The cat stayed at the forge. She was the forge's cat. Nobody took her to Norfolk, and nobody asked her twice, and the morning after the wedding she was on the blue coat on the end of the shoe-bench at seven, where she had been for fifteen months before any of this, with her back to everybody.And in the January after, in the frost, in a nursery at Walsingham, the Duchess of Walsingham sat by the window with a letter from Sedgebrook, and read it aloud, because the man it was for was on the floor. He was on his back on the hearth-rug with his boots off, and on his chest, on a dark-green frieze coat that had been folded there for the purpose, a small black kitten was asleep, no bigger than his hand. It had come from Sedgebrook in a basket in November, with a note in the Duke of Brigstock's hand that said only: Sheba declined the invitation. This one accepted.The Duke of Walsingham had not moved for an hour. He did not intend to."Rhoda writes," said Abigail, "that the roof is holding. That Bugler is well and lame in nothing. That Father has had the range blacked and shining." She turned the page. "And that Sheba is well, and fat, and on the blue coat every morning, and that everybody in the village has called her by her name to her face since the day you said it—the carrier, and the children, and Sir Digby from his horse—and that she answers to none of them, and never will, and that Jethro says it's the only sensible thing about her.""She answered to me," said the Duke of Walsingham from the floor, to the kitten."She looked at you.""I shall take it."Abigail Tinsley, Duchess of Walsingham, put the letter down in her lap, and looked at the biggest man in Norfolk lying on a hearth-rug under a kitten, and laughed at him—at him, and nobody had ever laughed at him like that, with love in it, and he found he could stand it, from her—and got down on the rug beside him, and put her head on his shoulder, and stayed.And at Sedgebrook, that same morning, at seven, in the frost, with the fire up and a duke at the bellows and a duchess with a foot on her knee and an old man on a stool at the fire's left hand, a fat black cat sat on a folded blue coat on the end of the shoe-bench, with her eyes shut, and was warm—which is the whole of it, and is not nothing.