"I have four thousand eight hundred pounds of my own," said Morwenna, "and a position in this school until Lady Imogen finds a better music mistress, which she says will not be before Easter. I will not be bought, or kept, or put on a shelf at Kelmscott to be looked at. I shall go on saying exactly what I think. I shall go on telling you when you are wrong, which will be often." She stood up. "If you can bear all of that, Your Grace, then yes."
"I can bear it," said Jasper. "I was rather counting on it."
---
They were married at Easter, in the church of St. Giles at Chalcott, because Morwenna said that she had walked up that aisle once to marry the wrong man and she meant to walk up it again and get it right. It was a small wedding. Aunt Clemency cried throughout. Thrale stood up with Jasper. Eleven little girls in white pinafores, and the Bishop's wife's niece, filled the two front pews and were very good, mostly. Miss Peverell had charge of them and was not frightened of anything.
Mr. Fothergill read the service. His spectacles had been mended, and his voice, when he came to the place, was firmer than Jasper had ever heard it.
"Therefore if any man can shew any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace."
The church was perfectly silent. Jasper listened to it — to the silence, and the spring wind in the yew tree outside, and somewhere far off a lamb crying in a field. Nobody stood. Nobody spoke.
He turned his head, very slightly, and looked at the front pew.
His sister was sitting there between two of her pupils, in a new gown of pale blue — not grey, for the first time in eight years — with her hands folded in her lap and her chin up, exactly as their mother used to sit. She caught his eye.
And Lady Imogen Tremayne, who had once stood in this same county with a pen held out to her across a schoolroom table and refused to sign away her own name, smiled at her brother. It was not forgiveness — not all of it; not yet. But it was the beginning of it, and she let him see that it was, in front of everybody.
Then she looked past him, at the bride, and nodded, once.
"Go on, Mr. Fothergill," said Morwenna. "We're quite sure."