The Sealed Letter

Miss Bennett sits by a moribund fire. She should ring for the girl to bring in more coals-though it's only mid-October, the afternoon is bitter-but somehow she doesn't dare.

She's been here a week and a half. (She hadn't the momentum to get as far as France or Italy; she knew she could lose herself in the less fashionable quarters of Pimlico just as easily.) A week and a half of solitary meals on trays, afternoons watching the dying fire, her lungs creaking like unoiled hinges. She broods over the possibility that the girl will have noticed something. Only this morning she remembered that her handkerchiefs are monogrammed: why would a Miss Bennett's handkerchiefs say E. F.? At any moment, the landlady might march in to demand an explanation. What decent woman takes lodgings under an assumed name?

Fido got it out of Pride and Prejudice, not that she resembles any of those bright girls with their futures sparkling before them. Well, maybe what's-her-name, the one who played the piano too long and bored the guests.

Her dreams have never been so lurid. Last night she was setting type, working so fast her hands blurred. She felt a tug; she looked down to see that she was wearing a voluminous white satin gown, and one of its flounces was caught up in the machinery of the Wharfedale press. Slowly, inexorably, Fido was being pulled from her desk, dragged nearer and nearer the hungry cylinders of the machine. Then she was in the bowels of the press, rolled quite flat, covered with red-inked words. The strange thing is, what was distressing her in the dream, what made her scream and keep screaming without a sound, was not pain, but the fact that she couldn't read the words.

After ten days in this rented room, she's finding it hard to get out of bed before nine. She speaks to no one, has no business, receives no post. In all her adult life, Fido's never been in such a state of isolation. She feels obscurely guilty about leaving her most responsible clicker, Wilfred Head, in sole charge of the press at such a busy time, not to mention dropping the new Victoria Magazine entirely into Emily Davies's hands-but a sort of helplessness has paralyzed her. Since a few days into what she's come to think of as her confinement, when she went out for air and happened to glimpse a placard advertising Shocking Revelations on First Day of Codrington Trial, she's read no papers, for fear of what she'll find there. Perhaps this is cowardice. Very likely. Fido has suspended all her principles on assuming the name Bennett.

If the trial began on the eighth… surely it must be over and done with by now? But to find out, she'll have to buy a newspaper, and the thought makes her sick to her stomach.

Her limbs have tightened from lack of exercise. This must be what it feels like to be one of those elegant invalids, cooped up and cosseted all over Mayfair and Belgravia. Fido's afraid to so much as walk in a park because she might run into someone who recognizes her. This city of almost three million souls is smaller than one might think. Accidental meetings happen all the time. (On the last day of August, for instance, on Farringdon Street. Two tangled fates wandered apart for seven years, then converged without warning.)

Fido broods, too, on the original accident, a full decade ago: the day she glimpsed Helen Codrington for the first time, crying by the shore in Kent. Was there a choice, at that moment? Fido could always have walked by, she supposes; pretended not to notice the tears streaking that small, lovely face; said nothing, not even a "May I be of any assistance?" But no, it's simply not in Fido to be so cold, not even nowadays when the world of business has toughened her, and certainly not back then, as a girl of nineteen. So perhaps it's our nature that makes our fate. Inescapable.

And even to save herself from complications, would Fido really want to be the kind of person who walked on past a distraught stranger, fearing to involve herself, averting her face? A dull, utilitarian life that would be. A life without risk.

A tap at the door, and she jumps.

"Miss Bennett?"

"Come in."

"Telegram for you," says the girl, handing it to her.

Alone again, Fido strains to breathe, waits for her pulse to slow. The only person who has her address-for emergencies-is Bridget Mulcahy at the press. Please come at once. B. M.

She takes a cab to Bloomsbury, and finds the press in a state of apocalypse. Great Coram Street is littered with hacking, sobbing typos. Miss Jennings, the deaf girl, is standing frozen on a curb, with streaming eyes. "What on earth has happened?" Fido asks another hand, who goes into a coughing fit at the sight of the proprietor. The girl beside her speaks up hoarsely. The word sounds like dying.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Cayenne, I said. Cayenne powder, madam, all over the floor."

The poisonous stuff is not just on the floorboards, Fido finds when she makes her way inside-handkerchief pressed to her face-but in the machines too, scattered among the type itself. What a simple technique, but how effective. Her throat makes a harsh whoop. She catches sight of some red paint daubed on a wall: Something Stinks, it says.

"Have the police been called?" she asks a red-faced Mr. Head.

"Of course," he says shortly.

She coughs and wheezes, then finds her way to her office, where Bridget Mulcahy, face swathed in a scarf like some harem girl, is mopping the floor.

"Miss Faithfull," she cries out. A cold breeze whistles in the window.

Fido collapses into a chair, shivering under her greatcoat. "We are veterans of this kind of sabotage, Miss Mulcahy, aren't we?" She means her tone to be encouraging, but it comes out piteous.

"'Tisn't sabotage this is, but war." The woman's brogue has strengthened in the crisis. "Those misfortunate hands who tripped in here first thing this morning-their throats are scalded."

"I blame myself," Fido mutters.

"That's nonsense, madam."

"I ought to have been here. I am the target." She makes herself go on. "This attack is not simply directed against the cause of female employment, for once. That graffiti on the wall-"

"The men should have scrubbed it off by now," scolds Bridget Mulcahy.

Fido shakes her head. "You know as well as I do that it refers to my name having been dragged into this divorce."

Miss Mulcahy's face remains blank. "I already told the peelers, I believe Kettle may be involved."

"Our Mr. Kettle? Our clicker?" asks Fido, startled.

"He ever so fortuitously sent in his notice yesterday morning. And no window was smashed, which means the brutes must have had the key!"

Fido drops her face into her hands. After a long minute, she tries to gather her forces; she straightens up. Her lips taste of harsh spice. Is it possible-Kettle letting their enemies in? She suspected him of fiddling the accounts, but no worse. She's beginning to distrust her ability to take the measure of people.

No matter how she flees from the grasp of the Codrington case, it finds her and drags her down. What good has it done her to go to such lengths to defy the court's summons? Without ever entering the witness box, she's been judged and sentenced in every household in London. Her knuckles are between her teeth now: the metallic tang of blood.

By the time the press has been cleaned up, all the hands seen by a doctor, and other small but urgent matters of business settled, Fido hasn't the heart to go back to Pimlico and take up her pretence of being Miss Bennett. She sends a boy to collect her things from the lodgings instead, and walks home to Taviton Street.

It's only a few minutes from the press, but today it takes her a quarter of an hour. She stumbles along in a daze through the sharp October afternoon.

Letting herself into the house with her own key, she startles Johnson in the hall. Wide-eyed, long-faced, the maid stands staring as if at an apparition.

Fido can't summon the energy for any sort of explanation. Besides, what good is it to have servants if you have to explain yourself to them? "I'll be in my study," she says instead, hoarsely. "Yes, madam."

She coughs up a lot of yellow-brown stuff into a basin, and drinks two glasses of water. On her desk, a perfect stack: unread copies of the Times. She shudders at the sight. And then decides to get it over with, because this day could hardly get any worse.

The first report, which she finds in the edition of the ninth, gives her a vertiginous feeling as she reads about all these colourful characters: the reckless Mrs. Codrington, the sorrowful admiral, the audacious, interchangeable Mildmay and Anderson. And here comes the wife's friend, this enigmatic Miss Faithfull. (She's described as Helen's companion, as if she was some kind of toady working for bed and board during the three years she spent at Eccleston Square.) Fido cringes at the references to meetings between Helen and Anderson in her own house. How could she have been taken in by Helen's rigmarole about breaking with him gradually? According to Mr. Bovill, the co-respondent's missing witness-Miss Emily Faithfull-played a shameful role in the intrigue, as go-between, accessory, in short, as pander-ess. She tries, and fails, not to think of her parents and brothers and sisters reading this.

But it's when she finds, in the report of the tenth of October, that Few's affidavit about the attempted rape was not withdrawn, that she starts to tremble. The admiral's barrister mocks the very idea of his client's molesting a young woman not reputed to be of conspicuous beauty. Fido wipes her eyes-vanity, vanity, she scolds herself-and forces herself to read on. What shadow Miss Faithfull's flight casts on the veracity of her tale, I will leave to the gentlemen of the jury to decide.

Her eyes scurry through the columns, hunting for her name. There's worse: Here comes a peculiarly distorted version of the summer of 1857, when she left Eccleston Square. Miss Faithfull's poisonous role… his wife's passionate feelings for this person were causing her to shrink away from her husband. He entrusted to paper his thoughts on Miss Faithfull's role in the crisis, and his reasons for banishing her-which document was sealed up and placed by him in the hands of his brother. There follows a lot of legal bickering about the status and relevance of this sealed letter.

Fido rubs her aching forehead. She's never heard of this document. When Harry suggested she go home to Surrey… she remembers the conversation as cordial, if awkward. Why would he have sat down to write a memorandum about it? Surely he'd remember what had been in his own mind, without having to commit it to paper?

A kind of proof, then. A proof of what? Slowly, cumbersomely, her mind grinds the husk off the seed.

Her eye moves up the column again. His wife's passionate feelings for this person were causing her to shrink away from her husband. Fido stares at that sentence, reads it again, and once more.

Oh, good God.

A proof of a suspicion, only. No one has named that suspicion, in court or in the newspaper. (Not the kind of thing anyone wants to spell out, even in these tell-all times.) A word to the wise. Those who don't understand it won't even notice what they're missing; those who do, will comprehend the whole business in a moment. Sealed up.

Nauseated, she holds to the edge of the desk as if she's in a rowboat, being pulled into the eye of a storm.