"Then sit down, and I will say it, and you will make it fit to be seen."
This, too, was the arrangement. Dorothea Ackroyd could add a column of eleven figures in her head faster than her father's chief clerk could add it on a slate. She could hear a price once and recall it a year later to the farthing. She could not read a page of print without the letters sliding and swapping and climbing over one another like beetles in a box, and she could not write a line without the pen going astray, b for d, the words reversing themselves, until the paper looked like the work of a child of six. Her father believed she disliked books. Her governesses had believed she was idle, and one of them had believed it with a ruler. Only Thomasin knew that she had wept over primers until she was thirteen, and then, with terrible discipline, stopped weeping and begun to memorise.
Thomasin took her place at the little writing table by the fire, trimmed the pen, and waited.
"Write," said Dorothea. "My lord. I thank you for your letter. I am sorry about the bridge. We are all well in Bath. It is very cold for June. My father sends his compliments. Your servant, Dorothea Ackroyd."
Thomasin wrote it. She read it back. They looked at each other.
"I cannot send that," said Dorothea. "Can I?"
"It is perfectly civil."
"It is perfectly dead. He will think he is marrying a—a draper's account." She stood up and walked to the window again and stood there with her arms folded against her ribs. "I agreed to marry him, Tam. I did not agree to pretend I have anything to say to him. Papa wants a countess for a daughter and Lord Carrowby wants Papa's money for his roof, and I don't object to either, but I'll be hanged if I'll sit here composing sentiments about the weather. Write what a woman is supposed to write. You know. You've read all those novels."
"Thea, they ought to be your words."
"They will be my words. They will have my name on them. That is all words are, in this world, for a woman—who signs them." She did not turn round. "Please. I would rather go down the Pump Room steps on my knees."
So Thomasin took a fresh sheet, and after a long minute of watching the rain run down the Bath stone outside, she began.
"Laura Place, Bath. The ninth of June.