Possession. A Romance

Chapter 12

What is a House? So strong-so square

Making a Warmth inside the Winds

We walk with lowered eyelids there

And silent go-behind the blinds

Yet hearts may tap like loaded bombs

Yet brains may shrill in carpet-hush

And windows fly from silent rooms

And walls break outwards-with a rush-

-CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE

They stood on the pavement and looked up at the carved letters over the porch: BETHANY. It was a sunny day in April. They were awkward with each other, standing at a distance. The house was spick and span, three storeys high, with sash windows. Prettily sprigged curtains hung on carved wooden rings from a brass rail. Inside the front window a maidenhair fern stood in a large Minton pot. On the front door, painted a deep Delft blue, hung a sinuous brass dolphin door-knocker. There were buds on the roses and a sea of forget-me-nots at their feet. There was a frieze of bricks with moulded sunflowers between storeys. Every brick breathed fresh air; each had been stripped and drenched with blow-torch and high-speed jet, so that the house lay revealed beneath its original skin. "It's a good restoration job," said Maud. "It makes you feel funny. A simulacrum."

"Like a fibre-glass copy of the sphinx."

"Exactly. You can just see a very Victorian fireplace in there. I can't tell if it's an original or a vamped-up one from a demolition lot."

They looked up at the bland or blind face of Bethany.

"It would have been sootier. It would have looked older. When it was younger."

"A postmodern quotation-" There was a porch now, with the first tendrils of a very new clematis advancing up it, a porch of new white wooden arches, a miniature bower.

Out of here she had come, stepping rapidly, in a swirl of determined black skirts, lips tight with determination, hands compressed on her reticule, eyes wide with fear, with hope, wild, how? Had he come down the road from St Matthias Church, in his tall hat and his frock coat? Had she, the other, peered through her rimmed glasses from an upper window, her eyes blurring?

"I've never been much interested in places-or things-with associations-"

"Nor I. I'm a textual scholar. I rather deplore the modern feminist attitude to private lives."

"If you're going to be stringently analytical," Roland said, "don't you have to?"

"You can be psychoanalytic without being personal-"Maud said. Roland did not challenge her. It was he who had suggested they come to Richmond to discuss what to do next, and now they were here, the sight of the little house was indeed disturbing. He suggested that they go into the church at the end of the road, a huge Victorian barn, containing modern glass-walled galleries and a quiet coffee bar. The church was full of children's activities, prancing and bedizened clowns, fairies and ballerinas, easels and scraping violins and piping recorders. They settled in the coffee bar, in a reminiscent patch of stained-glass light.

Nothing had been heard from Sir George since they had despatched their fervent thank-yous in January. Maud had taught a difficult term. Roland had applied for jobs-one in Hong Kong, one in Barcelona, one in Amsterdam. He had little hope of these-he had once seen a copy of Blackadder's standard reference for him, lying around in the Ash factory, which praised his diligence and thoroughness and caution, making him sound thoroughly dull. They had agreed, Roland and Maud, to say nothing to anyone, and to do nothing until they either heard from Sir George or saw each other again.

Roland had said to Maud, on that last cold day in Lincoln, that it looked as though perhaps Christabel had contemplated accompanying Randolph on his natural history expedition to North Yorkshire in June 1859. This had seemed obvious to him; he had not taken into account Maud's complete lack of knowledge of R. H. Ash's movements. He elaborated. Ash had been gone for a month, travelling alone, walking along shores and cliffs, studying geology and marine life. He was to have been accompanied by Francis Tugwell, the clergyman author of Anemones of the British Coast, but illness had prevented Mr Tugwell from coming. Critics ascribed to this studious month, Roland told Maud, a shift in the subject-matter of Ash's poetry, from history to natural history, so to speak. Roland himself did not subscribe to this view. It was part of a general intellectual movement at the time. The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Ash's friend Michelet, the great historian, had at this time taken to nature study and had written four books related to the four elements-La Mer (water), La Montagne (earth), L'Oiseau (air), and L'Insecte (fire, since insects lived in the hot underneath). Ash's "natural" poems were like these, or like Turner's late great paintings of elemental light.

Ash had written to his wife, most days, if not every day, during this tour. The letters were in Cropper's edition; Maud and Roland had brought photocopies to their meeting.

My dearest Ellen,

I and my tall basketof specimenjars arrived in one piece in Robin Hood's Bay - though much bruised and dirtied from the shaking of the train and the continuous rain of smuts and live sparks from the engine, most particularly in the tunnels. The Pickering-Grosmont line travels through the Newtondale Gorge - a cleft formed during the Ice Age - where the engine produces, amongst romantically desolate moorland, a sublime volcanic eruption of its own, due to the steepnessof thegradient. It put me in mind of Milton 's Satan, winging his black way through the asphaltic fumes of Chaos - and ofLyell's solid, patient yet inspired work on the raising of the hills and the carving of the valleys by ice. I heard curlews, making their peremptory, desolate sound, and saw what I like to believe was an eagle, though it was probably no such thing - at all events, a hovering predator, floating on the invisible element. Strange narrow-chested sheep bound away, scattering stones, and swaying their woolly integument in the air like banks of weed in the sea-water - heavy and slow - They starefrom crags -I was about to write inhumanly- but thatgoes without saying - they have a look almost dae monic and inimical, for domesticated animals. You would be interested by their eyes - yellow with a black bar of a pupil - horizontal, not vertical - which gives them their odd look.

The train is a modern successor to a successful horse-drawn railway designed and built by George Stephenson himself. I should almost have preferred that more decorous conveyance to the snorting firedragon who ruined my travelling-shirt (no, I shall not send it home; my landlady, a Mrs Cammish, is an excellent laundress and starcher, I am assured).

Here everything seems primaeval - the formations of the rocks, the heaving and tossing of the full sea, the people with their fishing boats (called cobles in the local speech) which I imagine are not much changed from the primitive if versatile little craft of the early Viking invaders. Here on the shore of the German Ocean I feel thepresence of thoseNorthern Lands across its cold grey-green wastes - very different from the close civilised fields of France across the Channel - Even the air is somehow both ancient and fresh - -fresh with salt and heather and a kind of absolute biting cleanness, resembling the taste of the water here, which has bubbled deliciously from perforated limestone, and is more surprising than wine - after the turgid Thames.

But you will be thinking I have no regretfor my warm house and library and smoking-jacket and desk, andfor the company of my dear wife. I think of you steadily and with steady love - of which you need no assurance.Are you well? Are you able to go about and to read without headache?Write and tell me of all your doings. I shall write more, and you shall see that I am become a diligent anatomist of simple life-forms- a vocation more satisfying at the moment than the recording of human convulsions.

JUNE I 5

I have been diligently reading at Lyell in my long evenings, when I have done with my dissection, which I try to do whilst the light is good, between coming in from the walks and dining. I have abandoned the tall specimen-jars for a series of plain yellow pie dishes which sit about on all the available surfaces of my dining-room, containing Eolis pellucida, Doris billomellata, Aplysia and several varieties of polyps - Tubularian, Plumularian, Sertularian - exquisite little Aeolides and some compound Ascidians. It is hard indeed, Ellen, not to imagine that some Intelligence did not design and construct these perfectly lovely and marvellouslyfunctioning creatures - and yet it is hard also not to believe the weight of evidence for the Development Theory, for the changes wrought in all things, over unimaginable Time, by the gradual action of ordinary causes. Tell me, were you indeedable, or well enough, to hearProfessor Huxley's paper on "The Persistent Types of Animal Life"? He must argue, like Darwin, against repeated acts of Creation in the setting of a distinct species on the face of the earth - but rather for the gradual modification of existing species. Were you able to make any notes? They would be of the greatest value - in assuaging curiosity at least - to your enthusiastic amateur husband. Today I walked down the cliffs from Scarborough to see the awesome Flamborough Head, where so many have met terrible deaths, in the race of water and the powerful currents - which you can almost see and hear, chuckling beneath the slap of the high waves even on a good smiling day, as this was. The cliffs are chalky-white and carved andfaceted and sliced by the elements into fantastic shapes - which the superstitious might take for Divine sculptures, or petrified ancient giants. One stands out to sea - raising an impotent or menacing stump - like a bandaged member eaten by some white leprosy. There were two Rocks known as the King and Queen - of which the latter only is still standing. Lyell describes the whole of this coast as subject to gradual dilapidation and writes of the waste of Flamborough, which is being decomposed by the salt spray,theprocess, lower down the coast, being facilitated by the throwing out of many springs from the argillaceous beds.

It occurs to me to think - if salt water and fresh water may sopatiently - and with such inevitable blind causation - give form to these white marble caves and churches and inhuman Figures by sculpting with chisel, or by moulding with the pressure of the threads of water growing to a head in the spring, and cutting fine channels with droplets and the thrust of gravity -

If this mineralforce can createsuch forms as stalactites and stalagmites - why may not the channels of the ear or the vesicles of the heart - over millennia - respond to pressure and direction -?

How may what is born, is formed by gradual causes, transmit thisform to its offspring - transmit the type- tho the individual may fail? This if I mistake not, is not known. I may cut off a sprig of a tree - andgrow a whole tree - roots and crown and all from that - and how may that be? How does the twig-slip know to form root and branch?

We are a Faustian generation, my dear - we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know.

Lyell tells us also of many villages on this coast which have been engulfed by the waters - such are Auburn, Hartburn and Hyde as well as Aldbrough, which has moved inland. I have not been able to find that there aremyths or legends connected with these melancholy vanished communities - as I believe there are, for instance, in Britanny - butfishermen have found relics of houses and churches out on sandbanks in the midstoj the sea… However, if there is no drowned city of Is to torment my nights with underwater bells calling, I havefound a homely English sprite, a Hob, who inhabits a Hole, called naturally a Hob Hole. This genial Hob cures the whooping cough (known in this part of the world as the kink-cough). This Hob Hole is a cave in the cliff near the village of Kettleness - whichfell into the sea, one dark December night in 182c, sliding downwards all of a smooth piece.

You will be beginning to think I am in danger of drowning, or being engulfed in brine and sand. A wave whipped away a net I had left carelessly by my side when feeling in a deep pool on Filey Brigg for a recalcitrant Polyp - but I am unscathed, apart from a few honourable scratches from barnacle-crusts and infantmussels. I shall be restored to you in two weeks' time - with all my dead wonders of the deep -

"Mortimer Cropper claims to have traced every step of that holiday," Roland told Maud. " 'The long tramp to Pickering along the Roman Road must have made the Poet as footsore as it made me, though his keen eye must have remarked even more to please and interest him than I could see in these later times…' "

"He didn't imagine Ash had a companion?"

"No. Would you, reading those letters?"

"No. They read exactly like the letters of a solitary husband on holiday, talking to his wife of an empty evening. Unless it's significant that he never says 'Wish you were here' or even 'I wish you could see'-that's all a textual critic could make of it. Apart from the obvious reference to drowned Is which we knew he already knew about. Think about it-if you were a man in the excited state of the writer of the Christabel letters-could you sit down every evening and write to your wife-in front of Christabel, it would have to have been? Could you produce these-travelogues?"

"If I thought I must-for her sake-Ellen's-I might."

"It would require quite horrible self-control and duplicity. And they look such peaceable letters-"

"They do seem to be reassuring her-from time to time-"

"We would read that in, though, once we supposed-"

"And Christabel? Is anything known about her in June 1859?"

"There's nothing at all in the Archive. Nothing until Blanche dies in 1860. Do you think-?"

"What happened to Blanche?"

"She drowned herself. She jumped from the bridge, at Putney-with her clothes wetted and her pockets full of big round stones. To make sure. She's on record as admiring the heroism of Mary Wollstonecraft's suicide attempt from the same bridge. She obviously noted that Wollstonecraft found it hard to sink, because of her clothes floating."

"Maud-is it known why?"

"Not really. She left a note saying that she couldn't pay her debts and that she was a 'superfluous person,' 'of no utility' in this world. She hadn't a penny in the bank. The coroner diagnosed a temporary female imbalance of the mind. 'Women are known for strong and irrational alterations of temperament,' he said."

"Women are. Feminists use that argument about car accidents and exams-"

"Don't get distracted. I take your point. The thing is-scholars have always assumed Christabel was there-she gave evidence saying she'd been 'away from home at that time'-I've always assumed that meant a day or a week or two at the most-"

"What time of year did Blanche die?"

"June 1860. For a year before that we've nothing about Christabel-nothing but the Lincolnshire letters, that is. And some fragments of Melusina, we think, and a few fairy tales she sent toHome Notes including-wait a minute-one about a Hob who cures whooping cough. Not that that proves anything."

"He could have told her that story."

"She could have read it elsewhere. Do you think she did?"

"No. Do you think she went to Yorkshire?"

"Yes. But how can it be proved? Or disproved?"

"We could try Ellen's journal. Do you think you could approach Beatrice Nest? Without saying why, or connecting it with me?"

"That shouldn't be difficult."

A troupe of infant ghouls, white-sheeted and livid-green-faced, gambolled into the coffee room, and cried out for more juice, more juice, more juice. A child in a leotard and warpaint pranced beside them, the lines of his body more than apparent, a savage putto.

"What would Christabel have thought?" Roland asked Maud, who said: "She invented enough goblins. She knew well enough what we are. She doesn't seem to have been hampered by respectability."

"Poor Blanche."

"She came here-to this church-before she made up her mind to jump. She knew the Vicar. 'He surfers me as he suffers many maiden ladies with imagined pain. His Church is full of women, who may not speak there, who may embroider little stools but must not presume to offer sacred paintings-' "

"Poor Blanche."

"Hullo?"

"May I speak to Roland Michell?"

"He's not here. I don't know where he is."

"Could I leave a message?"

"If I see him, I can give him one. I don't always see him. He doesn't always read messages. Who's speaking?"

"My name is Maud Bailey. I just wanted him to know I'll be in the British Library tomorrow. To see Dr Nest."

"Maud Bailey."

"Yes. I wanted to talk to him first, if possible-in case anyoneit's rather delicate-I just wanted him to know -so he could make arrangements. Are you still there?"

"Maud Bailey."

"That's what I said. Hullo? Are you there? Who cut us off? Damn."

"Val?"

"What?"

"Is anything wrong?"

"No. Not particularly."

"You're behaving as though something is."

"Am I? How am I behaving? It makes a change for you to notice I'm behaving at all."

"You haven't said anything all evening."

"That's not unusual."

"No. But there are ways of not saying anything-"

"Forget about it. It's not worth bothering about."

"All right. I'll forget."

"I shall be out late tomorrow. That should suit you."

"I can work late in the BM. No problem."

"You'll enjoy that. There was a message for you. People seem to think I'm an eternal secretary, just taking down messages." A message? "Very de haut en bas. Your friend Maud Bailey. She'll be in the Museum tomorrow. I don't recollect the details."

"What did you say to her?"

"Now I've got you all worried. I didn't say anything. I put the phone down."

"Oh Val."

"Oh Val, Oh Val, Oh Val. That's all you ever say. I'm going to bed now. I must turn in for my long day tomorrow. A huge income-tax fraud, isn't that exciting?"

"Does Maud say I should… or shouldn't… did she mention Beatrice Nest?"

"I don't recollect, I told you. I shouldn't think so. Fancy her being in London, Maud Bailey…" If he had had it in him to raise his voice, to shout Don't be so ridiculous, and mean it, things might never have come to this.

If there had been more than one bed in the flat he could have used his natural defence, which was self-enfolded inattention. He woke now most mornings stiff with keeping himself to the edge of the mattress.

"It's not what you seem to think."

"I don't think anything. It's not my place to think anything. I'm not told anything. I don't share anything, so I don't think anything. I'm a superfluous person. Never mind."

And if this was in some terrible sense, not Val, where was she, lost, transmuted, in abeyance, what should he, what could he do? How was he responsible for this lost Val?

Maud and Beatrice began badly, partly because they found each other physically unsympathetic, Beatrice like an incoherent bale of knitting-wool and Maud poised and pointed and sharp. Maud had constructed a sort of questionnaire about Victorian wives, under headings, and worked her way slowly round to the question, which did interest her, of the nature of the reason for Ellen's writing. "I'm very keen to know if the wives of these so-called great men-

"He was a great man, in my opinion-"

"Yes. If their wives were content to rest in their husbands' glory or felt that they themselves might have achieved something if conditions had been favourable. So many of them wrote journals, often work, secret work, of very high quality. Look at Dorothy Wordsworth's marvellous prose-if she had supposed she could be a writer-instead of a sister-what might she not have done? What I want to ask is-why did Ellen write her journal? Was it to please her husband?"

Oh no.

"Did she show it to him?"

"Oh no. I don't think so. She never says so."

"Do you think she wrote it for publication, in any form?"

"That's a harder question. I think she knew it might be read. There are several sharp comments in it about contemporary biographical habits-rummaging in Dickens's desk before he was fairly buried and that sort of thing-the usual Victorian comments. She knew he was a great poet and she must have known they would come-the scavengers-sooner or later if she didn't burn it. And she didn't burn it. She burned a lot of letters, you know. Mortimer Cropper thinks Patience and Faith burned them, but I think it was Ellen. Some are buried with her."

"Why do you think she wrote the journal, Dr Nest? In order to have someone to talk to? As an examination of conscience? Out of a sense of duty? Why?"

"I do have a theory. It's far-fetched, I think."

"What is your theory?"

"I think she wrote it to baffle. Yes. To baffle."

They stared at each other. Maud said, "To baffle whom? His biographers?"

"Just to baffle."

Maud waited. Beatrice described helplessly her true experience: "When I started on it, I thought, what a nice dull woman. And then I got the sense of things flittering and flickering behind all that solid-oh, I think of it aspanelling. And then I got to think-I was being led on-to imagine the flittering flickering things-and that really it was all just as stolid and dull as anything. I thought I was making it all up, that she could have said something interesting- how shall I put it-intriguing-once in a while-but she absolutely wasn't going to. It could be an occupational hazard of editing a dull journal, couldn't it? Imagining that the author was deliberately baffling me?"

Maud looked back at Beatrice, baffled. She saw the outline of stalwart strapping under the so-soft speckled wool of Beatrice's bolster-like front. The wool was basically powder-blue. It was hugely vulnerable. Beatrice dropped her voice. "I expect you think I've very little to show for all these years of work on these papers. Twenty-five years to be precise, and sliding past at increasing speed. I've felt very conscious of that-that slowness-with the increasing interest shown by-your sort of scholar-people with ideas about Ellen Ash and her work. All I had was a sort of sympathy for the-helpmeet aspect of her-and to be truthful, Dr Bailey, a real admiration for him, for Randolph Ash. They said it would be better to-to do this task which presented itself so to speak and seemed appropriate to my-my sex-my capacities as they were thought to be, whatever they were. A good feminist in those days, Dr Bailey, would have insisted on being allowed to work on the Ask and Embla poems."

"Being allowed?"

"Oh. I see. Yes. On working on the Ask and Embla poems." She hesitated. Then: "I don't think you can imagine, Miss Bailey, how it was then. We were dependent and excluded persons. In my early days-indeed until the late 1960s-women were notpermitted to enter the main Senior Common Room at Prince Albert College. We had our own, which was small and slightlypretty. Everything was decided in the pub-everything of import-where we were not invited and did not wish to go. I hate smoke and the smell of beer. But should not therefore be excluded from discussing departmental policy. We were grateful for employment. We thought it was bad being young and-in some cases, not in mine-attractive-but it was worse when we grew older. There is an age at which, I profoundly believe, one becomes a witch, in such situations, Dr Bailey-through simple ageing-as always happened in history-and there are witch-hunts-

"You will think I am mad. I am trying to excuse twenty-five years' delay-with-personalities-You would have produced an edition twenty years ago. The truth is also, I wasn't sure it was right. If she would have liked what I was doing."

Maud felt a heat of fellow-feeling, unexpected and powerful. "Can't you give up? Do your own work?"

"I feel responsible. To myself, all those years. To her. "

"Could I see the journal? I'm particularly interested in 1859. I read his letters to her. The Yorkshire ones. Did she get to Huxley's lecture?"

Was this too blatant? Apparently not. Beatrice raised herself slowly and extracted the volume from a grey steel cabinet. She clasped it for a moment defensively.

"A Professor Stern came. From Tallahassee. She wanted to know-to know-to find out about Ellen Ash's sexual relations- with him-or anyone. I told her there was nothing of that kind in this journal. She said there must be-in the metaphors-in the omissions. We were not taught to do scholarship by studying primarily what was omitted, Dr Bailey. No doubt you find me naive."

"No. I occasionally find Leonora Stern naive. No, that's the wrong word. Single-minded and zealous. And she may have been right. Maybe what you find baffling is a systematic omission-"

Beatrice thought. "That I may grant. Something is omitted. I fail to see why it must be presumed to be-that kind of thing."

This dogged and flushed minor defiance struck another chord of fellow-feeling in Maud, who edged her chair closer and looked into the rumpled weary face. Maud thought of Leonora's ferocity, of Fergus's wicked playfulness, of the whole tenor and endeavour of twentieth-century literary scholarship, of a bed like dirty egg-white.

"I agree, Dr Nest. In fact I do agree. The whole of our scholar ship-the whole of our thought-we question everything except the centrality of sexuality-Unfortunately feminism can hardly avoid privileging such matters. I sometimes wish I had embarked on geology myself."

Beatrice Nest smiled and handed over the journal.

ELLEN ASH'S JOURNAL

JUNE 4TH 1859

The house is echoing and silent without my dear Randolph. I am full of projects for improvements in his comfort to be effected whilst he is away. The study curtains and those in his dressing-room must come down and be beaten out thoroughly on the line. I am in doubts as to the wisdom of attempting to wash the upper ones. The drawing-room pair I attempted have never been the same, either as to lustre or as to the "hang" of their folds. I shall set Bertha to a diligent beating and brushing and see what can be done. Bertha has been somewhat sluggish of late; she comes slowly when called and leaves tasks not rounded-off (the silver candlesticks, for instance, which have streaks of tarnish under the rims or the buttons on R's nightshirt, which are still deficient). I wonder if something is amiss with Bertha. After the uncertainties and dilapidations-and yes, violence and destruction-wrought by her predecessors I had hoped that Bertha would continue to be the half-invisible busy birdlike presence she commenced with so successfully. Is she unhappy or unwell? Both I fear but do not wish to think. Tomorrow I will ask her directly. She would be surprised if she knew what courage, and of what variable kinds (as to the disturbance of both her comfortable goings-on and my own) this requires of me. I lack my mother's force of character. I lack many things in which my dear mother was both proficient and naturally greatly endowed. Above all, when my dear one is away, I miss our hours of quiet reading to each other of an evening. I wondered whether to go on with our study of Petrarch, where he left off, and decided against it; it loses too much without his beautiful voice bringing to life the ancient passion of the Italian. I read a chapter or two of Lyell's Principles of Geology in order to share with him his enthusiasm for his study, and was equally charmed by the intellectual gravity of Lyell's vision and chilled by his idea of the aeons of inhuman time that went to the making of earth's crust-which is still, if he is to be believed, perpetually in process of making. And where may hide what came and loved our clay? as the Poet asked finely. I do not-unlike the Reverend Mr Baulk-feel that this newly-perceived ancient state of things impinges on our settled faith in any decisive way. Perhaps I am unimaginative or too instinctive or intuitive in my trust. If the Tale of Noah's Deluge turns out to be a fine poetic invention, shall I, the wife of a great poet, thereby cease to pay attention to its message about the universal punishment of sin? If the exemplary Life and mysteriously joyful Death of that greatest and only truly good Man were to be thought of as inventions that would be differently threatening.

And yet, to live in a time which has created a climate of such questioning… surely, after all, Herbert Baulk has cause for anxiety. He tells me I should not trouble my intellect with questions which my intuition (which he qualifies as womanly, virtuous, pure and so on and so on) can distinguish to be vain. He tells me I know that my Redeemer liveth, and looks eagerly for my assent to his proposition as though my assent provides him with strength also. Well, I assent. I do assent. I do know that my Redeemer liveth. But I should be grateful on earth if Herbert Baulk could respectably resolve his intellectual doubts so that our prayers could be full of honest praise and robust faith in a watchful Providence, rather than darkly riddling, as at present.

It is late for me to be writing this. I should not work so late if I was not alone-apart from the servants-in the house. I shall shut this book and betake myself to my pillow to fortify myself for the curtain-battle and the questioning of Bertha.

JUNE 6TH

This day brings a letter from Patience, who begs to stay here overnight with her brood, on the way to her seaside summer in Etretat. I must make her welcome-and indeed I shall be more than glad to exchange views and news of many dear ones unfortunately distant. But it is not a good time to receive any visit, with half the furnishings dismantled and a thorough inventory and washing of the china embarked on and not carried through, and some of the chairs under covers, and others being stitched by the useful Mr Beale. He discovered between the arm and the deep cushion of Randolph's study chair (the green leather tub chair) two guineas, the lost bill for candles which caused such a dispute, and the penwiper presented by the Ladies of St Swithin's church (and how they could have thought that anyone could have brought himself to sully all that fine work with ink blotches is beyond my comprehension). The chandelier is down and all its crystals are being carefully cleaned and polished. And into this more or less regulated disorder are to rush Enid, George, Arthur and Dora, who are as dangerous to crystal teardrops in their exaggerated carefulness as in any wanton playfulness. And yet they must come, of course. I have written to say so. Shall I retrieve or send away the chandelier? I dine in my study on broth and a slice of bread

.

JUNE 7TH

A letter from Randolph. He is well and pursuing his studies profitably. We shall have much to discuss on his return. I have had a sore throat and violent attacks of sneezing-maybe from all the dust aroused by the cleaning efforts-and retired to my couch for the afternoon, behind closed curtains, where I dozed only fitfully, not well. Tomorrow I must rouse myself to receive Patience. Bertha has made up beds for the children in the old Nursery. I have still not asked her if anything ails her-but she is if anything more sullen and more lethargic than she was a week ago.

JUNE 9TH

How fortunate that the Master of this house is absent, for it has in the last twenty-four hours been converted into a veritable Pandemonium. George and Arthur are sturdy little creatures, for which we must always be grateful, and the dear girls-in repose-have an air of great sweetness with their soft pale skins and large unclouded eyes. Patience refers to them as my angels-and so they are, they are, but the city of Pandemonium was peopled by fallen angels, and all four of my exquisite nephews and nieces have a great propensity to fall just where it is most inopportune, dragging down cloths, scattering posies, and in Georgie's case cannoning, just as I feared, into the china bowl containing the crystal drops from the chandelier which rattled like pebbles underwater. Patience's nursemaid is not a great disciplinarian though she is excellent and perpetual at kissing and cuddling. Patience smiles benignly and says she declares Grace loves the dear infants truly, which I am sure is the case.

I told Patience she looked blooming, which is not exactly so, but I hope God will forgive me a small white lie. I was a little shocked at the changes in her-a fading of lustre from the hair, a lining of her dear tired face, a loss of that trimness of figure in which she used so to delight. She declares frequently that she is well and happy, but complains also of shortness of breath, lumbar pains, incessant toothaches and headaches, and other insidious ailments which have persisted-strengthened their attack, she says-since her last lying-in. She says Barnabas is the most considerate husband a woman could have, in this situation. He is much occupied with his theological writings-he is not of Herbert Baulk's persuasion at all-and has hopes, Patience tells me, of a Deanery before too long.

JUNE I0TH

Patience and I have had time for much private conversation, both over dinner and because the bevy of cherubs flew out to Regent's Park for some air. We had a sharp-sweet reminiscing talk about the old days in the Close, and how we ran in the orchard and dreamed of being women. We talked quite girlishly of old fans and stockings and the pain of oppressive bonnets during long sermons and of the trials dear Mamma must have borne, giving birth to fifteen infants, of whom we four girl children only survived.

Patience with her customary acuteness observed immediately that something ailed Bertha, and made a shrewd guess as to what it might be. I said I should speak to Bertha, and had indeed been waiting for an opportune moment to do so. Patience said it could only harm Bertha and the household if it waited too long. Patience has a strong sense that it is contaminating to continue in the presence of sin. I said I felt we were enjoined to love the sinner, and Patience retorted that this did not entail cohabiting with the visible proof of the sin, unchastised. We remembered Mamma's fortitude in such situations, and how she felt it to be her duty to inflict chastisement herself on erring young women. I remember one in particular, poor Thyrza Collitt, running screaming from room to room and Mamma whirling after her with upraised arm. I shall never forget that screaming. I shall never beat any servant of mine, and nor, whatever she says, will Patience, though she claims Barnabas believes it to be, in certain judiciously selected circumstances, a salutary proceeding. I do not believe my dearest Randolph would ever consider applying his hand-or anything else-to any young person in our employment. I must ask Bertha to go, before he returns; it is my duty .

JUNE I2TH

My dear husband writes at length; he is well and his researches flourish. I have packed all my descriptions of my busy days into his long letter, which is posted, and have no time nor inclination to note here more than those things which it is not fitting he should be troubled with. There are flaws in two of the crystal teardrops-one large one from the central crown, and a less significant one from the peripheral circle. What shall I do? I am convinced-no, that is unjust-I have a propensity to suspect-that the accidental kicking of the crystal-bath by Arthur and Géorgie has shattered these two. I have said nothing to dearest R about these beaverings; I mean to surprise him with a home newly gleaming and radiant. I could attempt to replace the flawed droplets-but am convinced that could never be done in the time and would moreover be costly. I do not like to think of the thing hanging there with these cracks and chasms apparent in its surface. I have spoken to Bertha. It is as I thought and Patience said. She cannot be brought to say who is the responsible man-but denied strenuously, in a great burst of weeping, that he could possibly be required to take care of her, either by marrying, or in any other way. She expressed no penitence, but also no defiance, asking me only over and over "What can I do?" to which I have no sufficient answer. "It all continues on whatever I will," she strangely said. I said I should write to her mother, and she pleaded with me not to do so-"It would break her heart and set her obdurately against me forever," she said. Where will she go? What home can she have? What should I, in Christian charity, do for her? I do not want to trouble Randolph 's work with these matters, and yet am not empowered to do much for Bertha without his assent. There is also the dreadful problem of the replacement to be thought of, with all the fears of drunkenness, theft, breakages and moral corruption which go with such choices. Some ladies I know seek servants far afield and in country places-Cockney knowingness is a thing I find difficult to confront or command as I should. Patience says the servant classes are naturally ungrateful, lacking education. At times like this-when they must be encountered and judged and enquired into-I am led to wonder why they do not rather feel hatred? That hatred is what some do feel I am convinced. And I do not see how a true Christian can find a world of master and man to be "natural"- He came even to the least, and perhaps more urgently to the least-to the mean, to the poor-in goods or spirit.

If Randolph were here I could discuss this with him. Perhaps it is as well he is not-it belongs to my sphere of influence and responsibility.

JUNE

Patience and her brood departed this morning for Dover, all smiles and fluttering handkerchiefs. I hope they had a smooth crossing. I hope they enjoy to the full their seaside pleasures. Another letter is come from Randolph, just as they had set off, full (the letter that is) of sea air and breezes and other delightful free forces. London is brassy hot and heavy-I think we may have a storm. It is unnaturally quiet and sultry. I have resolved to consult Herbert Baulk about Bertha. I felt a headache coming on, and a sense of being flustered by the sudden silence and emptiness of my house again. I retired to my room and slept for two hours, waking somewhat refreshed, though with a vestigial headache

JUNE

Herbert Baulk came and stayed to take tea and talk. I proposed a game of chess-because I thought it might distract him from a too vehement expression of his doubts and certainties, and because I enjoy these miniature campaigns. He was pleased to tell me that I played very well for a lady-I was content to accept this, since I won handsomely.

I asked him about Bertha. He told me of an institution that makes very handsome provision for women in her position to be brought to bed and if at all possible re-established in a useful trade. He said he would inquire if she might be accepted-I was bold enough to engage myself-that is, my dearest Randolph-to contribute to her keep until her lying-in, if that might aid in securing a bed for her. He is told the dormitories are kept spotlessly clean by the exertions of the inmates themselves, and that the food is plain but nourishing, and cooked by the women themselves in the same way.

JUNE

I slept badly and as a result had a strange fragmented dream in which I was playing chess with Herbert Baulk, who had decreed that my Queen could move only one square, as his King did. I knew there was injustice here but could not in my dreaming folly realise that this was to do with the existence of my King who sat rather large and red on the back line and seemed to be incapacitated. I could see the moves She should have made, like errors in a complicated pattern of knitting or lace-but she must only lumpishly shuffle back and forth, one square at a time. Mr Baulk (always in my dream) said calmly, "You see I told you you could not win," and I saw it was so, but was unreasonably agitated and desirous above all of moving my Queen freely across the diagonals. It is odd, when I think of it, that in chess the female may make the large runs and cross freely in all ways-in life it is much otherwise.

Mr Baulk came again in the afternoon and spoke eloquently and at length about the wickedness of imputing fraudulent motives to the New Testament miracles, most especially that of the resurrection of Lazarus. He said inquiries were going on promisingly as to the institution for Bertha. I have not told her of it, lest her hopes be raised only to be dashed. She goes slowly and dully enough about her work, with a puffed face.

JUNE

A surprise! A small package came, containing a gift from my beloved Randolph, with a poem, all for me. He has been to Whitby, a fishing-town, where, he writes, the local people have a highly-developed art of polishing and carving jet which is cast up on their beaches and made by them into useful buttons and also decorative objects and jewellery. He sends me a most exquisite brooch, carved with a wreath of Roses of Yorkshire-all with their thorny twigs entwined and leafage-it is both artistic and wonderfully truthful. It is blacker than soot, and yet every way you turn its facets, it sparkles with light and a kind of angry energy of its own-one of the qualities of jet is that if rubbed it will attract light bodies, as in animal magnetism. It is a form of lignite, R. writes, obviously delighted with the substance, an organic stone, like coal, of course. I have some jet beads, and have seen many of course, but never any to match this for depth of darkness or brilliance of sheen.

I transcribe his poem here, for it is worth more to me than the lovely gift itself. Despite all We have been so happy in our life together, even our separations contribute to the trust and deep affection that is between us.

I love a paradox and so I send

White Yorkshire roses carved in sombre jet

Their summer frailty fixed here without end

A life in death but not funereal yet

As ancient forests in their black deaths warm

Our modern hearths with primal vanished light

So may our love, safe in your heart from harm

Shine on, when we are grey, and make us bright.

JUNE

Not a good day. I told Bertha she must go, and that Herbert Baulk would arrange for her to be received at the Magdalen Home if she consented to it. She answered me not a word but stared and stared, breathing very heavily, and a dark plum-red in colour, as though she was unable to take in what I was saying. I repeated that Mr Baulk had been very kind, and that she was very fortunate, and all I heard was this fierce sighing or panting breath, somehow filling my little sitting-room. I dismissed her, saying I expected an answer when she had thought over the offer; I should have added that I expected her to be away by the end of next week, but could not. What will become of her? The mail brought a whole heap of letters of the kind we are increasingly in receipt of-inclosing poems or parts of poems, pressed flowers for his Bible or Shakespeare, requests for autographs, recommendations (impertinent) for his reading, and humble or sometimes peremptory requests for him to read Epic Poems or treatises or even novels, which their authors believe may interest him, or may be helped by his recommendation. I answer those gently enough, wishing them well, and saying how very busy He is-which is quite true. How do they expect him to continue to "astonish and delight" them with "his recondite ideas," as one put it, if they do not leave him free time to pursue his reading and intricate thought? Among these letters was one requesting an interview with mepersonally in a matter of great importance, the writer said, to me myself. This too is not unusual-many, especially young women-appeal to me in order to come into close quarters with my dear one. I replied civilly that I did not grant personal interviews to strangers, as too many were requested, but that if the writer had anything very particular to communicate I would beg her in the first instance to write to me with some indication of the matter in question. We shall see if this produces anything or nothing, pertinence, or, as I suspect, something vague and crazed.

JUNE

A worse day. The headache seized me and I lay all day in a darkened bedroom, betwixt asleep and wake. There are many bodily sensations that are indescribable yet immediately recognisable, as is the smell of baking bread or that of metal polish, which could never be conveyed to one who had no previous experience of them. Such is the way in which the preliminary dizziness or vanishing incapacitates the body and intimates the headache to come. It is curiously impossible-once entered into this state-to imagine ever issuing out of it-so that the Patience required to endure it seems to be a total eternal patience. Towards evening it lifted a little. Another letter from the mysterious and urgent lady. A matter of life and death, she writes. She is well-educated, and if hysterical, not frantically so. I put the letter by, feeling too low in spirits to decide about it. The headache introduces one to a curious twilight deathly world in which life and death seem no great matter.

JUNE

Worse still. Dr Pimlott came and prescribed laudanum, which I found some relief in. During the afternoon there was a hammering at the door, and a distracted Bertha let in a strange lady who demanded to see me. I was at that time up, and sipping broth. I told her she might come back when I was recovered and she accepted this postponement briskly and nervously. I took more laudanum and went back into my dark room. No writer has written well enough of the Bliss of sleep. Coleridge wrote of the pains of sleep, and Macbeth speaks of a sleep foregone-but not of the bliss of relaxing one's grip of the world and warmly and motionlessly moving into another. Folded in by curtains, closed in by the warmth of blankets, without weight, it seems-

JUNE

Half a bad day, and half, as may happen, a good clear day, one might say, renewed. The furniture-cleaning has gone on well during my somnolent absence and all that-the arm-chairs, the table covers, the lamps, the screen-seems also renewed. My importunate visitor came and we talked some time. That matter is now I hope quite at an end and wholly cleared up.

JUNE

A Poet is not a Divine being, with an angelic vision. Randolph has always denied that description. He likes to use Wm Wordsworth's phrase, "a man speaking to men" and is, dare I say it, acquainted with more of the variety and vagaries of human nature than ever Words-worth was, who looked customarily inward. Herbert Baulk came and spoke with great kindness to Bertha, who, as before with me, said nothing, and stood a red-faced block. We played chess. I won.

JULY

This morning Bertha was found to be slipped away during the night, with all her possessions and some also of Jenny's, she claims, including a carpet-bag and a woollen shawl. Nothing belonging to this house appears to have been taken, though all the silver is out or ranged accessibly in drawers and cabinets. It may be she mistook the shawl, or that Jenny herself is mistaken. Where can she have gone? What should best be done? Should I write to her Mother? There are arguments for and against this-she did not wish her Mother to be told of her condition, but may now simply have taken refuge there. I gave Jenny one of my own shawls and one of our own travelling-cases. She was much pleased. Perhaps Bertha is gone to the man who [passage crossed out illegibly] Should we pursue her? She cannot have taken to the streets, as she is. If we find her, shall we appear retributive? That would not be my intention. I have done wrong in her regard. I have behaved less than well. Herbert Baulk is not a tactful man. But I knew that when I em barked on this course. I should have

JULY

Another bad day. I lay all day in bed with the curtains open, for I became superstitiously afraid of spending so long in a house with drawn curtains. A dull sun shone through rolling mist and fog. At even it was replaced by a smaller duller moon on an inky sky. I was motionless all day, in one position. I had a haven of painlessness and torpor and every other twist and turn was agony. How many days do we spend lying still, waiting for them to end, so that we may sleep. I lay suspended almost as Snow White lay maybe, in the glass casket, alive but out of the weather, breathing but motionless. Outside, in the weather, men suffer heat and cold and fluctuating air. When he returns, I must be quick and lively. It must be so.

Maud said, "She could write. I didn't immediately see what you meant by baffling. And then, I think I did. On the evidence of that part of the journal-I couldn't form a very clear idea of what she was like. Or if I liked her. She tells things. Interesting things. But they don't make a whole picture."

"Which of us do?" asked Beatrice."What happened to Bertha?"We never find out. She doesn't tell. Or even if she went after her."

"It must have been terrible for Bertha. She-Ellen-doesn't seem to see…"

"Doesn't she?"

"Oh, I don't know. She describes her clearly. Poor Bertha."

"Dust and ashes," Beatrice surprisingly said. "Long ago. And the child, if it was born."

"How frustrating, though. Not to know."

"Professor Cropper found the jet brooch. The very one. It's in the Stant Collection. On sea-green moiré silk, he told me. I've seen a photograph."

Maud ignored the brooch. "Do you have any ideas about the hysterical letter-writer? Or does she vanish without trace, like Bertha?"

"There is not more about her. Nothing more."

"Did she keep her letters?"

"Not all. Most. In bundles, in shoe-boxes. I've got them. Mostly fan-letters for him, as she says."

"Could we look?"

"If you're interested. I have looked at them all, once or twice. I had an idea about writing an article about Victorian precursors of, as it were, fan clubs. But I found it rather sickly when I came to it."

"Could I really see?" Beatrice turned her impassive stare on Maud's eager ivory face, and read something there, if not precisely. "Why not, I suppose…" she murmured, not moving. "What reason why not?"

The shoe-box was made of tough black cardboard, cracking with dryness and bound with tape. Beatrice, sighing and sighing, undid this, and there they were, neatly bundled, letter upon letter. They sifted the dates, opened envelopes, pleas for charity, offers of secretarial help, flowing screeds of passionate admiration, written to Randolph and addressed to Ellen. Beatrice checked the date and came up with a screed at once agitated and artistically written, faintly Gothic. And there it was.

Dear Mrs Ash,

Pleaseforgive the intrusion upon your most valuable time and attention. I am a gentlewoman, and at present totally unknown to you, but I have something to impart to you which closely concerns both of us and is in my case no less than a matter of life and death. Believe me I speak the cold truth, no more.

Oh how can I make you trust me? You must. May I trespass on your time andcome to seeyou? I shall not need to stay long - but I have that to tell you - -for which you maycome to thank me - or not - hut that is no matter - you must know -

I may befound at all times at the address which heads this letter. Believe me oh believe me, I wish to stand your friend.

Yours most sincerely

Blanche Glover

Maud closed her face and dropped her eyelids on what must be a glitter of pouncing. She said, trying to make her voice indifferent, "This looks like it. Any more? This looks like the second letter she mentions. Is the first one there?"

Beatrice riffled. "No. No more. At least-unless this is the same writing. It looks like the same paper. It's got no heading and no signature."

You did wrong to keep my Evidence. If it was not mine, it is also not yours. I beg of you to consider more carefully and to think better of me. I know how I may have appeared to you. I chose my words ill. But what I said was true and urgent, as you will come to see.

Maud sat, holding this sheet of paper, in an agony of indecision. What Evidence had Ellen kept? And of what? A clandestine correspondence or a trip to the Yorkshire Coast with a solitary biologising poet? What had Ellen felt or understood? Had Blanche handed her the purloined manuscript of Swammerdam? How could she make copies of precisely these documents without alerting Beatrice, and with Beatrice, surely, Cropper and Blackadder? A kind of imperious will in her tapped at her like a hammer, and was interrupted in its coding of a cunning request by Beatrice's woolly voice. "I don't know what you're up to, Dr Bailey. I don't know if I want to know. You came looking for something and you found it."

"Yes," said Maud in a whisper. She moved her long hands in a gesture of silence at the partition walls behind which lurked Black-adder and the Ash Factory.

Beatrice Nest's face was bland and patiently questioning.

"It isn't only my secret," Maud hissed. "Or I wouldn't have been disingenuous. I-I don't know what I've found, yet. I promise I'll tell you first when I do. I think I know what Blanche Glover told her. Well, one of two or three things it might have been."

"Was it important?" asked the grey voice, with no indication of whether the "importance" was scholarly, passionate or cosmic. "I don't know. It might change our views of-of his work, I suppose, a bit."

"What do you want of me?"

"A Xerox of those two letters. If it can be done, a copy of the Journal, between those dates. Not to tell Professor Cropper. Or Professor Blackadder. Yet. We discovered this ourselves-" Beatrice Nest seemed to think for a longish time, her face propped in her hands.

"This-what you're so excited about-it won't-it won't expose her to ridicule-or-misapprehension? I've become very concerned that she shouldn't be-exposed is the best word I suppose-exposed. "

"It isn't primarily to do with her."

"That is not necessarily reassuring." A maddening silence. "I suppose I shall trust you. I suppose I shall."

Maud walked briskly out through Blackadder's office, where Paola raised a languid hand; the Professor himself was not there. In the outer dark, in the corridor, however, a familiar Aran sweater whitened the murk, familiar gold hair shone.

"Surprise," said Fergus Wolff. "Surprise, ha?"

Maud drew herself up and made a dignified side-step."Wait a minute. I'm in a hurry."

"To do what? Pursue the labyrinthine coilings of the Melusina? Or to see Roland Michell?"

"Neither."

"Then stay."

I can't.

She stepped. He side-stepped. She stepped the other way. He was there. He put out a strong hand and clasped it like a handcuff on her wrist. She saw the egg-white bed.

"Don't be like that, Maud. I want to talk to you. I'm suffering terribly in about equal amounts of curiosity and jealousy. I can't believe you've got involved with sweet useless Roland and I can't understand what you're doing haunting the Crematorium here, unless you have."

"Crematorium?"

"Ash Factory." He was pulling on her arm while he talked so that her body and her briefcase were leaning towards his body, which put out its remembered flickers of electrification. "I need to talk to you, Maud. Let me buy you a good meal. Let's just talk. You're the most intelligent woman I know. I miss you terribly, you know, I should have said that, too."

"I can't. I'm busy. Let go, Fergus."

"Tell me what's going on at least, go on, do. If you tell me I'll be fearfully discreet.'

"There's nothing to tell."

"And if you don't tell me, I shall find out, and consider what I find out to be my own property, Maud."

"Let go of my wrist." A large black-uniformed, black-skinned woman appeared unsmiling behind them. "Please read the notices. Silence at all times in the book corridors."

Maud wrenched her wrist free and strode away. Fergus called after her "I warned you," and could be seen going into the Ash Factory, followed by the black wardress, rattling chains of keys.

Two days later Roland and Maud met in Oodles, the vegetarian restaurant at the end of Museum Street. Maud had brought the collection of xeroxed sheets that Beatrice had given her. She had had another unnerving experience trying to telephone Roland to arrange this meeting; she was also troubled by an enthusiastic letter from Leonora Stern, who had been given a grant by the Tarrant Foundation to come to England, and wrote enthusiastically: "next semester I shall be with you."

They stood in a queue and bought tepidly microwaved spinach lasagne; they then took refuge in the underground part of the restaurant, hoping to avoid curious eyes. Roland read Ellen's journal and Blanche's letters. Maud watched him and then said, "What do you think?"

"I think the only certain thing is that Blanche told Ellen something. Showed her the stolen letters, probably? I want to think Blanche did this because Christabel had gone to Yorkshire with Ash. It fits in beautifully. But it isn't proof."

"I can't think how we could prove it."

"I did have certain wild ideas. I thought of going through the poems-his and hers-written about then-with the idea that they might reveal something. I thought if I retraced his steps in Yorkshire -with the idea that she might have been there-and the poems in hand-I might get somewhere. We've already found one correlation no one could have thought of who wasn't looking for a connection. Randolph Ash wrote to his wife about a Hob who cured whooping cough and Christabel wrote a tale about one. And then Ash relates his interest in drowned Yorkshire villages to the City of Is as well as to Lyell. People's minds do hook together-"

"They do."

"One might find a cumulative series of such coincidences."

"It would be interesting, anyway."

"I even had a theory about water and fountains. I told you Ash's post-1860 poetry had this elemental streak-water and stones and earth and air. He mixes up geysers from Lyell with Norse myth and Greek mythical fountains. And Yorkshire waterfalls. And I wondered about the Fountain of Thirst in Melusina. "

"How?"

"Well, is there an echo here? This is out of Ask to Embla. It possibly links that fountain to the one in the Song of Songs, as well. Listen:

" 'We drank deep of the Fountain of Vaucluse

And where the northern Force incessantly

Stirs the still pool, were stirred. And shall those founts

Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed?' "

Maud said "Say that again." Roland said it again. Maud said, "Have you ever really felt your hackles rise? Because I just have. Prickles all down my spine and at the roots of my hair. You listen to this. This is what Raimondin says to Mélusine after he is told she knows he has looked at her in her marble bath and broken the prohibition:

" 'Ah, Mélusine, I have betrayed your faith.

Is there no remedy? Must we two part?

Shall our hearth's ash grow pale, and shall those founts

Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed?' "

Roland said, "Shall our hearth's ash grow pale."

"The image of the hearth runs all through Melusina. She built castles and homes; the hearth is the home."

"Which came first? His line or her line? There are problems about dating Ask to Embla-which we're obviously on the way to solving, among other things. It reads like a classic literary clue. She was a clever and hinting sort of woman. Look at those dolls."

"Literary critics make natural detectives," said Maud. "You know the theory that the classic detective story arose with the classic adultery novel-everyone wanted to know who was the Father, what was the origin, what is the secret?"

"We need," said Roland, carefully, "to do this together. I know his work, and you know hers. If we were both in Yorkshire- "

"This is all madness. We should tell Cropper and Blackadder and certainly Leonora and marshal our resources."

"Is that what you want?"

"No. I want to-to-follow the-path. I feel taken over by this. I want to know what happened, and I want it to be me that finds out. I thought you were mad, when you came to Lincoln with your piece of stolen letter. Now I feel the same. It isn't professional greed. It's something more primitive."

"Narrative curiosity-"

"Partly. Could you manage a few days' field research at Whitsuntide?"

"It might present difficulties. Things aren't easy at home. As you may have noticed. If you and I-went up there-it wouldn't be liked. It would be misconstrued."

"I know, I understand. Fergus Wolff thinks. He thinks. He professes to believe-that you and I… "

"How dreadful-"

"He threatened me in the Library with finding out what we were up to. We must watch him."

Roland considered Maud's embarrassment and did not ask what were her feelings about Fergus Wolff. That they were violent was clear. Equally he did not intend to discuss Val.

"People who are going off on real naughty weekends manage to find excuses," he said. "Put up smoke-screens. It happens all the time, I'm told. I don't see why I shouldn't think of something. Money's more of a problem."

"What you need is a small research grant to look at something not too far away from Yorkshire and not too near either-"

"Ash did some work in York Minster Library-"

"Something like that."