walks in at eleven o'clock."
Catherine set down her needle. She had never seen the new Duke of Fenwood, and almost nobody had.
The old one, the brother, had been a fixture of the county for twelve years—a broad, loud, well-liked man who opened the Wormsley subscription ball every autumn. He had died in the June before last in the flood at the ford below Bledlow, with his wife in the carriage beside him and the water four feet over the crossing stones.
They had been going home from a dinner. It was seven miles round by the bridge or a quarter of a mile through the ford. The coachman had said the water was high, and the Duke had said the water was always high. Two hours later, a hayward found the carriage lamp on its side in a willow forty yards downstream, still burning, which was the detail the county could never leave alone.
They had left a daughter of eight, and they had left a younger brother nobody had laid eyes on in nine years, because he had spent those nine years in Northumberland being another man's land agent for £240 a year. That was the whole of what Wormsley knew about Patrick Rushmere, and Wormsley had been chewing it for fourteen months.
Catherine went to the door because everybody in the building went to a door. She did not go far. She stood in the passage with her scissors still on their ribbon at her waist, in the black stuff gown that Mrs. Locksley's hands wore to assemblies so as to be a shadow, and she looked down thirty feet of candlelight into the ballroom.
He was standing just inside it. He was tall, and he did not stoop, which somehow made him look worse rather than better, because a tall man who stoops has decided to be sorry about it. Auburn hair cut close, going a little dark at the temples. Not a poor coat; she saw the cloth from thirty feet—superfine, the cut London, but plain, without a single thing on it to look at. Worn by a man who did not know what to do with his hands.
The stewards came at him in a body, and he said something short to each of them. The set that was forming broke apart to be presented and reformed wrong. Catherine watched a whole room full of people who had waited fourteen months for this arrange themselves around him at a distance of six feet, like water round a stone.
He danced once with Lady Kitson's second daughter, correctly and without any pleasure at all. When it was over, he bowed, returned her to her mother, and stood at the side of the room with his hands behind his back.
"He hasn't smiled," Ruth whispered. "Not once. Not at anybody."
Catherine watched him a moment longer. What she noticed was not the not smiling; it was that between the figures of the dance, when the line stood still, he had looked at the doors twice—the way a man looks at a door when he has promised somebody he will stay until a particular hour and is counting.
She went back to her chair and her workbox, because there would be three more hems before the night was over. And there were.