For a moment Saltash looked at him. Then he shrugged, and smiled, and bowed.
"As you like," he said. "I'm in no hurry. Penhallow — I'll call on you tomorrow. Miss Penhallow — I hope you will feel more yourself after some rest." He turned, unhurried, and walked down the aisle between the staring pews, and out through the door into the churchyard, where the April light lay thin and bright across the wet graves.
Morwenna watched him go. She heard the creak of the lych gate. She heard a horse.
And she understood, all at once, what she had done.
"Eleven miles," she said. "I told him eleven miles."
The duke's eyes opened.
"He knows I've been to Wells," she said. Her lips felt numb. "He drove me there himself. He knows I had my veil made there. He knows exactly where to go." She seized the duke's sleeve, mud and all. "Your Grace. He's not going home to Clifton. He's going to her."
III
The post horses were finished. Jasper knew it before he reached them — the near one stood with its head down and one hind leg resting, and the off one was still dark with sweat under the harness after twenty minutes' standing. They had come thirty miles since Frome on bad roads. He could flog them into a trot and they would fall down somewhere on the hill above Chalcott, and that would be the end of it.
"There's the Bell," said Thrale, who had come out of the church at his heels. He pointed down the street to a low thatched inn with a painted sign. "They'll have something."
The Bell had a grey cob that drew the brewer's dray and a bay mare belonging to the landlord's son, who was away at Shepton Mallet market with the only other horse in the stable worth the name. It took the ostler ten minutes to find the harness and another five to persuade the mare that she had any business between shafts at all. Jasper stood in the yard and watched them, and did not shout, because shouting would only make the mare worse, and every minute went past him like a coach he had missed.
"He has a quarter of an hour on us," said Morwenna Penhallow behind him.
He turned. She had come down the street from the church with her skirts held up out of the mud in one fist and her bonnet in the other, the lace veil trailing from it like a flag of truce. Her uncle was nowhere in sight. Her face was still white but her mouth was set.