They came to stillness at last, both of them exactly three heartbeats out of breath.
He did not let her go at once. He stepped back a controlled inch at a time.
“Better,” he said.
“You promised to vary your vocabulary.”
“Do you want ‘exemplary’?”
“No.”
“Then we are at ‘better,’” he decided, and let his hands fall. “Now. Tell me what you fear when the set begins.”
“What do I fear?”
“Yes. Say it aloud so it stops gnawing.”
“That I will be stupid. That I will do it wrong and everyone will see. That I will hurt someone. That I will… be hurt.”
He nodded to each, the way one nods to a list that requires action rather than pity.
“First: stupidity is loud; ignorance is quiet. You are not stupid. Second: everyone does it wrong; no one remembers. Third: my toes will survive. Fourth—” His voice gentled. “Fourth is not a dance problem. Fourth is amanproblem.”
She looked away.
“Who taught you to brace?” he asked after a moment.
“A man who hates a woman named Maria,” she said before she could decide not to, surprised at how quickly the sentence found the world. “I had her name.”
Silence settled. He did not askwho. “The nunnery?”
She nodded.
“You know it is infamous.”
“I know it was unkind,” he said. “Names change in the telling. Cruelty does not.”
“How comforting.”
“Not meant to comfort,” he said, and moved them a few steps to sit at the window bench. He did not touch her and sat on the side.
“If you wish to tell me, I will know where to steer us. If you do not, I will still find you a man whose first instinct is not to raise his voice.”
Maria did not know if she should speak about this. She never had, really. Not even to Nicholas and Violet. But it felt easy with him.
“There was a man,” she said at last. “Not a priest. A steward of sorts, over the accounts and the girls. He was quite fond of his rules, and his wife had left him when he was very young. Or died. Or both. The stories changed. He hated her. Her name was Maria.”
Stephen did not move.
“And so?”
“And so…” She wet her lips and pressed her hands together hard enough to stop them shaking. “When the girls were lined up, he would pass by me and choose me when he wished to make an example. If a seam was crooked, he said toMariawithout looking. If a broom was out of place. If the bread was burned. If the bread was perfect.” Her mouth tugged. “When it was perfect, it was becauseIhad not baked it. He preferred… certainty.”
“He liked to find what he had decided to see,” Stephen said, his anger seeming palpable.
“Yes.” Maria’s voice lowered. “He was always hardest on me because that is what justice felt like to him. He thought he was balancing a scale that had tipped before I was born. The punishments were not… dramatic. No beatings. He thought spectacle vulgar. He preferred humiliation.”
She made herself breathe.