The second letter was three pages long, in a fine upright sloping hand, with long tails to the y's and every t crossed with a single decided stroke.
"Carrowby Hall. The fourteenth of October.
"My dear Miss Bramley,
"I have been trying since May to decide whether I have the right to write to you, and have decided that I have not, and am doing it anyway, which you will recognise as a family failing.
"This letter is from me. It is the first I have ever sent you that is. You may burn it unread; you have every right. But if you read it, I want you to know that everything in it is mine, and that my name at the bottom is the true one, and that there is nobody standing behind my chair.
"The pears came in hard again this year. Mrs. Thewlis stewed them with cloves. Myles said they were excellent. I find I minded a great deal less than usual, and I have been trying to think why..."
There was more. There were two pages and a half more. Thomasin did not read them yet. She laid the sheet face down on the table beside the other, and looked out of the window at the frost going off the river and the smoke going up from it into the light.
She thought of a garden wall with pear trees nailed to it. She thought of a man on a bank above a heron, asking whether he might write, and of a woman at a door with her hand on the latch, saying, I'm only beginning to find out. She thought of a cousin in Yorkshire with a half-sheet of paper and a pen and no pencil mark, going at her own name like a lock. She thought that she had spent nine months loving a voice that belonged to two people and to neither, and that she did not yet know—might never know, might not be meant to know—which half of it had been the true one; and that this, perhaps, was what it was to have a name of one's own at last: not to be sure, and to answer anyway.
Then she took a sheet of paper from Mrs. Mossop's writing box and mended the pen and dipped it, and wrote at the head of the page, in her own clear upright hand, the date and the place.
Below that she wrote: Dear—
And there she stopped, with the ink drying on the nib, while the bell in the cathedral tower struck the quarter, true as a plumb-line, and down in the street a carrier's cart went by toward the bridge; and she sat with the two letters face down on the table before her, one short and one long, and did not yet write the name.