She had a very good character. The Dowager would write her a recommendation. She would go to London, perhaps, or Bath, and work for a lady of fashion who wanted her correspondence done, and she would see out the rest of her years in a small clean room with a window, among the letters of other people.
It was entirely sensible. She repeated it to herself several times.
At ten o'clock the next morning the post came, as usual, and she cut the string, and sorted it, and found, in the middle of the pile, a letter addressed to herself.
Miss Clara Whitlow, The Study, Dunmere Court.
She did not know the hand. It was a strong, firm, rather angular hand, with a slight unevenness in the downstrokes, like the writing of a man who had learned to hold a pen again at the age of twenty-nine. There was no postmark. It had been delivered by hand, and laid, among the others, on the bottom of the pile.
She broke the seal.
Dear Miss Whitlow,
I have never written a letter in my life that I did not dictate, and it has taken me four hours and a good many sheets of my grandmother's paper to produce this one. You will observe that the hand is not good. I ask you to read it in the spirit in which it is offered.
On the ninth of April you came to this house to put my father's papers in order, and you found, among a great many other things, a letter addressed to me. You have since been kind enough to tell me that a postmark is an honest thing. I should like to put the case, therefore, that a letter is the most honest thing in the world, and that I intend to be honest in this one.
I am a man who has been, for the greater part of his life, afraid of one thing. It is not death. I have met that. It is not pain. I have met that too. It is the possibility of being wanted, and then not wanted. I learned it at ten years old, in the schoolroom, and I have carried it ever since, like a stone in the pocket, and I have kept very still so that nothing could jog it.
You have jogged it.
You came into my father's study and read twenty years of silence as though it were a language, and you found the one voice in it that I had been told did not exist. You knelt on my library carpet and took my hand. You sat up all night in a cold room, for no reason in the world except that I had asked you to stay. You said my name in a carriage, and I had forgotten that it could be said like that.
I do not know what is the proper form. I am a viscount, and you are the daughter of a postmaster, and my grandmother tells me there are a great many people in Wiltshire who will have something to say about it. I do not care. I find that I have, in the last two months, entirely stopped caring what anyone says, which is a remarkable relief.
I only know that I love you. I think I have loved you since the night you dropped the candle. I do not expect you to feel the same. I expect only that you will tell me the truth, as you have always done, because it is the thing I most admire in you.
If the answer is no, I shall not trouble you again. You will have a character from my grandmother, a quarter's wages in advance, and my sincere good wishes for your future happiness.