"Your Grace," he said. "And Miss Penhallow, too — good. I'm glad you've both come. Now we can settle this like reasonable people." He gestured at the paper on the table. "Lady Imogen and I were just coming to an understanding."
Jasper had never in his life struck a man except with the gloves on, at Jackson's rooms in Bond Street, where it was a matter of science and everybody shook hands afterward. He found that he had crossed half the room without knowing he had moved, and that his right hand was a fist, and that he did not care in the least about science.
"Don't."
It was Imogen. She had not raised her voice. She had not moved from the window. But it stopped him as surely as a wall.
"Don't," she said again. "This is mine, Jasper. It has been mine for seven years. You don't get to walk in at the end of it and knock him down and call it settled." She looked at Saltash. "Tell my brother what you came for, Rupert. Tell him exactly what you told me. I should like him to hear it."
For the first time, Saltash hesitated.
"My dear—"
"I am not your dear. I was your wife. I am, it seems, still your wife, which is a great deal worse." She came away from the window then, slowly, and stopped at the end of the long table, across it from him. "Shall I tell him, then? He came here," she said to Jasper, without looking away from Saltash, "to offer me two hundred pounds and a passage to Philadelphia on the *Amity*, which sails from Bristol on Saturday. All I need do in return is sign that." She nodded at the paper. "It is a declaration, very nicely worded, to say that I never was married to him nor to any man; that I lived with him under his protection for a year as his mistress, of my own free will; and that I invented the marriage afterward out of spite, because he would not keep me." Her voice did not shake. "If I sign it, I am a fallen woman, and no one will believe a word I say against him ever again, and he marries Miss Penhallow next week in some church where the clergyman has not read his canons. And if I don't sign it—"
"Imogen," said Saltash quietly.
"— if I don't sign it, he will go to every mother of every girl in this school, one by one, and tell them who has been teaching their daughters their catechism for five years. Not my name. My history. A runaway. A cast-off. Living under a false name. He will do it beautifully." She smiled — a thin, bright, frightening smile. "He said that, too. He said, *You know I'll do it beautifully, Imogen.* And he will. And then my school is finished, and I am finished, and Peverell is out of a place, and eleven little girls go back to their mothers and are told never to speak of me again." She looked at Jasper at last. "That is what he came for."
"It's a fair offer," said Saltash. He had recovered himself; his voice was easy again, reasonable, almost kind. "Your Grace must see that. It's the best offer she'll have. What's the alternative? A trial? Her name in every newspaper in England? *Duke's Sister Wed at Gretna to Penniless Adventurer* — a fine thing for the house of Kelmscott. And for what? To send me to the hulks for seven years? I'll be out in four. And she'll still be what she is, and everyone will know it." He spread his hands. "Two hundred pounds and Philadelphia. A new name, a new country, nobody the wiser. I'd have thought Your Grace would pay twice that to have it done quietly. Your father would have."
"Yes," said Jasper. "I expect he would."