Nehemiah Morgan's face did something then that she would remember for a long time. It did not harden, the way a guilty man's face hardens, and it did not slacken, the way a liar's does when he is caught. It went very still, and then it went pale under the weathering, and she understood that whatever she had just told him, he had not known it.
"Ma'am," he said quietly, "would you show me?"
She knelt on the platform, which was not a ladylike thing to do, and undid the brass catches of the case. She took out the second bundle, the newer one, and drew the top letter from under the string and held it out to him without letting go of it. He did not try to take it. He bent and read it where it was, in her hand, with the wind riffling the edge of the paper, and she watched his lips move very slightly over the words, the way men's lips move when they have learned to read late and by themselves.
When he straightened up he put his hat back on, as though he needed both hands free for something and did not know what.
"That's not my brother's hand," he said.
"It is the hand of every letter I have ever had from him. All nineteen."
"Then it's not my brother's hand in any of them," Nehemiah said. "Caleb couldn't write but to sign his name, Miss Rudd. And he did that like a man killing snakes."
Later she would think that this was the moment the ground went out from under her, more than the moment he told her Caleb was dead. A death was a thing that happened to people; she had buried both her parents and knew the shape of it. But this was different. This reached back. It went into the bundles of letters she had read by candlelight in the attic room over Prosper Weems's print shop, and it touched every one of them, the early ones as much as the late, and it asked her a question she did not have an answer to.
Who had she been talking to, all this time?