"So you put the pearls in my trunk."
"Yes." She did not look away. "They were glass, Isabel. I could never have let the justice see them. I knew that. I only needed you to believe I would." She looked down at the letter. "I am four-and-thirty. I go to my brother in Bath on Monday. His wife does not like me. I shall have the little room at the back, and carry her shawl, and find her fan, and sit a little behind her chair. I have been thinking about that all the way here: that I shall be a companion." Her mouth twisted. "You would say it serves me right."
Isabel let that lie. She stood in the smoky little room and looked at this beautiful, frightened woman who had once taken a year of her life away in a single night. She had imagined this moment many times on the hill in the dark; in some of her imaginings, she had been cruel. She found now that she did not want to be.
"I shan't tell anybody about the pearls," she said. "Not in Bath, and not in London, and not in the county. Nor will His Grace. You have my word, and you may have his too. The jeweler has promised the same." She drew a breath. "But you will write two letters before you leave this inn. You'll write to His Grace and say that you found your pearls in your own case the morning after the ball, and that I took nothing from your house that was not mine. And you'll write the same to your brother, so that when people ask you in Bath where you have been, you will already have told the truth once, and it will be easier the second time."
Lady Livia stared at her. "And that is all?"
"That is all."
Isabel picked up the jeweler's letter, folded it, and put it back in her basket. Then she hesitated. She took something else out of the basket—a small stone jar with a cloth tied over the top—and set it down on the table.
"That's heather honey from last August. It is the best we had. It's very dark. My mother used to say it tasted like the hill in winter." She looked at the pearls. "And if I were you, my lady, I would sell those too, for whatever they will fetch. They are a very heavy thing to carry about: a thing that isn't true. I carried something like it for a year. You'll feel lighter."
She did not wait for an answer. She went out of the parlor and through the taproom, where Lady Livia's maid sat at a table by the door with her glass half-empty, unable to meet her eyes.
The two letters were brought up the hill to the cottage at dusk by the boy from the inn. Both were signed. The hand was not quite steady, and there was a blot at the bottom of the second, as if something had fallen on it.