The book was a folio ledger with a marbled cover that had come out of her father's shop. Stitched into it at the corner with a single tacking stitch was a finger's width of every gown that had gone through Catherine's hands since she was fourteen. Beside each scrap in pencil, three lines in her small hand: what it had been, what it became, who wore it. It was not sentiment; a remaking woman must remember four years on whether the breadths of a gown have already been turned, because a gown can only be turned once. The book was her memory, and it was also, though she would not have used the word, the only record in existence of eight years of her life.
The morning after the Michaelmas assembly, Wormsley talked about nothing else, and the workroom over the shop got all of it by 9:00.
"He came in at eleven and went out at twelve," said the apprentice girl, Bess, who had it from her brother, who had held horses. "He never took supper, and he never spoke to the stewards above two words. Mrs. Gauthorpe says he is proud."
"Mrs. Gauthorpe says the rain is proud when it falls on her," said Mrs. Locksley. "Turn that hem."
"They say he is not fit for it," Bess said with relish. "Nine years an agent in Northumberland, and now he sits in that great house with the shutters up and won't see a soul. They say the little girl doesn't speak."
Catherine's needle went on. She had said nothing about the supper room, and she was not going to. There is a species of thing a woman in her position learns not to say aloud, because the telling of it turns immediately into something else in other people's mouths.
"'They say,'" Mrs. Locksley repeated. "'They'—the busiest family in England." She snapped her scissors shut. "My cousin's girl is in that nursery, and the child speaks perfectly well when she chooses, which is not often, and is nobody's business. And the Duke sat with his brother's coffin two nights running, and would not let them close the lid till the sister came from Bristol. If any of you thinks that is pride, you may go and be proud in the street."
The workroom went quiet in the way it did about twice a year.
"Sit down, Bess," Mrs. Locksley said. "Not you, Catherine. Come here."
She had a letter in her hand. It had been opened, and it had a seal on it that had been broken carefully rather than torn.
"Farcourt," she said. "By the hand of Mr. Petherick, their steward, who writes like a man being charged by the word." She held it out. "Read it. You will be going, so you may as well read it."
Catherine read it twice. It desired Mrs. Locksley to attend at Farcourt on Thursday, the second of October, and to bring a person capable of taking measurements, and of exercising patience. The mourning for the late Duke and Duchess was to be laid aside at Michaelmas by direction. Lady Ellen Rushmere had grown three inches and had nothing whatever to wear that was not black.
There was a second paragraph. It was shorter, and the hand had pressed harder: the order was to be complete by the eighteenth of November—morning dresses, a pelisse, a hat, gloves, shoes, and one good gown fit for a child to be seen in by a gentleman coming down from London on the business of the Court of Chancery.
"Chancery," Catherine said.