Mrs. Locksley took the letter back and folded it along its old folds. "The aunt has moved: Mrs. Marfleet of Bristol, the Duchess's own sister. She has petitioned to have the care of that child put into her own hands."
"Can she do such a thing?"
"She can ask. Anybody may ask. The child is a ward of the court now, and the court is a room in London with a man in it who has never seen Farcourt and never will. What he will have instead is a report." Mrs. Locksley put the letter in her apron pocket. "Somebody will come down and look at that house and write down what he sees. And on what he writes, that child will be sent to Bristol or left where she is."
"And what will he see?" Catherine asked.
"A house with the shutters up and the clocks stopped. A duke who has spoken to nobody in fourteen months, and a little girl who won't say good morning to a stranger." Mrs. Locksley picked up her shears again. "And a man in London will read it over his breakfast and think quite reasonably that the aunt sounds a very sensible woman."
She began to cut, and the shears went through the calico with the long, tearing sound that had been the sound of Catherine's whole life.
"Thursday," Mrs. Locksley said. "Wear the gray. And Catherine—take your book."
Farcourt stood four miles north of Wormsley at the end of an avenue of limes that somebody was still keeping in order. That was the first thing Catherine noticed from the gig, and it was the thing she kept coming back to afterwards.
The avenue was swept, the verges were cut, the park wall had been repointed within the year, and the lodge windows were clean—and every shutter on the front of the house was closed. Thirty-two windows in warm brown stone, the color of a loaf, with the light of a fine October morning lying full on them. Behind every pane, the inside face of a shutter, painted white, folded across and barred.
"They have not opened the front rooms since the funeral," Mrs. Locksley said. "Don't stare. It gives them the advantage."
They went to the side door and were expected, though nobody used the word "welcome." Mrs. Tapscott, the housekeeper, was a small, dry woman of sixty with a face like a closed account. She took them through a stone passage and out into the great hall of Farcourt, and Catherine understood in about four seconds that this house was not what the county said it was.
The county said it had gone to ruin. It had not. It was immaculate. The floor was polished, and the chairs stood square. There was not one cobweb, not one drift of soot, not a single dead lamp, and the whole vast room smelled of beeswax and cold stone, and nothing else at all. There were no flowers, no gloves on a table, no hat, no letters, no work put down, no book left face down on a chair. Nothing in that hall suggested that a living person had crossed it since it was built.
And on the wall above the stairs, the tall case clock stood with its hands at twenty minutes past six.
Catherine looked at it a second too long.