There were practical matters to settle.
Ella had not, in her six weeks at Blackwood, given much thought to how she presented herself. The housekeeper's uniform was dark blue and neat and communicated exactly what it needed to communicate. She had not needed anything else.
She needed something else now.
Lucy was dispatched to town with specific instructions and returned with four cloth samples fanned out like a hand of cards, each one held up in the direction of the afternoon light with the expression of someone conducting a very serious artistic consultation.
"The dark green," Ella said.
"I knew you'd say that."
"Simple cut. The collar high. Sleeves to the wrist."
Lucy looked at the sleeves instruction with mild puzzlement. "Why to the wrist?"
"Because I need to fit a small notebook into the lining without it being visible," Ella said.
There was a pause.
"You are," Lucy said, "genuinely the most remarkable person I have ever met."
The dress was cut in six days—the town's seamstress was efficient and, after Ella explained the sleeve requirement without explaining why, produced a lining pocket of such elegance that it appeared to be a structural feature of the garment.
The more complicated preparation was the conversation she needed to have with Samuel about how they were going to behave at the dinner. She raised it on a Tuesday, after the accounts review.
"We need to be consistent," she said. "About how we are together, in public. The point of being there is that no one questions why we're there—which means they need to believe the marriage is real, and that we are what we appear to be."
"Which is," he said.
"People who have chosen each other." She kept her voice factual. "We're recently married. We know each other well enough that we don't need to perform attention—we just—have it. Naturally."
He was quiet for a moment. "You're asking me to stop maintaining professional distance," he said.
"I'm asking you to let it relax when it's useful," she said. "Not to perform warmth. Just to—not suppress what's there." She paused. "Is there something there?"
He looked at her, and the quality of that look was the answer to her question before he spoke a word.
"Yes," he said simply.
She held his gaze for a moment.
"Then that's all you have to do," she said. "Don't manufacture it. Just stop hiding it."
He nodded once. There was a quality to the nod—something settled in it, like a decision made—that she carried with her back down the stairs and didn't set down.
The night before the dinner, she could not sleep.
She lay in the dark of her room and thought about what she was walking toward—not just the dinner, the investigation, Robert Brown and the possible existence of a ledger copy somewhere in a careful clerk's private files. All of that was manageable, it was the part of the equation she understood.
The part she didn't understand was simpler and harder. It was the look on Samuel's face when he had said yes. The weight of a man who did not say things he didn't mean.
She turned onto her side and looked at the ring on her left hand, just visible in the dark.
Grey stone. Old silver. A house that breathed around her while it slept.
She thought: I came here with nothing but what I could do.
She thought: I seem to have acquired rather more than that.