The supper room at Wormsley was the long, cold chamber at the north end. At a quarter to midnight, it held the wreck of a supper: cut ham, a trifle gone to soup, twenty glasses, four candles left of thirty, and a smell of cold gravy.
Catherine went in because the jug in the retiring room had been empty for an hour and the servants had all gone down to eat.
The Duke of Fenwood was standing at the end of the table with his back to her, quite alone, doing absolutely nothing.
She stopped. There was no possible way to go out again without being heard, so she did what she had been taught to do at seventeen, which was to become furniture.
"There is water in the blue jug," he said without turning round. "I have already looked."
"Thank you, Your Grace."
He turned then: sea-gray eyes, the color of the estuary at Bledlow in February, and a face that was younger than she had expected and much more tired. He looked at her for a moment as though he were solving something.
"You are the one from the passage," he said. "With the box."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"You have been in that chair since eight o'clock."
She had. She had not supposed that any person on the other side of that door had registered it, and the fact that this one had went through her oddly, like cold water on a tooth.
"There is generally work, Your Grace."
"What work?"
She was too tired to dress it up. "A flounce trodden through. Two hems let down where the ladies have grown. A shoulder seam gone in the reel." She lifted the workbox an inch. "And a sleeve where a lady caught her bracelet in it and cried because it was new."