This year, the invitations for the Christmas Day Ball are unforgivably late, though after everything that Cora's been through this year Sarah thinks they'd be best calling the whole bloody thing off, and Sarah's natural talent of forgery finally comes in very handy indeed.

It's not a skill she advertises; that is, she doesn't put it on her resume, but it's handy nonetheless, and her mistress does not rebuke her, at least not this time. It isn't as though she's practised after all, but she tells Cora so, because she suspects the reality is even worse, but it's hardly her fault her ladyship is so distracting. It isn't easy to focus on her own work with her lady's brow furrowed so endearingly in concentration, when her lips are pursed with purpose, and when the occasional sigh of pleasure escapes unbidden when the Countess is satisfied with her work. It's the expression that was yesterday superseded by a sort of haunting sadness.

Sarah can't bear that look now – hasn't been able to since 1914, and perhaps long before – and of course a Christmas tree doesn't have the power to inspire the sort of misery the loss of Cora's son does, but it hurts her all the same, and injures Sarah's heart too.

But it's gone now; Cora is focused entirely on her work, scrawling Marchioness of Flintshire here and Lady Margaret Skelton there, and the names mean nothing to Sarah, except a vague image of Susan Flintshire's sour face, but she watches ink on parchment twist and swirl and loop-the-loop the way she knows it will, watches letters form in the delicate handwriting she knows by heart, and does the same herself, muttering some cock and bull story about practising for a moment just like this, in order to avoid the sad, pathetic reality.

That she's spent so many years watching Cora, admiring her, adoring her, that she knows every bit of her by heart.