Cropper ruffled the large packet of letters and said, "Their love letters. As she said." He looked at the sealed letter and handed it to Maud. Maud looked at the handwriting and said, "I think… I'm nearly sure…"
Euan said, "If it's unopened the question of ownership becomes very interesting. Is it the property of the sender-if it wasn't received-or the property of the addressee, since it lies unopened in his grave?"
Cropper, before anyone could think of any reason why not, took the envelope, slipped his knife under the seal, and opened it. Inside were a letter and a photograph. The photograph was stained at the edges and covered with silvery dashes like a storm of hailstones or white blossom, and with circles of dark sooty markings, like the infestations of mirrors, but behind and through all this glimmered the ghostly figure of a bride, holding a bouquet of lilies and roses, looking out from a mass of veiling and a heavy crown of flowers.
Leonora said, "Miss Havisham. The Bride of Corinth."
Maud said slowly, "No, no, I begin to see-"
Euan said, "Do you? I thought so. Read the letter. You know the writing."
"Shall I?"
So, in that hotel room, to that strange gathering of disparate seekers and hunters, Christabel LaMotte's letter to Randolph Ash was read aloud, by candlelight, with the wind howling past, and the panes of the windows rattling with the little blows of flying debris as it raced on and on, over the downs.
"My dear - my dear -
They tell me you arevery ill. I do ill to disturb your peace at this time, with unseasonablememories - but I find I have - after all - a thing which I must tell you. You will say, it should have been told twenty-eight years ago - or never - and so maybe it should - but I could or would not.And now I think of you continuously, also I pray for you, and I know -I have known for these many years - that I have done you wrong.
You have a daughter, who is well, and married, and the mother of a beautiful boy. I send you her picture. Youwill see - she isbeautiful - and resembles, I like to think, both her parents, neither of whom she knows to be her parent.
So much is - if not easy to indite - at least simple. But the history? With such a truth, I owe you also itshistory - or owe myself, it may be -I have sinned against you - but for causes -
All History is hardfacts - and something else - passion and colour lent by men. I will tell you - at least - the facts.
When we two parted I knew- but not with certain proof- - that the consequences would be - what they were. We agreed - on that last black day - to leave, to leave each other andnever for a moment look back. And I meant to keep my side of it for pride's sake andfor yours, whatever might c ome. So I made arrangements - you would not believe how I calculated and schemed - Ifound a place to go - (which you later discovered, I know) where I should make no one but myself responsible for ourfate - hers and mine - And then I consulted the one possible helper - my sister Sophie - who arranged to help me in a lie more appropriate to a Romance than to my previous quiet life - but Necessity sharpens the wits andfortifies resolution - andso our daughter was born in Brittany, in the Convent, and carried to England, where Sophie took her and brought her up as her own, as we had agreed. And I will say that Sophie has loved and cherished her as well as anyone not her true mother might do. She has run free in English fields and married a cousin (no cousin, of course, truly seen) in Norfolk, and is a Squire's wife, and comely.
And I came here - not long after you and I met for the last time - as it turns out - at Mrs Lees's seance, where you were so angry, so wrathful - and so was I too, for you tore awaythe dressings from my spirit's wounds, and I thought, as women will, you might suffer a little with my good will, f or the greater part of suffering in this world is ours - we bear it. When I said to you - you have made a murderess of me -I spoke of poor Blanche, whose terrible end torments me daily. But I saw you thought I spoke as Gretchen might to Faust. And I thought - with a cold little malice born of my then extreme sickness of body and mind - let him think so, then, if he knows me so little, let him wear himself away, thinking so. Women in childbirth cry out exceedingly against the author as they see it of their misfortunes, for whom a moment's passion may have no lasting reminder, no monstrous catastrophe of body or of soul - so I thought then -I am calmer now. I am old now.
Oh, my dear, here I sit, an old witch in a turret, writing my verses by licence of my boorish brother-in-law, a hanger-on as I had never meant to be, of my sister'sgood fortune (in the pecuniary sense) and I write to you, as if it wasyesterday, of all that rage like iron bands burning round mybreast, of the spite and the love (for you, for my sweet Maia, for poor Blanche too). But it is not yesterday, and you are very ill. I wish you may be well, Randolph, and I send you my blessing, and I ask yours, and your forgiveness, if it may be. For I knew and must have known that you have a generous heart and would have caredfor us - -for me andfor Maia - but I had a secret f ear - here it all tumbles out, afterall - but Truthis best,now - is it not? -I was afraid, you see, that you would wish to take her, you and your wife, for your very own - and she was mine, I bore her -I could not let her go- and so I hid herfrom you - and youfrom her, for she would have loved you, there is a space in her life forever, which is yours. Oh, what have I done.
And here I might stop, or might have stopped a few lines back, with my proper request for forgiveness. I write under cover to your wife - who may read this, or do as she pleases with it -I am in her hands - hut it is so dangerously sweet to speak out, after all these years -I trust myself to her and your good will - This is in some sort my Testament. I have had few friends in my life, and of those friends two only whom I trusted - Blanche - and you - and both I loved too well and one died terribly, hating me and you. But now I am old I regret most of all not those few sharp sweetdays of passion - which might have been almost anyone's passion, it seems,for all passions run the same course to the same end, or so it now seems to me being old - I regret, I would say, had I not grown garrulously digressive- our old letters, of poetry and other things, our trusting minds which recognised eachother.Did you ever read, I wonder,one of the few poor exemplars sold of The Fairy Melusina- and think -I knew her once - or as you most truly might - 'Without me this Tale might not have come to the Telling'? I owe you Melusina and Maia both, and I have paid no debts. (I think she will not die, my Melusina, some discerning reader will save her?)
I have been Melusina these thirty years. I have so to speak flown about and about the battlements of this stronghold crying on the wind of my need to see andfeed and comfort my child, who knew me not. She was a happy soul - a sunny creature, simple in her affections and marvellously direct in her nature. She loved her adoptive parents most deeply - Sir George too, who had not a drop of her blood in his beef-veins, but was entranced by her prettiness and good nature, which was as well for her and me.
Me she did not love. To whom can I say this but to you? She sees me as a sorcière, a spinster in a fairy tale, looking at her with glittering eye and waiting for her to prick her poor little finger and stumble into the brute sleep of adult truth. And if my eye glittered with tears she saw them not. No, I will go on, I fill her with a sort of fear, a sort of revulsion - shefeels, rightly, a too-much in my concernfor her - but misreads that, which is most natural, as something unnatural.
You will think - if the shock of what I have had to tell you has left you any power to care or to think about my narrow world - that a romancer such as I (or a true dramatist, such as you) would not be able to keep such a secretfor nigh on thirty years (think, Randolph, thirty years), without b ringing about some peripeteia, some dénouement, some secret hinting or open scene of revelation. Ah, but if you were here, you would see how I dare not. For her sake, for she is so happy. For mine, in that I fear - I fear the possible horror in herfair eyes. If I told her -that- and she stepped back? And then I swore to Sophie that it should be a condition of her kindness that it was absolute and irrevocable - and without Sophie's goodwill there would have been no home and no support for her.