"My own hand is a disgrace. You've seen it."
"Then let it be a disgrace," said Thomasin Bramley, and went up the bank to the coach.
XIV.
The canon's widow lived in the North Bailey at Durham, in a tall narrow house with its back to the river and its front to the cathedral, so that every quarter of an hour the great bell in the tower came down through the schoolroom ceiling like a hand laid on the head. It was a sound bell. It rang true. Thomasin found, to her surprise, that she missed the other one.
Mrs. Mossop was deaf and kind. The grandchildren called her Miss Bram. She taught them French verbs and the kings of England and how to sew a straight seam, and on Sundays she walked by the river under the castle and watched the leaves come down into the Wear, and wrote nothing to anyone, because there was no one to whom she had the right to write.
The first letter came in September. It was a single half-sheet, folded small, and the hand on the direction was so laboured that the postmaster had written underneath it in pencil, Try N. Bailey.
"Tam,
"I have the Wakefield books now. Papa says I am the beter man of busness and he will let me have Halifax by Christmas. Mrs Pyne reads to me. She reads very slow and smels of peppermint. She is not you.
"I do not want you back yet. I think I shall. Not yet.
"D. Ackroyd."
The D faced the right way. There was no pencil mark beside it, and no sign that one had been rubbed out with bread. Thomasin sat on the edge of her bed in the narrow room under the leads with the half-sheet in her lap and wept for the first time since Bath, steadily and quietly, for nearly an hour; and then she put it, not in a drawer, but inside the cover of her prayer book, where she would see it every Sunday.