Possession. A Romance

Chapter 28

The Rowan Tree Inn stands about a mile outside Hodershall, in the shelter of a curve of the North Downs. It was built of flint and slate in the eighteenth century, and is long and low, under a mossy slate roof. It fronts a meandering road, now modernised and widened, which cuts across largely bare downland; across the road, a further mile up a long grassy track, is the Hodershall Parish Church, built in the twelfth century, squat and stony, also under a slate roof, with an unassuming tower and a weathercock in the shape of a flying dragon. These two buildings stand apart from Hodershall village, behind the arm of the down. The Rowan Tree has twelve bedrooms, five along the main road front, and seven more in a modern annexe, built in the same local stones, behind the original building. It has an orchard, with tables and wooden swings for summer visitors. It is mentioned in all the Good Food guides.

On October fifteenth it had few visitors. The weather was warm for the time of year-the trees still had their leaves-but very wet. Five of the bedrooms were taken, two of them by Mortimer Cropper and Hildebrand Ash. Cropper had the best bedroom, over the solidly handsome front door, looking out to the track to the church. Hildebrand Ash was next to him. They had been there a week, and had gone for long tramps along the Downs in all weathers, well protected with high boots, waxed jackets and portable parkas. Mor-timer Cropper said, once or twice in the bar, which was panelled and dark, with shining gold hints of brass and dark green shades on its discreet lights, that he was thinking of buying a home in the district, a place in which to settle and write for part of the year. He visited various house agents and looked at various estates. He was knowledgeable about forestry and interested in organic farming.

On the fourteenth, Ash and Cropper went into Leatherhead and visited the offices of Densher and Winterbourne. They stopped at a garden centre on their way out of the town and purchased-for cash-various heavy-duty spades and forks and a pickaxe, which they stowed in the boot of the Mercedes. On the afternoon of the fourteenth, they took a walk to the church, which was, as usual, locked against vandals, and wandered round the churchyard, looking at the gravestones. There was a notice at the entrance to the little graveyard, which was fenced with crumbling iron railings; the notice informed them that this parish, the parish of St Thomas, was part of a group of three parishes, of which the Reverend Percy Drax was vicar. Holy Eucharist and Morning Prayer were held there on the first Sunday of every month; Evensong on the last.

"I don't know this Drax," said Hildebrand Ash.

"A most unpleasant person," said Mortimer Cropper. "The Schenectady Poetry Fellowship made a presentation to this church of an inkwell Ash had used on his American tour, and some of his books he had signed for American admirers, with his photograph pasted in. They presented a glass case as well, to display the treasures; Mr Drax has sited it in a mostobscure corner and covered it with a dusty baize pall and absolutely no external indication of its nature, so that it is entirely missed by the casual visitor…"

"Who can't get in anyway," said Hildebrand Ash.

"Precisely. And this Drax is very hostile to being asked for keys by Ash scholars and admirers who wish to pay their respects. He says-he has written to me in letters-that the church is God's house, not Randolph Henry Ash's mausoleum. I see no contradiction."

"You could buy the things back."

"I could. I have offered substantial donations to him even for the loan of the objects. The books are already represented in the Stant Collection, but the inkwell is unique. He replies that unfortunately it is not in the terms of the gift that the objects may be disposed of. He is not interested in ways of altering the terms of the gift. He is positively surly."

"We could take them too," said Hildebrand. "While we were at it."

He laughed, and Mortimer Cropper frowned.

"I am not a common thief," he said severely. "It is only that box-whose contents we may only guess at-the thought of it decaying in the ground until such time as we acquire the legal right to exhume it-the thought of perhaps never knowing-"

"The value-"

"The value is partly the value I set on it."

"Which is high," said Hildebrand, with a question.

"Which is high even if it contains nothing," said Cropper. "For my peace of mind. But it will not contain nothing. I know."

They took a turn or two about the churchyard. Everything was quiet, English and dripping. The graves were mostly nineteenth-century with some earlier and a few later. The grave of Randolph and Ellen was at one edge of the churchyard, in the shelter of a kind of grassy knoll, or mound, on which grew an ancient cedar and an even older yew, screening the quiet corner from the eyes of anyone on the path to the church door. The railings were just beyond the grave and beyond them a field, closely cropped, of down grass, containing a few stolid sheep and a little stream, bisecting it. Someone had already been digging; green turfs were neatly stacked against the rails. Hildebrand counted thirteen.

"One for the head and a double row for the length of the… I could do that. I can cut turfs, I take an interest in our lawn. Are you thinking of trying to leave it so it looks undisturbed?"

Cropper thought. "We could try that. Put it all back real neatly and stow it with old leaves and things, and hope it grows back before anyone notices who might think twice. We should try that."

"We could set up a diversion. Leave a trail of false clues so it looked as if we were Satanists, practising a black mass or something." Hildebrand gave another snort and long high chuckle of solitary laughter. Cropper looked at his heavy pink face and felt twinges of fastidious distaste. He was going to have to spend much more of his time than would be pleasant in this banal creature's company.

"Our best hope is that nobody notices. Anything else is bad-if anyone notices at all that the grave has been disturbed, they will also notice our presence here quite likely. And put two and two together. Then we just fake it out. If we find the box and take it away, no one can prove it ever existed, even if they dig again and have a look. Which they won't. Drax won't let them. But our best hope-I repeat-is to be unobtrusive."

On their way out of the churchyard they passed two other visitors, a man and a woman, green-clad in quilted jackets and Wellingtons against the pervasive rain, blending into the background in an English way. They were examining the sculpted heads of laughing cherubs or baby angels on two tall leaning stones; the little creatures rested their dimpled feet on footstool skulls. "Morning," said Hildebrand, in his country English voice, and "Morning" they replied, in the same tone. Nobody met anyone else's eye; it was very English.

On the fifteenth Cropper and Hildebrand dined together in the restaurant, which was panelled like the bar, and had a cheerful log fire burning in the stone fireplace. Cropper and Hildebrand were to one side of this; a young couple, who had attention only for each other, and who were holding hands across the table, had the other. Cracking oil portraits of eighteenth-century parsons and squires, half obscured and blackened by candle-smoke and thickened varnish, stared down heavily from the panels. They ate by candlelight, salmon mousse in lobster sauce, pheasant with all the trimmings, Stilton, sorbet cassis maison. Cropper savoured it all with regret. He was not going to be able to come back here for some considerable time, and he had enjoyed his visits to this part of the world. He liked the Rowan Tree Inn; it had romantically uneven floors, paved on the ground floor, creaking under carpets above; its corridors were so low and narrow that he was forced to stoop his tall head. The water made strange thumping and hawking sounds, which he treasured as he treasured, with equal love, the endless silver flow in his streamlined, gold-tapped bathroom in New Mexico. Both were good of their kind, snug, cramped, ancient smoky England, and the dry sun, the glass, the airy steel, the expansiveness of New Mexico. His blood was running, he was excited, as he always was when truly on the move, when his mind hung, like the moon, over his trajectory from one earth-mass to another, when he was neither here nor there. Only this time, more than ever. He had spent the time before dinner in his room, running through exercises and routines, limbering up, contorting his muscles, swaying and twisting and punching and coercing his body into suppleness. He liked that. He looked good, still. He stood in front of a cheval glass in his special exercise clothes, long black pants and terry-cloth sweater. He resembled his piratical ancestors, or a film version of them, his silvery hair romantically dishevelled on his brow.

Hildebrand said, "And tomorrow, USA, here we come. I've never been, you know. Only seen it on telly. You'll have to teach me about giving lectures."

Cropper thought that perhaps he could, or should, have done it all entirely alone. But then it would have been absolute theft, absolute intrusion, whereas this way, he was only speeding up a natural process, buying from Hildebrand what would have been his in any case, later, a very little later, if he was to be believed about Lord Ash's state of health.

"Where have you parked the Merc?" said Hildebrand.

"Tell me about your-" said Cropper, casting about for a safe topic of conversation. "Tell me about your gardening, about your lawn."

"How did you know about my lawn?”

“You told me. Never mind why, now. What sort of garden do you have?"

Hildebrand began a long description. Cropper looked round the dining-room. The honeymoon couple had their heads together over their table. The man, smoothly handsome, in what Cropper recognised as a Christian Dior wool and cashmere jacket in dark peacock, took their joined hands to his mouth and kissed the inside of the girl's wrists. She wore an ivory silk shirt, displaying an amethyst necklace on a smooth throat, above a purple skirt. She caressed her partner's hair, evidently in that obsessive and compulsive state that excludes, for brief periods of human lives, all consciousness of other observers.

"How late shall we have to leave it?" said Hildebrand. "We won't discuss that here," said Cropper. "Tell me about- about-”

“Have you told them we're checking out?”

“I paid them for tomorrow night.”

“It's a good night. Nice and quiet. Good moon." On the way up to their bedrooms they crossed the young couple, both coming out of the wooden telephone cubicle in the hall.

Mortimer Cropper inclined his head. Hildebrand said "Goo' night.”

“Good night," said the couple, together. "We're going to bed early," said Hildebrand. "Done in with the exercise." The girl smiled and took hold of her companion's arm. "So are we. Going to bed. Good night. Sleep well."

Cropper waited until one o'clock to go out. Everything was quiet. The fire still smoked. The air was heavily still. He had parked the Mercedes by the car park gate; there was no problem about getting back to the hotel, as the room-keys all had Yale keys attached for the front door. The great car purred away smoothly, across the road, up the track to the church. Cropper parked it under a tree by the church gate, and got out storm lanterns and his newly purchased implements from the boot. It was raining a little; the ground underfoot was wet and slippery. He and Hildebrand made their way in the dark to the Ashes' grave. "Look," said Hildebrand, standing in a patch of moonlight between the church and the knoll with the yews and the cedar. A huge white owl circled the church tower, unhurried, powerful and entirely silent, intent on its own business.

"Spooky," said Hildebrand Ash.

"A beautiful creature," said Mortimer Cropper, somehow identifying his own excitement, his own sense of potency and certainty in his muscles and mind with the measured wing beat, the easy, easy floating. Above the owl, the dragon moved a little, this way, that way, creaking, desisting, catching a desultory air movement.

They had to move fast. It was a lot of work, potentially, for two men, before daylight. They cut and stacked turf. Hildebrand said, panting, "Do you have any idea whereabouts it might be?" and Cropper realised that although he had indeed a very precise idea, that the thing lay somewhere about the heart of the larger-than-man-size space of the plot of land, this idea had been nurtured in his own hot imagination; he had seen the scene of the box's reinterment so often, so often in his mind's eye, that he had invented the place. But not for nothing was he the descendant of spiritualists and Shakers. He gave weight to intuition. "We'll start at the head," he said, "and excavate a decent depth, and progress towards the feet in an orderly way.

They dug. They threw up an increasing mound, a mixture of clay and flints, chopped ends of roots, small bones of vole and bird, stones, sifted pebbles. Hildebrand grunted as he worked, his bald head glinting in the moonlight. Cropper swung his spade with a kind of joy. He felt he was over some border of the permissible and everything was just fine. He was not a grey old scholar, smelling of the lamp, sitting on his fundament. He was doing, he would find, it was his destiny. He poised his sharp spade above the earth and struck and struck with a terrible glee, slicing, penetrating the sloppy and the resistant. He took off his jacket, and felt the rain on his back with pleasure, and his own sweat trickling between his shoulder-blades and down his breast, with joy. He struck, he struck, he struck. "Steady on," said Hildebrand, and "Keep going," hissed Cropper, pulling with his bare hands at a long snake of the yew's root system, getting out his heavy knife to cut it.

"It is here. I know it is here."

"Go steady. We don't want to disturb the-disturb-if we can help it.”

“No. We shouldn't have to. Keep at it." A wind was getting up. It flapped a little: one or two of the churchyard trees creaked and groaned. A sudden gust lifted Cropper's discarded jacket briefly from the stone where it hung, and dropped it to the earth. Cropper thought, as he had not precisely thought so far, that at the bottom of the pit he was excavating, lay Randolph Ash and his wife, Ellen, or what was left of them. The storm-light showed only slice-marks of their spades and raw, cold-smelling soil. Cropper snuffed the air. Something seemed to move and swing and sway in it, as if ready to slap at him. He felt for a moment, very purely, a presence, not of someone, but of some mobile thing, and for a moment rested dully on his spade, forbidden. In that moment, the great storm hit Sussex. A long tongue of wind howled past, a wall of air banged at Hildebrand, who sat down suddenly in the clay, winded. Cropper began to dig again. A kind of dull howling and whistling began, and then a chorus of groans, and creaking sighs, the trees, protesting. A tile spun off the church roof. Cropper opened his mouth and shut it again. The wind moved in the graveyard like a creature from another dimension, trapped and screaming. The branches of the yew and cedar gesticulated desperately.

Cropper went on digging. "I will," he said. "I will."

He told Hildebrand to go on, but Hildebrand couldn't hear and wasn't looking; he was sitting in the mud next to a gravestone, clutching the neck of his jacket, fighting the air that had worked its way inside.

Cropper dug. Hildebrand began to crawl slowly round the rim of Cropper's excavation. The very bases of the yew and the cedar began to shift, to move laterally and to complain.

Hildebrand pulled at Cropper's sleeve.

"Stop. Go in. This is-beyond the limit. Not safe. Shelter." Horizontal rain whipped and sliced the flesh of his cheeks. "Not now," said Cropper, poising his spade like a divining rod, and struck again.

He hit metal. He got down to the earth and scrabbled with his hands. It came up-an oblong thing, covered with corrosion, a nugget recognisably shaped. He sat down, on the adjacent stone, clutching it.

The wind prised at the church roof and flung off a few more tiles. The trees cried out and swung. Cropper pushed at the box with useless fingers, chipped at a corner with a knife. The wind took his hair and turned it in mad spirals round his head. Hildebrand Ash had his hands over his ears. He edged closer and cried in Cropper's ear.

"This? It?"

"Right. Size. Yes. This is It."

"What now?"

Cropper gestured at the hole.

"Fill that. I'll put my box in the trunk of the car-"

He set out across the churchyard. The air was full of noises. There was a whining, ripping noise, which he saw was the sound of the trees along the track and in the hedgerow whipping to and fro, tossing their crowns of trailing twigs from earth to sky to earth. More tiles cut the air with a sound of their own, and hit the ground, or gravestones, with keen crashing explosions. Cropper hurried on, bearing his box, his face smeared with flying leaves and with streaks of sap. Nevertheless, as he went, he fingered his find, seeking, and touching, the edge of the box's rim. As he struggled with the gate to the churchyard, which danced dementedly on its hinges, bucked under his hand and so saved him, he heard a sound of something rising and bursting in the earth, as he had seen oil gushers do in Texas, and mixed with this another sound, tearing, straining, creak ing so horridly loudly that its creaks were an outcry. Around his very feet the earth quaked and moved; he sat down; there was a sound of rending and a great mass of grey descended before his eyes like a tumbling hill, accompanied by the sweeping sound of a whole mass of leaves and fine branches whipping the moving air. The final sound of all these-except the original rushing, which persisted- was a mixture of drums, cymbals, and theatrical thundersheet. His nostrils were full of wet soil and sap and gasoline fumes. A tree had fallen directly across the Mercedes. His car was gone, and his path back to the inn was barred, by one tree at least, possibly by many.

He came back towards Ash's grave, pushing against a howling tide of air, hearing other trees crash all around. As he came to the knoll and turned his storm lantern on it, he saw the yew tree throw up its arms and a huge gaping white mouth appear briefly in the reddish trunk, close to the thick base of the tree, which leaned giddily over, and went on cracking slowly, slowly, descending in a burst of needle-leaves, and finally snapping and shuddering to rest across the grave, obscuring it utterly. He could now go neither forwards nor backwards. He cried out "Hildebrand!" and his own voice seemed to curl uselessly back like smoke in his face. Was he safer nearer the church? Could he get there? Where was Hildebrand? There was a momentary lull and he called again.

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 Mitchell, 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 Maclntyre. 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 arevery ill. I do ill to disturb your peace at this time, with unseasonablememories - 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. Youwill see - she isbeautiful - 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 itshistory - or owe myself, it may be -I have sinned against you - but for causes -

All History is hardfacts - 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 andnever for a moment look back. And I meant to keep my side of it for pride's sake andfor yours, whatever might c ome. So I made arrangements - you would not believe how I calculated and schemed - Ifound a place to go - (which you later discovered, I know) where I should make no one but myself responsible for ourfate - 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 andfortifies resolution - andso 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 awaythe dressings from my spirit's wounds, and I thought, as women will, you might suffer a little with my good will, f or 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'sgood fortune (in the pecuniary sense) and I write to you, as if it wasyesterday, of all that rage like iron bands burning round mybreast, 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 caredfor us - -for me andfor Maia - but I had a secret f ear - here it all tumbles out, afterall - but Truthis 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 herfrom you - and youfrom 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 - hut 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 sweetdays 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 eachother.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 andfeed 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 - shefeels, rightly, a too-much in my concernfor 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 secretfor nigh on thirty years (think, Randolph, thirty years), without b ringing 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 herfair 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'Dancing and playing 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 Jive. 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 closedcastle, behind my motte-and-bailey defences - should I have been a greatpoet - 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 eachother -for eachother - only it was in the endforMaia (who will have nothing of her 'strange name' and is called p lain May, which becomes her).

I have been so angryfor so long - with all of us, with you, withB lanche, with my poor self. And now near the end "in calm of mind allpassion 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 rusts in order ranged

Of tame villatic fowl-

Is not that fine? Did we not-did you not flame, and I catchfire?Shall w e 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 Godfor you - if there must be a Dragon - that He was You -

I must give up this writing. One more thing. Yourgrandson (and mine, most strange). His name is Walter and he chants verses to the amazement ofhis stable- and furrow-besotted parents. I have taught him much ofthe Ancient Mariner: he recites the passage of the blessing of the snakes, and thevision of the glittering eye of the ocean cast up to the moon, most feelingly, and his owneyes arebright 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 notask, 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 -" Hildebrand said, "I don't understand-" Euan said, "Unfortunately, illegitimate children couldn't inherit at that time. Or you, Maud, would be the outright owner of the whole mass of documents. I suspected something like this might be the case. Victorian families often looked after bastards in this way, hiding them in legitimate families to give them a decent chance-"

Blackadder said, "How strange for you, Maud, to turn out to be descended from both-how strangely appropriate to have been exploring all along the myth-no, the truth-of your own origins."

Everyone looked at Maud, who sat looking at the photograph. She said, "I have seen this before. We have one. She was my great-great-great-grandmother." Beatrice Nest was in tears. They rose to her eyes and flashed and fell. Maud put out a hand.

"Beatrice-"

"I'm sorry to be so silly. It's just so terrible to think-he can't ever have read it, can he? She wrote all that for no one. She must have waited for an answer-and none can have come-" Maud said, "You know Ellen. Why do you think she put it in the box-with her own love-letters-”

“And their hair," said Leonora. "And Christabel's hair, it must be, the blond-"

Beatrice said, "She didn't know what to do, perhaps. She didn't give it to him, and she didn't read it-I can imagine that-she just put it away-"

"For Maud," said Blackadder. "As it turns out. She preserved it, for Maud." Everyone looked at Maud, who sat whitely, looking at the picture, holding the manuscript.

Maud said, "I can't go on thinking. I must sleep. I'm exhausted. We shall think of all this in the morning. I don't know why it's such a shock. But." She turned to Roland. "Help me find a bedroom to sleep in. All these papers should go to Professor Blackadder, for safe-keeping. I'd like to keep the photograph, just tonight, if I may."

Roland and Maud sat side by side on the edge of a four-poster bed, hung about with William Morris golden lilies. They looked at the photograph of Maia's wedding-day, in the light of a candle, held in a silver chamber-candlestick. Because it was hard to see, their heads were close together, dark and pale, so that they could smell each other's hair, still full of the smells of the storm, rain and troubled clay and crushed and flying leafage. And underneath that, their own particular, separate human warmths.

Maia Bailey smiled up at them serenely. They read her face now in the light of Christabel's letter, and thus saw it, amongst all its silvery spangles and shine of ageing, as a happy confident face, wearing its thick wreath with a certain ease, and feeling pleasure, not drama, in the occasion.

"She looks like Christabel," said Maud. "You can see it."

"She looks like you," said Roland. He added, "She looks like Randolph Ash, too. The width of the brow. The width of the mouth. The end of the eyebrows, there."

"So I look like Randolph Henry Ash."

Roland touched her face. "I would never have seen it. But yes. The same things. Here, at the corner of the eyebrow. There, at the edge of the mouth. Now I have seen it, I shall always see it."

"I don't quite like it. There's something unnaturally determined about it all. Daemonic. I feel they have taken me over.”

“One always feels like that about ancestors. Even very humble ones, if one has the luck to know them." He stroked her wet hair, gently, absently. Maud said, "What next?”

“How do you mean, what next?”

“What happens next? To us?”

“You will have a lot of legal problems. And a lot of editing to do. I-I have made some plans.”

“I thought-we might edit the letters together, you and I?”

“That's generous, but not necessary. You turn out to be a central figure in this story. I only got into it by stealing, in the first place.

I've learned a lot.”

“What have you learned?”

“Oh-something from Ash and Vico. About poetic language.

I'm-I-I have things I have to write.”

“You seem angry with me. I don't understand why."

"No, I'm not. That is, yes, I have been. You have your certainties. Literary theory. Feminism. A sort of social ease, it comes out with Euan, a world you belong in. I haven't got anything. Or hadn't. And I grew-attached to you. I know male pride is out of date and unimportant, but it mattered."

Maud said, "I feel-" and stopped.

"You feel?"

He looked at her. Her face was like carved marble in the candle light. Icily regular, splendidly null, as he had often said to himself.

He said, "I haven't told you. I've got three jobs. Hong Kong, Barcelona, Amsterdam. The world is all before me. I shan't be here, you see, to edit the letters. They aren't to do with me."

Maud said, "I feel-"

"What?" said Roland.

"When I feel-anything-I go cold all over. I freeze. I can't- speak out. I'm-I'm-not good at relationships."

She was shivering. She still looked-it was a trick of her lovely features-cool and a little contemptuous. Roland said, "Why do you go cold?" He kept his voice gentle.

"I-I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of possession if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and-"

"Beautiful."

"Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don't want that. It kept happening."

"It needn't."

"Even you-drew back-when we met. I expect that, now. I use it.”

“Yes. But you don't want-do you-to be alone always. Or do you?

"I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on doingmy work. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going. You understand?"

Oh yes.

"I write about liminality. Thresholds. Bastions. Fortresses."

"Invasion. Irruption."

Ot course. "It's not my scene. I have my own solitude.”

“I know. You-you would never-blur the edges messily-”

“Superimpose-”

“No, that's why I-”

“Feel safe with me-”

“Oh no. Oh no. I love you. I think I'd rather I didn't.”

“I love you," said Roland. "It isn't convenient. Not now I've acquired a future. But that's how it is. In the worst way. All the things we-we grew up not believing in. Total obsession, night and day. When I see you, you look alive and everything else-fades. All that."

"Icily regular, splendidly null.”

“How did you know I used to think that?”

“Everyone always does. Fergus did. Does.”

“Fergus is a devourer. I haven't got much to offer. But I could let you be, I could-”

“In Hong Kong, Barcelona and Amsterdam?”

“Well, certainly, if I was there. I wouldn't threaten your auton omy.”

“Or be here to love me," said Maud. "Oh, love is terrible, it is a wrecker-”

“It can be quite cunning," said Roland. "We could think of a way-a modern way-Amsterdam isn't far-" Cold hand met cold hand. "Let's get into bed," said Roland. "We can work it out.”

“I'm afraid of that too.”

“What a coward you are after all. I'll take care of you, Maud." So they took off their unaccustomed clothes, Cropper's mul ticoloured lendings, and climbed naked inside the curtains and into the depths of the feather bed and blew out the candle. And very slowly and with infinite gentle delays and delicate diversions and variations of indirect assault Roland finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him, so that there seemed to be no boundaries, and he heard, towards dawn, from a long way off, her clear voice crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in pleasure and triumph.

In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.