Nobody moved. The wind blew a strand of her hair across her mouth and she put it back with the hand that held the card.
"Nan," said the Earl. "Go in."
"No."
"This is not your affair."
"It is more my affair than it is yours, Myles. That's what I've come to tell you." Lady Anne came down the step into the garden and shut the door behind her, carefully this time, as if she were afraid of waking someone. Her face was white to the lips. "Miss Bramley. Please. Whatever you were going to say, don't say it yet. Not until you've heard me. You'll want to know what you're saying yes to."
Thomasin found she had sat down on the low stone coping of the border. She did not remember doing it.
"You know," she said.
"I know you wrote them. I've known since last night, since this." Lady Anne held up the card; the looped tail of the y in her own name trailed across it. "I've half known since you came. Since your cousin praised my hand at the carriage step, in the very words. Since I said a thing about pears to you in this garden, to see what you would do, and you went the colour of that wall." She turned to her brother. "And you've half known too, I think, since the first night, when she said the water forgets the heron and you said that's exactly it. You didn't know the heron, Myles. You never read about the heron. I watched you pretend you had."
The Earl said nothing. He was looking at his sister as though she had begun speaking in a foreign language.
"I came down to stop her answering," Lady Anne said, "because I knew what you'd do the moment she said yes. You'd go straight in to Mr. Ackroyd and cry off and offer for her, and damn the money and damn the roof, because you're honest, you were always honest, you were the most honest boy in Northumberland and it's been the ruin of you. And she'd have had you. Look at her. She'd have had you in a moment." Lady Anne's voice cracked, and steadied. "And neither of you would have known what you were saying yes to. Because the man who wrote back to her wasn't you."
"I told you what to say."
"You told me the heron had gone up river." She almost laughed. "That's what you told me, the first time. And the second time you told me the bridge was half built and to say something about swifts. And then you said, you know what I'd say, Nan, say it better than I would—and you went down to see the Armstrong boy, and I sat at that table for an hour and I didn't write what you'd say. I wrote what I'd say. And I gave it to you to sign, and you signed it without reading it, and I let you, and I did it again the next week, and every week after."