"It's the only one I've got." She was quiet for a moment. "My father used to say that when you see a ship running onto the rocks, you don't stop to ask the captain's leave before you fire the gun. You fire it, and you let him curse you afterward if he's alive to do it." She gave a short laugh. "I expect she'll curse me. I expect she'll never forgive me as long as she lives. I've thought about that a good deal."
"And?"
"And she'll be alive to do it. That's what I keep coming back to." She looked at him sidelong. "He let her think he was dead for six years, Your Grace. What do you suppose he'll do now that she's the only thing standing between him and nine thousand pounds — and a cart to the hulks at Portsmouth?"
He did not answer. He put the whip to the mare, which he had not done before, and she flung up her head and lunged into a canter, and this time, by some miracle, the cob went with her.
---
Wells came at them all at once, round a shoulder of hill — a little grey city in a bowl of green, with the three towers of the cathedral standing up over the roofs as if they had been set down there by a giant and forgotten. They came rattling in by the Bristol road at a quarter past twelve, with the mare in a lather and the cob blowing like a smith's bellows, and Miss Penhallow directed him through a maze of narrow streets behind the market place into a quiet lane of tall old houses under the cathedral's north side, where the Liberty began.
"There," she said. "The green door. Over the chandler's."
There was a horse tied to the railing outside the chandler's. A big rawboned chestnut, its flanks streaked dark with sweat, its legs muddied to the girths with the chalky white mud of the Mendip tops.
Jasper was out of the gig before it had stopped moving. He heard Miss Penhallow call something behind him and did not stop for it. The green door was on the latch. He went through it into a narrow passage that smelled of tallow and ink, and up a steep uncarpeted stair, two steps at a time, and at the top of the stair a thin freckled girl in a grey stuff gown stood barring a door with her back against it and both hands spread flat on the panels, like a child playing at forts.
"You can't go in," she said. Her voice was shaking. "Sir, you can't. She said nobody was to—"
"Miss Peverell." Miss Penhallow had come up the stair behind him, panting, with her skirts in her fist. "Miss Peverell, it's all right. This is — he's her brother. Where are the children?"
"In the garden. She sent them all out. She said to keep them there and play at Grandmother's Footsteps and not to come in, whatever we heard." The girl's eyes were huge. "There's a gentleman with her. He came twenty minutes ago. He was very civil. He said he was an old friend. And she went white as paper, Miss Penhallow, and told me to go down and take the girls out, and then she shut the door, and they've been in there ever since, and I can't hear what he's saying, only she's not said anything at all for ever so long—"