She went into the back parlour and shut the door behind her.
"Thea," she said. "I must read you something. All of it. And you must let me finish before you say anything at all."
It took four hours. She brought down the bottom drawer entire and set it on the table between them, and read every letter he had sent from the first to the last, without missing a line—the heron, the bell, the boy, the coat, the march with his boots on, the dark—and after each of his she read the rough copy of her own that answered it. Her voice went twice, and both times she waited, and went on. Dorothea sat on the sofa with her hands folded in the old posture and did not move. Outside, the thaw dripped. A servant knocked about dinner and was sent away. The light went, and Thomasin lit the candles herself, and read on by them.
When she had finished, she put the last sheet down on top of the others and folded her hands in her lap and waited.
Dorothea was silent for so long that the candle by her elbow guttered and recovered.
"The pear tree," she said at last. "That was your father's house. At Crewkerne."
"Yes."
"And the man reading Cowper. That was you."
"Yes."
"And this house—where you walk softly, and learn which boards creak." Dorothea looked round the room, slowly, at the sofa and the fire and the writing table and the window, as if seeing them for the first time. "That is this house. That is my house."
Thomasin said nothing.
"I asked you every morning what you had written. Every morning, Tam, for nine months. You said the weather. You said, we are well." Dorothea's voice was perfectly level. It was the voice she used with her father's clerks when the columns did not agree. "You read me that he'd let two men go and the price of oats. You read me a smaller man. You sat in that chair and read me a smaller man, so I should not want him, and kept the rest upstairs in a drawer."