Velvet received Lord Vale in the receiving-hall on the thirty-second day, with the lark cups laid out on the long table and the hearth fire lit at exactly the moment that his footsteps sounded on the stair. She had timed it with care. A guest should come into a warm room that had been waiting for him, and should feel, without quite knowing why, that the room had been waiting for no one else. Velvet had been Chamberlain of Ormhold for years, and she had learned that the first ten breaths in a room were the only ones a visitor remembered in full.
Vale came in with his hat in his hand and his silver frogging freshly brushed. He stopped in the doorway, looked at the fire, and then at her, and his face did something she had not expected. It softened. It went briefly young.
“Madam Chamberlain,” he said. “You have a room like a bell that has been well struck.”
It was a pretty thing to say. She had been waiting for him to say something pretty, because that was the way of lords, and she could manage a pretty answer in her sleep. She gave him one. She curtsied, very low and very exact, and told him that his lordship’s coat was the finest that had come up the Lessary Road since the Sallowmere fair, and that his lordship’s courage in standing before the Chamber with a mistaken count and admitting it had been, in her opinion…
