Alison’s familiar stationery arriving at the house some two or three times a week, Lizzie’s trembling hand accepting the envelopes from her father—
“I see you’re enjoying a nice correspondence with this English lady,” he said one day, inadvertently provoking a stab of panic — had he discovered Alison’s letters? Had he read them? That very afternoon, the house empty save for Maggie puttering about in the sitting room, she’d taken the letters from their hiding place beneath her undergarments in the bedroom dresser drawer, and burned them all in the kitchen stove, an act she regretted later when the flow of mail became a trickle and she longed for the reassuring words and passionate outbursts of the preceding winter.
It had seemed virtually certain that Alison would be coming to New York in May—
“... primarily to be by your side again, my dearest love, but I confess to an ulterior motive as well. The very thought of enduring the start of another London ‘season’, as they would have it, is enough to set me trembling. How shall this season of ’91 be any different, I ask you, than that of ’90, or ’89, or ’88, or ad infinitum, back to the time of William the Conqueror, I dare say? I should hope to escape it even were it not for the knowledge of my sweet Miss pining, and the expectation of prolonged and blissful quatre a cinqs (cat that sank, indeed!) in some dim and cloistered hotel room while New York’s horsecars rumble past our curtained windows. I can scarcely wait, Lizzie!”
— but the trip was postponed until June (this after Lizzie had already booked a hotel for them in New York) and then again till July (“When the heat shall be intolerable, I know,” Alison wrote) and then till the fall (“I am aiming for no later than a September 15 departure, and have already made inquiries of the various steamship lines”), the letters less frequent now, once a week, and then twice monthly — and still no definite word that she had booked passage and would soon be on her way.
In October, Alison wrote:
“Oh, my dearest Lizzie, I am forlorn. My wretched husband, the Empire Builder, has decided it is imperative that he visit his money in India, planning on a November departure for arrival when the weather there will be less severely hot than it is just now. Normally, I should have gone dancing barefoot in the streets at news of his departure, but he is insisting this time that I accompany him, Lord alone knows why. Perhaps he wishes me to lead him safely by the hand through the scores of begging lepers in the streets. Perhaps he feels that dallying with twelve year-olds in vermin-infested cribs is less desirable than having his obedient wife by his side to serve as a sometime plaything, though I’m positive he’s long forgotten what scant pleasures I may have to offer.
“And you, my love? Have you forgotten the nectar and the spice? Do you long for me as I long for you, my precious, fragile orchid? We will be returning to London shortly before Christmas, and I promise I shall try my utmost to make the journey to America as soon as possible in the New Year. Until then, my darling Miss, be mine forever, as I am surely thine.”
There was a card from her at Christmas.
Nothing else.
And then... silence.
All through January Lizzie wrote to her daily at the Kensington address, suspecting at first that the Newburys had extended their stay in India (but would they not have come home for Christmas, as she’d said they would?), fearing next that Alison had contracted some dread disease in Delhi or Calcutta or wherever they had gone (she had mentioned lepers, hadn’t she?), believing then that Albert was intercepting her letters, and then that they had moved and were not receiving forwarded mail, and then that they had gone to Cannes during the winter season Alison so despised (but a letter to the villa was never answered), refusing to accept what was becoming more and more apparent, the unbearably painful realization that Alison no longer cared to answer her desperate pleadings.
In the silence of her bedroom, she reread by lamplight the last paragraph of the letter Alison had written before leaving for India:
And you, my love? Have you forgotten the nectar and the spice? Do you long for me as I long for you, my precious, fragile orchid? We will be returning to London shortly before Christmas, and I promise I shall try my utmost to make the journey to America as soon as possible in the New Year. Until then, my darling Miss, be mine forever, as I am surely thine.
Then what had happened? What was causing the silence now? Should she write to Albert? Had something truly dire befallen Alison?
She remembered a rainy afternoon in Cannes, the conversation with Alison that day, the distant sea surging.
“I should never want another woman but you. I should never dream of allowing anyone else to do to me...”
“Never say never.”
“Though I’m certain that the moment I’m gone, you shall tumble into bed with the nearest...”
“More than likely.”
She refused to believe this. She read and reread the last paragraph of Alison’s letter. What was it promising, then, if not a love as eternal as her own? In a blinding snowstorm at the beginning of February, Lizzie walked to the telegraph office in town and sent a cable she hoped would be clear to Alison while remaining cryptic to the clerk who took her hand-lettered message. It read:
Mistress,
Have you changed your mind then?
Miss
“Miss what?” the clerk asked.
“Send it that way,” Lizzie said, and the clerk shrugged.
Alison’s answer did not arrive until St. Valentine’s Day. The same familiar hand on the same familiar stationery. The same Kensington address. And inside the envelope, appropriate enough on this day for lovers, a poem. No date, no salutation, no closing sentiment, no signature, only the poem in blue ink on the paler blue stationery:
The meaning was immediately clear to her. She read the letter, if such it was, yet another time, and then burned it in the stove together with the letter she’d received in October. The snow lashed fiercely at the windows as the flames licked at the blue sheets of paper. She replaced the lid on the stove and went upstairs to her room, and only then did she begin sobbing with the knowledge that what had happened almost two summers ago had been — for Alison, at least — a passing fancy, something best and soon forgotten, pressed into a memory book like the faded, dry and crumbling orchid she’d received as a farewell gift in London. Thine Forever, she thought, and sobbed uncontrollably. Days later, when her father asked if she had stopped writing to her friend in London, she replied simply, “Yes.”
Spiritlessly, listlessly, she got out of bed.
There was fresh water in the pitcher on the dresser; she had filled it last night from the tap over the pantry sink before going up to bed — voices in the sitting room, muted, the sitting room dark, she’d had no desire to talk to anyone then, she’d talked long enough to Alice Russell. The fears she’d relayed to her, still with her this morning, vague and nameless, filling her with uncertain dread. The house burning down around them. Perishing in flames. The fires of Hell. Damnation forever.