"Her name is Lady Imogen Tremayne," she said. "She is your sister, and she is alive. He married her at Gretna Green on the ninth of May, 1810, under the name of Rupert Lennard. He left her at a lodging house in Carlisle in February of the following year, with eleven shillings and a quarter's rent owing, and eight months later she received a letter informing her that he had died of a fever in Lisbon." The bride drew a breath. Her voice wavered for the first time, and then steadied. "He did not die in Lisbon, Your Grace. He is standing beside me. And your sister lives eleven miles from this church."
Nobody moved.
Then Rupert Saltash turned his head and looked at his bride, and for the first time since Jasper had come through the door, the pleasant expression left his face entirely, and Jasper saw what was underneath it.
It was only for an instant. But an instant was enough.
"Morwenna," said her uncle hoarsely. "Morwenna, what in heaven's name—"
"I wrote the letter," the bride said. She was still looking at Jasper. "The one you came on. I wrote it. I did not sign it because I did not know whether you would come, and if you didn't, I was going to have to marry him." Her mouth twisted. "And I thought that if I had to marry him, I would rather not be ashamed in front of you as well."
II
Seven weeks earlier, Morwenna Penhallow had climbed the steep stair of a narrow house in the Liberty at Wells with a parcel of Brussels lace under her arm, and had thought, quite calmly, that she would very likely be unhappy for the rest of her life, and that there were worse things.
She was twenty-four. Her father had been a packet captain out of Falmouth who had gone down with his ship off Ushant when she was nine; her mother had followed him within the year, of nothing in particular that the doctors could name. Morwenna had been sent up the country to her father's brother in Bristol, who imported Portuguese wines and lived in a tall house in Queen Square with a fanlight over the door and a great many debts behind it. Uncle Josias was not a cruel man. He was a frightened one, which in the end came to much the same, and for fifteen years he had fed her and clothed her and sent her to a respectable school, and never once let her forget it.
Her grandmother on her mother's side had left her nine thousand pounds, in the funds, in trust. The trust would end when she married, or when she turned twenty-five, whichever came first. Her twenty-fifth birthday was the eleventh of September.
She had worked out, some time before Christmas, that this was why Mr. Rupert Saltash had begun to call.
He was a friend of her uncle's — or more exactly, a creditor of her uncle's, which in Queen Square passed for friendship. He had lent money on three cargoes that had not come in and one that had come in spoiled, and he held her uncle's notes of hand for a sum that her uncle would not name to her, but which turned his face grey whenever Saltash's knock came at the door. Saltash was charming to her. He was charming to everyone. He brought her aunt Clemency hothouse grapes and listened to her uncle's stories with every appearance of interest and talked to Morwenna about books, and he did it all so well that it took her nearly a month to notice that he never actually looked at her while he was doing it. His eyes would rest on her face, pleasantly, and go somewhere else behind it, as if he were adding something up.
In January he had asked her uncle for her hand. Her uncle had told her it was settled. She had said that it was not settled at all, and her uncle had wept — actually wept, at the breakfast table, with egg on his waistcoat — and told her that if she refused, Saltash would call in the notes, and the house would go, and her aunt with her bad chest would be in lodgings by Lady Day, and that it would be Morwenna's doing.