Hildebrand called out, “Help. Help. Where are you?”
Another voice said, “Here, by the church. Hang on.”
Peering between the branches of the yew, Cropper saw Hildebrand crawling along the grass between the graves towards the church. Waiting for him was a dark figure with a flashlight, whose beam was swung in his direction.
“Professor Cropper?” said this being, in a clear, authoritative male voice. “Are you all right?”
“I seem to be trapped by trees.”
“We can get you out, I expect. Have you got the box?”
“What box?” said Cropper.
“Yes, he has,” said Hildebrand, “Oh, get us out of here, this is ghastly, I can’t take any more.”
There was a crackling sound, like the electric forces that played at Hella Lees’s seances. The figure spoke to the air.
“Yes, he’s here. Yes, he’s got it. We’re all cut off by trees. Are you OK?”
Crackle, crackle.
Cropper decided to run for it. He turned back. It must be possible to circumnavigate the tree in the track—except that there seemed to be other trees, a hedge, a huge scaly barrier reared where none had been.
“It’s no good,” the figure incredibly said. “You’re surrounded. And there’s a tree on your Mercedes.”
Cropper spun round, and the beam of the other’s flashlight revealed, peering through the branches, like bizarre flowers or fruit, wet and white, Roland Michell, Maud Bailey, Leonora Stern, James Blackadder, and with streaming white woolly hair descended, like some witch or prophetess, a transfigured Beatrice Nest.
It took them an hour and a half to scramble back on foot to the Rowan Tree Inn. The Londoners, who had set out in two cars from Mortlake before the storm, but had begun to see its effects before they set out for the church, had brought a small saw from Blackadder’s Peugeot, as well as the walkie-talkie with which Euan had equipped them. Armed with this, and Cropper’s shovels, they scrambled and climbed over and under fallen columns and sighing vegetation, holding out hands to help, pushing, pulling, until they arrived at the road and saw festoons of cable and dark windows. The power was cut. Cropper let them all in to the Inn, still clutching the box. In the hall already were a crew of stranded lorry drivers, motorcyclists and a couple of firemen. The landlord was moving round the hall with candles in bottles. Huge pans of water were boiling on the kitchen Aga. At no other time would the incursion of so many wet, dirty scholars in the small hours have been taken with such casual and unquestioning calm. Pots of coffee and hot milk—and, at Euan’s suggestion, a bottle of brandy—were taken up to Cropper’s room, where his captors accompanied him. Dressing-gowns and spare sweaters were found for all, amongst Cropper’s bags and Hildebrand’s brand-new luggage. It was all so unreal, and the sense of communal survival was so powerful that they sat stupidly good, smiling weakly, damp and chill. Neither Cropper nor the others, curiously, could find force to be angry or even indignant. The box sat between candles, on the table in the window, rusty and earthy and wet. The women, all three clothed in pyjamas—Maud in Cropper’s black silk, Leonora in his scarlet cotton, and Beatrice in peppermint and white stripes belonging to Hildebrand—sat side by side on the bed. Val and Euan had their own clothes and represented normality. Blackadder wore a sweater and cotton trousers of Hildebrand’s. Euan said, “I’ve always wanted to say, ‘You are surrounded.’ ”
“You said it very well,” said Cropper. “I don’t know you, but I’ve seen you. In the restaurant.”
“And at the Garden Centre, and Densher and Winterbourne, and the churchyard yesterday, yes. I’m Euan MacIntyre. Dr Bailey’s lawyer. I believe I can prove she is the legal owner of the manuscripts of the letters—both sides—at present in the possession of Sir George Bailey.”
“This box, however, is nothing to do with her.”
“It will be mine,” said Hildebrand.
“Unless you had a Faculty from the Bishop, and permission from Mr Drax and permission from Lord Ash, it was feloniously obtained by disturbing a burial, and I can take it from you, and take you into custody as a citizen’s arrest. Moreover, Professor Blackadder has a letter forbidding the export of the contents until their status as national heritage treasures has been ascertained.”
“I see,” said Mortimer Cropper. “There may, of course, be nothing in there. Or merest dust. Might we—conjointly—examine the contents? Since we are unable to leave this place, or each other’s company?”
“It shouldn’t be disturbed,” said Beatrice. “It should be put back.”
She looked round the group and saw no support. Mortimer Cropper said, “If you believed that, you could have made your citizen’s arrest before I found it.”
Blackadder said, “That is perfectly true.”
Leonora said, “Why did she leave it to be found, if she didn’t entertain the thought of it? Why wasn’t it clasped to her bosom—or his?”
Maud said, “We need the end of the story.”
“There is no guarantee that that is what we shall find,” said Blackadder.
“But we must look,” said Maud.
Cropper produced a can of oil, and rubbed the oil round the join, working it with his knife, flaking off particles of rust. After a long few moments, he inserted the knife point under the join and pushed. The lid sprang off, revealing Randolph Ash’s glass specimen container, cloudy and stained, but intact. Cropper lifted the lid of this too, slipping his knife round it, neatly, neatly, and took out the contents. An oiled silk bag contained: a hair bracelet, with a silver clasp of two hands joining; a blue envelope containing a long thread of very finely plaited pale hair; another oiled silk package that proved to contain a thick bundle of letters tied with ribbon; and a long envelope, once white, sealed, inscribed in brown letters: To: Randolph Henry Ash, under cover.
Cropper ruffled the large packet of letters and said, “Their love letters. As she said.” He looked at the sealed letter and handed it to Maud. Maud looked at the handwriting and said, “I think … I’m nearly sure …”
Euan said, “If it’s unopened the question of ownership becomes very interesting. Is it the property of the sender—if it wasn’t received—or the property of the addressee, since it lies unopened in his grave?”
Cropper, before anyone could think of any reason why not, took the envelope, slipped his knife under the seal, and opened it. Inside were a letter and a photograph. The photograph was stained at the edges and covered with silvery dashes like a storm of hailstones or white blossom, and with circles of dark sooty markings, like the infestations of mirrors, but behind and through all this glimmered the ghostly figure of a bride, holding a bouquet of lilies and roses, looking out from a mass of veiling and a heavy crown of flowers.
Leonora said, “Miss Havisham. The Bride of Corinth.”
Maud said slowly, “No, no, I begin to see—”
Euan said, “Do you? I thought so. Read the letter. You know the writing.”
“Shall I?”
So, in that hotel room, to that strange gathering of disparate seekers and hunters, Christabel LaMotte’s letter to Randolph Ash was read aloud, by candlelight, with the wind howling past, and the panes of the windows rattling with the little blows of flying debris as it raced on and on, over the downs.
“My dear—my dear—
They tell me you are very ill. I do ill to disturb your peace at this time, with unseasonable memories—but I find I have—after all—a thing which I must tell you. You will say, it should have been told twenty-eight years ago—or never—and so maybe it should—but I could or would not. And now I think of you continuously, also I pray for you, and I know—I have known for these many years—that I have done you wrong.
You have a daughter, who is well, and married, and the mother of a beautiful boy. I send you her picture. You will see—she is beautiful—and resembles, I like to think, both her parents, neither of whom she knows to be her parent.
So much is—if not easy to indite?
??at least simple. But the history? With such a truth, I owe you also its history—or owe myself, it may be—I have sinned against you—but for causes—
All History is hard facts—and something else—passion and colour lent by men. I will tell you—at least—the facts.
When we two parted I knew—but not with certain proof—that the consequences would be—what they were. We agreed—on that last black day—to leave, to leave each other and never for a moment look back. And I meant to keep my side of it for pride’s sake and for yours, whatever might come. So I made arrangements—you would not believe how I calculated and schemed—I found a place to go—(which you later discovered, I know) where I should make no one but myself responsible for our fate—hers and mine—And then I consulted the one possible helper—my sister Sophie—who arranged to help me in a lie more appropriate to a Romance than to my previous quiet life—but Necessity sharpens the wits and fortifies resolution—and so our daughter was born in Brittany, in the Convent, and carried to England, where Sophie took her and brought her up as her own, as we had agreed. And I will say that Sophie has loved and cherished her as well as anyone not her true mother might do. She has run free in English fields and married a cousin (no cousin, of course, truly seen) in Norfolk, and is a Squire’s wife, and comely.
And I came here—not long after you and I met for the last time—as it turns out—at Mrs Lees’s seance, where you were so angry, so wrathful—and so was I too, for you tore away the dressings from my spirit’s wounds, and I thought, as women will, you might suffer a little with my good will, for the greater part of suffering in this world is ours—we bear it. When I said to you—you have made a murderess of me—I spoke of poor Blanche, whose terrible end torments me daily. But I saw you thought I spoke as Gretchen might to Faust. And I thought—with a cold little malice born of my then extreme sickness of body and mind—let him think so, then, if he knows me so little, let him wear himself away, thinking so. Women in childbirth cry out exceedingly against the author as they see it of their misfortunes, for whom a moment’s passion may have no lasting reminder, no monstrous catastrophe of body or of soul—so I thought then—I am calmer now. I am old now.
Oh, my dear, here I sit, an old witch in a turret, writing my verses by licence of my boorish brother-in-law, a hanger-on as I had never meant to be, of my sister’s good fortune (in the pecuniary sense) and I write to you, as if it was yesterday, of all that rage like iron bands burning round my breast, of the spite and the love (for you, for my sweet Maia, for poor Blanche too). But it is not yesterday, and you are very ill. I wish you may be well, Randolph, and I send you my blessing, and I ask yours, and your forgiveness, if it may be. For I knew and must have known that you have a generous heart and would have cared for us—for me and for Maia—but I had a secret fear—here it all tumbles out, after all—but Truth is best, now—is it not?—I was afraid, you see, that you would wish to take her, you and your wife, for your very own—and she was mine, I bore her—I could not let her go—and so I hid her from you—and you from her, for she would have loved you, there is a space in her life forever, which is yours. Oh, what have I done?
And here I might stop, or might have stopped a few lines back, with my proper request for forgiveness. I write under cover to your wife—who may read this, or do as she pleases with it—I am in her hands—but it is so dangerously sweet to speak out, after all these years—I trust myself to her and your good will—This is in some sort my Testament. I have had few friends in my life, and of those friends two only whom I trusted—Blanche—and you—and both I loved too well and one died terribly, hating me and you. But now I am old I regret most of all not those few sharp sweet days of passion—which might have been almost anyone’s passion, it seems, for all passions run the same course to the same end, or so it now seems to me being old—I regret, I would say, had I not grown garrulously digressive—our old letters, of poetry and other things, our trusting minds which recognised each other. Did you ever read, I wonder, one of the few poor exemplars sold of The Fairy Melusina—and think—I knew her once—or as you most truly might—‘Without me this Tale might not have come to the Telling’? I owe you Melusina and Maia both, and I have paid no debts. (I think she will not die, my Melusina, some discerning reader will save her?)
I have been Melusina these thirty years. I have so to speak flown about and about the battlements of this stronghold crying on the wind of my need to see and feed and comfort my child, who knew me not. She was a happy soul—a sunny creature, simple in her affections and marvellously direct in her nature. She loved her adoptive parents most deeply—Sir George too, who had not a drop of her blood in his beef-veins, but was entranced by her prettiness and good nature, which was as well for her and me.
Me she did not love. To whom can I say this but to you? She sees me as a sorcière, a spinster in a fairy tale, looking at her with glittering eye and waiting for her to prick her poor little finger and stumble into the brute sleep of adult truth. And if my eye glittered with tears she saw them not. No, I will go on, I fill her with a sort of fear, a sort of revulsion—she feels, rightly, a too-much in my concern for her—but misreads that, which is most natural, as something unnatural.
You will think—if the shock of what I have had to tell you has left you any power to care or to think about my narrow world—that a romancer such as I (or a true dramatist, such as you) would not be able to keep such a secret for nigh on thirty years (think, Randolph, thirty years), without bringing about some peripeteia, some dénouement, some secret hinting or open scene of revelation. Ah, but if you were here, you would see how I dare not. For her sake, for she is so happy. For mine, in that I fear—I fear the possible horror in her fair eyes. If I told her—that—and she stepped back? And then I swore to Sophie that it should be a condition of her kindness that it was absolute and irrevocable—and without Sophie’s goodwill there would have been no home and no support for her.
She laughed and played like Coleridge’s limber elf ‘Singing, dancing to itself’—do you remember our letters of Christabel? She cared nothing for books, nothing. I wrote her small tales, and they were bound and printed, and I gave them to her, and she smiled sweetly and thanked me, and put them by. I never saw her read them for pleasure. She loved to ride, and to do archery, and played boys’ games with her (so-called) brothers … and in the end married a visiting cousin she had tumbled in haystacks with as a tiny staggering little thing of five. I wanted her to have an untroubled life and so she did—but it is not mine, I am not of it, I am the spinster aunt who is not loved.…
So I am punished, in some sort, for keeping her from you.
Do you remember how I wrote to you of the riddle of the egg? As an eidolon of my solitude and self-possession which you threatened whether you would or no? And destroyed, my dear, meaning me nothing but good, I do believe and know. I wonder—if I had kept to my closed castle, behind my motte-and-bailey defences—should I have been a great poet—as you are? I wonder—was my spirit rebuked by yours—as Caesar’s was by Antony—or was I enlarged by your generosity as you intended? These things are all mixed and mingled—and we loved each other—for each other—only it was in the end for Maia (who will have nothing of her ‘strange name’ and is called plain May, which becomes her).
I have been so angry for so long—with all of us, with you, with Blanche, with my poor self. And now near the end “in calm of mind all passion spent” I think of you again with clear love. I have been reading Samson Agonistes and came upon the dragon I always thought you were—as I was the ‘tame villatic fowl’—
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame
And as an evening dragon came
Assailant on the perched roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl—
Is not that fine? Did we not—did you not flame, and I catch fire? Shall we survive and rise from our ashes? Like Milton’s Phoenix?
that self
-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embossed
That no second knows nor third
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed
And though her body die, her fame survives
A secular bird, ages of lives.
I would rather have lived alone, so, if you would have the truth. But since that might not be—and is granted to almost none—I thank God for you—if there must be a Dragon—that He was You—
I must give up this writing. One more thing. Your grandson (and mine, most strange). His name is Walter and he chants verses to the amazement of his stable- and furrow-besotted parents. I have taught him much of the Ancient Mariner: he recites the passage of the blessing of the snakes, and the vision of the glittering eye of the ocean cast up to the moon, most feelingly, and his own eyes are bright with it. He is a strong boy, and will live.
I must close. If you are able or willing—please send me a sign that you have read this. I dare not ask, if you forgive.
Christabel LaMotte”
There was silence. Maud’s voice had begun clear, expressionless, like matt glass, and had ended with suppressed feeling.
Leonora said, “Wow!”
Cropper said, “I knew it. I knew it was something vast—”