"I mean it," he said. "If you don't want to, don't. There are other ways. Hensleigh can't hold him for ever without your word, but I can — I'll find the blacksmith's wife. I'll find the man who wrote from Lisbon. I'll find the man who sold Mama's pearls, if they were sold. There'll be something, somewhere, that doesn't need you to stand up in court in front of—"
"Jasper," she said. "Stop it. That's what I meant. That's the thing you don't understand." She leaned forward. "I am going to give it."
He stopped.
"I decided last night. After you'd gone. I sat up in this room with Rupert's letters and that paper he wrote, and I thought about Philadelphia." Her mouth twisted. "And I found that I didn't want to go to Philadelphia, or Jamaica, or anywhere else that people send women like me when they want them to stop being a nuisance. I've been sent away once. I've been somebody else for five years. I'm tired of it. I would like to be myself in front of everybody, once, even if it's only in the dock at the Wells assizes — even if it's only to say, *Yes, I did that, and he did this, and here is the proof.*" Her voice was very steady. "I don't need you to spare me. I've been spared enough. I need something else from you."
"Anything."
"Don't say that until you've heard it." She was silent a moment. "When I give my evidence, I want you in the court. Not in a private room behind the judge's chair. Not at the Swan, waiting for a message. In the court. In the front row of the public seats, where every gossip in Somerset can see you, and they'll be there, Jasper, all of them, with their opera glasses. I want them to look at me in the witness box and then look at you, and see that the Duke of Kelmscott is not ashamed of his sister." She swallowed. "Even if you are. You'll sit there and you'll look as though you aren't. You owe me that much."
He found he could not speak for a moment.
"I'm not," he said at last. "Ashamed. I never was. Not of you."
"No?" She tilted her head. "Then what were you, when you sent my letter back?"
So there it was. He had known it was coming. He had known it since the gig on the road to Wells, since the church, since Grosvenor Square on Tuesday night with the rain blowing in across the hall. Perhaps he had known it for six years.
"A coward," he said.
She waited.