Velvet read Article Thirteen aloud when the Chamber asked the Chamberlain to speak to the Articles as a whole, because she was the household’s voice for the last time that season, and everybody in the Hall knew it.
She stood to do it. She had not stood in the Chamber since the audience in the spring, and when she rose from her chair at the right hand of the table the room made a small sound, a breath drawn in and let go, as a crowd sighs when a performer walks out onto a stage they had not expected to see again. Velvet did not smile. She had dressed for the reading in the plainest grey she owned, with no lace at the throat and no ribbon in her hair, and her powder was thin and nearly invisible, so that the lines at the corners of her mouth showed clearly in the candle-light, and nobody in the room pretended not to see them.
She read the article plainly. She did not lift her voice at the end of the sentences or bow her head at the commas. She read it the way she would have read the steward’s accounts to a new master, flat and clear and entirely without flourish, and the Hall listened to every word.
