She did. It was the most terrible fortnight of Thomasin's life. Every morning for fourteen days she sat in the back parlour and read her own heart aloud, letter by letter, to the woman she had robbed, and Dorothea Ackroyd sat with her eyes closed and her lips moving and learned it, as she had learned the price of wool in every market town in the West Riding: the heron, the bell, the pears, the boots. By the end she could recite any passage from the first word. She never once asked Thomasin to stop, or to go more gently. She never once said that she forgave her. On the last evening, when the trunks were corded in the hall, she said only, "When we are there, you will not write anything. Not a line. Not a note to the laundress. He knows your hand better than he knows my face."
"I know," said Thomasin.
"Good," said Dorothea, and went up to bed.
VII.
They came to Carrowby on the nineteenth of April, a day early, at the end of five days on the Great North Road and one more on a road that was not a road at all after Rothbury but a wet track up a valley between two shoulders of hill, with the snow still lying in long white rags in the gullies and the burns coming down brown and loud over the stones.
Thomasin sat with her back to the horses and watched the country come at her backward, and knew it.
She knew the river before they crossed it: the long shallow pools, the alders, the shingle. She knew the new bridge, raw yellow stone among the grey. She did not let herself look for the heron, and then the carriage slowed for the turn and she looked, and he was there, below the bridge, standing in the shallows with his neck drawn in like an old man in a muffler, so still that the water had forgotten him.
She made some sound. Dorothea's eyes came round to her and away again.
And then the house: grey, built of the hills, so that from the road you could not tell where one stopped and the other began; long and low, with a squat tower at one end and the east wing roofed now in new lead that shone dull in the wet light like a pewter plate. As the carriage came into the yard, the bell in the stable cupola struck four, and it rang flat, and Thomasin had to put her hand over her mouth.
They were on the steps to meet the carriage. The Earl stood at the top, bareheaded in the wind, in a dark green coat, with his right hand in a grey glove at his side and his left held out to Mr. Ackroyd. Beside him was a tall woman in black half-mourning, with a long pale face and black brows and a cap that did not suit her, who came down the steps quickly and took Dorothea's hands before Dorothea was fairly out of the carriage.
"Miss Ackroyd. You are welcome. You must be frozen. I'm Anne—I've written to you so often I feel we've met."
"Lady Anne," said Dorothea. "You have a beautiful hand."