"Because I have been a man in a room with you," he said. "And I have not been a man in a room with anybody else since I was five-and-twenty. Because you are the only person who ever asked me who gives the order. And because I would like, for the rest of my life, to come into a room and find that somebody is working in it."
One second, two seconds, three.
"Yes," said Catherine Hathstone.
They were married in the April at Bledlow, in a gown she made new out of cloth Lady Ellen chose after twenty minutes of the most serious deliberation in England. Not turned, not remade: new, because she had spent five years making other women's old silk look like nobody's history, and she was not going to be married in a mend.
Some doors in that county never opened again. Mrs. Gauthorpe was ill for twenty years whenever the Duchess of Fenwood was expected, and there are two houses within nine miles of Farcourt whose cards have never come. Catherine found, to her own surprise, that this troubled her about as much as a flat cello. What she missed, and went on missing, was the workroom; she said so once at forty, and Nell laughed at her for it.
Their son was born in the March of the year twenty-one, in the room with the good north light. It had been the late Duchess's morning room, and was by then the sewing room of the house, with fourteen girls in it on a Tuesday learning fine work at eight shillings the week.
The white work in Isabelle's basket was never finished; Catherine could have done it in an afternoon. It lies in a glass frame in the upstairs passage with the needle still in it and the brown thread, and underneath, in a small hand, three lines and no more:
Was begun by Isabelle, Duchess of Fenwood, on the 12th of June.
Was not finished.
Is not to be.
The clocks at Farcourt are wound on Sunday mornings, all five of them, by Lady Ellen when she is at home, because her uncle gave her the keys on her tenth birthday and never took them back. She winds the hall clock eleven turns, and she will not let anybody else touch the stable clock at all.
And on Michaelmas night, the drawing room shutters at Farcourt stand open with candles in the windows. From the turn of the avenue, the front of the house has two squares of yellow light. The Duchess sits in the chair by the fire with her work and the branch of three candles at her left hand.
There are nine gowns in that house that she made with her own hands, and four she has made twice. She does not need to see them; she knows the sound of them. And there is not one soul under that roof who does not know her.