The second letter from Carrowby came in the first week of July, and it was not about a bridge.
Thomasin read it on the stairs before she had quite meant to. The seal was the same, a raven on a closed helm; the hand was the same fine sloping hand. But the first line made her stop with one foot on the landing.
"Madam,
"I have been out three mornings this week looking for a swift, and have seen nothing but rooks, who are not cheated by anything and complain of it regardless."
She read the rest standing up, in the cold light from the stair window, and when she went in to Dorothea she was already composing in her mind the reasons why it would not matter if she read it a little quickly.
"From him again?" Dorothea was at her father's desk in the small back parlour with the household books open in front of her, not reading them, running her finger down the margin where Thomasin had marked the totals so that she could check them against the figures in her head. "Anything about money?"
"A little. The bridge is half built. He has had to let two men go from the home farm."
"Two men, at this season. He must be pinched to the bone." Dorothea frowned. "Go on."
Thomasin read. She read the passage about the bridge. She read the passage about the home farm and the price of oats, which had already doubled in Newcastle because the hay was rotting in the fields. She read that Lady Anne sent her compliments. She did not read the paragraph in the middle, which said:
"I think a great deal about what you wrote, that you must learn me from my bridges. I have been trying to think what else you might learn me from, and find the list is short. I was a younger son for thirty years and a soldier for ten of them; I did not expect to be anything else, and I am not sure I know how. When my brother died I came home to a house I had not lived in since I was a boy, and found I remembered the smell of the stair-carpet and nothing else at all. I walk about it at night like a man in somebody else's coat. That is a strange thing to tell a lady, and I would not tell it to you if you had not been honest with me first. I think you were. I think you were glad and did not know why. I should like to be the reason, one day, if I can manage it."
She did not read that. She folded the letter along its creases with the paragraph inside, and said, "He hopes your father's affairs at Leeds go on well."
"They do," said Dorothea, satisfied. "Answer him and tell him so. And tell him oats are cheaper in Hull if he has a man who can fetch them. Mr. Rigg was saying so to Papa on Tuesday."