"She also said," Morwenna went on, a little more slowly, "that you may call. On Sundays. After church."
He looked at her.
"On her," she added, colouring faintly. "She meant — on her."
"Of course," said Jasper gravely.
---
He called on Sundays. He called every Sunday from April until the end of August, driving down from Kelmscott on the Saturday and putting up at the Swan, until the landlord kept the same rooms for him without being asked and the boot boy knew how he liked his coffee. He sat in the schoolroom and drank weak tea out of thick school cups and was very careful to pay for nothing. He was not, at first, much use. He did not know how to talk to his sister any more, and she did not make it easier for him. There were Sundays when they sat for an hour and said almost nothing, and he drove away afterward feeling as though he had been flayed. But he went back. And slowly, very slowly, over the summer, things began to happen that were not quite conversation and not quite silence either. He mended a broken kite for one of the little girls and was told by his sister that he had done it wrong. He was set to carrying hymn books to the cathedral for the children's Whitsun service, forty of them in a basket, and was seen doing it by the Dean. He was taught, by Miss Peverell, who had stopped being afraid of him, a better method for long division. One Sunday in July, Imogen laughed at something he said — not much; just a short, startled laugh, as if it had got out before she could stop it — and then looked at him across the table as if she were not sure what to do about it.
And Morwenna was always there. She sat at the pianoforte with the cat on the lid and played Clementi badly and Haydn rather well. She argued with him about the Corn Laws, and the Princess Charlotte's marriage, and whether Sir Walter Scott would ever admit to having written *Waverley*. She knew a great deal about ships, and nothing at all about horses, and she said exactly what she thought on every subject that came up, and some that didn't. He had never in his life met anyone who made him feel so continually that he had better be honest, or else.
It was Morwenna who found what was wrong with the letter from Lisbon. She found it in June, going through the bundle of letters from Imogen's workbox with the Bristol attorney Hensleigh had sent down to help prepare the case. She had taken up the letter of condolence from Lisbon, the one that had made Imogen a widow in 1811, and turned it over, and frowned, and held it to the window, and then said in an odd voice, "Mr. Gower. Where's the packet mark?"
The attorney did not know what she meant.
"Every letter from Lisbon comes in by the Falmouth packet," said Morwenna. "My father carried them for eleven years. They're stamped *Packet Letter* at Falmouth, and charged at the foreign rate — shillings, not pence. Everyone knows it. Everyone at sea." She laid the letter on the table. "This has no packet stamp. It's charged at elevenpence. It's an inland letter, Mr. Gower. Look at the mark. It was posted in Bristol." She looked up at Imogen. "He never went to Lisbon at all. He wrote his own death notice and posted it from Broad Street, and walked home to dinner."
And in July, a fortnight before the assizes, a parcel came to the school from Queen Square. It was addressed in Aunt Clemency's spidery hand, and inside it, wrapped in a flannel petticoat, was a long official-looking letter that had come for Morwenna in May, from the keeper of the old marriage registers at Springfield, near Gretna, in answer to an inquiry she had sent him under her own name back in March. Her uncle had kept it from her. Her aunt had found it in his desk.
It was a certified extract from a marriage register. On the ninth day of May, 1810, it said, at Springfield in the parish of Gretna, in the presence of the undersigned witnesses, there had been married, by declaration before witnesses according to the law of Scotland, *Imogen Tremayne, spinster, of the parish of Kelmscott in the county of Oxford*, and *Rupert Lennard, bachelor, of the parish of Clifton in the county of Gloucester*.