The note came at breakfast the next morning, brought up by the chandler's boy. It was three words long, in a quick plain hand that he had last seen on the cover of a letter on his father's desk.
*Four o'clock. Alone.*
He went at four. Miss Peverell let him in, looking at him as though he might bite, and took him up the stair, and he went into the schoolroom.
It had been put to rights. The forms were back in their places along the walls, and the ink had been scrubbed out of the floorboards, leaving a pale ghost of itself in the shape of a cloud. The samplers were pinned up on their string again, though *A is for Apple* had a dark blot now in one corner that would never come out. The windows stood open and the room was full of the sound of the cathedral bells ringing for evensong, and the cool smell of rain on lavender from the garden below.
Imogen sat at the master's table with her hands folded on it. She did not get up.
"Sit down, Jasper," she said.
He sat on the end of a form, because there was nowhere else. It was built for children and it put his knees nearly up to his chin. He thought she might laugh at that, and she did not.
"I'm going to tell you some things," she said. "And then you're going to tell me some things. And then I am going to decide what to do. I wanted you to know that that's the order of it. It isn't you who decides."
"I understand."
"I don't think you do. But you will." She drew a breath. "I've had a letter from Sir Walter Hensleigh. He has committed Rupert for trial at the summer assizes, here in Wells, in August. On a charge of bigamy, on the information of Miss Penhallow and on my information — if I give it. He says that without my evidence there is no case. Miss Penhallow can say what I told her. I'm the only one who can say what happened." She looked down at her hands. "If I give it, I give it in my own name. *Imogen Tremayne.* There's no other way. They'll print it in the *Bath Chronicle* and the *Bristol Mirror* and *The Times*, and everyone in this city will know that Mrs. Esmond of the Liberty is a duke's daughter who ran away to Gretna with a fortune-hunter and was kept by him in Carlisle for a year and then thrown off. Every one of them. And they will all decide what they think of me, and of the girls I've been teaching."
"Then don't give it."
She raised her eyes.