Possession. A Romance

Chapter 4

The Thicket is Thorny

Up snakes the glassy Tower

Here is no sweet Dovecote

Nor plump Lady's Bower

The wind whistles sourly

Through that Sharp land

At the black casement

He sees her white hand

He hears the foul Old One

Call quavering there

Rapunzel Rapunzel

Let down your Hair

Filaments Glosses

Run trembling down

Gold torrent loosened

From a gold Crown

The black claws go clutching

Hand over hand

What Pain goes shrilling

Through every strand!

Silent he watches

The humped One rise

With tears of anguish

In his own eyes

-CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE

When Roland arrived in Lincoln he was already irritated by having to take the train. It would have been cheaper to have taken the coach, if longer, but Dr Bailey had sent a curt postcard telling him it would be best for her to meet him off the noon train; the campus was some way out of town, it would be best that way. On the train, however, it was possible to try to catch up on what there was to know about Christabel LaMotte. His college library had provided two books. One was very slim and ladylike, written in 1947 and entitled White Linen after one of Christabel's lyrics. The other was a fat collection of feminist essays, mostly American, published in 1977: Herself Herself Involve, La-Motte's Strategiesof Evasion.

Veronica Honiton provided some biographical information. Christabel's grandparents, Jean-Baptiste and Emilie LaMotte, had fled to England in the Terror of 1793 and had settled there, choosing not to return after the fall of Bonaparte. Isidore, born in 1801, had gone to Cambridge, and toyed with writing poetry, before becoming a serious historian and mythographer

much influenced by German researchers on folk-tales and the origins of biblical narrative, but staunch in his own mystical Breton brand of Christianity. His mother, Emilie, was an older sister of the republican and anticlerical historian, also a folklore enthusiast, Raoul de Kercoz, who still maintained the family manor of Kernemet. In 1828 Isidore married Miss Arabel Gum-pert, daughter of Canon Rupert Gumpert of St Paul 's, whose firm religious faith was a powerful steadying influence on Christabel's childhood. There were two daughters of the marriage, Sophie, born in 1830, who became the wife of Sir George Bailey, of Seal Close, in the Lincolnshire Wolds, and Christabel, born in 1825, who lived with her parents until in 1853 a small independence, left her by a maiden aunt, Antoinette de Kercoz, enabled her to set up house in Richmond in Surrey, with a young woman friend whom she had met at a lecture of Ruskin's.

Miss Blanche Glover, like Christabel, had artistic ambitions, and painted large canvases in oil, none of which have survived, as well as carving the skilful and mysterious wood engravings which illustrate Christabel's delightful, if slightly disquieting, Talesfor Innocents, and Tales Told in November, and her religious lyrics, Orisons. It is believed to be Miss Glover who first encouraged Christabel to embark on the grandiose and obscure epic poem, The Fairy Melusina, a retelling of the old tale of the magical half-woman, half-snake. The rifts of the The Fairy Melusina are heavily overloaded with ore; during the Pre-Raphaelite Period it was admired by certain critics, including Swinburne, who called it, "a quiet, muscular serpent of a tale, with more vigour and venom than is at all usual in the efforts of the female pen, but without narrative thrust; rather, as was Cole-ridge's Serpent who figured the Imagination, with its tail stuffed in its own mouth." It is now deservedly forgotten. Christabel's reputation, modest but secure, rests on the restrained and delicate lyrics, products of a fine sensibility, a somewhat sombre temperament, and a troubled but steadfast Christian faith.

Miss Glover was unfortunately drowned in the Thames in 1861. The death seems to have had a distressing effect on Christabel, who returned eventually to her family, living with her sister Sophie for the rest of her quiet and uneventful life. After Melusina she appears to have written no more poetry, and retreated further and further into voluntary silence. She died in 1890 aged sixty-six.

Veronica Honiton's comments on Christabel's poetry concentrated sweetly on her "domestic mysticism," which she compared to George Herbert's celebration of the servant who "sweeps a room as for Thy laws."

I like things clean about me

Starched and gophered frill

What is done exactly

Cannot be done ill

The house is ready spotless

Waiting for the Guest

Who will see our white linen

At its very best

Who will take it and fold it

And lay us to rest.

Thirty years later the feminists saw Christabel LaMotte as distraught and enraged. They wrote on "Ariachne's Broken Woof: Art as Discarded Spinning in the Poems of LaMotte." Or "Melusina and the Daemonic Double: Good Mother, Bad Serpent.”

“A Docile Rage: Christabel LaMotte's Ambivalent Domesticity.”

“White Gloves: Blanche Glover: Occluded Lesbian sexuality in LaMotte." There was an essay by Maud Bailey herself on "Melusina, Builder of Cities: A Subversive Female Cosmogony." Roland knew he should tackle this piece first, but was inhibited by its formidable length and density. He started "Ariachne's Broken Woof," which elegantly dissected one of Christabel's insect poems, of which there were apparently many.

From so blotched and cramped a creature

Painfully teased out

With ugly fingers, filaments of wonder

Bright snares about

Lost buzzing things, an order fine and bright

Geometry threading water, catching light.

It was hard to concentrate. The Midlands went flatly past, a biscuit factory, a metal box company, fields, hedges, ditches, pleasant and unremarkable. Miss Honiton's book contained, as a frontispiece, the first image he had seen of Christabel, a brownish, very early photograph, veiled under a crackling, protective translucent page. She was dressed in a large triangular mantle and a small bonnet, frilled inside its rim, tied with a large bow under her chin. Her clothes were more prominent than she was; she retreated into them, her head, perhaps quizzically, perhaps considering itself "birdlike," held on one side. She had pale crimped hair over her temples, and her lips were parted to reveal large, even teeth. The picture gave no clear impression of anyone in particular; it was generic Victorian lady, specific shy poetess.

At first he did not identify Maud Bailey, and he himself was not in any way remarkable, so that they were almost the last pair at the wicket gate. She would be hard to miss, if not to recognise. She was tall, tall enough to meet Fergus Wolffs eyes on the level, much taller than Roland. She was dressed with unusual coherence for an academic, Roland thought, rejecting several other ways of describing her green and white length, a long pine-green tunic over a pine-green skirt, a white silk shirt inside the tunic and long softly white stockings inside long shining green shoes. Through the stockings veiled flesh diffused a pink gold, almost. He could not see her hair, which was wound tightly into a turban of peacock-feathered painted silk, low on her brow. Her brows and lashes were blond; he observed so much. She had a clean, milky skin, unpainted lips, clearcut features, largely composed. She did not smile. She acknowledged him and tried to take his bag, which he refused to allow. She drove an immaculately glossy green Beetle.

"I was intrigued by your question," she said, as they drove off. "I'm glad you made the effort to come. I hope it will be worth it." Her voice was deliberately blurred patrician; a kind of flattened Sloane. She smelled of something ferny and sharp. Roland didn't like her voice.

"It may be a wild-goose chase. It's almost nothing really."

"We'll see."

Lincoln University was white-tiled towers, variegated with violet tiles and orange tiles and from time to time acid-green tiles. In high winds, Dr Bailey said, these blew off and were a real hazard to walkers. There were often high winds. The campus was fenny-flat, laid out like a kind of chess-board, redeemed by an imaginative water-gardener who had made a maze of channels and pools, randomly flowing across and around the rectangular grid. They were now clogged with fallen leaves, amongst which Koi carp pushed blunt pearly noses. The University dated from the opulent heyday of expansion and was now slightly grubby and tatty, mortared cracks grinning between the white oblongs under their urban plaque.

The wind stirred the silk fringes of Dr Bailey's too-rich headgear. It ruffled Roland's black fur. He pushed his hands in his pockets and stepped a little behind her as she strode. No one else seemed to be about, although it was term. He asked Dr Bailey, where were the students and she told him that today, Wednesday, was a non-teaching day, reserved for sports and study.

"They all disappear. We don't know where. As if by magic. Some of them are in the library. Most aren't. I don't where they go”

The wind ruffled the dark water; orange leaves made its surface jagged and sloppy at once.

She lived at the top of Tennyson Tower- "It was that or Maid Marian," she remarked, as they swung its glass door, her voice distantly scornful. "The Alderman who funded it wanted it all called after Sherwood folk. Here is the English Department and the Arts Faculty Office and History of Art and also Women's Studies. Not our Resource Centre. That's in the Library. I'll take you. Would you care for coffee?"

They went up in a paternoster lift that cranked regularly past its otherwise vacant portals. These doorless lifts unnerved Roland; she stepped in precisely and was lifted above him before he dared follow, so that he was already clambering onto the pedestal she occupied when he lunged forward and up, almost too late. She did not remark on this. The walls of the paternoster were mirror-tiled, bronze-lit; she flashed at him from wall to wall, hotly. Out again she came precisely; he tripped on this threshold too, the floor lifting beneath him.

Her room was glass-walled on one side, and lined floor to ceiling with books on the others. The books were arranged rationally, thematically, alphabetically, and dust-free; this last was the only sign of housekeeping in that austere place. The beautiful thing in that room was Maud Bailey herself, who went down on one knee very gracefully to plug in a kettle, and produced from a cupboard two blue and white Japanese mugs.

"Take a seat," she said crisply, indicating a low upholstered bright blue chair where students no doubt sat to have their work handed back. She handed him walnut-coloured Nescafe. She had not taken off the headdress. "Now, how can I be of help to you?" she said, taking her own seat behind the barrier of the desk. Roland meditated strategies of evasion of his own.

He had vaguely imagined, before meeting her, that he might be able to show her Xeroxes of the purloined letters. Now he knew he could not. Her voice lacked warmth. He said, "I am working on Randolph Henry Ash. As I wrote to you. It's just come to my attention that he might have corresponded with Christabel LaMotte. I don't know if you have any knowledge of such a correspondence? They certainly met."

"When?"

He handed her a copy of his transcript of Crabb Robinson's Journal.

"That might be mentioned in Blanche Glover's diary. We've got one of her diaries in the Resource Centre. It covers that period-she began it when they moved to Richmond. The papers we have in our Archive are essentially the contents of Christabel's desk when she died-she expressed a wish that they should be sent to one of her nieces, May Bailey, 'in the hope that she may come to care about poetry.' "

"And did she?"

"Not as far as I know. She married a cousin and went off to Norfolk and had ten children and ran a large household. I'm descended from her-she was my great-great-grandmother, which makes me Christabel's great-great-great-niece. I persuaded my father to let us lodge the papers in the Archive when I came here. There isn't a lot of material, but it's important. Manuscripts of the Tales, lots of undated lyrics on random little slips of paper, and of course all the revisions of Melusina, which she rewrote at least eight times, always changing it. And a commonplace book, and a few letters from friends, and this one diary of Blanche Glover's, just for three years. I don't know if we once had more-no care was taken of them, I'm sorry to say-none has come to light."

"And LaMotte. Did she keep a journal?"

"Not as far as we know. Almost certainly not. She wrote to one of her nieces advising against it. It's a rather good letter. 'If you can order your Thoughts and shape them into Art, good: if you can live in the obligations and affections of Daily Life, good. But do not get into the habit of morbid Self-examination. Nothing so unfits a woman for producing good work, or for living usefully. The Lord will take care of the second of these-opportunities will be found. The first is a matter of Will.' "

"I'm not sure about that."

"It's an interesting view of it. That's late-1886. Art as will. Not a fashionable view for a woman. Or maybe for anyone."

"Do you have her letters?”

“Not many. A few family ones-admonitions like that, recipes for bread-baking and wine-making, complaints. Others exist, not many from the Richmond period, one or two from visits she made to Britanny; she had family there, as maybe you know. She doesn't seem to have had intimate friends, except Miss Glover, and they didn't need to correspond, since they shared their house. The letters haven't been edited-Leonora Stern's trying to get something together, but there's little to go on. I suspect Sir George Bailey at Seal Court may have something but he's not willing to let anyone look. He threatened Leonora with a shotgun. I thought it might be better if she went there-she's from Tallahassee, as you no doubt know- rather than myself, since there's an unfortunate history of litigation and unpleasantness between the Seal Court family and the Norfolk one. But Leonora's approaches had a most unfortunate effect. Most unfortunate. Yes. Well. And how did you come to form the opinion that Randolph Henry Ash was interested in LaMotte?"

"I found an unfinished draft of a letter to an unidentified woman in a book of his. I thought it might be her. It mentioned Crabb Robinson. He said she understood his poems."

"That doesn't sound very probable. I wouldn't have thought his poems would appeal to her. All that cosmic masculinity. That nasty anti-feminist poem about the medium, what was it, Mummy Possest? All that ponderous obfuscation. Everything she wasn't."

Roland considered the pale incisive mouth with a kind of hopelessness. He wished he had not come. The hostility towards Ash somehow included himself, at least in his own eyes. Maud Bailey went on: "I've checked my card index-I'm working on a full-length study of Melusina-I've only found one reference to Ash. It's from a note to William Rossetti-the MS is in Tallahassee- about a poem he published for her.

" 'In these dim November days I resemble nothing more than that poor Creature of RHA's Fantasy, immured in her terrible In-Pace, quieted perforce and longing for her Quietus. It takes a Masculine Courage to find pleasure in constructing Dungeons for Innocents in his Fancy, and a Female Patience to endure them in sober fact.' "

"That's a reference to Ash's Incarcerated Sorceress?"

"Of course." Impatiently.

"When was it written!"

"1869. I think. Yes. Vivid but not much help."

"Hostile if anything."

"Exactly."

Roland sipped his coffee. Maud Bailey reinserted the card into its place in her file. She said, looking into the box, "You must know Fergus Wolff, he must be at your college, I think."

"Oh yes. It was Fergus who suggested I should ask you about LaMotte." A pause. The fingers moved busily, tidying. "I know Fergus. I met him at a conference, in Paris." A little less crisp, the voice, a little less elderly-authoritative, he thought unkindly.

"He told me," said Roland, neutrally, watching for a sign of her consciousness of what Fergus might have said, of how he might have spoken. She compressed her lips and stood up.

"I'll take you to the Resource Centre."

The Lincoln Library could not have been more different from the Ash Factory. It was a skeletal affair in a glass box, with brilliant doors opening in glass and tubular walls, like a box of toys or a giant ConstructoKit. There were dinging metal shelves and footfall-deadening felt carpets, pied-piper red and yellow, like the paint on the stair-rails and lifts. In summer it must have been bright and baking, but in wet autumn slate-grey sky lay like another box against its repeating panes, in which lines of little round lights were reflected, like Tinkerbell's fairylights in her Never-Never-Land. The Women's Archive was housed in a high-walled fish-tank. Maud Bailey settled Roland into a tubular chair at a pale oak table, like a recalcitrant nursery-school child, and put before him various boxes. Melusina I. Melusina II. Melusina III and IV. MelusinaUnassigned. Breton Poems. Poems ofDevotion. Mise Lyrics. Blanche. In this box she showed him a long thick green book, a little like an accounts book, with sombre marbled endpapers:

A Journal of Our Home-Life.

In Our House in Richmond

Blanche Glover

Commenced on the day of our setting up house.

May 1st May Day 1853

Roland took it up respectfully. It did not have for him the magnetic feel of the two letters that were folded into his pocket, but it represented the tease of curiosity.

He was worried about his Day Return ticket. He was worried about Maud's limited patience. The journal was written in an excited and pretty hand, in short rushes. He skimmed it. Carpets, curtains, the pleasures of retirement, "Today we engaged a Cook-general," a new way to stew rhubarb, a painting of the infant Hermes and his mother, and yes, Crabb Robinson's breakfast.

Here it is.

"Good. I'll leave you. I'll fetch you when the Library shuts. You've got a couple of hours."

"Thank you."

We went out to breakfast with Mr Robinson, a pleasant but prosy old gentleman who told us a complicated tale of a bust of Wieland, retrieved by himself from unworthy oblivion, to the great delight of Goethe and other literary eminences. Not much of interest was said, and certainly not by shadowy me, though that is as I would have it. Present were Mrs Jameson, Mr Bagehot, Ash the poet, without Mrs Ash, who was indisposed, and some younger members of the London University. The Princess was much admired and rightly. She spoke great good sense to Mr Ash, whose poetry I cannot like, though she professed to like it greatly, which naturally flattered him. He lacks, in my view, the lyrical flow and intensity of Alfred Tennyson, and I doubt his seriousness. His poem about Mesmer is a great puzzle to me, as I cannot tell with any certainty what is his attitude to Animal Magnetism, whether mocking or endorsing, and this is so with other of his work, so that often one is led to wonder whether there is not a great pother of talk about nothing much. For my part, I endured a long disquisition on the Tractarians from a young and opinionated university liberal. He would have been much surpris'd to know my true Opinion on these matters, but I did not chuse to let him be so much familiar, I kept mum, and smiled and nodded as best I might, keeping my Thoughts to myself. But I was almost glad when Mr Robinson decided to tell the company at large of his Italian journey ings with Words-worth, who desired to be back at home with every step they made, and could only with the utmost difficulty be persuaded to look about him.

I too desired to be at home, and was glad when we were able to close our own dear front door behind us, and be gathered in to the silence of our little parlour.

A home is a great thing, as I had not courage to say to Mr Robinson, if it is certainly one's own home, as our little house is. When I think of my previous existence-of all I thought I could reasonably expect of the rest of my life, an allowed place at the extreme corner of someone's drawing-room carpet, a Servant's garret or no better, I give thanks for every little thing, which is unspeakably dear to me. We had a late luncheon, cold fowl and a salad got up by Liza, walked in the Park in the afternoon, worked, and in the evening had a dish of warm milk and white bread, sprinkled with sugar, quite as Wordsworth himself might have done. We played and sang together, and read aloud a little of the Faerie Queene. Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise. Surely Richmond is Beulah, I said to the Princess, who said it was only to be hoped no wicked Fairy envied us our pleasant lot.

Nothing further, for three and a half weeks, except simple meals, walks and readings, music and Blanche's plans for paintings. Then Roland found a sentence which could have been something or nothing. Nothing if you were not looking carefully.

I have been wondering whether to attempt, in oils, a subject from Malory, the imprisoning of Merlin, maybe, by the damsel Nimue, or the solitary Maid of Astolat. My brain is filled full of vague images, but no clear vision of one necessary thing. I have sketched oak trees in Richmond Park all week-all my lines are too light for the thick solidity of their girth. What draws us to make pretty what should express Brute Power? Nimue or the Lily Maid would require a model and the Princess can hardly be asked for so much of her time, though I hope she may think the time spent on "Christabel before Sir Leoline" was not wholly wasted. I paint so thinly, as though my work were unlit stained glass that requires a flood of light from beyond and behind to illuminate and enliven it, and there is no beyond and behind. Oh I want Force. She has hung "Christabel" in her bedroom where it catches the morning sun and shows up my imperfections. She is much exercised about a long letter which arrived today, which she did not show me, but smiled over, and caught up and folded away.

There was nothing at all, except Roland's own need and concern, to suggest that the long letter might be his own letter. It could have been any letter. Had there been more? Three weeks later he found another meaningful/meaningless sentence.

Liza and I have been busy with our apple-and-quince jelly; the kitchen is veiled and festooned in dripping jelly-muslin, ingeniously caught up amongst the legs of inverted chairs, like spiderwebs. Liza burned her tongue, testing whether it would set or not, and being too greedy to taste or anxious to please. (Liza is greedy. I am sure she consumes bread and fruit in the middle of the night. Coming down to breakfast I find raw, slanting cuts / never made on the loaf in the crock.) The Princess did not help us this year. She was getting her Literary Letter ready to post, though she denied this, and said she was hurrying to finish the Glass Coffin for the book of tales. I believe she is writing fewer poems. Certainly she does not show me them, of an evening, as we were used to do. All this correspondence is detrimental to her true gifts. She is in no real need of epistolary adulation. She knows her own worth. I only wish I were as sure of mine.

Two weeks later:

Letters, letters, letters. Not for me. I am not meant to see or know. I am no blind mouldiwarp, my Lady, nor no well-trained lady's maid to turn my head and not see what is stated not to concern me. You need not hurry them away to lie in your sewing-basket or run upstairs to fold them under your handkerchiefs. I am no Sneak, no watcher, no Governess. A governess is what I am most surely not. From that fate you rescued me, and you shall never, for one moment, one little moment, suppose me ungrateful or making claims.

Two weeks later:

So now we have a Prowler. Something is ranging and snuffing round our small retreat, trying the shutters and huffing and puffing inside the door. In old days they put mountain ash berries and a cast horseshoe over the lintel to frighten away the Fairy Folk. I shall nail some up now, to show, to prevent passage, if I may. Dog Tray is nervous of prowlers. His hackles go up on his shoulders, as a wolfs would, when he hears the Hunter. He gnashes the empty air. How very small, how very safe, is a threatened dwelling. How large the locks seem, how appalling would be their forcing and splintering.

Two weeks later:

Where is our frankness of intercourse? Where the small, unspeakable things we used to share in quiet harmony? This Peeping Tom has put his eye to the nick or cranny in our walls and peers shamelessly in. She laughs and says he means no harm, and is incapable of seeing the essential things we know and keep safe, and so it is, so it must be, so it must always be. But it amuses her to hear him lolloping and panting round our solid walls, she thinks he will always be Tame, as he is now. I cannot claim to know better, I know nothing, I never have known very much, but I fear for her. I asked her how much writing she had lately done, and she laughed, and said she was learning so much, so very much, and when it was all learned she should have new matter to write about and many new things to say. And she kissed me, and called me her dear Blanche, and said I knew she was a good girl, and very strong, and not foolish. I said we were all, all foolish, and in need of divine strength to help us out when we were weak. She said she had never so much felt its presence, its immediacy, as lately. I went up to my bedchamber and prayed, as I have not prayed-from desolation-since I prayed to leave Mrs Teape's house and thought I should never be answered. The candle flame ran huge shadows like grasping fingers across the ceiling in the draught. I could put some such running, grasping lines of light and shadow around Nimue and Merlin. She came in to me as I knelt there and raised me up, and said we must never quarrel and that she would never, ever, give me cause to doubt her, and I must not suppose she could. I am sure she meant what she said. She was agitated; there were a few tears. We were quiet together, in our special ways, for a long time.

Next day:

The Wolf is Gone from the Door. Dog Tray's hearth is his own. I have begun on the Lily Maid of Astolat, which suddenly seemed best.

This writing ended, indeed the book ended, abruptly, not even at the end of the year. Roland wondered if there were other diaries. He put little slips of paper in the entries that made up his fragile narrative or non-narrative. There was no evidence to connect the Prowler with the letter-writer, or the letter-writer with Randolph Henry Ash, and yet he felt a powerful conviction that all three were one and the same. If they were, would not Blanche have said so? He must ask Maud Bailey about the Prowler, yet how could he do so without coming clean in some way-about his own interest in the matter? And exposing himself to that censorious and supercilious gaze?

Maud Bailey put her head round the door. "Library's closing. Did you find anything?”

“I think so. It may be all in my own head. There are things I need to ask someone, you. Is it permitted to photocopy the manuscript? I simply haven't had time to copy out what I've found. I-”

“You seem to have had a profitable afternoon." Drily. Then, as a concession, "Exciting, even.”

“I don't know. The whole thing is a wild-goose chase.”

“If I can help-" said Maud, having packed away Blanche's pages into their box. "I shall be only too happy. Let's have coffee. There's an SCR Coffee place in the Women's Studies block.”

“Am I allowed in?”

“Naturally," said the frigid voice.

They sat down at a low table in the corner, under a poster for the Campus Crèche and facing posters for the Pregnancy Advisory Service-"A woman has a right to decide about her own body. We put women first"-and a Feminist Revue: "Come and see the Sorcières, the Vamps, the daughters of Kali and the Fatae Morganae. We'll make your blood run cold and make you laugh on the Sinister side of your face at Women's Wit and Wickedness." The room was largely uninhabited: a group of women in jeans were laughing in the opposite corner, and two girls were in earnest conversation by the window, pink spiky heads leaning together. Maud Bailey's excessive elegance was even odder in this context. She was a most untouchable woman. Roland discerned in her a rigorous sense of correctness, or justice, which made her trustworthy, but would likely cause her to disapprove of his own behavior about the letters. Nevertheless, he had decided desperately to gamble on showing her the Xeroxes of the letters because he must know about Christabel LaMotte, and something not himself drove him on. He was forced to lean forward in a kind of pseudo-intimacy and speak low.

"You know this Prowler Blanche Glover got so worried about? Is anything known about him? The wolf at the door?"

"Nothing certain. I think Leonora Stern has made a tentative identification with a young Mr Thomas Hearst of Richmond who liked to come and play the oboe with the ladies. They were both accomplished pianists. There do exist two or three letters from Christabel to Hearst-she even sent him a few poems in one, which he kept, fortunately for us. He married someone else in i860 and drops out of the picture. Blanche may have made up the prowling. She had a vivid imagination."

"And was jealous." Ot course. "And the literary letters she refers to? Is it known who they were from? Or if they were connected to the 'prowler'?”

“Not as far as I know. She had abundant letters from people like Coventry Patmore who admired her 'sweet simplicity' and 'noble resignation.' Lots of people wrote. It could have been anyone. You think it's R. H. Ash?"

"No. I just-I think I'd better show you what I have." He brought out the photocopies of his two letters. Whilst she was unfolding them, he said, "I should explain. I found these. I haven't shown them to anyone else. No one knows they exist."

She was reading. "Why?"

"I don't know. I kept them to myself. I don't know why." She finished reading. "Well," she said, "the dates fit. You could make up a whole story. On no real evidence. It would change all sorts of things. LaMotte scholarship. Even ideas about Melusina. That Fairy Topic. It's intriguing. "

"Isn't it? It would change Ash scholarship, too. His letters are really rather boring, correct and distant really-this is quite different."

"Where are the originals?"

Roland hesitated. He needed help. He needed to speak. "I took them," he said. "I found them in a book and I took them. I didn't think about it, I just took them."

"Why?" Stern but much more animated. "Why did you?"

"Because they were alive. They seemed urgent-I felt I had to do something. It was an impulse. Quick as a flash. I meant to put them back. I will. Next week. I just haven't, yet. I don't think they're mine, or anything. But they aren't Cropper's or Blackadder's or Lord Ash's, either. They seemed private. I'm not explaining very well."

"No. I suppose they might represent a considerable academic scoop. For you."

"Well, I wanted to be the one who does the work," Roland began innocently, and then saw how he had been insulted. "Wait a minute-it wasn't like that at all, not like that. It was something personal. You wouldn't know. I'm an old-fashioned textual critic, not a biographer-I don't go in for this sort of-it wasn't profit- I'll put them back next week-I wanted them to be a secret. Private. And to do the work."

She blushed. Red blood stained the ivory.

"I'm sorry. I don't know why I should be; it was quite a reasonable assumption and I can't begin to imagine how anyone would dare to whip two manuscripts like that out of sight-I'd never have the nerve. But I do see you weren't thinking in these terms. I do really."

"I just wanted to know what happened next."

"I can't let you Xerox Blanche's diary-the spine won't stand it-but you can copy it out. And go on hunting through those boxes. Who knows what you'll find. No one was hunting for Randolph Henry Ash, after all. Can I book you a guest room until tomorrow?"

Roland thought. A guest room seemed infinitely attractive; a quiet place where he could sleep without Val, and think about Ash, and take himself at his own pace. A guest room would cost money he hadn't got. Also there was the Day Return.

"I have a Day Return ticket."

"We could change that."

"I'd rather not. I am an unemployed postgraduate. I haven't got the money."

Now she was wine-red. "I hadn't thought. You'd better come back to my place. I've got a spare bed. It's still better than buying another ticket now you're here-I'll cook supper-and tomorrow you can look at the rest of the Archive. It would be no trouble."

He looked at the shiny black trace of the faded brown writing. He said, "All right."

Maud lived on the ground floor of a red-brick Georgian house on the outskirts of Lincoln. She had two large rooms, and a kitchen and bathroom constructed from what had been a warren of smaller domestic offices; her own front door had once been the tradesmen's entrance. The university owned the house; the upper floors were university flats. The kitchen, quarry-tiled, looked out onto a courtyard paved in red brick with various evergreen shrubs in tubs.

Maud's living room was not what might have been expected of a Victorian scholar. It was bright white, paint, lamps and dining-table; the carpet was a Berber ofT-white. The things in this room were brilliantly coloured in every colour, peacock, crimson, sunflower, deep rose, nothing pale or pastel. Alcoves beside the fireplace held a collection of spotlit glass, bottles, flasks, paperweights. Roland felt wakeful and misplaced, as though he was in an art gallery or a surgeon's waiting-room. Maud went away to make supper, refusing offers of help, and Roland called the Putney flat, where there was no reply. Maud came through with a drink and said, "Why don't you read Tales for Innocents? I've got a first edition."

The book was scuffed green leather, with faintly Gothic lettering. Roland sat on Maud's huge white sofa by the wood fire and turned the pages.

Now there was once a Queen, who might have been thought to have everything she could desire in the world, but had set her heart on a strange silent bird a traveller had told of, which lived in the snowy mountains, nested only once, raised its gold and silver chick, sang once only, and then faded like snow in the lowlands…

There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come, nor set a fire so that smoke did not pour into the room, a useless, hopeless, dreaming daughter, to whom her mother would often say that she should try to fend for herself in the wild wood, and then she would know the value of listening to advice, and of doing things properly. And this filled the perverse daughter with a great desire to go even a little way into the wild wood, where there were no plates and no stitching, but might well be a need of such things as she knew she had it in herself to perform…

He looked at the woodcuts, which were described on the title page as "Illustrations by B.G." A female figure with a scarfed head, flying apron and great wooden shoes, standing in a clearing surrounded by dark pine trees full of white eyes among their crossing arms of needles. Another figure, wrapped in what appeared to be netting hung with little bells, beat netted fists against a cottage door whilst squashed, lumpen faces leered behind upper windows. A little house, surrounded by the same black trees, at the foot of which, his chops on the whited steps, his sinuous length curved around its corner in a dragon-clasp, the long wolf lay, whose hairs were cut in harmony with the incisive feathering of the trees.

Maud Bailey gave him potted shrimps, omelette and green salad, some Bleu de Bresse and a bowl of sharp apples. They talked about Talesfor Innocents, which, Maud said, were mostly rather frightening tales derived from Grimm and Tieck, with an emphasis on animals and insubordination. They looked together at the one about the woman who had said she would give anything for a child, of any kind, even a hedgehog, and had duly given birth to a monster, half-hedgehog, half-boy. Blanche had drawn the hedgehog-child in a Victorian high chair at a Victorian table; behind it were dark panes of cupboard glass, before it a huge intruding hand, pointing to its dish. Its face was blunt and furred and screwed up as though about to burst into tears. Its prickles were round its ugly head like spined rays of a halo, and descended its neckless shoulders, criss-crossing, to meet the incongruity of a starched, frilled collar. It had blunt little claws on its stubby hands. Roland asked Maud what the critics made of this. Maud said that Leonora Stern believed it represented Victorian women's fear, or any woman's fear, of giving birth to a monstrosity. It was related to Frankenstein, the product of Mary Shelley's labour pains and horror of birth.

"Do you think that?"

"It's an old story, it's in Grimm, the hedgehog sits on a black cock in a high tree and plays the bagpipes and tricks people. I think you can understand things about Christabel from the way she wrote her version. I think she simply disliked children-the way many maiden aunts must have done, in those days."

"Blanche is sorry for the hedgehog."

"Is she?" Maud examined the little picture. "Yes, you're right. Christabel isn't. It becomes a very resourceful swineherd-multiplies its pigs on forest acorns-and ends up with a lot of triumphant slaughter and roast pork and crackling. Hard for modern children to stomach who grieve for the Gadarene swine. Christabel makes it into a force of nature. It likes winning, against the odds. In the end it wins a King's daughter, who is expected to burn its hedgehog-skin at night, and does so, and finds herself clasping a beautiful Prince, all singed and soot-black. Christabel says, 'And if he regretted his armoury of spines and his quick wild wits, history does not relate, for we must go no further, having reached the happy end.' "

"I like that."

"So do I."

"Did you start work on her because of the family connection?"

"Possibly. I think not. I knew one little poem by her, when I was very small, and it became a kind of touchstone. The Baileys aren't very proud of Christabel, you know. They aren't literary. I'm a sport. My Norfolk grandmother told me too much education spoilt a girl for a good wife. And then the Norfolk Baileys don't speak to the Lincolnshire Baileys. The Lincolnshire ones lost all their sons in the first World War, except one invalid one, and became rather impoverished, and the Norfolk Baileys hung on to a lot of the money. Sophie LaMotte married a Lincolnshire Bailey. So I didn't grow up with the idea that I had a poet in the family, by marriage of course. Two Derby winners and an uncle who made a record ascent of the Eiger, that's the sort of thing that mattered. "

"What was the little poem?"

"The one about the Cumaean Sibyl. It was in a little book I once got for Christmas called Ghosts and Other Weird Creatures. I'll show you.

He read

Who are you?

Here on a high shelf

In webbed flask I

Hook up my folded self

Bat-leather dry.

Who were you?

The gold god goaded me

Sang shrieking sang high

His heat corroded me

Not mine his cry.

What do you see?

I saw the firmament

Steady the sky

I saw the cerement

Close Caesar's eye.

What do you hope?

Desire is a dowsed fire

True love a lie

To a dusty shelf we aspire

I crave to die.

"It's a very sad poem."

"Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong. The Sibyl was safe in her jar, no one could touch her, she wanted to die. I didn't know what a Sibyl was. I just liked the rhythm. Anyway, when I started my work on thresholds it came back to me and so did she.

"I wrote a paper on Victorian women's imagination of space. Marginal Beings and Liminal Poetry. About agoraphobia and claustrophobia and the paradoxical desire to be let out into unconfined space, the wild moorland, the open ground, and at the same time to be closed into tighter and tighter impenetrable small spaces-like Emily Dickinson's voluntary confinement, like the Sibyl's jar."

"Like Ash's Sorceress in her In-Pace.”

“That's different. He's punishing her for her beauty and what he thought of as her wickedness."

"No, he isn't. He's writing about the people, including herself, who thought she ought to be punished because of her beauty and wickedness. She colluded with their judgment. He doesn't. He leaves it to our intelligence."

A disputatious look crossed Maud's face, but all she said was

"And you? Why do you work on Ash?"

"My mother liked him. She read English. I grew up on his idea of Sir Walter Ralegh, and his Agincourt poem and OfFa on the Dyke. And then Ragnarôk. " He hesitated. "They were what stayed alive, when I'd been taught and examined everything else."

Maud smiled then. "Exactly. That's it. What could survive our education."

She made him up a bed on the high white divan in her livingroom-not a heap of sleeping-bags and blankets but a real bed, with laundered sheets and pillows in emerald green cotton cases. And a white down quilt, tumbled out of a concealed drawer beneath. She found him a new toothbrush in its unbroken wrap, and said, "It's a pity about Sir George. Being such a curmudgeon. Who knows what he's got? Have you ever seen Seal Court? Victorian Gothic at its most tracery-like, pinnacles and lancets, deep in a dell. We could drive out there. If you think you've got time. I very rarely feel any curiosity about Christabel's life-it's funny-I even feel a sort of squeamishness about things she might have touched, or places she might have been-it's the language that matters, isn't it, it's what went on in her mind-"

"Exactly-"

"I've never bothered much about Blanche's Prowler and that sort of thing-it didn't seem to matter who it was, only that she thought something existed-but you've stirred something up-"

"Look," he said. He fetched the envelope out of his case. "I brought them with me. After all, what else could I do with them? They're faded but…"

Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else… I feel, I know with a certainty that cannot be the result of folly or misapprehension, that you and I must speak again-

"I see," she said. "They're alive."

"They don't have ends."

"No. They're beginnings. Would you like to see where she lived? And ended, indeed?" He was visited by a memory of a cat-pissed ceiling, of a room with no view.

"Why not? Since I'm here."

"You go in the bathroom first. Please."

"Thank you. For everything. Good night."

He moved gingerly inside the bathroom, which was not a place to sit and read or to lie and soak, but a chill green glassy place, glittering with cleanness, huge dark green stoppered jars on water-green thick glass shelves, a floor tiled in glass tiles into whose brief and illusory depths one might peer, a shimmering shower curtain like a glass waterfall, a blind to match, over the window, full of watery lights. Maud's great green-trellised towels were systematically folded on a towel-heater. Not a speck of talcum powder, not a smear of soap, on any surface. He saw his face in the glaucous basin as he cleaned his teeth. He thought of his home bathroom, full of old underwear, open pots of eyepaint, dangling shirts and stockings, sticky bottles of hair conditioner and tubes of shaving foam.

Later, Maud stood in there, turning her long body under the hot hiss of the shower. Her mind was full of an image of a huge, unmade, stained and rumpled bed, its sheets pulled into standing peaks here and there, like the surface of whipped egg-white. Whenever she thought of Fergus Wolff, this empty battlefield was what she saw. Beyond it lay, if she had chosen to conjure them up, unwashed coffee cups, trousers lying where they had been stepped out of, heaped dusty papers ring-stained with wineglasses, a carpet full of dust and ashes, the smell of socks and other smells. Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance. The Paris conference where she had met Fergus had been on Gender and the Autonomous Text. She had talked about thresholds and he had given an authoritative paper on "The Potent Castrato: The phallogocentric structuration of Balzac's hermaphrodite hero/ines." The drift of his argument appeared to be feminist. The thrust of his presentation was somehow mocking and subversive. He flirted with self-parody. He expected Maud to come into his bed. "We two are the most intelligent people here, you know. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen or dreamed about. I want you, I need you, can't you feel it, it's irresistible." Why it had been irresistible, Maud was not rationally sure. But he had been right. Then the arguments had begun. Maud shivered.

She slipped on her nightdress, long-sleeved and practical, and loosed from her shower-cap all her yellow hair. She brushed fiercely, supporting the fall, and considered her perfectly regular features in the mirror. A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows, with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing. The feminists had divined that, who once, when she rose to speak at a meeting, had hissed and cat-called, assuming her crowning glory to be the seductive and marketable product of an inhumanely tested bottle. She had worn it almost shaved in her early teaching days, a vulnerable stubble on a white and shivering scalp. Fergus had divined how afraid she was of the doll-mask and had dealt with it in his own way, daring her to let it all hang out, quoting Yeats at her in his Irish voice.

Never shall a young man

Thrown into despair

By those great honey-coloured

Ramparts at your ear

Love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.

"You should be ashamed to believe that," said Fergus, "and you so wise and clever about every other thing, my dear.”

“I don't," Maud had said, "believe that or care." So he had dared her to grow it, and she had grown it, from eyebrow to ear to nape to the length of the neck to the shoulders. The growing had lasted the affair, almost exactly; when they parted, the long queue knocked on her spine. Now, for pride, she would not crop it, she would not so much mark the occasion, but instead wore it always inside some sort of covering, hidden away.

Roland felt buoyed up by the height of Maud's great divan. The room smelled of the ghost of wine and a hint of cinnamon. He lay in his white and emerald nest under the shaded light of a heavy brass lamp, green above, creamy inside. There was an incapable sleeper somewhere in his mind, a sleeper bruised and tossing on heaped feather mattresses, the Real Princess, suffering the muffled pea. Blanche Glover called Christabel the Princess. Maud Bailey was a thin-skinned Princess. He was an intruder into their female fastnesses. Like Randolph Henry Ash. He opened Talesfor Innocents and read:

THE GLASS COFFIN

There was once a little tailor, a good and unremarkable man, who happened to be journeying through a forest, in search of work perhaps, for in those days men travelled great distances to make a meagre living, and the services of a fine craftsman, like our hero, were less in demand than cheap and cobbling hasty work that fitted ill and lasted only briefly. He believed he should come across someone who would want his skills-he was an incurable optimist, and imagined a fortunate meeting around every corner, though how that should come about was hard to see, as he advanced farther and farther into the dark, dense trees, where even the moonlight was split into dull little needles of bluish light on the moss, not enough to see by. But he did come upon the little house that was waiting for him, in a clearing in the depths, and was cheered by the lines of yellow light he could see between and under the shutters. He knocked boldly on the door of this house, and there was a rustling, and creaking, and the door opened a tiny crack, and there stood a little man, with a face as grey as morning ashes, and a long woolly beard the same colour.

"I am a traveller lost in the woods," said the litle tailor, "and a master craftsman, seeking work, if any is to be found.”

“I have no need for a master craftsman," said the little grey man. "And I am afraid of thieves. You cannot come in here."

"If I were a thief I could have forced my way in, or crept secretly in," said the little tailor. "I am an honest tailor in need of help."

Now behind the little man stood a great grey dog, as tall as he was, with red eyes and hot breath. And at first this beast had made a low girning, growling sound, but now he hushed his threatening, and waved his tail slowly, and the little grey man said, "Otto is of the opinion that you are honest. You may have a bed for the night in return for an honest evening's work, for help with cooking and cleaning and what must be prepared in my simple home."

So the tailor was let in, and there was a strange household. In a rocking chair stood a brilliantly coloured cockerel and his pure white wife. In the fire-corner stood a black-and-white goat, with knobby little horns and eyes like yellow glass, and on the hearth lay a very large cat, a multi-coloured, mazy-patterned brindled cat, that looked up at the little tailor with eyes like cold green jewels, with black slits for pupils. And behind the dining table was a delicate dun cow, with milky breath and a warm wet nose and enormous soft brown eyes. "Good morning," said the tailor to this company, for he believed in good manners, and the creatures were surveying him in a judging and intelligent way.

"Food and drink you will find in the kitchen," said the little grey man. "Make us a fit supper and we will eat together."

So the little tailor turned to, and prepared a splendid pie, from flour and meat and onions he found there and decorated its top with beautifully formed pastry leaves and flowers, for he was a craftsman, even if he could not exercise his own craft. And whilst it was cooking he looked about him, and brought hay to the cow and goat, golden corn to the cock and hen, milk to the cat and bones and meat from his cooking to the great grey dog. And when the tailor and the little grey man were consuming the pie, whose warm smell filled the little house, the little grey man said, "Otto was right, you are a good and honest man, and you care for all the creatures in this place, leaving no one unattended and nothing undone. I shall give you a gift for your kindness. Which of these things will you have?"

And he laid before the tailor three things. The first was a little purse of soft leather, which clinked a little as he put it down. The second was a cooking pot, black outside, polished and gleaming inside, solid and commodious. And the third was a little glass key, wrought into fantastic fragile shape, and glittering with all the colours of the rainbow. And the tailor looked at the watching animals for advice, and they all stared benignly back. And he thought to himself, I know about such gifts from forest people. It may be that the first is a purse which is never empty, and the second a pot which provides a wholesome meal whenever you demand one in the right way. I have heard of such things and met men who have been paid from such purses and eaten from such pots. But a glass key I never saw or heard of and cannot imagine what use it might be; it would shiver in any lock. But he desired the little glass key, because he was a craftsman, and could see that it had taken masterly skill to blow all these delicate wards and barrel, and because he did not have any idea about what it was or might do, and curiosity is a great power in men's lives. So he said to the little man, "I will take the pretty glass key." And the little man answered, "You have chosen not with prudence, but with daring. The key is the key to an adventure, if you will go in search of it."

"Why not?" replied the tailor. "Since there is no use for my craft in this wild place, and since I have not chosen prudently."

Then the animals came closer with their warm, milky breaths that smelled sweetly of hay and the summer, and their mild comforting gaze that was not human, and the dog lay with his heavy head on the tailor's foot, and the brindled cat sat on the arm of his chair.

"You must go out of this house," said the little grey man, "and call to the West Wind, and show her your key, when she comes, and let her carry you where she will, without struggle or alarm.

If you fight or question she will toss you on the thorns and it will go ill with you before you come out of there. If she will take you, you will be set down in a bare heath, on a great stone, which is made of granite and is the gate to your adventure, though it will seem to have been fixed and unmoving since the making of the world. On this stone you must lay a feather from the tail of the cockerel here, which he will willingly give you, and the door will be opened to you. You must descend without fear, or hesitation, and descend further, and still descend; you will find that your glass key will shed light on your way if you hold it before you. In time you will come to a stone vestibule, with two doors leading to branching passages you must not follow, and a low curtained door leading on and downwards. You must not touch this curtain with your hand, but must lay on it the milk-white feather which the hen will give you, and the curtain will be opened silently, by unseen hands, and the doors beyond it will lie open, and you may come into the hall where you shall find what you shall find."

"Well, I will adventure," said the little tailor, "though I have great fear of the dark places under the earth, where there is no light of day and what is above is dense and heavy." So the cock and the hen allowed him to take a glistening burnished black and emerald feather and a soft creamy-white feather, and he bade them all good bye and went into the clearing, and called to the West Wind, holding up his key.

And that was a delightful and most alarming sensation, when the long, airy arms of the West Wind reached down through the trees and caught him up, and the leaves were all shivering and clattering and trembling with her passing, and the straws danced before the house and the dust rose and flew about in little earth-fountains. The trees grabbed at him with twiggy fingers as he rose up through them, lurching this way and that in the gusts, and then he felt himself held against the invisible rushing breast of the long Wind, as she hurled moaning along the sky. He rested his face against his airy pillow, and did not cry out or struggle, and the sighing song of the West Wind, full of fine rain and glancing sunshine, streaming clouds and driven starlight, netted him around and around.

She put him down as the little grey man had foretold on a huge grey granite stone, pitted and scarred and bald. He heard her whisking and wailing on her way, and he bent down and laid the cock-feather on the stone, and behold with a heavy groaning and grinding the huge stone swung up in the air and down in the eurth, as though on a pivot or balance, disturbing waves of soil and heather like thick sea-water, and showing a dark, dank passage under the heather-roots and the knotty roots of the gorse. So in he went, bravely enough, thinking all the time of the thickness of rock and peat and earth over his head, and the air in that place was chill and damp and the ground underfoot was moist and sodden. He bethought him of his little key and held it up bravely before him, and it put out a little sparkling light that illumined a step at a time, silvery-pale. So he came down to the vestibule, where the three doors were, and under the sills of the two great doors light shone, warm and enticing, and the third was behind a musty leather curtain. He touched this leather, just brushing it with the tip of his soft henfeather, and it was drawn away in angular folds like bat-wings, and beyond a little dark door lay open into a tiny hole, into which he thought he might just manage to put his shoulders. Then truly he was afraid, for his small grey friend had said nothing of this narrow little place, and he thought if he put his head in he might never come out alive.

So he looked behind himself and saw that the passage he had just come down was one of many, all wrinkled and wormy and dripping and tangled with roots, and he thought he could never find his way back so he must perforce push on and see what lay in store. It took all the courage he had to thrust his head and shoulders into the mouth of that entrance, but he closed his eyes and twisted and turned and after a time tumbled out into a great stone chamber, lit with a soft light of its own that dimmed the glitter of his shining key. It was a miracle, he thought, that the glass had not shivered in that tight struggle, but it was as clear and brittle as ever. So he looked about him, and saw three things. The first was a heap of glass bottles and flasks, all of them covered with dust and cobwebs. The second was a glass dome, the size of a man, and a little taller than our hero. And the third was a shining glass coffin, lying on a rich velvet pall on a gilded trestle. And from all these things the soft light proceeded, like the glimmering of pearls in the depth of water, like the phosphorescent light that moves of itself on the night surface of southern seas, or shines round the heaving shoals, milky-white over their silver darts, in our own dark Channel.

Well, he thought, one or all of these is my adventure. He looked at the bottles, which were many colours, red and green and blue and smoky topaz, and contained wisps and rinsings of nothing much, a sigh of smoke in one, a rocking of spirituous liquid in another. All were corked and sealed, and he was too circumspect to break the seals till he saw better where he was and what was to do.

He moved on to the dome, which you must imagine like the magic covers you have seen in your drawing-room under which dwell all sorts of brilliant little birds, as natural as life on their branches, or flights of mysterious moths and butterflies. Or maybe you have seen a crystal ball containing a tiny house which you can shake to produce a brilliant snowstorm? This dome contained a whole castle, set in a beautiful park, with trees and terraces and gardens, fishpools and climbing roses, and bright banners hanging limp in its many turrets. It was a brave and beautiful place, with innumerable windows and twisting staircases and a lawn and a swing in a tree and everything you could desire in a spacious and desirable residence, only that it was all still and tiny enough to need a magnifying glass to see the intricacies of its carvings and appurtenances. The little tailor, as I have told you, was first and foremost a craftsman, and he stared in wonder at this beautiful model and could not begin to imagine what fine tools or instruments had carved and wrought it. He dusted it a little, to marvel better, and then moved on to the glass coffin.

Have you remarked, where a fast-flowing stream comes to a little fall, how the racing water becomes glassy smooth and under it the long fine threads of the water-weed are drawn along in its still-seeming race, trembling a little, but stretched out in the flow? So under the surface of the thick glass lay a mass of long gold threads, filling in the whole cavity of the box with their turns and tumbles, so that at first the little tailor thought he had come upon a box full of spun gold, to make cloth of gold. But then between the fronds he saw a face, the most beautiful face he could have dreamed of or imagined, a still white face, with long gold lashes on pale cheeks, and a perfect pale mouth. Her gold hair lay round her like a mantle, but where its strands crossed her face they stirred a little with her breathing, so that the tailor knew she was alive. And he knew-it is always so, after all-that the true adventure was the release of this sleeper, who would then be his grateful bride. But she was so beautiful and peaceful that he was half-loath to disturb her. He wondered how she had come there, and how long she had been there, and what her voice would be like, and a thousand other ridiculous things, whilst she breathed in and out, ruffling the gold threads of hair.

And then he saw, in the side of the smooth box, which had no visible cleft or split, but was whole like a green ice egg, a tiny keyhole. And he knew that this was the keyhole for his wondrous delicate key, and with a little sigh he put it in and waited for what should ensue. And the little key slipped into the keyhole and melted, as it seemed into the glass body of the casket, so for a moment the whole surface was perfectly closed and smooth. And then, in a very orderly way, and with a strange bell-like tinkling, the coffin broke into a collection of long icicle splinters, that rang and vanished as they touched the earth. And the sleeper opened her eyes, which were as blue as periwinkle, or the summer sky, and the little tailor, because he knew this was what he must do, bent and kissed the perfect cheek.

"You must be the one," said the young woman, "you must be the one I have been waiting for, who must release me from enchantment. You must be the Prince."

"Ah no," said our hero, "there you are mistaken. I am no more-and indeed no less-than a fine craftsman, a tailor, in search of work for my hands, honest work, to keep me alive."

Then the young woman laughed merrily, her voice strengthening after what must have been years of silence, and the whole strange cellar rang with that laughter, and the glass fragments tinkled like broken bells.

"You shall have enough and more than enough, to keep you alive forever, if you help me out of this dark place," she said. "Do you see that beautiful castle locked in glass?"

"Indeed I do, and marvel at the craft with which it was made."

"That was no carver's or miniaturist's craft, but black magic, for that was the castle in which I lived, and the forests and meadows round it were mine, where I roamed freely, with my beloved brother, until the black artist came one night seeking shelter from foul weather. For you must know that I had a twin brother, as beautiful as the day, and gentle as a fawn, and wholesome as new bread and butter, whose company pleased me so much, as mine also pleased him, that we swore an oath never to marry but to live forever peacefully in the castle, and hunt and play together the livelong day. But when this stranger knocked, in a howling gale, with his wet hat and cloak pouring rainwater and his smiling mouth, my brother invited him in eagerly, and gave him meat and wine, and a bed for the night, and sang with him, and played cards, and sat by the fire, talking of the wide world and its adventures. As I was not pleased with this, and indeed a little sorrowful that my brother should take pleasure in another's company, I went to bed early and lay listening to the West Wind howling round the turrets and after a while fell into an uneasy slumber. From this I was wakened by a strange, very beautiful twanging music, coming from all about me. I sat up, and tried to see what this might be or mean, and saw the door of my chamber slowly open and he, the stranger, came striding in, dry now, with black curly hair and a dangerous smiling face. I tried to move, but could not, it was as though a band gripped my body, and another band was tied about my face. He told me that he meant me no harm, but was a magician, who had made the music play around me, and wished to have my hand in marriage and live in my castle, with me and my brother, in peace hereafter. And I said-for I was permitted to answer-that I had no desire for marriage, but wished to live unwed and happy with my dear brother and no other. So he answered that that might not be, that he would have me whether I would or no, and that my brother was of his opinion in this matter. We shall see that, said I, and he answered unabashed, with the invisible instruments twanging and humming and jangling all over the room, 'You may see it, but you must not speak about this or anything that has passed here, for I have silenced you as surely as if I had cut out your tongue.'

"Next day I tried to warn my brother, and it was as the black artist had said. When I opened my mouth to speak on this topic it was as though my lips were sewn together with great stitches in the flesh, and my tongue would not move in my mouth. Yet might ask to have the salt passed, or discourse of the evil weather, and so my brother, to my great chagrin, noticed nothing, but set out blithely to go hunting with his new friend, leaving me at home to sit by the hearth, and to feel silent anguish at what might ensue. All day I sat so, and in the late afternoon, when the shadows were long on the castle lawns and the last rays of the sun were brassy and chill, I knew with certainty that something terrible had happened, and ran out of the castle, and away to the dark woods. And out of the dark woods came the black man, leading his horse on one arm, and on the other a tall grey hound with the saddest face I have ever seen on any creature. He told me my brother had suddenly gone away, and would return no more for a great and uncertain length of time and had left me, and the castle, in charge of him, the dark magician. He told me this gaily, as if it did not much matter whether I believed it or no. I said I would by no means submit to such injustice and was glad to hear my own voice steady and confident, for I feared my lips might again be sewn into silence. When I spoke great tears fell from the eyes of the grey hound, more and more, heavier and heavier. And I knew in some sort, I think, that the animal was my brother, in this meek and helpless form. Then I was angry, and said he should never come into my house, nor come near me, with my good will. And he said that I had perceived correctly, that he might do nothing without my good will which he would strive to gain, if I would allow it. And I said, this should never be, and he must never hope for it. Then he became angry, and threatened that he would silence me forever, if I would not agree. I said that without my dear brother I had little care where I was, and no one I wished to speak to. Then he said I should see whether that was so after a hundred years in a glass coffin. He made a few passes and the castle diminished and shrank, as you see it now, and he made a pass or two more and it was walled with glass as you see. And my people, the men and maidservants who came running, he confined as you see, each in a glass bottle, and finally closed me into the glass coffin in which you found me. And now, if you will have me, we will hasten from this place, before the magician returns, as he does from time to time, to see if I have relented."

"Of course I will have you,' said the little tailor, "for you are my promised marvel, released with my vanished glass key, and I love you dearly already. Though why you should have me, simply because I opened the glass case, is less clear to me altogether, and when, and if, you are restored to your rightful place, and your home and lands and people are again your own, I trust you will feel free to reconsider the matter, and remain, if you will, alone and unwed. For me, it is enough to have seen the extraordinary gold web of your hair, and to have touched that whitest and most delicate cheek with my lips." And you may ask yourselves, my dear and most innocent readers, whether he spoke there with more gentleness or cunning, since the lady set such store on giving herself of her own free will, and since also the castle with its gardens, though now measurable with pins and fine stitches and thumbnails and thimbles, were lordly and handsome enough for any man to wish to spend his days there. The beautiful lady then blushed, a warm and rosy colour in her white cheeks, and was heard to murmur that the spell was as the spell was, that a kiss received after the successful disintegration of the glass casket was a promise, as kisses are, whether received voluntarily or involuntarily. Whilst they were thus disputing, politely, the moral niceties of their interesting situation, a rushing sound was heard, and a melodious twanging, and the lady became very agitated, and said the black magician was on his way. And our hero, in his turn, felt despondent and fearful, for his little grey mentor had given him no instructions for this eventuality. Still, he thought, I must do what I can to protect the lady, to whom I owe so much, and whom I have certainly, for better, for worse, released from sleep and silence. He carried no weapon save his own sharp needles and scissors, but it occurred to him that he could make do with the slivers of glass from the broken sarcophagus. So he took up the longest and sharpest, wrapping its hilt round in his leather apron, and waited.

The black artist appeared on the threshold, wrapped in a swirling black cloak, smiling most ferociously, and the little tailor quaked and held up his splinter, thinking his foe would be bound to meet it magically, or freeze his hand in motion as he struck. But the other merely advanced, and when he came up, put out a hand to touch the lady, whereupon our hero struck with all his might at his heart, and the glass splinter entered deeply and he fell to the ground. And behold, he shrivelled and withered under their eyes, and became a small handful of grey dust and glass powder. Then the lady wept a little, and said that the tailor had now twice saved her, and was in every way worthy of her hand. And she clapped her hands together, and suddenly they all rose in the air, man, woman, house, glass flasks, heap of dust, and found themselves out on a cold hillside where stood the original little grey man with Otto the hound. And you, my sagacious readers, will have perceived and understood that Otto was the very same hound into which the young brother of the lady of the coffin had been transformed. So she fell upon his grey hairy neck, weeping bright tears. And when her tears mixed with the salty tears that fell down the great beast's cheek, the spell was released, and he stood before her, a golden-haired young man in hunting-costume. And they embraced, for a long time, with full hearts. Meanwhile the little tailor, aided by the little grey man, had stroked the glass case containing the castle with the two feathers from the cock and hen, and with a strange rushing and rumbling the castle appeared as it must always have been, with noble staircases and innumerable doors. Then the little tailor and the little grey man uncorked the bottles and flasks and the liquids and smokes flowed sighing out of the necks of them, and formed themselves into men and women, butler and forester, cook and parlourmaid, all mightily bewildered to find themselves where they were. Then the lady told her brother that the little tailor had rescued her from her sleep and had killed the black artist and had won her hand in marriage. And the young man said that the tailor had offered him kindness, and should live with them both in the castle and be happy ever after. And so it was, and they did live happily ever after. The young man and his sister went hunting in the wild woods, and the little tailor, whose inclination did not lie that way, stayed by the hearth and was merry with them in the evenings. Only one thing was missing. A craftsman is nothing without the exercise of his craft. So he ordered to be brought to him the finest silk cloth and brilliant threads, and made for pleasure what he had once needed to make for harsh necessity.