The Duke paused at the door. Miss Vane? She looked up. Tomorrow morning. The East Garden, before breakfast.
He said it the way he said most things, plainly and without decoration. If you choose to come. He walked out. Nora sat down on the stool and looked at the fire for a moment. Then she picked up the hem and began stitching again.
But outside in the hallway, the sound of the Dowager Duchess Heloise Reinhardt's arrival could be heard clearly through two closed doors. Her voice was not loud. It was simply the kind of voice that traveled. Calder. The Dowager was saying, in the tone of a woman who had raised a Duke and intended to remind him of that fact.
I have just been told by Lady Farrow in the entrance hall, while removing my traveling coat, that you rejected 10 presented candidates in favor of a girl with an ink stain on her hand who was there to fix a hem. Tell me this is not accurate. There was a pause. It is mostly accurate. The Duke's voice said.
The Dowager's silence was somehow louder than her speaking. Nora pressed her lips together and kept her eyes on the stitching. The fire in the hearth shifted, throwing warm light across the plain ivory of her dress, across the careful, even stitches, across the ink that would not wash off her thumb. Somewhere above her, in the beautiful, impossible rooms of Ashvale Manor, 10 families were rearranging their plans. A grandmother was drawing breath for what was sure to be a significant conversation.
A secretary was updating a list that no longer reflected any recognizable reality. And a duke who had walked past 10 prepared women to point at a corner was now standing somewhere down that long hallway deciding for reasons that had not yet been fully named what he actually wanted. Nora tied off her thread and snipped it. She held up Tilda's hem and checked it against the light. The stitching was invisible.
It would hold. She folded it neatly over her arm, stood up, and walked quietly out of the receiving room, down the side corridor that the staff used, and up to the room she shared with her cousin Tilda on the second floor. Tilda was sitting on the bed when Nora entered. She was 17 and sharp-eyed and had her mother's forehead and her father's mouth and a great deal more intelligence than people generally gave her credit for. She looked at Nora with the focused intensity of someone who had been waiting.
"Tell me everything. " Tilda said. "Your hem is fixed. " Nora said and set it on the chair by the wardrobe. "Nora. " "I don't know anything yet. " Nora said honestly. She sat down in the chair by the window and looked out at the garden below. From here she could see a portion of the east garden, the part with the low stone wall and the climbing roses that had gone dormant for winter, with their bare stems curling upward against the pale stone.