"The river came over the haugh on Tuesday and took three of Armstrong's sheep. I went down with the men at first light. We found two of them alive in the alders, standing on a single root with their feet together like a pair of aldermen at a christening, and could not get them off it for an hour, because they did not believe in us. I have thought since that a great deal of my life has been spent trying to persuade frightened creatures that the ground on the other side is firmer than the root they are standing on, and that I have very seldom been sure of it myself."
"There is a heron that fishes below the new bridge every evening. Anne says he is the same heron that fished there when we were children, which is impossible, but I have decided to believe her. He stands so still that the water forgets him. I envy him that. I have not been forgotten by anything since I came home; every bill in Northumberland knows my name."
"You asked what the house is like. It is grey. It is built of the stone the hills are made of, so that from the Rothbury road you cannot tell where the one stops and the other begins. There is a bell in the stable cupola that has been cracked since my grandfather's time and rings flat, so that every hour on the hour the whole house is reminded that something is not quite right. I find I have grown fond of it. A sound bell would seem to me now like a man who smiles too much."
Thomasin read those passages to Dorothea, or some of them. She read the sheep, because Dorothea laughed at the aldermen. She read the price of lead and the number of tenants in arrears and the state of the turnips. She did not read the heron. She did not read the cracked bell. She did not read, in August, a short paragraph at the bottom of the third page that said, "I have begun to wait for your letters as I used to wait for orders before a march—sleeplessly, with my boots on," because it was not the kind of thing that could be read aloud in a back parlour to a woman checking the butcher's bill, and because she could not have read it in a steady voice.
And when she answered, she answered in the small hours, in her own room, with the window open on the wet roofs; and in the mornings she read Dorothea a summary.
"What did you tell him?"
"That we are well. That it rained at the Sydney Gardens and the band played to nobody."
"That's true enough," said Dorothea. "Did you put that Papa may come north in October to look at the coal?"
"I did."
"Good." And she signed.
It would have been possible, Thomasin told herself in those weeks, to argue that nothing was being taken from anyone. Dorothea did not want the letters; she had said so. Lord Carrowby wanted a correspondent; he had one. The words were honest words. If Thomasin spared her lady the turnips, or wrote more than she was told, it was only what she had been asked to do on the very first morning.
That was the argument. She made it to herself on the stairs, and at the writing table, and lying awake listening to the rain in the gutters. It was a good argument. It had only one flaw, which was that she had never in her life hidden anything from Dorothea Ackroyd until that summer, and now she had a drawer.