"Good night," he said. "You should be paid double for this evening. You will not be."
And he went out past her. She heard his boots the length of the passage, then the front doors, then a carriage on the cobbles going north out of the town towards Farcourt.
Catherine stood in the cold supper room with an empty jug in her hand for longer than she had any business standing there. Then she went back to her chair, because Lady Kitson's eldest had put her heel through a flounce in the last set of the night, and there was nobody else to do it.
To understand what Catherine Hathstone did with the rest of that autumn, you have to go back seven years to the bow window on the market square.
Hathstone's had been a linen draper's since before the turnpike came. It was a narrow shop with four steps up, a brass rail across the window, and a counter of oak so old it had gone black where two generations of hands had rested on it. Thomas Hathstone was a mild, exact man who wrote his accounts in a round clerk's hand and took off his hat to the poorest woman in Wormsley when she came in for a yard of dowlas. Her mother did the fine work in the room behind. Alice Hathstone had been apprenticed at fourteen in Bath and could set a sleeve better than any woman in three counties. She taught her daughter by putting the work in front of her and saying nothing until it was wrong.
Catherine was six when she was given her first hem, and nine when her mother let her sew a real seam on a real gown for a real customer, standing behind her the whole time with her arms folded. At the end she said, "That will do," which was, in that room, the highest praise there was.
The lung complaint took her father slowly from the winter she was thirteen. Four years of it, and the doctor came from Bledlow at seven shillings a visit. Each winter, the stock in the shop got a little thinner, because you cannot buy cloth with money you have given to a doctor. He died in the March she was seventeen. The shop went in the June to a man from the county town who put a milliner in it, and the oak counter went for firewood—which Catherine had never quite forgiven, and had never once mentioned to anybody.
Her mother lived another year and a half. She sewed until five days before the end, sitting up in the bed with the work on her knees, because the money in the house was what her hands made, and there was no other kind. Catherine buried her in the November and walked into Mrs. Locksley's on the Monday.
"You want a place?" Mrs. Locksley had said.
"I want work, ma'am. A place is bed and board and being told what you are. Work is neither. Show me your hands."
She had shown them. Mrs. Araminta Locksley was then fifty-eight, and had buried a husband and a business in London before she ever came north. She turned the hands over and looked at the callus at the side of the second finger.
"Alice Hathstone's daughter," she said. "Eight shillings the week, and you eat here. If you cry in my workroom, you may cry quietly."
That had been five years ago. Catherine had cried in the workroom exactly twice, quietly, and Mrs. Locksley had put a cup of tea at her elbow both times without a word, and gone on cutting.
What she had of her mother was the thimble and the sample book.