And it was Mr. Ackroyd—kind, loud, oblivious Mr. Ackroyd—who finished it, though nobody ever told him so. For when the Earl came in at eleven, muddy to the knees, and sat down to a late cup of coffee, Mr. Ackroyd was telling Dorothea a story about her late mother, and the Earl, perhaps out of courtesy, perhaps not, asked after the late Mrs. Ackroyd's family, and whether Miss Bramley was of that side.
"Ay, her sister's girl," said Mr. Ackroyd comfortably. "The sister married a parson—Bramley, a curate down at Crewkerne in Somerset, poor as a church mouse. Little house, damp as a well. He died of a fever he took visiting a cottage, and this one sat by him reading poetry till the end and an hour after, they say. Sixteen she was. So we took her in. Best thing I ever did. She's been Thea's right hand since."
The Earl put his cup down.
"Crewkerne," he said.
"In Somerset. Nothing there but sailcloth and pears."
"Pears," said the Earl. He looked down the table at Thomasin, and she looked back at him, because she could not look anywhere else; and then he got up, quite slowly, and said that he begged their pardon, he had a letter he must see to, and went out.
X.
She went to the walled garden because Lady Anne had told her she might tread there as she liked, and because it was the only place at Carrowby where there was no pen and no paper and no one to hand her either.
It was a raw grey noon, with a wind off the hills that smelled of snow though it was the last week of April. The pear trees stood against the south wall with their arms nailed out like something in a sermon. She walked the length of the path and back, and the length of it again, and on the third time she turned at the end and he was standing inside the door in the wall, with his hat in his left hand and his gloved right held against his coat.
He shut the door behind him. He did not come any closer.
"Miss Bramley."
"My lord."