She had said nothing more that day. But the following week, when Saltash drove Morwenna up to Wells himself in his gig for the last fitting — he had business in the town and it was no trouble, he said, no trouble in the world — Mrs. Esmond had not come down to meet them. A thin, freckled girl of about seventeen, who said she was Miss Peverell and taught the little ones their letters, had let Morwenna in and taken her up, and Saltash had waited below in the street. And when Morwenna came into the workroom, Mrs. Esmond was standing a little back from the window, behind the edge of the curtain, looking down into the street where Saltash sat in his gig with the reins in one hand, idly flicking the whip at a fly.
She did not turn round. She said, in a voice Morwenna had never heard her use, "Is that him?"
"Yes. Why—"
"Please shut the door."
Morwenna shut the door.
It took Mrs. Esmond a long time to begin, and when she did, she told it badly, out of order, in a flat quiet voice that kept stopping. But she told it. A girl of eighteen, in Bath with an aunt for the season, bored and lonely and very angry with her father. A half-pay captain, so he said, who played the flute and quoted Byron and seemed to understand everything she said before she had finished saying it. A runaway in a hired chaise at dawn, with her mother's pearls sewn into her stays, and four days of racketing north to the border, and a smoky room at Gretna with a blacksmith's wife for a witness. Then a year. Then Carlisle. Then a February morning when he went out to see a man about a horse and did not come back, and the pearls were gone from her box, and the landlady wanted her quarter's rent.
"I wrote to my father," Mrs. Esmond had said, looking at the window. "And then I wrote to my brother. My father's letter was not answered. My brother's—" She stopped. "My brother's came back."
"Came back?"
"Unopened. With the seal unbroken, and my brother's own hand on the cover. *Refused.*" She said the word as if it had a taste. "So I understood how things stood. And in the October a letter came from a man I had never heard of, at an address in Lisbon, saying he regretted to inform me that Captain Lennard had died of a putrid fever and been buried in the English cemetery there. I was a widow, the letter said. I was very sorry to hear it." She laughed — a small terrible sound. "I believed it. Of course I believed it. Why would anyone lie about a thing like that?"
"Because he wanted to be free," Morwenna had said slowly. "Because a dead man can't be sent for."
"Yes. I see that now." Mrs. Esmond turned from the window at last. Her face was perfectly dry. "I came south. I had a little French and a little music and I could sew. I took my mother's maiden name, more or less, and called myself a widow, which I thought I was. And I have kept this school for five years and been very nearly happy, and I had stopped — I had very nearly stopped—" She put her hand over her eyes. "And now he is sitting in a gig outside my window, and he is going to marry you in seven weeks."
"Then he can't," Morwenna had said. "If you are his wife, he can't. You have only to say so."
Mrs. Esmond dropped her hand.