"Because she is dead!"
It was almost a shout. It rang off the high ceiling. In the sudden silence she heard him draw a ragged breath, and saw that his hand was shaking so badly the letter rattled.
"Because I buried her," he said, in a voice gone raw. "Not in the ground. In myself. Do you understand? I put her away. It took me ten years. I do not know that I can do it again."
"I know," Clara said softly.
"You cannot know."
"No," she said. "I cannot. But I know that a postmark is a very honest thing."
He turned his head and looked at her.
"May I show you?" she asked.
She held out her hand, palm up. For a moment he did not move. Then, very slowly, as one gives up a weapon, he put the letter into it.
She carried it to the window and held it in the light.
"Lyme," she read. "The twenty-ninth of April. The stamp is a Dorset one, the crown above the town name, and the date is struck in red, which is the old pattern, not the new. See how the ink has sunk into the paper? It was stamped by a man with a heavy hand on a damp day. A forger might copy the handwriting, my lord, but he would hardly trouble to travel to Dorset and post it in a small seaside town with a hand-stamp that is nearly worn out. And the seal." She turned it over. "A thumbprint. Not a signet. Whoever wrote this has no seal of her own. She is not a rich woman. And the paper is not new. It has been kept a long time, in a drawer perhaps, and brought out for a special occasion."
"A special occasion."
"I think," Clara said, quite gently, "that someone has been saving it."
He sank into the chair beside the fire. He did it all at once, like a man whose strings have been cut, and sat with his elbows on his knees and his ruined hand pressed over his mouth.
She did not speak. She stood beside him, holding the letter, and waited. It was a skill she had learned at her father's counter: that there is a kind of silence in which a person can be asked nothing at all, and that it is, sometimes, the greatest kindness one human being can offer another.
After a long time he lowered the hand.