"Yes," said his sister. "I am." And she took the letter out to the hall for the morning post, and stood there in the cold beside the salver for some minutes after she had put it down, though there was nothing to wait for.
V.
The winter came early and hard, as everyone had said it would after such a summer. In Bath there was ice on the inside of the windows in Laura Place by the middle of November, and the chairmen went about with sacking round their boots, and Reuben Ackroyd, who had not after all gone north in October to look at the coal, sat by the drawing room fire with his gouty foot on a stool and read the Leeds Intelligencer aloud to anyone who would sit still.
"Your Carrowby had better get his tenants' rents in while there's anything to get," he announced, the week before Christmas.
"He won't distrain on them, Papa," said Dorothea, without looking up from the card table, where she was playing a game of patience entirely from memory, laying the cards face down in their rows and turning them only when she knew what they were. "He's let the Michaelmas arrears stand till spring. He wrote so."
"Did he? Then he's a fool." Mr. Ackroyd turned a page. "A kind fool. I'd rather a kind fool than a clever villain for a son-in-law, but I'll want it tied up tight in the settlement, my girl, so he can't be kind with your money."
"He'll be kind with his own," said Dorothea. "I'll see to mine."
Thomasin, sewing by the lamp, listened to this and kept her eyes on her needle. She had read Dorothea the paragraph about the arrears. She had not read the one beneath it, in which he said that he had sat up with the Armstrong boy on the last night, and held the child's hand with his good one, and that the boy had asked him whether it hurt, being shot, and he had said no, which was the first lie he had told in years, and that he would tell it again tomorrow.
She had answered that letter at three in the morning, with the fire out and her shawl round her shoulders and her fingers so cold she had to stop between lines to breathe on them. She had told him about her father's death—not about a merchant's wife who had died in a tall house in Leeds, which was Dorothea's grief, and which she could have borrowed, but about a curate who had died in a small house in Somerset of a fever caught visiting a cottage, with his daughter of sixteen sitting beside him reading Cowper aloud because he had asked for it, and then reading on for an hour after he had stopped hearing, because she did not know what else to do. She had written: "I don't think you lied to the boy. I think 'no' was the shape of what you meant. You meant: I am here, and it will not hurt more than you can bear while I am here. That is not a lie. That is a translation."
She had known as she wrote it that she was finished. Not finished with the letters—she could not imagine being finished with them—but finished with the pretence that she was doing it for Dorothea, or for kindness, or because she had been asked. She was doing it because there was a man three hundred miles away in a grey house who wrote to her as though she were the only person in England who would understand him, and she had been in the world twenty-seven years and nobody had ever written to her like that at all, and she could not stop.
That he did not know he was writing to her was a fact she held at arm's length, like a hot dish.
She had seen him once. It was in Bruton Street in April, the afternoon of the proposal. She had been present, as chaperone, in a chair by the wall, for the quarter of an hour that Dorothea afterward called the most tedious of her life. Thomasin remembered him as tall and dark and very still, standing because he had not been asked to sit, with a black silk sling under his coat and a grey glove on the hand in it. He had spoken to Dorothea about coal. Twice he had looked across the room at Thomasin, gravely, as though wondering what she was for, and she had looked down at her work. She could not now, try as she might, remember the sound of his voice. She remembered the glove.