She came a little way into the garden and stopped on the path where they could all see her. The wind moved the ends of her shawl. She did not look at Thomasin.
"I'll tell you what I know, since everyone else has," she said. "I can't read, my lord. Not as you can, nor as Miss Bramley can, nor as your sister can. When I look at a page the letters will not stay still. They turn round and change places. I can make out a word if I go at it like a lock with the wrong key, a letter at a time, but by the end of the line I've forgotten the beginning. I can't write my own name without a mark to aim at. I've known it since I was six years old and I've hidden it since I was eight, when a woman my father paid forty pounds a year beat me across the hands with a ruler for idleness. My father doesn't know. Nobody knows but Miss Bramley. And now you."
The Earl had got to his feet. "Miss Ackroyd—"
"I'm not telling you so you'll be sorry for me. I'm telling you so you'll understand what she did." Still she did not look at her cousin. "When your first letter came I asked her to answer it. I told her to write what a woman is supposed to write. That much is mine; I'll not have anyone say it isn't. But after that I asked her every morning what she had written, and she told me the weather, and I signed it. I signed my name to every one of those letters, my lord, as you signed yours. Neither of us read a word of them. You because you trusted your sister, and I because I trusted my cousin, and I couldn't."
She stopped, and pressed her lips together, and went on.
"So here's the account, as near as I can cast it. I've been courted by your sister. You've been courted by my cousin. The two of them have been writing to each other all winter, each thinking the other was someone else. And the only two people in England whose names are on all that paper are the only two who never wrote a line of it and never read one." She drew a breath. "Everyone in this garden has been in love but me. And I am the only one who has been lied to by both sides."
Nobody answered her. There was nothing to answer.
"I'll not marry you, my lord," said Dorothea. "I want to be plain about why, because Bath will have a dozen reasons by Midsummer and I'd like one person to know the true one. It's not on her account." She jerked her chin, very slightly, toward Thomasin, without turning her head. "And it's not because you don't love me; I never asked you to. I'd have married you without that and thought it a fair bargain, and I think we'd have done well enough. I'll not marry you because you would sit across the breakfast table from me for forty years waiting for me to say something about a heron, and I never would, and you'd be too much of a gentleman to tell me I'd disappointed you. And I'd know. I'd know every morning."
"You haven't disappointed me," said the Earl. "On my honour. You've been—you've been the only one of us who—"
"Don't," said Dorothea. "Please. It does you credit, but don't." For the first time her voice shook, and she let it, and waited until it had finished. "I'll tell Papa I've changed my mind. He'll roar. Bath will say I'm a draper's daughter who aimed above herself and lost her nerve. Let them. I've been called worse by better." She turned to go, and then turned back. "You'll still want money for the roof, I expect, and the lead mines at Alston are good security; I've seen the figures. I'll tell Papa to lend you two thousand at four per cent. That's business. It's nothing to do with this, and if you refuse it out of pride you're a greater fool than I took you for."
Then at last she looked at Thomasin—a long, level, unforgiving look, with something in it that was not unforgiving at all, and was worse.
"And you'll not answer him," she said. "Not today. Not in my name, and not in yours. You haven't got one yet." And she went out through the door in the wall and closed it behind her without a sound.