She had thought about it for three days. Then she had gone down to breakfast and said, "Very well." She had meant it. She was not a romantic girl; she never had been. She had watched her aunt cough through fifteen Bristol winters and she knew what lodgings were. And Saltash was not, so far as she knew, a brute. He was merely a man who wanted nine thousand pounds, and who would be civil to her afterward because it cost him nothing. Plenty of women lived their whole lives on less.
So she had bought muslin for the gown and dove-grey silk for the pelisse, and her aunt, who was sentimental about such things, had given her a length of very old lace that had been her own mother's and said it must be made into a veil. And because the lace was old and fragile and needed working onto a new ground by someone who knew what she was doing, Morwenna had been sent up to Wells, to a little school in the Liberty kept by a widow who took in fine needlework to make ends meet.
Mrs. Esmond.
She was perhaps five-and-twenty, and looked older about the eyes. She had fair hair worn very plain, and long, quick hands, and a low voice with something in it that did not belong in a two-room school for tradesmen's daughters — some trick of vowels, some way of holding her head, that Morwenna noticed and did not think about. She took the lace and turned it over in the light from the window and said it was Mechlin, not Brussels, and a hundred years old if it was a day, and that she would be honoured to work it. She charged a fair price and would not take more. She gave Morwenna tea in the schoolroom, among the slates and the samplers, while eleven little girls in pinafores pretended not to stare.
Morwenna went back three times for fittings. By the third time they were friends, or something very like it. She could not afterwards have said how it happened. Mrs. Esmond did not talk about herself. But she listened in a way that made one want to talk, and Morwenna, who had not had anyone to talk to in a long while, found herself telling her a great deal more than she meant to — about her father and the packet, and her uncle's debts, and the nine thousand pounds, and the man who was going to marry her for them.
"And you are content?" Mrs. Esmond had said, bent over the lace, not looking up.
"I am resigned. It's not the same, but it lasts better."
Mrs. Esmond's needle had paused for a moment. Then it went on.
"What is his name?" she said. "Your intended."
"Saltash. Mr. Rupert Saltash, of Clifton."
The needle went on. It did not pause again. But Morwenna, sitting across the table with her teacup, saw Mrs. Esmond's other hand — the one that held the lace taut against the frame — slowly close, until the knuckles were white, and the old fragile thread began to pull.
"Mrs. Esmond. The lace—"
"Yes." Mrs. Esmond opened her hand. She looked down at it as if it belonged to somebody else. "I beg your pardon. I have a cramp sometimes. It's nothing."