The Sealed Letter

The last day of August, and the sky is the colour of hot ash. Something rancid wafts on the air from Smithfield Market; the air glitters with stone dust. She's swept down Farringdon Street in the slipstream of bowlers, top hats, baskets on porters' heads. A hand lights on her arm, a small, ungloved hand; the brown silk of her sleeve is caught between plump pink fingertips. She staggers, clamps her pocketbook to her ribs, but even as she's jerking away she can't help recognizing that hand.

"Fido?"

One syllable dipping down, the next swooping up, a familiar and jaunty music; the word skips across the years like a skimmed stone. Almost everyone calls her that now, but Helen was the first. Fido's eyes flick up to Helen's face: sharp cheekbones, chignon still copper. An acid lemon dress, white lace gloves scrunched in the other hand, the one that's not gripping Fido's sleeve. The human river has washed Fido sideways, now, into a scarlet-chested, brass-buttoned officer, who begs her pardon.

"I knew it was you," cries Helen, holding her emerald parasol up to block the terrible sun. "Did you take me for a pickpocket?" she asks, a giggle in her throat.

"Only for half a moment, Mrs. Codrington," she manages to say, licking her gritty lips.

A flicker of pain across the pointed face. "Oh, Fido. Has it come to that?"

"Helen, then," says Fido, and smiles despite herself. Despite the skintightening sensation of encountering a friend who is no longer one. Despite the memories that are billowing up like genii from smashed bottles. She wrenches a handkerchief from her jacket pocket and dabs at her forehead. The two women are blocking the traffic; an old man swerves around them, under a sandwich board that reads No Home Should Be Without One.

"But how you've grown," Helen is marvelling.

Fido looks down at the brown bulge of her bodice. "Too true."

Pink fingers clap to the coral mouth. "You monster! Still the same talent for mistaking my meaning, or letting on that you do. Of course I meant you've grown up so."

"It has been, what, seven years?" Her words are as stiff as tin soldiers. Checking her bonnet is straight, she becomes belatedly aware that the scarlet uniform she bumped into a minute ago is hovering, so she turns to see him off.

"Oh, my manners," says Helen. "Miss Emily Faithfull-if I may-Colonel David Anderson, a friend of the family's from Malta."

The colonel has dangling blond whiskers. Fido lets his fingers enclose hers. "Delighted," she says distractedly.

"The Miss Faithfull?"

She winces at the phrase. By his accent, he's a Scot.

"Printer and Publisher to the Queen?"

The man's well informed. Fido concedes a nod. "Her Majesty's been gracious enough to lend her name to our enterprise at the Victoria Press." She turns back to Helen. So much to say, and little of it speakable; words log-jam in her throat. "Are you and Captain Codrington home on leave, or-"

"Forever and ever, amen," says Helen.

That little twisted smile is so familiar to Fido that the years fall away like planks splintering under her feet. She feels dizzy; she fears she'll have to sink to her knees, right here in all the dusty clamour of London's City district.

"Matter of fact, it's Vice-Admiral Codrington now," remarks Colonel Anderson.

"Of course, of course, forgive me," Fido tells Helen. "I can't help thinking of him by the name he bore in the days…" The days when I knew him? When I knew you? But she's not that girl anymore. It's 1864: I'm almost thirty years old, she scolds herself.

"Harry's been immured in paperwork for weeks, ever since our vile crossing from Malta," complains Helen, "so I've press-ganged the colonel into service as my parcel carrier today."

"A keen volunteer, Mrs. C.," he corrects her, swinging two small packages on their strings. "I'll just pop across the road to pick up your whatsits, shall I?"

"Curtain tassels, a dozen of the magenta," she reminds him.

"That's the ticket."

Tactful of the officer to absent himself, Fido thinks. But once she and Helen are alone, the discomfort rises between them like a paper screen. "Such heat" is all she manages.

"It takes me back," says Helen pleasurably, twirling her fringed green parasol and tipping her chin up to catch the merciless light.

Watching that face, Fido finds it hard to believe that this woman must be-count the years-thirty-six. "To Italy? Or do you mean India?"

"Oh, both: my whole torrid youth!"

"Was it… was it generally hot in Malta?"

Helen's laugh comes out startlingly deep, like a sob. "So we're reduced to discussing the weather."

Irritation boils in Fido's veins. "As it happens, I'm pressed for time today-"

"Oh, yes, I was almost forgetting what a very important person you've become. The Miss Faithfull, philanthropist, pioneer!"

Fido wants to take her by the lemon-lace-edged shoulders and shake her like a doll. "I prefer to call myself a woman of business."

"I can quite see why I was dropped the moment I left the country," Helen rattles on, "considering how pressed for time you've been, what with all your valiant efforts on behalf of our downtrodden sex."

Her mouth, Fido finds, is hanging open. "Whatever can you mean, dropped?"

A pretty shrug. "It needn't have been done with such brutal efficiency, need it?" Helen's dropped the mocking tone. "Friendships have their seasons, that's understood. But you might have let me down rather more gently, I suppose, after all we'd been through."

Fido blinks dust out of her eyes.

"It wasn't kind, that's all I'll say. Or womanly. It wasn't like you, like what I knew of your heart, or thought I did."

"Stop." She holds up her white-gloved hand till it almost touches those rapid lips.

Helen only speeds up. "You'd had your fill of me and Harry by the time we embarked for Malta, was that it? All at once sick to death of us and our bickerings?" Her eyes have the wet blue sheen of rain. "I know, I know, I quite see that we'd worn you out between us. But I must confess, when I found myself tossed aside like yesterday's newspaper-"

"My dear." Fido almost barks it. "I find these accusations incongruous."

Helen stares at her like a baby.

"Must I remind you, I wrote twice to Admiralty House in Valetta and got not a word of reply to either?"

"Nonsense!"

Fido is bewildered. This is like one of those dreams in which one is caught up in an endless, illogical series of tasks.

"Of course I wrote back," cries Helen.

"From Malta?"

"Of course from Malta! I was a stranger in a strange land; I needed a bosom friend more than ever. Whyever would I have left off writing? I poured out all my worries-"

Fido breaks in. "When was this? What month?"

"How should I recall, all these years later?" asks Helen reasonably. "But I know I replied as soon as I got your letter-the one and only letter I received from you when I was in Malta. I sent several long screeds, but on your side the correspondence simply dried up. You can't imagine my nervous excitement when a packet of post would arrive from England, and I'd rip it open-"

Fido's chewing her lip; she tastes blood. "I did change my lodgings, that autumn," she concedes. "But still, your letters ought to have been sent on directly by the post office."

"Lost at sea?" suggests Helen, frowning.

"One of them, perhaps, but could the Continental mail really be so-"

"Things do go astray."

"What a very absurd-" Fido hears her voice rise pitifully, and breaks off. Scalding water behind her eyes. "I don't know what to say."

Helen's smile is miserable. "Oh heavens, I see it all now. I should have tried again; I should have kept on writing, despite my mortified feelings."

"No, I should! I thought-" She tries now to remember what she'd thought; what sense she'd made of it when Helen hadn't written back, that strange year when the Codringtons were posted abroad and Fido stayed alone in London, wondering what to make of herself. "I suppose I supposed… a chapter in your life had drawn to a close."

"Dearest Fido! You're not the stuff of a chapter," Helen protests. "Several volumes, at least."

Her brain's whirling under the hot, powdery sky. She doesn't want to cry, here on Farringdon Street, a matter of yards from her steam-printing office, where any passing clerk or hand might spot her. So Fido laughs instead. "Such an idiotic misunderstanding, like something out of Mozart. I couldn't be sorrier."

"Nor I. These seven years have been an eternity!"

What in another woman would strike Fido as hyperbole has in Helen Codrington always charmed her, somehow. The phrases are delivered with a sort of rueful merriment, as if by an actress who knows herself to be better than her part.

She seizes Fido's wrists, squeezing tight enough that her bones shift under the humid cotton gloves. "And what are the odds that I'd happen across you again, not a fortnight after my return? Like a rose in this urban wilderness," she cries, dropping Fido's wrists to gesture across the crowded City.

Fido catches sight of the straw-coloured curls of Colonel Anderson, making his way back across Farringdon Street, so she speaks fast. "I used to wonder if you had new, absorbing occupations-another child, even?"

Helen's giggle has half a shudder in it. "No, no, that's the one point on which Harry and I have always agreed."

"The little girls must be… what, ten or so?" The calculation discomfits her; she still pictures them spinning their tops on the nursery floorboards.

"Eleven and twelve. Oh, Nan and Nell are quite the sophisticated demoiselles. You won't know them."

Then the Scot is at her elbow. "Rather a nuisance, Mrs. C.," he reports. "They've only eight of the magenta in stock, so I've asked for them to be sent on to you in Eccleston Square when they're ready."

Fido's mind is suddenly filled with the tall white walls in Belgravia that she once called home. "The same house?" she asks Helen, under her breath. "Were you able to put the tenants out?"

"The same everything," she answers. "Harry and I have picked up our former life like some moth-eaten cloak from the floor of a wardrobe."

"Doesn't someone in Trollope tell a bride, 'Don't let him take you anywhere beyond Eccleston Square'?" asks Colonel Anderson.

Fido laughs. "Yes, it's still the last bastion of respectability."

"Are you a Belgravian too, Miss Faithfull?"

"Bloomsbury," she corrects him, with a touch of defiance. "I'm one of these 'new women'; they'd never have me in Eccleston Square."

"Even as ''Printer to Her Majesty'?"

"Especially under that title, I suspect! No, I live snug and bachelor-style on Taviton Street. I read the Times over breakfast, which rather scandalizes my maid."

They all laugh at that.

"I was just setting off home after a morning at my steam-works, over there at Number 83," says Fido, gesturing up Farringdon Street. "The Friend of the People-a weekly paper-is in type, and goes to press tomorrow."

"How exciting," murmurs Helen.

"Hardly. Mulish apprentices, and paper curling in the heat!" Even as she's saying the words, this automatic disparagement irritates Fido. The fact is, it is exciting. Sometimes when she wakes in the morning, every muscle in her limbs tightens when she remembers that she's a publisher, and no longer just the youngest of Reverend Ferdinand Faithfull's enormous brood.

"I'll hail a cab at the stand, then, shall I," Anderson asks, "and drop you ladies home?"

"I have a better idea," cries Helen. "Ever since reading about the Underground Railway, I've been longing to descend into Hades."

Fido smiles, remembering what it's like to be sucked into this woman's orbit: the festive whims and whirls of it. "I don't mean to disappoint you, but it's quite respectable."

"You've tried it?"

"Not yet. But as it happens," she adds on impulse, "my physician believes it might be beneficial."

"My friend's a martyr to asthma," Helen tells the colonel.

My friend: two simple words that make Fido's head reel.

"The Underground's uncommon convenient," he says, "and certainly faster than inching through all this traffic."

"Onwards, then: a journey into the bowels of the earth!" says Helen. Her hand-the bare one-is a warm snake sliding through the crook of Fido's elbow.

Yet another building site has opened up like an abscess since Fido was last on this street. Anderson helps the ladies across the makeshift plank bridge, Helen's yellow skirt swinging like a bell. The wasteland is littered with wheelbarrows and spades, and the caked foreheads of the navvies remind Fido of some detail about face painting from a tedious lecture she recently attended by a South Sea missionary.

"I barely recognize London-the way it's thrown out tendrils in all directions," remarks Helen.

"Yes, and the government refuses to make the developers consider the poor," Fido tells her, "who're being evicted in their tens of thousands-"

But Helen has stopped to brush something off a flounce, and Fido feels jarred, as if she's walked into a wall. The old Fido-meaning, the young Fido-knew nothing more of the state of the nation than she'd picked up on parish visits with her mother in Surrey. That girl never spouted statistics; she talked of novels, balls, matches, who had dash and go. The long hiatus, the seven years during which Fido and Helen have been unknown to each other, seems to gape like a tear in a stocking.

In the station, a train is waiting, the hazy sunlight that comes through the roof catching its gilt name: Locust. "But we're not underground at all," complains Helen.

"Patience is a virtue," murmurs Colonel Anderson, handing the ladies into the first-class compartment.

White walls, mahogany and mirrors, a good carpet; the carriage is an impersonation of a drawing-room, thinks Fido. The gas globes hanging from the ceiling give off a light that's wan but bright enough to read by, and a peculiar fume.

Helen leans against Fido and shivers pleasurably. "I should think it must be fearfully hazardous to combine fumes and sparks in an enclosed tunnel."

The tone amuses Fido; Helen's always delighted in even a slim possibility of danger. "I suppose one must trust in the scientists."

"If there should be an explosion, I'll carry you out in a trice," Anderson tells Helen. "Both of you," he corrects himself, "under my arms, like twin battering rams!"

Fido can't stop her eyebrows shooting up.

"Beg pardon, my imagination rather ran away with me there." His whiskers look more like a spaniel's ears than ever.

"You must excuse the colonel," murmurs Helen, laughing in Fido's ear. "We're a dreadfully lax lot on Malta; the sun evaporates all our Anglo proprieties."

But Helen, after childhood in Calcutta and adolescence in Florence, is the most un-English of Englishwomen; she's always waltzed her way around the rules of womanhood. It's a quality that Fido relished even when she was young, long before she ever did any hard thinking about the arbitrariness of those rules.

Helen is staring at a label on the window that bears a picture of a heart, and inside it, in Gothic lettering, The Dead Heart.

"It's a play," Fido tells her.

"Ah." A sigh. "I've been gone so long, I'm quite behind the times."

"The whole city's pockmarked with these irksome labels," Anderson mutters. "Really, advertising has had its day; the public can't be fooled anymore."

"At the theatre, by the by, don't you hate women who're afraid to laugh?" Helen asks Fido.

"Awfully," she says, grinning back at her. It's the surges of familiarity that she's finding strangest: as if the friends haven't been apart for a moment.

A piercing whistle makes Fido jump, and the carriage sways into move ment. All at once her dress feels soaked in the armpits and the small of the back. Her chest's a little tight; she makes herself take long breaths of the metallic air. The wheels start to thunder, the engine screams. The carriage is filling up with vapour, and she coughs violently; Anderson stands and wrestles with the window catch. "Breathe it in deeply," says Helen, one hand caressing Fido's shoulder blade.

The smoke feels poisonous, but then medicines often do; she does her best to fill her lungs and hold it in. The train's been swallowed up by darkness, and the gaslight flares up greenly. At this speed, there's a peculiar vibration, a sort of undulation of the thundering machine. Above them, she knows, there's more than twenty feet of packed London earth. How do the thirdclass passengers bear it in their open wagons? This isn't like a railway tunnel, because it shows no sign of coming to an end.

"More than a little oppressive, no?" she remarks, but the others show no sign of hearing her over the shrieking demons, and she shouldn't have spoken because now she's hacking so hard her lungs are on fire. Between the coughs, the wheezing is getting worse. She fumbles in her bag, claws the lining.

"Let me, let me," shouts Helen, taking the bag from her. "Is this little bottle-"

Fido undoes it with spasmodic fingers and puts it to her nose. The camphor and menthol make her eyes water, and she gasps. She takes a long drink that burns like vitriol. But already she can feel the laudanum calming her lungs a little. She finds a folded handkerchief and douses it in the mixture. Holding it to her face, she makes herself do nothing but breathe.

The train's stopped. Anderson is speaking in her ear, something about King's Cross, can she manage a little longer or should they alight here? She shakes her head, unable to speak. Her wretched lungs!

Another few minutes of jolting and shrieking, and then the train halts again: Euston. Anderson's helping her to her feet, and Helen's holding her other elbow. Up a long, twisting staircase-they all three stop whenever Fido's overtaken by a coughing fit. A male passenger's voice behind mutters a complaint, and Anderson turns to snap something about the lady's being unwell.

Finally they emerge on Gower Street. The sun's gone behind a thick veil of cloud, and it seems a little cooler. Fido's breathing has eased enough to let her speak: "I'm perfectly well now, really."

"All my fault," Helen is lamenting as they turn down Endsleigh Gardens. "My vagaries so often end in disaster…"

"Not at all," says Fido hoarsely; "my own doctor recommended the experiment."

Helen's face brightens. "It is rather a thrill, though, isn't it, to cross the capital in a matter of minutes?"

She nods, coughing explosively again.

At the entrance to Taviton Street, the top-hatted gatekeeper expresses such concern for Miss Faithfull's health that Anderson's obliged to tip him.

"If you please," says Fido, on her steps, loosening herself from her friends' arms, "I'm quite recovered now." Embarrassment makes her voice almost surly. "You've been awfully kind, Colonel."

"Fortunate to be of any assistance to such a celebrated lady," says Anderson with a neat bow.

"Will you solemnly swear to rest now?" breathes Helen in her ear. "And a line tomorrow."

"A paragraph, at the least."

They part laughing; their hot hands come away reluctantly, like ivy. It's all very strange, Fido thinks; seven years of silence cracked open like a windowpane.

She uses her own key; she's never seen the need for interrupting the servants' work to make them let her in.

It's these small, rational reforms that make the Reverend and Mrs. Faithfull shudder so, on their rare visits from Headley. Her father's a clergyman of the old, well-bred, moderate school; he preaches in tailored black, and has equal scorn for genuflecting Tractarians and Low ranters. Fido still feels bad about the enormous expense she put him to by her coming out: all those unflattering flounces, and for what? At twenty-two, finding herself alone in London after the Codringtons' departure, she had a quiet tussle with her parents that ended with her winning their cautious agreement that she was to be treated as a sensible spinster of thirty, with her own modest household, trying to make her way in the literary world. But two years later, when Fido broke it to them that she had taken up the cause of rights for women, and was setting up a printing house as a demonstration of female capacity for skilled labour, Mrs. Faithfull got two red spots very high in her cheeks and asked whether it wasn't generally held that a lady who engaged in trade, even with the highest of motives, lost caste. Fido countered with some sharp remarks about idle femininity that make her wince to remember, especially considering that her mother has never known an idle hour in her life.

What about these days? Do the Faithfulls consider the youngest daughter of their eight to be still a lady? Best not to ask. Officially they condone her life in the capital-your mission, her mother called it once, which must be how she describes it to her neighbours in Surrey-but Fido can sense the strain. They'd so much rather she were settled in some country town and producing a child a year, like her sisters.

Upstairs, in her bedroom, Fido catches sight of herself in the mirror. Intelligent eyes in the long, upholstered face of-well, there's no other way to put it-a well-fed dog. Her limp brown hair, cropped to her neck, is pulled back by a plain band. The flesh sags softly under her chin where white lace, grubby from her morning in the City, meets the brown cloth. No corsets, no crinoline: it cost her only a little pang to give them up, and she never misses them now. (They didn't make her look any prettier, only more conventional, another harmless frilled sheep drifting along with the herd.) Walking arm in arm with Helen this afternoon, it strikes her that the two of them must have looked like characters from quite different sorts of book. Well, Fido's as God made her. And as she's chosen to be. At least the way she dresses now is clear, uncompromising-and not eccentric enough to demand attention. It announces, I have more pressing business than to wonder who's looking at me.

She prises off her shoes before lying down. She hopes she isn't marking the counterpane. A shower-bath would be delicious, but the company only turns the water on in the mornings. Well, that's the last time she'll let herself be dragged through the vaporous sewers of the Underground. Some days this city is too much for her: a clanging machine that threatens to crush and swallow her. Some days she doubts her lungs will hold out till she's forty. But if she led the kind of quiet provincial days the Reverend and Mrs. Faithfull would prefer for their youngest daughter, it wouldn't be asthma that would choke off her life force in the end, but ennui. The fact is that for all its infinite varieties of filth, London is the thumping heart of everything that interests her, the only place she can imagine living.

She reaches into the bedside drawer for her tin of Sweet Threes and the little box of safety matches. (Fido has a standing order for her cigarettes; they're delivered straight from the factory in Peckham, so she doesn't have to push her way into a tobacconist's once a week, running the gauntlet of smirking men.) The Turkish tobacco in its tube of yellow tissue smells sweetly spiced and nutty-though when she first tried a cigarette, five years ago, it seemed to stink like used horse bedding. She draws the smoke deep into her raw lungs now, and feels her breathing ease at once.

Helen's back. Fido still can't quite believe it.

After her second cigarette she sleeps, a little, and then rings for Johnson to bring up some cold mutton and pickles. She always reads at meals, to make the most of her time and to keep her mental pistons firing. Over her dinner tray she skims the Social Science Association's latest pamphlet on Friendless Girls and How to Help Them. She clucks with irritation when she finds a misspelling she should have spotted in the galleys.

Her attention keeps wandering. What are the odds of running into someone in London? Three and a half million to one, according to the last census. It's not as if the two former friends ran into each other at one of their old Belgravia haunts, or the home of some mutual acquaintance. To happen to glimpse each other on Farringdon Street, in a mob of bankers and porters, only a fortnight after the Codringtons' return to England, with Helen in search of magenta tassels and Fido's head full of printing schedules-it can't be an accident. Such astonishing luck, after the awful mischance of the lost letters that ended their friendship so needlessly. Fido likes to think of her life as self-made, an ingenious machine held in her own two hands… but there's something so fortuitous about today's reunion, she can only attribute it to providence.

Friendless Girls has fallen onto the counterpane. She's back in Kent, all at once, at the spot on Walmer Beach where she first laid eyes on Helen Codrington in 1854. A lady with russet hair, perched like a mermaid on the rocks, those salty blue eyes staring out to sea. Fido was only nineteen, on a visit to help her sister Esther with the new baby, and green with inexperience. Green enough, for instance, to assume that a weeping wife must be grieving the lack of her brave captain (recently posted to the Crimea) rather than the fact of him.

The Reverend and Mrs. Faithfull's union was such a solid edifice, so proper in its manners and substantial in its comforts: what did Fido, at nineteen, understand of the darker games husbands and wives could play? How little she knew of marriage-of anything, she corrects herself now-before she became acquainted with the Codringtons. Before she found herself drawn into the absorbing misery of a principled man and a warm woman who had nothing in common. Nothing to bind them except two little daughters, and the full force of law.

The strange thing was, Fido liked them both. She felt drawn to Helen at once, by instinct, as a bloom opens to a bee. But to tall, bearded Captain Codrington too, as soon as he sailed home that November-when the Crimean winter shut down all possibility of what he called "decent action." She was drawn to his earnestness, his zeal for the Navy, his tenderness with the children; she found him manly in the best sense. And as for him, he took to his wife's new companion at once, paid her the compliment of serious conversation, as if she were something more interesting than a second season debutante. Within a month she'd picked up his wife's un-English habit of calling him Harry. One afternoon, when Helen had had a tantrum over caraway cake and rushed off to her room, Harry confided in Fido how valuable he thought her influence; how much the children treasured their "Aunt Fido"; how he hoped she'd consider Eccleston Square as her home whenever her parents could spare her from the Rectory in Headley. And little by little, without it ever receiving any further discussion, Fido found herself one of the family.

She began with a fount of optimism, not just as Helen's friend but also as a friend to the marriage. Surely the fact that this man and this woman were by nature alien to each other needn't mean that happiness would always be beyond their grasp? If Harry only mellowed a little, approaching his fifties… if he came to appreciate that his young wife's qualities were those of the singing grasshopper more than the industrious ant… if Helen, for her part, could be persuaded to accept the real life she'd chosen, rather than hankering for those chimerical ones she found between yellow paper covers… That was how Fido used to think, in the first years at Eccleston Square.

It embarrasses her to realize that she pictured herself as a sort of Miss Nightingale, lifting her lamp in dark passages. She tried not to take sides, but it was a vain attempt, she sees that now. Harry was away serving his sovereign for long stretches of the mid-1850s, and even when home between campaigns, he couldn't help but stand awkwardly outside the magic circle of the women's intimacy. I used to call her Madre, she thinks now. And sometimes, Little One. It's quite mysterious to Fido, that electric chain of feeling that can link two women of different ages, backgrounds, temperaments; that throb of sympathetic mutuality, that chiming note outside the range of men's hearing. Without understanding it, she's always responded to it as a diviner to the call of water deep underground.

Setting her tray aside, on impulse she gets out of bed, and goes to unlock a little drawer in her bureau. At the very back, rolled up in a piece of linen, she finds the choker. A cheap thing, but nicely made: mother-of-pearl, shells, pebbles of amber, all the small treasures of the Kentish shore, sewn onto a band of black velvet. Helen gave it to her to mark the first anniversary of their meeting, and Fido wore it for the best part of three years. The Codrington years, as she's called them ever since, in the privacy of her head.

She blamed herself at the time; of course she did. The fact is that for all Fido's sensible advice, her loving counsel, the Codrington marriage disintegrated on her watch. She did her best, and her best did no good at all.

Worse than that: by stepping in as a wide-eyed go-between, she became an obstacle. That awful last year, 1857, when Helen shut her bedroom door against her husband, and finally-having wilfully misunderstood a paragraph in the Telegraph about the new Matrimonial Causes Act-made a wild demand for a separation on the basis of incompatibility (as if any such thing existed in law)… Fido still can't sort out the pieces of that puzzle. All she knows is that the more she tried to help, the more entangled she got, the more she tangled matters that she'd have been better off not meddling with in the first place.

All this remembering is hard work, like using a muscle that's gone stiff and sore. There are things she can't look at directly yet; passages in her long history with the Codringtons over which she skips. Those strange, terrible months of quarrels and illnesses towards the end, for instance.

It still makes her blush to the throat to remember that Harry had to ask her to move out. (She ought to have left months before that, but Helen needed her so desperately, and the wound-up, wailing little girls…) He did it in a gentlemanly manner; assured her, "No third party should be obliged to witness such scenes." But Fido stumbled away from Eccleston Square like a child with scorched fingers.

And then in a matter of months, news came that Captain Codrington was to be elevated to the rank of rear admiral and made superintendent of the dockyards at Valetta. His wife and children would accompany him on his first land posting, that was understood; Admiralty House had dozens of rooms, and Helen was one of these rare Englishwomen raised in the tropics for whom the heat held no dangers. So off they went, the whole Codrington ménage. "It'll be a fresh start," Fido remembers telling a tear-stained Helen that summer of '57. "A heaven-sent second chance." She wanted to believe it herself; she was holding out for something like a happy ending.

And now? she wonders, as she stands fingering the seashell choker. Helen sounded no worse than rueful today on Farringdon Street, when she mentioned Harry being buried in paperwork. Perhaps seven years have dulled her weapons, and his. Have the spouses somehow muddled through their old antipathies, Fido wonders, and reached an entente cordiale?

On the verge of their departure, in '57, Fido imagined herself writing twice a week, and going out to Malta for long visits. She was still wearing the choker then; she wore it till long after the letters stopped arriving. She wasn't to know that the friendship had slipped through her fingers, by what she's only learned today-it still chokes her to realize it-was the most trivial of happenstance. The inefficiency of the Maltese post!

Fido rolls up the velvet necklace and puts it back in the drawer. It probably wouldn't go around her throat anymore. She's solider, these days, not just in flesh but also in mind. Being stranded seven years ago, left to her own devices, did her good. It doesn't matter why; it doesn't matter that it was all a mistake. Fido had to grow up and make a life for herself: a full one, useful and satisfying, an important life (if she says so herself).

But to feel the grey ashes of friendship reddening to life again-

Enough. At this rate she won't sleep tonight.

Fido puts the tray outside her door for Johnson. She returns Friendless Girls to the pile of pamphlets on the bedside cabinet, and unlocks the lower drawer in which she keeps her fiction. Not that she has anything indecent; the spines all bear the Pegasus motif of Mudie's Library. Ridiculous things are said of Miss Braddon's novels, or Mr. Collins's-that they harrow the nervous system and drive readers to drink or insanity. Fido finds them enlivening, in the small doses she allows herself; as with any stimulus, it's a matter of moderate use. Appalling secrets, deaths, bigamies, doppelgangers: there's nothing like a taste of the sensational at the end of a hard day. She takes out The Notting Hill Mystery now, and finds her place.

Two pages on, she finds herself staring into space. This is ridiculous. For seven years, she's been getting along perfectly well on her own. But we met again on Farringdon Street, by purest chance. In the multitudinous city, Helen laid her hand on mine.

At any rate, these are pointless speculations, because it's too late to turn back. There's no one-has never been anyone-whose company Fido relishes as much as Helen Codrington's. Despite the woman's excesses and flaws; despite all the complications of their shared history. The grave is open and the dead friendship walks.

The following afternoon, Fido should be supervising the printing of the Friend of the People, one of the contracts on which she most relies. But she can't settle. Finally she leaves her most reliable clicker, young Mr. Head, in charge. She sends a boy to hail a growler from the stand and tells the driver, "Eccleston Square, if you please." That's one of the paradoxes of being a lady, it strikes her: it's more respectable for Fido to rattle along in one corner of this four-wheeled growler, which could bear a whole family, than if she took a low-slung hansom meant for two.

Outside the house on Eccleston Square, an aproned man is scattering fresh gravel and watering it to keep down the dust. When Fido steps down and looks up at the green railings, it's all so much the same as the day she packed her cases to leave that she's gripped by a subtle nausea, and almost wishes she hadn't come. So many things have come rushing back to her in the single day and night since she's found Helen again: they spill out of her memory like coins from a shaken box.

Mrs. Nichols, the sour-faced housekeeper, greets her by name as if it were only yesterday, and has a maid show her into the dim drawing-room. Apart from the dark panelling, everything looks brand new. Muslin curtains shift above the plant-crammed glass cases built into the windows; the grate is filled with a paper peacock. The wallpaper's green and pink, embossed with a creeping vine pattern. The room seems to Fido to hold three times as much furniture as in the old days, and every high-shelved whatnot or occasional table, every chair leg or handle, is bronzed or scalloped or carved with flowers and animals. She counts ormolu vases, photographs of unfamiliar garden parties, Bengal shawls, gilt-eyed wally dogs. Jardinières cascading with silk ferns, domes of polished wax fruit, a glass globe of silver fish, as well as cages of skylarks and parrots and cockatoos (some stuffed, one-startling her with a shriek-very much alive). "It's all different," she says, spinning round as Helen glides in, wearing a lilac wrapper.

Her friend grins as she unlocks one of the dozens of drawers on a marquetried chiffonier and produces a tea caddy and sugar basin. "I've only just begun. It'll take me at least a year to prettify this old barracks of a house, but I had to tackle the drawing-room the moment we unpacked. I've been roaming Whiteley's and Swan and Edgar's like a madwoman. Look at this cunning little iron casket, can you guess what it is?"

Fido opens it, and a glass inkstand pops out.

"And these are real leaves, electro-plated-whatever that means," says Helen with a giggle. "I'd have everything up-to-date if Harry would only loosen the purse-strings," she adds under her breath.

Oh dear, thinks Fido, recognizing an old theme.

The two of them settle against the plump crimson cushions as Mrs. Nichols brings in the tea tray. "I've been playing forfeits upstairs with the girls," Helen explains.

And here they come, in their white pinafores. Nan and Nell both have their mother's copper hair, brushed back smoothly under black bands, and their father's height, which makes them stand a little awkwardly on the scarlet and emerald Brussels carpet.

"Darlingissimi, I wonder do you remember Miss Faithfull, who used to live with us before we went to Malta?"

"I believe so," says one of the girls uncertainly.

"But we always called you Aunt Fido," says the other.

"Indeed you did," Fido tells the child with a surge of warmth, "and I'd be honoured if you'd do so again."

"Nan's a stupendous pianist these days," says Helen, beckoning to the older girl and sliding her arm round the narrow waist as if she's guessed that Fido has no idea which is which, "and very sensitive with a watercolour brush. As for Nell-"

"I'm much less accomplished," volunteers the younger girl.

"-but far more moral," adds her sister.

Fido laughs. "You share your sentences, the way you used to share your toys."

"Oh, they share everything, even their faults," Helen tells her. "They're a perfect conspiracy."

Fido scrabbles for a memory. "You both had a craze for spinning tops."

"We have a collection of thirty-four-" Nell confides.

"-but we don't play with them anymore, it's beneath our dignity," says Nan.

This makes their mother yelp with amusement. "These days it's all stereoscope, stereoscope," she says, gesturing to a mahogany and brass device on a tiny table. "Every time I turn around I find them attached to the contraption, which can't be good for their eyes."

"But it's marvellous, Mama. Things seem so very real."

"It's so much better than the old magic lantern at the Allens'."

"When I look at the Stereo View from a Precipice, I feel as though I'm going to topple in," adds Nan.

"Topple off to the schoolroom now, if you please, so Mama can talk to her friend."

Nan leans into the visitor's ear on her way out. "Are you going to live upstairs again, Aunt Fido?"

She jumps. "No, my dear," she says, too heartily, "but we'll see a great deal of each other, I hope."

The girls sketch a simultaneous curtsy, and the maid closes the doors behind them.

It's oddly difficult to be alone with Helen, Fido finds. She hears herself swallow.

Helen's smile is tight. "When I spotted you on Farringdon Street, yesterday, you looked so-so changed, I hardly dared hail you."

"Older and fatter, you mean."

"No, no. I believe it's that you don't curl your hair anymore, and it's cut to your shoulders. And the shorter skirts."

Dowdy, Fido translates. "Yes, we working women tend to follow the country style," she says. "Nothing that will catch in machinery or trail in the dirt."

"Harry would never stand for an uncorseted wife," remarks Helen.

Is there a little envy in her tone? A pause. It's harder to keep the conversational plates spinning here than it was on the street. The pouring of tea takes up half a minute, then Fido launches into an enthusiastic précis of The Notting Hill Mystery.

"Well," says Helen, leaning back on the cushions, "I'm relieved you still have at least two relaxing habits in your ever-so-strenuous way of life. Novels and cigarettes."

"How did you-"

A giggle. "Yesterday, when I held your hand in the Underground, my fingers smelled of Turkish tobacco afterward."

"Mock all you like," says Fido, sheepish. There's no rational reason why a woman shouldn't smoke, especially if she finds it beneficial to her health-but somehow Fido prefers to do it in the privacy of her bedroom. "As for my strenuous way of life, I must tell you, work has been a revelation to me. What is it Mrs. Browning says?" She strains to remember. "Yes, that work is worth more in itself than whatever we work to get."

One slim eyebrow soars. "Hadn't you ever worked hard before you started going in for your rights?"

"Oh, Latin lessons with my father, sewing clothes for parish children," says Fido with a wave of the hand, "but nothing meaningful. When I happened across a copy of the English Woman's Journal and discovered the Cause…" She pronounces the word with an odd bashfulness. "I marched into 19 Langham Place, introduced myself to Miss Bessie Parkes, said 'Put me to any use at all.' Oh, the thrill of spending one's energies on something that really matters-" She breaks off, belatedly aware of the insult.

Helen's smile is feline.

Fido almost stammers. "What I meant is-for those of us without pressing duties, children to educate, and households to run, and-"

"Come, come, don't we know each other too well for cant? Mrs. Lawless gives the girls their lessons, and I handed my keys to Mrs. Nichols years ago. I pass my days reading, shopping, and yawning," says Helen easily. "London's so dead, off-season." She scans the drawing-room. "I'm thinking of having gaslight put in; I believe I could talk Harry into it, in the spirit of scientific progress."

"Think again," Fido advises her. "I find it more trouble than it's worth. It leaks, stinks of sulphur, blackens the ceiling, and it's far too hot in the summer."

"Mm," says Helen, "but so marvellously bright! Move with the times, isn't that the watchword for you moderns?"

"Only real progress," says Fido, a little uncomfortable with the teasing, "not experiment for its own sake."

"I'd call running one's own publishing house experimental. It must feel peculiar, to earn one's bread."

Fido grins at her. "I'll tell you what, my dear-if one gets paid for one's work, one knows somebody wants it. And one gains a power to do real good in the world. The first time I ever brought a cheque to the bank, and saw it cashed into hard golden sovereigns… Perhaps you should try it," she adds slyly.

Helen only giggles. "I wonder, did you read about Madame Genviève last week?"

"I don't know the lady."

"Nor I: a tightrope walker, as well as wife and mother," she explains. "Madame Genviève was performing blindfolded at a fête in Birmingham when she toppled to her death. It turns out she was unbalanced-"

"Mentally?"

"Literally," Helen corrects her, "by being in the last month of a delicate condition."

Fido winces.

"So perhaps nature has set some bounds to female ambition?"

"That's a ghoulish anecdote, Helen, not a reasoned argument." She cackles.

"I always felt like a cow, in the final months. It was hard enough to walk upstairs, let alone along a high wire."

"Come, come," says Fido, straight-faced, "what of the pride of giving life to a new soul?"

"Speaks one who's never tried it," cries Helen, poking her in the arm. "All I remember is the smell of the chloroform, and the curious sensation of skyrockets going off in my head. After that it's simply messy and confining," she tells Fido, "and I could never summon any tendre for them till the first few months were over. A newborn's frightful when undressed: swollen head, skinny limbs, and that terrible froglike action."

All Fido can do is laugh.

"But tell me more about this Reform Firm, isn't that what you call yourselves?"

"You're well informed." Fido is gratified that Helen would take such an interest in the Cause.

"Oh, the papers from home were full of you and your comrades at Langham Place: your English Woman's Journal and Married Women's Property Bill, your Victoria Press…"

"Then I'm sure you've read as much in the way of mockery as praise. The Reform Firm is what our enemies dubbed us-but like the Quakers, we've embraced the title, to take the sting out of it."

"So is this Miss Parkes the boss of the Firm?"

Fido shakes her head. "We're an informal knot of fellows," she explains, "each working on a variety of schemes to improve the lot of women. For instance, after that dreadful shipwreck last year in which all the female passengers drowned, we managed to persuade Marylebone Baths to open for women's classes one day a week."

Helen is clearly not interested in swimming classes. "Come, there's always a leader."

"Well, Madame Bodichon-Bar Smith, as was-could be called our guiding angel," says Fido, "as she ran and funded the first campaigns. But she's married a wild Algerian doctor and spends most of the year there."

"How sensible of her," says Helen wryly.

"Miss Bessie Parkes is Madame's chief acolyte and dearest friend, and set up the English Woman's Journal, and edited it till her health obliged her to resign the job to Miss Davies-a new comrade, but awfully capable-so yes, I dare say Miss Parkes could be considered first among equals" Fido admits. "My own efforts have focused on the press and SPEW-the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women-"

"What an unfortunate acronym," cries Helen.

"Isn't it! But five years ago, when we founded it in a surge of zeal, that seemed a trivial consideration."

"Tell me, which of these ladies-" Helen breaks off. "You're all ladies, I suppose?"

The question makes Fido uncomfortable. "By education, if not by birth. Miss Boucherett rides to hounds, whereas Miss Craig's a glover's daughter," she says a little defiantly.

"But what I want to know is, which of them is your real friend?"

Fido doesn't know how to answer.

"Who's supplanted me?"

For all its mocking tone, the question hits Fido like a crowbar. "Helen! You should know me better than to think I'd sacrifice old attachments for new."

Helen's face blooms, dazzles. "How it relieves me to hear you say that."

"There are certainly bonds of affection between us all at Langham Place, but-Isa Craig is very sympathetic, for instance, but I don't know that I could count her as a real friend. And since the death of Miss Procter-"

"You knew the poet, personally?" asks Helen, audibly impressed. "Adelaide was our hardest worker, and our wittiest," says Fido sadly. "Since that loss, old ties have frayed somewhat, and differences loom larger. But our work still unites us," she adds, afraid she's giving the wrong impression. "There's a great spirit of love at bottom."

Helen snorts. "I've run charity bazaars with women I'd happily see dead at my feet. But carina," she laughs, resting her fingertips on the brown satin of Fido's skirt, "if you haven't found one true intimate among the whole coven-that's a crying shame. You've such a genius for friendship, such an adhesive disposition-"

When I was young, thinks Fido with a stab. Perhaps it's rusted up.

"I had a sort of friend, in Malta," volunteers Helen.

"A sort of friend?"

"Quite a bit older; the wife of a local clergyman. The Watsons had a French governess for their wards, you see, and invited Nell and Nan over there to share lessons, which seemed harmless," says Helen bleakly. "We were all great mates till she began to turn Harry against me."

Fido's eyebrows shoot up. "Surely he didn't-he wasn't-"

"Oh, her attractions weren't of that kind," says Helen, "but she gained a strange ascendancy over him. Prigs are the worst of women; all that prudery hides a lust for power."

It strikes Fido that this is her chance to enquire into the state of the Codrington marriage. She wonders if the admiral is downstairs in his study. Has Harry been told she's in the house, for the first time since the day he-regretfully, impeccably-asked her to leave?

But she's hesitated too long, and Helen's rattling on again. "Well, my dear, if you really haven't one kindred spirit among this gang of black and midnight hags-then I intend to reinstate myself at once."

They're both grinning at her cheek. "There are no hags at Langham Place," Fido tells her. "Bessie Parkes, for one, is so small-boned and lovely that I feel like a bull beside her. In fact, there was a comical incident last spring when some Swedish professor called and mistook me for Miss Parkes; he described her in his travel memoir as an independent, strapping female who went outside and called a cab for herself-much to Bessie's horror!"

When Helen has stopped laughing, she remarks, "Reading about your career, in Malta-I used to wonder if you might end up marrying some earnest reformer, a lecturer on hygiene or some such. Or a vicar perhaps, like your sisters."

Fido smiles slightly. "You know, the old maid of today is not an object of pity."

"I've never pitied you for an instant."

"Independence, a home of one's own, travel…" She marks them off on her fingers. "Liberty's been a better husband to many of us than love."

"I've not a word to say against the single life," Helen protests, "I just can't quite imagine how it's done. But you'll hear no hymns to matrimony from me," she adds darkly.

There, the subject's been laid squarely on the table. Fido speaks before she can lose her nerve. "Are you… may I ask, are you and your husband any happier, these days?"

A small grimace. "Mi ritrovaiper una selva oscura," recites Helen. "That's the only tag from Dante I can recall from all the Signora's lessons."

"You've… woken in a dark wood?" Fido translates.

"And once married folk have strayed into the dark wood, one doesn't hear that they generally find their way out."

"I'm so very sorry." Not surprised, though, she realizes; not surprised at all.

"Well at least Harry and I both behave rather better than in the era when you had to put up with scenes over the breakfast table," says Helen. "Somehow we've acquired the knack of getting through the days. The years, rather! Separate lives, separate rooms, separate friends…"

All Fido can think to say is, "I'm sure he still cares for you, in his stiff way."

"Huh! Everything you know about marriage comes out of a book."

Fido stares at her. "That's not true. I've talked to many wives. They often speak of marriage pragmatically, as an occupation with its own duties and satisfactions. Some tell me a husband can be managed quite easily, as he wants only to be treated with deference, as master in his own house."

"So I should pacify Harry, just as I'd soothe one of the girls if she had a stomachache, or nag a forgetful maid, or tot up a budget for coals and lamp oil?" Helen's tone is withering.

"It's nothing more than tact. Forbearance. A hidden power."

"You try it!" Helen rubs the back of her neck. Then, in a chastened tone, "Did living with us for all those years scare you off the whole business?"

"Oh no," Fido assures her. "I'm afraid I've simply never felt that interest in a man that the poet calls 'woman's whole existence.' Solitude suits me," she adds. Is this true? she wonders suddenly. She thinks of solitude within a marriage, like a hearth that gives off cold instead of light. "But it mustn't be thought that my views on the advancement of women mean that I've lost faith in marriage," she goes on confusedly.

"Well, that makes one of us."

"Helen!" In the silence, she scrabbles for an analogy. "One may have a single bad dinner on a Sunday, without deciding to scrap the whole institution of Sunday dinner."

"I've been choking down this particular dinner for fifteen years," says Helen under her breath.

"Marriage is still the bedrock of society," Fido tells her, almost pleadingly. "If founded on self-respect and freedom-"

"Aye, if," Helen interrupts. "There's the rub."

Fido sighs. "Well, yes, it needs reform, of course. The entire engulfing of the wife's identity in the husband's-her surrender of property-his almost unlimited rights over her person…" Does her friend even know her true position under British law, Fido wonders-classed with criminals, lunatics, and children? "And so often the wife's I do is neither truly informed nor free."

Helen is nodding eagerly.

"We of the Cause-we seek to open careers to women precisely to give them a choice," Fido explains, "so they won't be driven by monetary need into loveless marriage, as some sort of life raft."

"I thought I was choosing. I thought I loved him," says Helen in a shaking voice. "These December-May matches…"

"Hardly December. I see you're still absurdly prone to exaggeration," says Fido, trying to lighten the moment.

"Well, late October, at least. Harry was forty-one, and I barely twenty-one; he might have been my father! A handsome giant in blue and white, with gold lace cuffs," she says wistfully, "posted to shield us Anglo-Florentines from the rebel mob. And I, little Miss Helen Smith, a wide-eyed Desdemona, enchanted by his tales of adventure on the high seas."

Fido frowns. Helen as Shakespeare's heroine, perhaps, but anyone less like the jealous Moor than the sober, thoroughly English Harry Codrington…" My dear, haven't the years done anything to soften you two to each other?"

"Oh, you innocent," says Helen. "That's not what years do."

The early September morning's still cool. Fido stands in the shower-bath and pulls the lever decisively. The numbing deluge makes her hiss. Afterwards she rubs herself all over with the towel, coughing. So many of her sex spend a week in bed at the least sign of weakness, but in Fido's view, the body's tremendous engine must be kept running.

Outside, the distinctive clink-clink of the milkwoman's iron-shod boots. She'll be shifting her laden yoke on her shoulders, filling up a half-quart for Miss Faithfull and lowering it on a hook over the railings.

Fido's still brooding over the conversation at Eccleston Square two days ago. She made a hash of explaining her work, or rather, its contagious excitement. In an age when the system (that hackneyed phrase) is generally said to determine everything, when all social ills are nobody's fault, the women of the Reform Firm-with the men of the Social Science Association and a few other forward-thinking organizations-say, not so! Fido's seen change coming in a single generation; the icy chains of prejudice shaking loose. She toils hard and with pleasure, so that other women may be freed from their set grooves (whether of poverty or boredom, dependence or idleness), freed to toil hard and with pleasure in their turn. This is what gets Fido out of bed by six every morning. So why does she feel she left Helen with the impression that she sits around squabbling with other do-gooders?

The main office of the Victoria Press is at 9 Great Coram Street, five minutes' brisk walk from the house. (Evacuation of Atlanta Ends Four Month Siege, reads the newsboy's sign, and she considers stopping to recommend a hyphen between four and month.)

In the typos' room, she pauses to congratulate Gladys Jennings on her recovery from smallpox; the girl's still purple-tinged and marked with scabs that Fido pretends not to see. Then she stops by the desk of Flora Parsons. "This will take half the day to correct," she remarks, handing back the long slip she's marked up in red. "If you'd applied your mind the first time, as Miss Jennings always does-"

"Beg pardon, ma'am," mutters Flora Parsons, head down, still rapidly plucking sorts from the alphabetical cases.

"It's not a matter of my pardon," says Fido, exasperated. "I'm merely pointing out why Miss Jennings makes eighteen shillings to your ten. That's the very reason I pay by the piece rather than by the week: to put your earning power in your own hands."

"You're very good to us, ma'am."

Fido could hardly miss the sarcasm. This one's a hard case: a workhouse orphan with cream-coloured hair who's been here four years now and is as slapdash as ever. Engaged, already, to one of the junior clickers, Mr. Ned Dunstable, which Fido finds disheartening: young hands are more trainable than their elders, but most won't trouble to master a trade they expect to leave at any moment. "You underestimate yourself, Miss Parsons," she says now, on impulse.

That makes the blonde typo glance up.

"It's a marvel to me, for instance, that without any formal schooling, you've such a fine grasp of the language."

A shrug. "Down to all the copy I've set up, I dare say. What old Robert Owen would call the spread of education."

Fido stands closer to the desk. "What infuriates me-" She breaks off. "If you really applied your forces," she starts again, "you could be the quickest, most accurate typo here. Save some capital, go into your wedded life on terms at least approaching equality. In fact, I've never hired a married woman yet, but in your case I would consider-"

Flora Parsons interrupts with a peculiar half-smile. "Ned and I will do perfectly well, thank you, ma'am."

Without another word, Fido goes back to her office.

She still does her own correcting; it's hard to find the time. She'd be glad to find an educated lady to take it on-though she's not sure she could afford one, given that six of her apprentices become journeymen this year and will have to be paid half as much again.

Mr. Head comes in hangdog with the Printer's Journal. "You see here, Miss Faithfull, where the London Society of Compositors is debating a policy of making its members swear not to finish work set up by females?"

Fido winces. And to think she's had the impression the trade's hostility to her has been fading away, as the years prove that the Victoria Press is not going to depress wages…" Women, if you please, Mr. Head," she says, glancing through the article; "females smacks of the zoo. Do I refer to your sex as males, as if you were orangutans?"

He grins, but only briefly. "What if the society were to strike the press?"

Fido takes a long breath before she answers. "Have you received a direct order from your superiors?"

"No, no," he says, horrified. "They don't know I'm a clicker here."

It's as if she's running a gambling cellar or opium den. "Well, then, I suggest you put it out of your mind, Mr. Head. If that dark day comes, you'll be obliged to decide whether to let yourself be bullied out of a job that I think you've found both agreeable and profitable."

He nods unhappily. He makes no move towards the door. "Myself and Mr. Kettle were thinking, perhaps we could change names."

She blinks at him. "You would be known as Kettle, and he as Head?" (She doesn't like Kettle, as it happens; on occasion she's suspected something fishy about his figures, but she's never had proof.)

"No, no, we'd both assume false ones, aliases on paper, as it were. So that there'd be no record that it's we who supervise the girls."

She almost laughs at the atmosphere of skullduggery. "Very well, I'll pay my clickers under any nom de guerre of your choice. May I still address you as Mr. Head and Mr. Kettle, to save confusion?"

"Certainly, madam, it's just for the books," says Head, sheepish.

Don't fret, she tells herself when he's gone; she presses her fingers to her hot face. It won't come to a strike. And if it does, well, I've survived worse. Had Fido wanted a peaceful existence, she reminds herself, she could have stayed at home and helped her mother with the parish work.

With unnecessary violence she slits open some letters, including one from Matthew Arnold apologizing for the lateness of his review of a new translation of Marcus Aurelius. My dear Faithfull is how he addresses her, and she likes the style; in the world of letters, sex shouldn't matter. Emily Davies has forwarded a poem by Miss Rossetti; Fido finds it touching that these authors remain willing to write for the pittance the English Woman's Journal can offer them.

She spends the next half-hour proofreading an article for the enormous Annual Proceedings of the Social Science Association:

"Are Men Naturally Cleverer Than Women?"

Men are superior to women because they know more, but they have this knowledge because they have three times the opportunities of acquiring it.

She likes that line; it has a punch to it.

The boy's tapped three times before she looks up. "A Mrs. Coddleton and a Colonel Anderson, to pay their respects, ma'am."

"Codrington," a merry voice corrects him from behind the opaque glass of the door.

Taken aback, on her feet, Fido's all smiles. Helen, here!

"I badgered poor Anderson to bring me along, since my lord and master's still glued to his papers," Helen explains as she presses her cheek to Fido's in the Continental manner. She's in the tiniest of ivory bonnets today: it's a stray dove perched on her brilliant hair.

The officer's in mufti, a rather loud waistcoat: the family tartan? Fido wonders. "No badgering was required," he assures her.

"What fun, Fido, to glimpse you in character," cries Helen, tucking her arm through Fido's as they move through the workroom.

Fido flinches a little, because the typos will have heard the nickname-then tells herself they must know it already. "That makes it sound as if I'm acting a role."

Helen's mouth twists. "Oh, don't we each have several selves?"

And indeed, even as Fido launches into the usual spiel about setting up the press four years ago, "as a practical demonstration to the world of the capacities of women's eyes, fingers, and brains," she's listening to herself with a strange self-consciousness, noting how cool and professional she sounds.

Helen sniffs the air.

"Ink," Fido tells her. She shows off the Wharfedale flatbed press, ornamented with brass eagles, "Capable of a thousand impressions an hour. Oh, and this is Miss Bridget Mulcahy: my first employee and right-hand woman."

The pallid Irishwoman smiles and bows, her hands skimming like dragon-flies as she returns cleaned letters to their cases.

"Daughter of a Limerick printer, who took the unusual step of training her," Fido tells her visitors in a murmur. "After his death she saw my advertisement in a newspaper and headed straight for London."

"Isn't it an unhealthy occupation?" Anderson asks as they walk between the pew-like composing desks.

Fido's always glad when a visitor brings up this misconception. "Traditionally, but not necessarily. I remember the Printer's Journal claimed all my hands would sink under the strain! But you see, I make sure to provide good lighting, ventilation, breaks for lunch, and stools to sit on while they work."

"Mm, nothing sinking about these girls, by the looks of it," says Anderson with an appreciative scan of the room that Fido doesn't like.

"Your hands, is that what you call them?" asks Helen in amusement, wiggling her fingers. "As if you're some monstrous octopus!"

Fido grins, but uneasily; it's strange to have her old friend here in the workroom, crackingjokes. "I see myself in a maternal role, really," she says in a low voice. "Miss Jennings here, for instance, is only thirteen; apprenticed by the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb."

"Awfully kind of you," remarks the colonel.

Fido shakes her head. "She's been rather more trouble to train, but wonderfully immune to distraction."

"Oh, but you have the coarser sex here too," Helen mutters, catching sight of Mr. Kettle chalking his hands.

"Well, of course there are tasks beyond the average girl's strength," says Fido a little defensively. "Carrying the type cases, feeding and striking off the sheets… So I hire one male clicker to oversee each company of five typos: he distributes copy, makes up the girls' work into columns and imposes the matter-puts the pages in the right order," she glosses. "But I'm proud to say I employ twenty-five girls here and fifteen at Farringdon Street."

Helen is hanging back, looking at the long racks covered with iron frames. "They're known as chases" says Fido, at her elbow, "but when they're filled with type and secured we call themformes." It occurs to her that she's being a bore. "Miss Clark is setting up a line at a time on a composing stick-if I may, Miss Clark-it's adjustable in width, you see." She offers the stick to Helen.

She pulls back. "I mustn't get stained; Harry and I dine at the Beechams' tonight."

Anderson chuckles. "There's no ink on it yet, Mrs. C."

That name has jarred on Fido's ear each time he's used it. Too vulgar, or too presuming? It sounds like something a butcher might call his wife. She tells herself not to be such a snob; military circles have their own jargon. "Everything's thoroughly scrubbed after each print run," she assures Helen. "The trade absolutely depends on hygiene and order." How pompous I sound, how elderly, at twenty-nine.

"You'd never take me on, Fido," Helen remarks. "Far too disorderly, not to mention too plump in the fingers."

"Your fingers are irrelevant, but your character would be an obstacle," Fido agrees, loosening into laughter.

She offers them tea in her office.

"Aha, Tennyson, capital." Anderson points his cane's silver tip at a framed verse on the wall and recites:

Fido smiles slightly. "In fact, the poet's a Miss Anna Walker."

Helen smiles at his discomfiture.

"Rather in the laureate's manner, though," ventures Anderson after a second.

Over shrimps and bread and butter, it emerges that some of Fido's Scottish connections are acquainted with some of the colonel's.

"This establishment is a great credit to you, Miss Faithfull," he tells her.

"Yet we've had our enemies," she says, theatrically.

Helen stops chewing a large shrimp.

Aha, that's hooked her. "Ceaseless sabotage, in the early days," says Fido. "Windows smashed, frames and stools daubed in ink to destroy the hands' dresses, sorts jumbled up in their cases or scattered like birdseed, machines prised apart with crowbars… the waste was simply ruinous, quite apart from the distress caused."

"My dear, how sensational," cries Helen.

Strange how a few years can reduce humiliation to an anecdote. "There were scurrilous attacks on me in the journals; I had to grow a rhinoceros's hide. But the Victoria Press was self-supporting in a year, I was honoured with Her Majesty's approval, and now we win medals for excellence from the International Exhibition." Well, one medal. In her attempt to impress her old friend, Fido's getting carried away.

"Bravissima," cries Helen, clapping her hands. "And to think, when I first knew you, it was four costumes a day and routs at Lady Morgan's."

Fido laughs. "I'm afraid we were a wild pair, my soi-disant chaperone and I," she tells Anderson.

"We had a policy of dancing with anything in trousers that asked us," contributes Helen.

"And made facile and impertinent remarks, in the name of youthful artless-ness. You, as the married lady, should have reined me in."

"Ah, but Fido's always been my better self," Helen tells Anderson. "And look at her now, how she's transformed herself from deb to philanthropist…"

"Miss Faithfull, on that theme," he asks playfully, "wouldn't you admit that some of your woman-ist set want to go too far?"

Fido arranges her smile. (It's little by little that the world will be changed, she reminds herself, as mice nibble a hole in a wall.) "I assure you, Colonel, we don't mean to smash the social machine, only to readjust its workings."

"But one hears of calls for women judges, MPs, officers-"

"Oh, if any argument's pushed ad absurdum…" Fido controls her temper. "My own belief is that there should be no legal bars to our sex's progress-and certainly none are needed, because it's inconceivable that more than a handful would ever attempt to enter the professions you mention. Women naturally prefer the nobler spheres of education, medicine, and welfare."

"Nobler than your line, Anderson," Helen teases.

"Well, more conducive to human happiness than war is, shall we say?" suggests Fido.

He snorts. "I'll grant you that, Miss Faithfull. What those miserable Americans are suffering this year, on both sides…"

She likes him for that.

"But I'll confess, we soldiers are always panting for another dust-up."

"The colonel's glory days were in the Crimea," Helen says with a little yawn.

"And as for poor Navy men like Codrington," he adds, "the last real action he saw was at Acre, a quarter of a century ago!"

Rather a sneering remark to make about his friend, Fido thinks. "More tea?" she asks.

Fido shouldn't be here this morning, strolling along the banks of the Serpentine; she should be at Langham Place, attending a meeting to discuss the draft of SPEW's quarterly report. But the sky's the blue of a vein, and the September breeze has cut the heat deliciously. And Helen asked her to come walking in Hyde Park, after all, and for the seven years in which she's done without her friend, it strikes Fido now, she's attended too many meetings.

"You must have read The Woman in White?" Helen asks.

"I got it twice from Mudie's, then bought my own," Fido admits. "The loyal, ugly Marion-she breaks my heart."

"I wore a white shawl all that summer."

"You're still a slave to fashion! What about Mrs. Norton's novels? Or Miss Braddon's?"

Helen nods eagerly. "My favourite title of hers is Three Times Dead."

"Do you take Temple Bar? The current serial is by Miss Braddon," Fido tells her, "it's called The Doctor's Wife, but she's really just an Englished Bovary. Now, Lady Audley can be accused of stealing from The Woman in White-"

"But she's so elegant and audacious, I forgive her everything."

"There's that interesting passage," Fido recalls, "that suggests such crimes result from women being frustrated in their ambitions to enter the professions."

"My favourite is the scene in which she shoves her husband down the well."

Fido lets out a hoot. "Do you remember reading Bleak House to each other, all that first winter?"

"Of course. The death of Lady Dedlock-you made me shudder so, I couldn't sleep."

"Did you hear that Dickens put his wife aside, after she'd given him ten children?"

"My dear, that story must have reached Rangoon the day after it broke," says Helen. "What a dastard, to vilify her in the papers as incapable of maternal love!"

"It's said that he's entangled himself with an actress," Fido adds, automatically lowering her voice, even though there's no one close enough to hear them on the riverbank.

"Worse," says Helen with satisfaction. "His sister-in-law."

"No!"

"I'm sure it was she I saw buying galoshes on Regent Street last week. Mrs. Dickens, I mean, not her sister. She's let herself go, dreadfully."

"She lives with the eldest son, and the others rarely visit," says Fido. "I heard she still reads every word her husband publishes. How sad."

"And how exhausting."

It's Helen's delivery, as much as what she says, that makes Fido burst out laughing. She brings out a side of Fido, a flippant, frank, almost devil-may-care side, that's been in an enchanted sleep for seven years. "Do you miss Malta?" she asks her now.

"Well, Harry certainly does," says Helen, her eyes on a pair of haughty swans. "He was top man of the top brass-whereas now he's got nothing to do but go to the odd chamber concert, or a lecture on warship design. So many wives complain they can't lure their husbands home from the club," she adds darkly, "whereas mine mopes around the house all day! I do hope they find him some paper-shuffling job at the Admiralty, or he's going to drive me and the girls to distraction with all his fussing."

"It was you I asked about," Fido reminds her. "Do you miss it?"

A little shrug. "Places mean little to me; people are all that matter."

What does that mean? Fido turns to examine Helen's face.

It came to her, during a sleepless hour last night, that if they're to take up their friendship again, it must be on new terms. In the old days at Eccleston Square, Fido was very much the junior, the subordinate-a sort of female Horatio; she can see that now. She often suspected Helen of exaggerating, obscuring her real feelings behind a lot of hyperbolic verbiage. And at the time, Fido accepted it as just Helen's way; she was too dazzled by Helen's charm to challenge her. But now Fido's a grown-up, worldly and busy. This time the two women must meet eye to eye, heart to heart, if they're to call themselves by the sacred name of friend. So she asks the question that's been on her mind. "Lucky timing, wasn't it, that Colonel Anderson's leave coincided with your family's return?" She says it as lightly as she can, but it still sounds like a knife thrust.

Helen's eyes flick to hers, then away across the river. "He expects to be recalled to Valetta shortly."

"Which is his regiment?"

"He commands the second battalion of the Twenty-Second Cheshire. One of the old school, like Harry-iron discipline, and all that."

Fido's surprised. "He seems such an agreeable fellow."

"Oh, he's pukka. Very agreeable," adds Helen. Then, in a flat voice, eyes fixed on the opaque surface of the water, "Dangerously so."

Fido's pulse is getting louder. You began this, she reminds herself.

"Do you understand me?" asks Helen, turning to squint at her slightly in the afternoon sun.

Her breath escapes as if from a balloon. "I rather hope not."

"But you do," says Helen with a half-laugh.

You were fishing, Fido rebukes herself; so don't complain if you've hooked something.

Helen rolls her head to one side, and rubs her neck as if it aches. "The man's desperately in love with me."

Fido's face contracts as if she's bitten into something rotten. "

What, I mustn't put plain words on the thing, even where there's nobody but waterfowl to hear us? Very well, let's be ever so English and say Anderson's confused, then," snaps Helen, walking faster, so Fido has to hurry to keep up. "Let's not admit that it's possible for a single man to conceive a burning attachment to a superior officer's wife. That the mother of two half-grown girls could still excite passion, at thirty-six!"

Fido opens her mouth to tell her that she's no less beautiful than she ever was, then shuts it. Helen's always needed male attention-in the old days, Fido thought of this as a minor weakness, like a craving for sweets-but there's a new, unnerving fierceness in her voice today. "Oh, Madre," she says, "you have got yourself in a scrape!"

No reply.

Out of breath, she seizes Helen by the elbow. "Slow down, and tell me all. You sound almost proud of making this fellow unhappy," she says sharply.

Helen spins around; two scarlet spots on her cheeks make her look even prettier. "On the contrary. It's all a disastrous accident."

She's like a child who's smashed a trayful of china.

"You don't know how it's been, these past years," Helen wails. "Harry's such a blank, as a husband-such a stick-in-the-mud. He doesn't want my company. In Malta, he wouldn't stay more than an hour at parties, so I was obliged to dance with other officers and have them escort me home."

Fido's mind is whirling.

"So can I help it if I've made one of my husband's friends my own, in a sincere and ingenuous spirit, and the man's persuaded himself that more is meant by it?"

"Helen," she begins sternly, "you should have cut Anderson off at the first sign of infatuation."

A shrug, very Tuscan. "What's the first sign? By the time one notices the thing, it's grown like a mushroom in the dark."

"All the more reason to root it up at once."

"I don't give him any encouragement."

"You do, I've seen it with my own eyes! What do you call running round town a deux?"

"Hardly running," Helen protests. "A little shopping, a harmless visit to a printing press…"

Fido feels a little dizzy. Could the colonel have asked for a tour of the Victoria Press as a respectable cover for a morning with Helen?

All of a sudden, Helen stops in her tracks. "Oh Fido, I can't hide anything from you. The excitement of having a handsome, sparkling fellow hang on one's every word-you can't imagine!"

Actually, Fido would rate the admiral's black-bearded, tall good looks over Anderson's golden spanielish ones, but she supposes any scowling man is less appealing than a smiling one. Fido can understand the appeal of the other sex in the abstract, but there's something missing in her; the part of a woman's heart that, in the presence of the right man, melts and runs like a vein of ore from the rock.

"Really," says Helen, grabbing her wrist, "can you blame me if I've taken his devoted gaze, like a cordial, to refresh my spirits at gloomy moments?"

"For shame! You must have known this could only cause pain to both of you in the end," Fido snaps, pulling her hand away. "As a wife and mother-"

"Now for the lecture," Helen says under her breath.

And indeed, Fido's still enough of a Faithfull to have the whole speech by rote, every principle and duty in its place…

"Don't," says Helen, pressing one finger hard against Fido's lips.

"Don't what?" But she knows.

"Don't throw stones. Don't disappoint me with what every lady in Belgravia would offer, the usual pieties and pruderies! My friend, you've made something entirely new of yourself, these past years, and it awes me to see it; you've got quite out of the rut of convention," says Helen in marvelling tones. "What you were saying about marriage the other day at my house-that a wife's whole identity is swallowed up-"

Fido tries to remember what bold statements she might have made. "Oh but my dear… I'm not being pious, nor a prude. It's a matter of…" She struggles for words. "Self-respect. Being true to oneself. You did take a vow."

"I didn't know what it meant," cries Helen, "how long a married life can be! And what other choice had a girl like me?"

"Carina." She's trying to marshal her arguments, but compassion confuses her. "I do feel for you."

Helen's eyes glitter like sand. She throws herself on Fido.

Fido registers the hot weight of Helen's face against her collarbone, through the cotton, and smells some kind of floral water in her hair. Two ladies standing pressed against each other, skirt to billowing skirt, on the banks of the Serpentine at three in the afternoon: an incongruous sight perhaps, but Fido refuses to care. "Little One," she whispers.

"The relief of letting it out, you can't imagine," sobs Helen, muffled.

I'm the only one in the world she's told, Fido thinks, with a kind of vertigo. We didn't exchange a word for seven years, but still, four days after meeting again, I'm the one she trusts. This secret's weighing heavy on her already, but she's proud to bear it.

As Fido lets herself into 19 Langham Place, a middle-aged lady hurries up the steps behind her. "Please excuse me-is this the office of the Female Employment Register?"

"That's correct."

"Can you help me?"

Looking at the strained forehead, the soft white hands, Fido doubts it. "Do take a seat in our reading room," she says, showing her in.

The lady grasps Fido's sleeve. "I'm-I don't know you, madam, but I must tell you I'm in most urgent need of remunerative employment. My daughters and I-my husband's a physician," she goes on disjointedly.

Fido waits uncomfortably.

"His practice failed," says the stranger in her strangulated voice. "He has abandoned us. That was four months ago, and we have no other resources."

"My sympathies. I'll make sure someone upstairs will come and write down your details for our register," Fido tells her, gently taking back her sleeve.

As she goes up the stairs, she's remembering the first few such petitioners she met, when she came to work here six years ago, with her carpetbag full of essays and her boundless confidence. (Our heartiest young worker, she'd heard Bessie Parkes call her once, to a stranger.) How spring-like the atmosphere at Langham Place was back in '58: change like ripe fruit dangling almost within their gasp, fruit for which former, more fearful generations had never dared to reach.

Today Bessie Parkes, Jessie Boucherett, Isa Craig, and Sarah Lewin (their secretary) are poring over a portfolio of drawings at the big office table. "Hello, Fido," beams Isa Craig.

"We missed you yesterday," remarks Bessie Parkes.

"Yes, I am sorry. My lungs have been playing up," says Fido, startled by the lie even as she produces it; why couldn't she have simply said she was otherwise engaged? She turns to Miss Lewin to tell her about the doctor's wife downstairs.

"Quite unemployable," sighs the secretary, pushing back her chair.

"Every other day, these reduced gentlewomen turn up at my press," Fido remarks, "and I always redirect them here, to the Employment Register-"

"But their mistake's a natural one, as the Victoria Press is so much better known," says Isa Craig warmly.

"What do you believe becomes of these tragic cases, when we turn them away?" Fido wonders.

"Is this person… handsome?" asks Jessie Boucherett.

"Not unpleasant to the eye."

"Then she'll probably put herself under some man's protection, in the end, rather than starve," says Jessie Boucherett.

Protection, thinks Fido, disgusted by the customary euphemism.

"Which of us could throw the first stone?" asks Bessie Parkes. "The Magdalene was forgiven, we're told, because she loved much. Remember Adelaide's masterpiece, 'A Legend of Provence'?"

Fido doesn't meet any of her comrades' eyes, but she can tell what they're all thinking. They've noticed, without Bessie Parkes ever having announced it, that she no longer works on Sundays; they know she's on the brink of converting from the Unitarian Church to Adelaide Procter's: Rome.

Isa Craig has turned away to wipe her eyes.

"Isa, my dear, you mustn't keep dissolving into tears at the mention of the beloved name." Bessie Parkes speaks in exalted tones. "Adelaide doesn't want us to mourn. Wasn't I with her at the last, and didn't I tell you how she went willingly, radiantly, to her beloved Jesus?"

This strikes Fido as sanctimonious cant, but she says nothing.

"After retching up blood for two years," mutters Jessie Boucherett.

Religion is one of those topics on which the women of the Reform Firm will never agree, which is why they have a policy of keeping it out of the English Woman's Journal.

Bessie bites her lip. "The poem of Adelaide's I mentioned, for any of you who may not recall its details, is about a nun who nurses a handsome knight; he seduces her to run away with him. Years later, a broken beggar, she comes back to the convent, and finds that the Virgin has been impersonating her there all this time, keeping her place."

"That's right," says Isa Craig, nodding. "The twist is that the nun can take up her old life again without fear of the holy sisters' judgement, because none of them ever knew she was gone."

Fido's lost in thoughts of Helen. She fears she may have been too hard on her yesterday. Who is Fido, who's never married a man nor been tempted by one, to stand in judgement on a platonic affaire, an unhappy wife's slim consolation? After all, these things die away on their own, like mayflies: the Channel and the Mediterranean will divide Helen from Anderson again in a matter of weeks.

"The infinite sympathy of the divine, the limitless mercy," marvels Bessie Parkes. She quotes from the poem: "No star is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be what we might have been."

At that moment Fido realizes something with a sickening sensation in her chest, like a tendon snapping: I'm jealous. That's what lay behind all her stern words yesterday: not ethics, so much as hurt. With his spaniel curls and his flippancy, Anderson hardly seems worthy of Helen's burning attention. (But then, what man would?) Something glorious happened on the last day of August on Farringdon Street, a friendship that seemed extinct flared up red and phoenix-like-and what business has a blond puppy to be blundering into such a story?

"On a more practical note," says Sarah Lewin, breaking the silence with her throaty whisper, "I must announce that subscriptions to the Journal are down this month."

"Heavens!"

"Not again!"

"Mm, I'm afraid they've slipped below six hundred."

Bessie Parkes lets out a long sigh. "Would you be so good as to look into it?" she asks their secretary. "Sound out a few subscribers who've decided not to renew…"

"I hear from many sides that our serial novel's popular," puts in Isa Craig.

"Ah, but what has the novel to do with the advancement of women?" asks Bessie Parkes.

Fido shrugs, her mind still wandering. "Every pill needs a little sugar."

It's just at this point that Emily Davies glides in and takes her seat at the table. "I do apologize for my lateness, but I bring rather extraordinary news," she announces in her usual brisk staccato. The Journal's editor is looking particularly doll-like today, Fido notices: bands of mouse-coloured hair framing her diminutive features. She slides a paper out of her thick pocketbook. "This morning I received a letter-they call it a memorial, in their stiff way-from the University of Cambridge…"

The members of the Reform Firm are all agog.

"…approving, on a strictly once-off basis, our request to have girls admitted to its local examinations."

"After all this time," Fido whoops, seizing the document.

"Oh Miss Davies, felicitations. Laurels to the conqueress," cries Bessie Parkes, shaking her hand.

"Nonsense, it was teamwork," says Emily Davies. "Those breakfasts you hosted for influential men, Fido: I believe they were crucial. But the fact is, I'd almost given up on the dons."

Not that anyone in the room takes this literally, since in the short time since the vicar's daughter from Newcastle has come south to work among them, she's shown no signs of dropping any fight. Emily Davies is like a terrier who won't let go of the stick, Fido thinks, only calmer.

"Our long struggle is at flood tide," says Bessie Parkes in the thrilling voice with which she gives readings from her poetry. "Soon we sail into port!"

As always, Emily Davies ignores such outbursts. "The local exams will at least nudge open the door to university admission. I intend that our daughters-I speak metaphorically," she tells the group, very dry, "will be able to enroll in a women's college at Cambridge."

Fido is thinking back to her boarding school in Kensington, mornings memorizing a dozen pages at a stretch out of Woodhouselee's Universal History while four out-of-tune pianos banged away overhead. If as a tomboyish bookworm Fido had glimpsed the possibility of attending university, how different everything might have been. She'd never have wasted two seasons as a debutante, no matter how much her mother doted on the idea. Nor ever met Helen Codrington, perhaps: now there's a strange thought.

"Some of us may have literal daughters yet," remarks Bessie Parkes in a low voice.

Fido exchanges a covert grin with Isa Craig. The rest of them are spinsters by vocation, but not Bessie Parkes: she's spent seventeen years fretting over whether to accept her older, debt-ridden suitor. Jessie Boucherett claims that Bessie will say yes before her dreaded fortieth birthday; Fido argues that she'd have done it by now if she meant to at all.

Emily Davies is tapping the page. "Look at the date: the gracious dons have given us only a matter of weeks to prepare our candidates. What kept me late this morning was that I've set about hiring a hall, finding examiners, accommodation… In a postscript, you notice, we're urged to make all necessary arrangements for dealing with any candidate's faints and hysterics."

Laughter all around.

The note Johnson the maid brings into the study bears Fido's name in a familiar, sprawling hand. It has a green wax seal that Fido recognizes at once. Semper Fidelis, the motto of the Smiths, Helen's family: always faithful. The two of them used to joke that it should have been Fido's instead, given her surname. And when the letters never came from Malta, in those miserable months after the Codringtons' departure in '57, Fido had come to think of it as a hollow phrase. But Helen, for all her eccentricities, has turned out to be loyal after all. Fido cracks the verdigris wax between finger and thumb and reads the letter through in one rush.

Eccleston Square

September 6, 186

My seelin-freund, my soul's mate,

I've brooded over everything you said by the Serpentine. You're a dark mirror but an accurate one. I see now that I've somehow stumbled into a dreadful story'the oldest kind. I haven't been able to find my way out of the maze by myself, but now you, my Ariadne, have offered me the thread.

Somehow it reminds me of what you were telling me the other day, that one should never buy silk flowers because (if I've recalled it aright?) the vapour rots the mouths of the girls who make them. You added something that struck me very much: "Knowledge brings responsibility." Well, you've opened my eyes, dearest Fido, and now I'll let myself delay no further in cutting the thing off at the root, at no matter what cost to my feelings or those of others.

You know what a wandering nature I've always had, and what a rebellious heart. I've been so alone, these past years, without a single real confidante to keep me steady… But now I have you back, and I mean to mend. To be "true to myself," as you put it. If I can always have you near, for the rest of my life, I believe I'll grow a little better every day.

May I come to you this afternoon?

Your

Helen

Fido's eyes rest on the framed photographs of her sisters and brothers and their infinite progeny, and they remind her of something; she jumps up to look in her writing desk. "Oh, I must give you my latest picture," she tells Helen, "in return for your lovely carte de visite."

Helen scrutinizes it. "It captures your majestic forehead, but it makes you look older than you are."

"Do you think?"

"Next time, some side lighting, perhaps."

A pause. Fido can't think of any subject of conversation except one.

"It must make such a difference," Helen remarks suddenly, "having an establishment of one's own."

Following Helen's gaze, Fido surveys the narrow drawing-room. Establishment seems a grand word for her skinny house on Taviton Street. The decor strikes her as shabbily old-fashioned, compared with Eccleston Square; how bare the little tables, how few bibelots for her visitor's eyes to rest on. "Such a difference?" she repeats, confused.

"To how one feels. You've such an independent spirit."

"If I do, you think I owe it to these four walls?" asks Fido, amused.

A graceful shrug. "Don't discount bricks and mortar. You can't imagine what it's like to live out one's days encompassed by a gloomy, ageing husband, my dear. I live between his four walls, wearing clothes he must pay for, obeying his minutest orders…"

"From what I recall, you ignore quite a few of Harry's orders," Fido can't resist saying.

Helen purses her coral lips. "Whether or no-they have a suffocating effect. I signed myself away at twenty-one," she adds, "as carelessly as a girl fills in her dance card at a ball!"

"Your letter-" Fido feels it's time to address the subject on both their minds, "it moved me very much."

Helen's smile irradiates her cheekbones, like a candle in a lantern. "Is Anderson-" His name comes out rather gruff.

"He took the train to Scotland for a couple of nights; he's only just come back," Helen tells her.

"It's really not fair to leave any doubt in his mind-"

"That was my thought exactly; that's why I've invited him here."

Fido stares at her. "Here?"

But in comes Johnson, her narrow shoulders hunched over the tray that bears the steaming urn, pot, caddies and all. (More than once, over the years, Fido has had a quiet word with her maid about posture and health, but it does no good.) It takes several minutes for Johnson to unload everything.

When they're alone, Fido brews the tea. "You might have asked me before making free with my house," she says under her breath.

"But I knew you'd say yes." Helen grins at her, rather wanly. "I can hardly speak to him at Eccleston Square, can I?"

Something occurs to Fido. "I thought you told me your husband didn't mind Anderson's squiring you all over town."

"I don't think I said that."

Fido tries to remember; perhaps she'd just assumed that the admiral, toiling away in his study, had no objections. "Don't tell me he… suspects the colonel of having feelings for you?"

"Feelings? I doubt it. Since Harry hasn't found me desirable in years, he can't imagine anyone else would," Helen says acidly. "But you see, I'd rather he didn't know that Anderson's back. It may seem rather coincidence, I mean," she says, rising to look out the window, "that the colonel's home leave should happen to overlap with the very month of our return."

Fido finds herself breathless. "Oh Helen! You mean to say that Anderson took leave in order to pursue you to London, and Harry believes him still in

Malta, all this time?"

"I knew nothing of it myself till the man's letter turned up on my tray," mutters Helen, eyes on the glaring street.

"But-"

"Don't fuss and fret," she says mildly, "I'm going to set it all to rights. But now you see that I can't invite him into my own house, and I can hardly begin such a speech on the street, or in a carriage: what if he were to make a scene?"

Fido frowns. "Surely he's too much of a gentleman-"

"Yes, but he's a desperate man too." Helen turns, speaking in a thrilled murmur. "The things he's said, in the past few weeks-threats against his own life…"

Fido clamps her teeth together. Vulgar, vulgar. "Very well, let it be here: if it were done when 'tis done, 'twere well it were done quickly," she quotes. "On what day am I to expect the colonel?"

Helen glances at the clock on the mantel. "He should be here any minute."

Fido recoils.

"Four, I said in my note."

"I don't want to be a party to such a scene!"

"Dearest, I wouldn't ask that of you," Helen assures her, coming over to press Fido's hands between her own surprisingly cool ones. "Simply make some excuse and leave the room for half an hour."

"But-"

The doorbell chimes below. A pause, then Fido hears Johnson's heavy footsteps cross the hall. "You're a force of chaos," she growls. "My life has been infinitely calmer without you in it."

Helen's eyes are glittering. "Don't be hard on me just now; I don't believe I can bear it. I'll need all my courage for this interview."

"Bless you, then," says Fido, giving her a crushing hug, and a kiss on her bright hair.

"Won't you go to the top of the stairs to receive the poor man?" asks Helen. "He thinks such a great deal of you."

That's humbug, Fido knows: the officer's only met her twice. But yes, she does pity Anderson, despite her squeamishness; pities his state of enthralled fascination; pities his puppyish look as he hurries up the stairs, unaware of the coming blow. Falling in love with Helen has probably been the great drama of his life; it'll all be humdrum regimental routine from this point on. He should have kept his mouth shut, Fido decides; should have adored his beloved in manly silence, or consigned his feelings to bad verse and locked them up in his desk. But that kind of gallantry's dead and gone. And can Fido really blame him for speaking his love, when Helen-in her loneliness and, yes, vanity-has clearly been all too ready to hear it? (A prim old adage of her mother's runs through Fido's head as she's walking towards the stairs: A gentleman is always a gentleman unless a lady forgets to be a lady.)

So she greets the colonel kindly, and brews fresh coffee, as he doesn't care for tea; she even offers him a little chasse-café from the brandy decanter, to cushion his spirits. She remarks on the delicious cooling of the weather; she speaks highly of Mr. Gladstone's speech on the secret ballot. "Perhaps its time has come. After all, they've adopted it in France and Italy already."

"Exactly," says Anderson with a snort. "It's a Papist notion. A Briton casts his vote openly and without shame, in the sight of his neighbours."

"A man of independent means, may, certainly," Fido concedes, "but too many voters are under the influence of their squires, or employers, or rich customers, so come Election Day they act as so many timid sheep. Wouldn't the secret ballot give them protection from reprisal-and the courage of their convictions?"

Anderson makes a face. "To my mind there's something sneaking and unmanly about it."

"But that's the paradox, isn't it, Colonel? In the case of democracy, it may take secrecy to bring about sincerity. Behind the veil, the truth will out!"

His eyes are sliding away from her again, towards Helen, on the other sofa, pale as a marble.

It's time. Fido stands and says quietly, "I've promised Mrs. Codrington to allow her to speak to you tête-à-tête, because I know she has something very important to say."

Anderson blinks, jumps to his feet.

There, Fido thinks, giving Helen a look over her shoulder, that should screw her courage to the sticking-place.

Downstairs in her study, she can't settle to anything. She leafs through the September number of the English Woman's Journal, making a few desultory notes about what could be done to liven it up. (For years now she's been aware of the paradox that although all the members of the Reform Firm have a raging passion for the Cause, their Journal has the earnest, mildly querulous tone of the newsletter of some minor craft guild.) She finds a squashed piece of layout, and hisses with irritation: she's always reminding her typos at the press of the importance of maintaining the spaces between things. To pass a little more time, she brings her account book up to date, and replies to a short but affectionate note from her mother. We've received permission from the University of Cambridge to put forward a few really superior candidates in the local examinations, she writes, an experiment which we do hope will contribute in some small way to raising standards in the proper education of girls, something that I know has always been dear to your heart, Mama.

When Fido checks her watch, only sixteen minutes have passed. But really, how long can it take to tell a man to abandon hope?

She fiddles with the chain of her watch, which has developed a kink in it; she uses a paperweight of the Crystal Palace to press the two links back into line. Her father bought Fido this glass globe as a souvenir of their visit to the Great Exhibition when she was fifteen. (Out of the multitude of objects on display, for some reason the one she remembers is the gigantic pocket knife with eighty blades.) That was the same year she spent a month's pocket money on Longfellow's Golden Legend, and her brother George-too devout, even before he was ordained, to approve of poetry-burned it. She wept, and complained to her mother, but didn't dare buy another copy. These days Fido's so much her own person that she finds it hard to remember being that girl. How far she's come from the safe, enclosed world of the Rectory, where words were as solid as bricks: brother, family, role, duty.

Nineteen minutes. Almost twenty. Such claptrap, Fido thinks suddenly, I'm not to be barred from my own drawing-room. Besides, Anderson probably rushed off the moment Helen broke it to him; why would he stay for further humiliation? But then, Fido hasn't heard the front door shut, so he can't have left. Is the man distraught, barging back and forth across the carpet? Issuing denunciations? Threats? She imagines his hands (with their light pelt of golden hair) clenched on Helen's smooth arm.

It only takes Fido a moment to rush upstairs. She waits outside the door of the drawing-room, listening for any sounds of distress. If the two are talking quietly, she'll give them five more minutes; eavesdropping would be detestable. Dust motes dance in the shaft of afternoon light coming across the landing from a gap in the curtains. Oddly enough, Fido can't hear any voices at all, just a little sharp sound: a high-pitched rasping. A sob? Could Anderson have walked out of the house quietly, left Helen crying at the tea table? Or have the two of them reduced each other to speechless misery?

Suddenly, across the back of Fido's eyes, the image of a kiss: Helen's coral mouth, the officer's straw moustache. She feels something like rage. She's about to fling the door open when she registers that the little sound's getting louder and faster. It's not a sound she's ever heard before, which is perhaps why it takes her several more seconds to admit what she's hearing. It's not a gasp of grief or muffled protest, no, it's mechanical: the frantic squeak of the sofa springs as they're forced up and down, up and down.

Fido can't go into the drawing-room, not now, but she finds she can't drag herself away either. She sinks to her knees on the landing, and her brown skirt spreads around her like a puddle.