"I've been up on the hill since six," he said. "I went to think, and found I couldn't. Then I came in and your uncle told me about Crewkerne." He looked at the pear trees and back at her. "I have a letter upstairs that says a good deal of what people call happiness is only stewing hard pears with cloves. I have another that says a curate's surplice hung on him like a sail for ten years and a shroud for ten and fitted him only in the middle. I have one that says a girl of sixteen read Cowper to her father for an hour after he stopped hearing her. Miss Ackroyd never had a father who wore a surplice. Miss Ackroyd's father is in the breakfast room eating his fourth chop."
"My lord—"
"Let me finish, I beg you. If I stop I shan't be able to start again." He drew a breath. "I am going to ask you one question. I'll not ask it twice. If the answer is no, I'll beg your pardon on my knees for an insult no gentleman should offer a lady under his roof, and go in, and marry your cousin on the twentieth, and be as good a husband to her as I know how, and never speak of this to any living soul. But if the answer is yes—" His voice did something, and he waited until it stopped. "If it is yes, then I can't marry her. Not honestly. Not knowing. And I'll find out how a man undoes a thing like this without dishonouring her, if there is a way, and if there isn't I'll dishonour myself instead and let the world say what it likes. I would rather be called a jilt than stand up in St. Cuthbert's and promise to love a woman for a voice that was never hers."
The wind went along the wall and rattled the pear branches against their nails.
"So," said the Earl of Carrowby. "Miss Bramley. Was it you? Did you write to me—all of it, every word? And did you mean it?"
Thomasin looked at him. She had imagined this moment in so many forms, lying awake in Laura Place with the rain in the gutters—imagined it as disgrace, as rapture, as a slammed door—that she had thought nothing about it could surprise her. But she had not imagined his face. She had not known it would be so frightened. She had not known that a man could ask a question as though he were standing on a single root above a flood, with his feet together, waiting to be persuaded that the ground on the other side was firm.
She opened her mouth. She did not know, afterward, what she had been going to say. She thought it was yes.
"I—"
The garden door crashed open against the wall so hard that a pane of the cold-frame beside it cracked across.
Lady Anne Ancroft stood in the doorway without bonnet or shawl, her black hair coming down on one side, her chest heaving as though she had run the whole length of the house and down the terrace steps, which she had. In her right hand, crushed against her skirt, was a whist card.
"Do not answer that," she said.
XI.