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I have been told, by a person whose judgment I trust, that I should send this to you by the post. I could not. You did not send yours. You sat up all night to write it, and rode out at dawn to put it into my hand yourself, so that I should not think you a coward.

I will not have you think me one.

So I have brought it. A hundred and fifty miles, by my aunt's carriage, with my uncle grumbling about the roads. If I have been brave enough, I have put it into your own hand, and you are reading this standing in front of me. If I have not, I have left it at your gate.

Either way, I have only one thing left to say. I have been trying to write it for ten days. I wrote it, at last, at an inn at Northampton, at two o'clock in the morning, under a ceiling with a crack in the plaster that put me in mind of the Thames.

I stop.

The inn at Northampton. The crack across the ceiling.

She lay under the same ceiling. A week after I did. In the same room, very likely; there are only four good rooms at the George. She lay there awake, and looked up, and thought of the Thames, as I did.

I refused a man I did not know, she writes. I would say yes to the one I do.

I am at the inn at Lambton.

E. B.

And below that, in the same hand, but smaller, squeezed in at the very bottom of the page, as though added at the last moment:

P.S. Your cousin Anne desires me to tell you that you are a great proud idiot, and that she has never in her life been wrong about anything, except a cow.

***

I laugh.

It comes up out of me the way it did in my aunt's sickroom, the way it did in the shrubbery at Rosings, from that low warm place I did not know I owned until she showed it to me. I laugh out loud, in my father's library, with my eyes still wet, and Georgiana jumps back from my shoulder as though I had fired a pistol.

"Brother!"

"She is at Lambton." I am on my feet. The letter is in my hand. I do not remember standing up. "Georgiana, she is at Lambton. She came to the lodge. She was here. She walked up to my gate on foot in the mud and asked for me, and Wragby told her I was riding, and she left this, and she went—where did she go? You said the park. Wragby said the park."

"Yes. Toward the lake. With the lady and the gentleman. Wragby thought they meant to ask Mrs. Reynolds if they might see the gardens, the way visitors do, and—"

I am already at the door.

"—and Brother, she said something else to Wragby, when she gave it to him, she said, tell him I—"

I do not hear the rest.

I am in the hall. I am on the stairs. Lowe is coming up them with a tray, and sees my face, and flattens himself against the wall with the tray held over his head, and I go past him so fast that the teacups rattle. I hear him say, behind me, very calmly, "Your hat, sir," and I do not stop for it.

The front door. The steps. The gravel.

"Sir!" A groom is running toward me from the stable arch. "Sir, shall I bring the black round?"

"No," I say. "I shall walk. I have had quite enough of horses."

***

I take the long way.

I do not mean to. My feet simply turn down the path by the lake instead of up across the lawn, the way they have turned a thousand times since I was a boy. Perhaps some part of me knows I need the time. Perhaps I am afraid. I do not stop to inquire which.

The lake is very still. The house stands in it upside down, gold in the afternoon sun. A pair of swans is going along the far bank with their cygnets in a line behind them.

And I rehearse.