"You wrote this yourself," she said.
"Of course. I'd not trust an attorney with a thing like that."
"This morning?"
Saltash's eyes narrowed a fraction.
"Last night," he said. "Why?"
"Because I have a bundle of letters in my workbox, Rupert," said Imogen, "that I have kept for six years, because I could not bear to burn them and could not bear to read them. Eleven letters. You wrote them to me in Carlisle, in the autumn of 1810, when you went to Newcastle about the horses. *To Mrs. Lennard.* Every one of them signed *your devoted husband, R. L.* In this hand." She folded the declaration once, and then again, very precisely, along the creases. "I never had anything to set beside them. Nothing anyone would swear was yours. I had six-year-old love letters signed with a dead man's initials and a woman's word that she knew the writing." She put the folded paper inside her bodice, flat against her breast, and laid her hand over it. "Now I have a whole page of your best hand, written last night, with your own name signed at the bottom as witness. Thank you. It was very thorough of you."
There was a moment in which nobody breathed.
Then Saltash came over the table.
He moved faster than Jasper would have believed possible for a man of his size — one hand flat on the table and the other reaching, the inkstand going over, a black flood across the wood — and Imogen stepped back, but not quickly enough, and his hand closed on her wrist.
Jasper hit him.
It was not science. It was not anything Jackson would have recognised. It was a single clumsy, furious blow that took Saltash under the ear as he twisted, and sent him sprawling sideways against the form along the wall, and brought the whole row of samplers down on top of him in a flutter of linen and coloured wool. *A is for Apple.* The cat leapt off the pianoforte with a yowl and vanished under a desk. Somewhere below, in the garden, a child shrieked with laughter at a game.
Saltash came up on one knee, shaking his head. There was blood at the corner of his mouth. He looked at Jasper, and at Imogen behind him with her hand pressed to her bodice, and at Miss Penhallow by the door — who had picked up the iron poker from the schoolroom grate, Jasper saw with some astonishment, and was holding it with both hands, like a cricket bat.