"Good." She stood up. So did he, with some difficulty, unfolding himself off the children's form; and this time, very faintly, the corner of her mouth moved. "You'll be at the assizes?"
"In the front row."
"With the opera glasses all on you."
"With every opera glass in Somerset."
"Very well." She came round the table. She stood in front of him for a moment, looking up into his face, as if she were trying to see the boy who had carried her down to the lake. Then she put out her hand — not to embrace him; she was not ready for that, and neither was he — and laid it flat for a moment against the front of his coat, over his heart, the way she had laid it over Saltash's paper.
"Now go away," she said, "and send Morwenna up. I have something to say to her, and I'd rather you didn't hear it."
VI
Jasper never learned what his sister said to Morwenna Penhallow in the schoolroom that afternoon. Neither of them ever told him. Miss Peverell, who had been on the stair, would say only that there had been a great deal of shouting at first, all of it Lady Imogen's, and then a long silence, and then, much to her astonishment, the sound of both ladies laughing. And when Morwenna came down to the Swan at six o'clock, she had been crying, and she was carrying a carpet bag that was not hers.
"I'm to have the little room over the workroom," she said, before he could ask. "And teach the pianoforte, and the use of the globes, and keep the accounts, because she says I'm the only person she knows who can add up a column of figures without lying to herself. Twelve guineas a year and my board." She lifted her chin. "She said that since I'd seen fit to ruin her life, I might at least make myself useful in it."
"And you said?"
"I said that seemed only fair." She hesitated. "She said one other thing. She said that you were not to be allowed to pay for anything. Not my board, nor the school's rent, nor the girls' copybooks. Not one penny. She said that if you tried, I was to tell her, and she'd throw it in the Bishop's moat." Her mouth twitched. "She meant it, I think."
"I'm sure she did."