"That's a reference to Ash's Incarcerated Sorceress?"
"Of course." Impatiently.
"When was it written!"
"1869. I think. Yes. Vivid but not much help."
"Hostile if anything."
"Exactly."
Roland sipped his coffee. Maud Bailey reinserted the card into its place in her file. She said, looking into the box, "You must know Fergus Wolff, he must be at your college, I think."
"Oh yes. It was Fergus who suggested I should ask you about LaMotte." A pause. The fingers moved busily, tidying. "I know Fergus. I met him at a conference, in Paris." A little less crisp, the voice, a little less elderly-authoritative, he thought unkindly.
"He told me," said Roland, neutrally, watching for a sign of her consciousness of what Fergus might have said, of how he might have spoken. She compressed her lips and stood up.
"I'll take you to the Resource Centre."
The Lincoln Library could not have been more different from the Ash Factory. It was a skeletal affair in a glass box, with brilliant doors opening in glass and tubular walls, like a box of toys or a giant ConstructoKit. There were dinging metal shelves and footfall-deadening felt carpets, pied-piper red and yellow, like the paint on the stair-rails and lifts. In summer it must have been bright and baking, but in wet autumn slate-grey sky lay like another box against its repeating panes, in which lines of little round lights were reflected, like Tinkerbell's fairylights in her Never-Never-Land. The Women's Archive was housed in a high-walled fish-tank. Maud Bailey settled Roland into a tubular chair at a pale oak table, like a recalcitrant nursery-school child, and put before him various boxes. Melusina I. Melusina II. Melusina III and IV. MelusinaUnassigned. Breton Poems. Poems ofDevotion. Mise Lyrics. Blanche. In this box she showed him a long thick green book, a little like an accounts book, with sombre marbled endpapers:
A Journal of Our Home-Life.
In Our House in Richmond
Blanche Glover
Commenced on the day of our setting up house.
May 1st May Day 1853
Roland took it up respectfully. It did not have for him the magnetic feel of the two letters that were folded into his pocket, but it represented the tease of curiosity.
He was worried about his Day Return ticket. He was worried about Maud's limited patience. The journal was written in an excited and pretty hand, in short rushes. He skimmed it. Carpets, curtains, the pleasures of retirement, "Today we engaged a Cook-general," a new way to stew rhubarb, a painting of the infant Hermes and his mother, and yes, Crabb Robinson's breakfast.
Here it is.
"Good. I'll leave you. I'll fetch you when the Library shuts. You've got a couple of hours."
"Thank you."
We went out to breakfast with Mr Robinson, a pleasant but prosy old gentleman who told us a complicated tale of a bust of Wieland, retrieved by himself from unworthy oblivion, to the great delight of Goethe and other literary eminences. Not much of interest was said, and certainly not by shadowy me, though that is as I would have it. Present were Mrs Jameson, Mr Bagehot, Ash the poet, without Mrs Ash, who was indisposed, and some younger members of the London University. The Princess was much admired and rightly. She spoke great good sense to Mr Ash, whose poetry I cannot like, though she professed to like it greatly, which naturally flattered him. He lacks, in my view, the lyrical flow and intensity of Alfred Tennyson, and I doubt his seriousness. His poem about Mesmer is a great puzzle to me, as I cannot tell with any certainty what is his attitude to Animal Magnetism, whether mocking or endorsing, and this is so with other of his work, so that often one is led to wonder whether there is not a great pother of talk about nothing much. For my part, I endured a long disquisition on the Tractarians from a young and opinionated university liberal. He would have been much surpris'd to know my true Opinion on these matters, but I did not chuse to let him be so much familiar, I kept mum, and smiled and nodded as best I might, keeping my Thoughts to myself. But I was almost glad when Mr Robinson decided to tell the company at large of his Italian journey ings with Words-worth, who desired to be back at home with every step they made, and could only with the utmost difficulty be persuaded to look about him.
I too desired to be at home, and was glad when we were able to close our own dear front door behind us, and be gathered in to the silence of our little parlour.
A home is a great thing, as I had not courage to say to Mr Robinson, if it is certainly one's own home, as our little house is. When I think of my previous existence-of all I thought I could reasonably expect of the rest of my life, an allowed place at the extreme corner of someone's drawing-room carpet, a Servant's garret or no better, I give thanks for every little thing, which is unspeakably dear to me. We had a late luncheon, cold fowl and a salad got up by Liza, walked in the Park in the afternoon, worked, and in the evening had a dish of warm milk and white bread, sprinkled with sugar, quite as Wordsworth himself might have done. We played and sang together, and read aloud a little of the Faerie Queene. Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise. Surely Richmond is Beulah, I said to the Princess, who said it was only to be hoped no wicked Fairy envied us our pleasant lot.
Nothing further, for three and a half weeks, except simple meals, walks and readings, music and Blanche's plans for paintings. Then Roland found a sentence which could have been something or nothing. Nothing if you were not looking carefully.
I have been wondering whether to attempt, in oils, a subject from Malory, the imprisoning of Merlin, maybe, by the damsel Nimue, or the solitary Maid of Astolat. My brain is filled full of vague images, but no clear vision of one necessary thing. I have sketched oak trees in Richmond Park all week-all my lines are too light for the thick solidity of their girth. What draws us to make pretty what should express Brute Power? Nimue or the Lily Maid would require a model and the Princess can hardly be asked for so much of her time, though I hope she may think the time spent on "Christabel before Sir Leoline" was not wholly wasted. I paint so thinly, as though my work were unlit stained glass that requires a flood of light from beyond and behind to illuminate and enliven it, and there is no beyond and behind. Oh I want Force. She has hung "Christabel" in her bedroom where it catches the morning sun and shows up my imperfections. She is much exercised about a long letter which arrived today, which she did not show me, but smiled over, and caught up and folded away.
There was nothing at all, except Roland's own need and concern, to suggest that the long letter might be his own letter. It could have been any letter. Had there been more? Three weeks later he found another meaningful/meaningless sentence.
Liza and I have been busy with our apple-and-quince jelly; the kitchen is veiled and festooned in dripping jelly-muslin, ingeniously caught up amongst the legs of inverted chairs, like spiderwebs. Liza burned her tongue, testing whether it would set or not, and being too greedy to taste or anxious to please. (Liza is greedy. I am sure she consumes bread and fruit in the middle of the night. Coming down to breakfast I find raw, slanting cuts / never made on the loaf in the crock.) The Princess did not help us this year. She was getting her Literary Letter ready to post, though she denied this, and said she was hurrying to finish the Glass Coffin for the book of tales. I believe she is writing fewer poems. Certainly she does not show me them, of an evening, as we were used to do. All this correspondence is detrimental to her true gifts. She is in no real need of epistolary adulation. She knows her own worth. I only wish I were as sure of mine.