It was the bottom drawer of the chest in her room, the one with the stiff handle. In it were his letters—she had begun, in July, to take them upstairs after reading them, saying that Dorothea would not want them lying about—and, beneath them, the rough copies of her own. She kept the rough copies because she could not bear not to. She would take them out sometimes, late, and lay a letter of his beside the letter of hers it answered, and read the two together, like a conversation overheard through a wall.
In September he wrote: "What do you think of, when you cannot sleep?"
She sat a long time with that one. It was half past two by the Abbey clock when she began to write.
"When I cannot sleep, I think of the house I was born in. It was very small and smelled of damp books, and there was a pear tree against the south wall that never ripened a single pear in all the years I knew it, and every autumn we picked them hard and green and stewed them with cloves, and pretended. I think of that a great deal. It seems to me now that a good deal of what people call happiness is only stewing hard pears with cloves, and pretending, and not minding very much.
"I think too of things I have said that I should not have said, and things I have not said that I should. The second list is longer. It is always longer, isn't it? I think the dead must spend their whole time going over it.
"And lately I think of you walking about your grey house in somebody else's coat, and the bell ringing flat, and I wonder if you are awake too. It is a foolish thing to wonder. But it makes the dark less large."
She did not strike any of it out. She looked at the line about the house she was born in—a small house, damp books, a pear tree—and knew that Reuben Ackroyd's daughter had been born in a tall new house in Park Square in Leeds with a carriage drive and a hothouse for pineapples, and that Lord Carrowby had very likely been told so by Reuben Ackroyd himself, at length, over port.
She let it stand. She told herself he would think it a fancy. She knew he would not.
In the morning Dorothea asked what she had written, and Thomasin said, "Only about the weather," and her cousin signed her name to it with the tip of her tongue between her teeth, and that was the first lie Thomasin told her in words.
IV.
At Carrowby the library faced north, because the man who built it had believed that books, like cheese, kept best out of the sun. In winter it was the coldest room in the house, and so it was the room where Myles Ancroft, sixth Earl of Carrowby, did his reading, on the principle that a man who could think in that room could think anywhere.
He was thirty-one. He had been a younger son and a captain of light dragoons for most of them, and the Earl for eight months, which was long enough to learn that the title came with eleven thousand pounds of debt, a roof that let in the rain, a sister who had run the house single-handed through two deaths and did not intend to stop, and a right hand that would close now only as far as a man's hand closes round a teacup. Two of its fingers ended at the second joint. A German surgeon in a barn outside Mont-Saint-Jean had told him he was lucky, and gone out to the next man.