"Not all of it," said the Earl. His voice was very quiet. "The boy. That was mine."
"The boy was yours. You sat up with him and came in at breakfast grey as ash and told me, and I wrote it down. The cousin by the wall was yours; you said it at dinner the night you came back from London. The sheep on the root were yours." She turned, at last, to Thomasin. "The coat was mine. The coat that isn't yours, that you walk about in at night. That was me, Miss Bramley. I've lived in that coat twelve years. And the boots on before a march—that was mine; I've never marched anywhere, God knows, but I know what it is to lie awake waiting for the post. And the dark." She stopped. "Knowing you in the dark. That was mine too."
The garden was very quiet. Somewhere beyond the wall the cracked bell struck one, flat.
Thomasin heard it as though it came from a long way off. She was thinking of nine months of letters in a fine sloping hand: of reading them on the stairs, of the bottom drawer with the stiff handle, of the paragraph about the coat that she had read seven times on the first night. She was thinking that she had written her answers by candlelight to a man in a grey house, and that there had been a woman at the other end, sitting at a table under a north window with ink on her finger, writing back by the same light. The two of them, all winter, each pretending to be somebody else, each believing the other was the only person in England who would understand. And the man whose name was at the bottom, and the woman whose name was at the bottom, signing in the dark.
"Why?" she said. It came out as a whisper.
"Because your letters were the best thing that had happened in this house since I was a girl," said Lady Anne simply. "Because I'm thirty-four, and I was to have been married at twenty-two to a man who went down with his ship off Ushant in the year five, and since then I have written every letter this family has sent, to bishops and bankers and tenants and aunts, and not one of them was mine. And the first time you answered, I read your letter and I thought: here is somebody. Here is somebody at last. And I couldn't bear to answer her about the drains." She looked at her brother. "I'm not sorry I wrote to her, Myles. I'm sorry I put your name to it. I'm sorrier than I can say."
"And Miss Ackroyd," said the Earl slowly. "Your cousin, Miss Bramley. What did she—" He stopped. "Where is she, in all this?"
"That," said Lady Anne, "is the other reason I came down. Because whatever Miss Bramley answers, she answers for her cousin too. It's her name at the foot of those letters. And she is not in this garden."
"No," said a voice from the doorway. "But she is now."
XII.
Dorothea Ackroyd stood in the doorway in her blue walking dress with a shawl held round her shoulders and her face perfectly composed. She had seen Lady Anne go past the morning-room window at a run, she said afterward, and Lady Anne was not a woman who ran; so she had followed. She had been standing on the step outside the door in the wall, she said, for some time.
"Since the coat," she said now. "Don't get up, my lord. Don't any of you. I'd rather say this standing."