Clara stayed on her knees. Slowly, she raised one hand and touched the back of her head. Where her braid had been, there was nothing now but short, ragged ends, uneven and sharp against her fingers. She thought of her mother's hands: one hundred strokes by the fire.
Then she rose to her feet. She did not wipe her eyes, because there were no tears in them. She looked at Lady Cecilia Marlowe calmly and directly, the way one equal looks at another.
"You will pay for every strand," Clara said.
She did not shout it; she said it quietly. But somehow, every person in that hall heard it.
For one moment, something flickered across Cecilia's face—something that looked almost like fear. Then she laughed: a high, bright, cruel laugh.
"Pay?" she said. "With what? You are a servant. You have nothing. You are nothing."
She tossed the scissors back into Hannah's basket. "Mrs. Dobbs, find her a cap. I do not wish to look at that ugly head again."
She turned and swept back up the grand staircase, her silk skirts whispering on the marble.
Slowly, the servants began to move. Nobody looked at Clara; nobody dared. Except old Mrs. Pike, who was staring at Clara with a strange expression on her face. It was not pity; it was something else, something Clara could not understand. It looked almost like recognition.
Clara turned away, and as she did, something made her look up.
High above the hall, on the dark gallery at the top of the stairs, a tall figure stood beside the railing: the Duke of Ravenshire.
How long had he been there? Long enough. Clara could see it in the stillness of him. He had seen everything: the kneeling, the scissors, the fire.
For one long moment, their eyes met across the empty air. Clara waited. Surely now he would speak. Surely now he would come down those stairs and say that this was wrong.
But the Duke said nothing. He simply turned his back and walked away into the darkness.
And Clara Bell, standing alone in the great hall with the smell of her own burning hair still in the air, understood for the first time how completely alone she truly was. Or so she believed. Because nobody in Ravenshire Hall knew who Clara Bell really was: not the Duke, not the housekeeper, and certainly not Lady Cecilia Marlowe, who had just made the most dangerous enemy of her life.
The servants' rooms at Ravenshire Hall were at the very top of the house, under the roof. In winter, they were freezing; in summer, they were stifling. Clara shared a narrow room with a young housemaid named Betsy, who snored softly and slept like the dead. Tonight, Clara was grateful for that.
She waited until Betsy's breathing grew slow and heavy. Then she rose, lit a small stub of candle, and stood in front of the cracked little mirror that hung on the wall. For the first time since the great hall, she let herself look.