I.
The letter had been folded into thirds and sealed with plain red wax, no device pressed into it, and the hand on the cover was so careful that Jasper Tremayne, sixth Duke of Kelmscott, had known at once it was a disguised one. Nobody wrote that neatly unless they were afraid of being recognised.
He had read it standing in the hall of his house in Grosvenor Square on Tuesday evening, still in his gloves, with the footman holding the door open behind him and the April rain coming in sideways across the marble. He had read it a second time in the library. By the third reading he had already rung for his secretary and sent for the travelling carriage, and when Aldous Thrale came down in his dressing gown with a candle and asked what in God's name the matter was, Jasper had simply handed it to him.
*Your Grace,*
*The man who took Lady Imogen from Bath in the spring of 1810 will be married again on Thursday the 17th of April, at eleven o'clock in the morning, in the church of St. Giles at Chalcott, in the county of Somerset.*
*If you wish to know where your sister is, ask him. Ask him before the vows are spoken. Afterwards it will be too late for a woman you have never met.*
There was no signature. There was nothing else at all.
"It could be anybody," Thrale had said, after a long silence. "It could be a hoax. It could be somebody wanting money, who will meet you at the church door with a story and an open hand."
"Then I shall give him money."
"Jasper."
"Seven years, Aldous." He had taken the letter back and put it inside his coat, against his shirt, as if it might be stolen. "Seven years, and four men from Bow Street, and that fellow in Edinburgh who charged me eighty pounds to tell me she had probably gone to Canada. If this is a hoax, it is the first hoax that has ever told me a day and an hour."
They had left London at midnight. They had changed horses at Hounslow and Maidenhead and Newbury in the dark, and at Marlborough in a grey wet dawn, and at Devizes Jasper had got out of the carriage because he could not bear to sit in it any longer and had hired a curricle and a pair of tired post horses and driven the rest himself, with Thrale clinging to the seat beside him and saying nothing, which was the great virtue of Thrale. They had slept three hours at an inn at Frome. Now it was a quarter to eleven on Thursday morning, and the lane down into Chalcott was so deep in red mud that the horses were blowing and slipping in it, and Jasper had a cramp in his left hand from holding the reins and no feeling at all in his face.