Two weeks later:
Letters, letters, letters. Not for me. I am not meant to see or know. I am no blind mouldiwarp, my Lady, nor no well-trained lady's maid to turn my head and not see what is stated not to concern me. You need not hurry them away to lie in your sewing-basket or run upstairs to fold them under your handkerchiefs. I am no Sneak, no watcher, no Governess. A governess is what I am most surely not. From that fate you rescued me, and you shall never, for one moment, one little moment, suppose me ungrateful or making claims.
Two weeks later:
So now we have a Prowler. Something is ranging and snuffing round our small retreat, trying the shutters and huffing and puffing inside the door. In old days they put mountain ash berries and a cast horseshoe over the lintel to frighten away the Fairy Folk. I shall nail some up now, to show, to prevent passage, if I may. Dog Tray is nervous of prowlers. His hackles go up on his shoulders, as a wolfs would, when he hears the Hunter. He gnashes the empty air. How very small, how very safe, is a threatened dwelling. How large the locks seem, how appalling would be their forcing and splintering.
Two weeks later:
Where is our frankness of intercourse? Where the small, unspeakable things we used to share in quiet harmony? This Peeping Tom has put his eye to the nick or cranny in our walls and peers shamelessly in. She laughs and says he means no harm, and is incapable of seeing the essential things we know and keep safe, and so it is, so it must be, so it must always be. But it amuses her to hear him lolloping and panting round our solid walls, she thinks he will always be Tame, as he is now. I cannot claim to know better, I know nothing, I never have known very much, but I fear for her. I asked her how much writing she had lately done, and she laughed, and said she was learning so much, so very much, and when it was all learned she should have new matter to write about and many new things to say. And she kissed me, and called me her dear Blanche, and said I knew she was a good girl, and very strong, and not foolish. I said we were all, all foolish, and in need of divine strength to help us out when we were weak. She said she had never so much felt its presence, its immediacy, as lately. I went up to my bedchamber and prayed, as I have not prayed-from desolation-since I prayed to leave Mrs Teape's house and thought I should never be answered. The candle flame ran huge shadows like grasping fingers across the ceiling in the draught. I could put some such running, grasping lines of light and shadow around Nimue and Merlin. She came in to me as I knelt there and raised me up, and said we must never quarrel and that she would never, ever, give me cause to doubt her, and I must not suppose she could. I am sure she meant what she said. She was agitated; there were a few tears. We were quiet together, in our special ways, for a long time.
Next day:
The Wolf is Gone from the Door. Dog Tray's hearth is his own. I have begun on the Lily Maid of Astolat, which suddenly seemed best.
This writing ended, indeed the book ended, abruptly, not even at the end of the year. Roland wondered if there were other diaries. He put little slips of paper in the entries that made up his fragile narrative or non-narrative. There was no evidence to connect the Prowler with the letter-writer, or the letter-writer with Randolph Henry Ash, and yet he felt a powerful conviction that all three were one and the same. If they were, would not Blanche have said so? He must ask Maud Bailey about the Prowler, yet how could he do so without coming clean in some way-about his own interest in the matter? And exposing himself to that censorious and supercilious gaze?
Maud Bailey put her head round the door. "Library's closing. Did you find anything?”
“I think so. It may be all in my own head. There are things I need to ask someone, you. Is it permitted to photocopy the manuscript? I simply haven't had time to copy out what I've found. I-”
“You seem to have had a profitable afternoon." Drily. Then, as a concession, "Exciting, even.”
“I don't know. The whole thing is a wild-goose chase.”
“If I can help-" said Maud, having packed away Blanche's pages into their box. "I shall be only too happy. Let's have coffee. There's an SCR Coffee place in the Women's Studies block.”
“Am I allowed in?”
“Naturally," said the frigid voice.
They sat down at a low table in the corner, under a poster for the Campus Crèche and facing posters for the Pregnancy Advisory Service-"A woman has a right to decide about her own body. We put women first"-and a Feminist Revue: "Come and see the Sorcières, the Vamps, the daughters of Kali and the Fatae Morganae. We'll make your blood run cold and make you laugh on the Sinister side of your face at Women's Wit and Wickedness." The room was largely uninhabited: a group of women in jeans were laughing in the opposite corner, and two girls were in earnest conversation by the window, pink spiky heads leaning together. Maud Bailey's excessive elegance was even odder in this context. She was a most untouchable woman. Roland discerned in her a rigorous sense of correctness, or justice, which made her trustworthy, but would likely cause her to disapprove of his own behavior about the letters. Nevertheless, he had decided desperately to gamble on showing her the Xeroxes of the letters because he must know about Christabel LaMotte, and something not himself drove him on. He was forced to lean forward in a kind of pseudo-intimacy and speak low.
"You know this Prowler Blanche Glover got so worried about? Is anything known about him? The wolf at the door?"
"Nothing certain. I think Leonora Stern has made a tentative identification with a young Mr Thomas Hearst of Richmond who liked to come and play the oboe with the ladies. They were both accomplished pianists. There do exist two or three letters from Christabel to Hearst-she even sent him a few poems in one, which he kept, fortunately for us. He married someone else in i860 and drops out of the picture. Blanche may have made up the prowling. She had a vivid imagination."
"And was jealous." Ot course. "And the literary letters she refers to? Is it known who they were from? Or if they were connected to the 'prowler'?”
“Not as far as I know. She had abundant letters from people like Coventry Patmore who admired her 'sweet simplicity' and 'noble resignation.' Lots of people wrote. It could have been anyone. You think it's R. H. Ash?"
"No. I just-I think I'd better show you what I have." He brought out the photocopies of his two letters. Whilst she was unfolding them, he said, "I should explain. I found these. I haven't shown them to anyone else. No one knows they exist."
She was reading. "Why?"
"I don't know. I kept them to myself. I don't know why." She finished reading. "Well," she said, "the dates fit. You could make up a whole story. On no real evidence. It would change all sorts of things. LaMotte scholarship. Even ideas about Melusina. That Fairy Topic. It's intriguing. "
"Isn't it? It would change Ash scholarship, too. His letters are really rather boring, correct and distant really-this is quite different."
"Where are the originals?"
Roland hesitated. He needed help. He needed to speak. "I took them," he said. "I found them in a book and I took them. I didn't think about it, I just took them."