Possession (39 page)

“Which of us do?” asked Beatrice.

“What happened to Bertha?”

“We never find out. She doesn’t tell. Or even if she went after her.”

“It must have been
terrible
for Bertha. She—Ellen—doesn’t seem to see …”

“Doesn’t she?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She
describes
her clearly. Poor Bertha.”

“Dust and ashes,” Beatrice surprisingly said. “Long ago. And the child, if it was born.”

“How frustrating, though. Not to know.”

“Professor Cropper found the jet brooch. The very one. It’s in
the Stant Collection. On sea-green moiré silk, he told me. I’ve seen a photograph.”

Maud ignored the brooch. “Do you have any ideas about the hysterical letter-writer? Or does she vanish without trace, like Bertha?”

“There is not more about her. Nothing more.”

“Did she keep her letters?”

“Not all. Most. In bundles, in shoe-boxes. I’ve got them. Mostly fan-letters for him, as she says.”

“Could we look?”

“If you’re interested. I have looked at them all, once or twice. I had an idea about writing an article about Victorian precursors of, as it were, fan clubs. But I found it rather sickly when I came to it.”

“Could I really see?”

Beatrice turned her impassive stare on Maud’s eager ivory face, and read something there, if not precisely.

“Why not, I suppose …” she murmured, not moving. “What reason why not?”

The shoe-box was made of tough black cardboard, cracking with dryness and bound with tape. Beatrice, sighing and sighing, undid this, and there they were, neatly bundled, letter upon letter. They sifted the dates, opened envelopes, pleas for charity, offers of secretarial help, flowing screeds of passionate admiration, written to Randolph and addressed to Ellen. Beatrice checked the date and came up with a screed at once agitated and artistically written, faintly Gothic. And there it was.

Dear Mrs Ash
,

Please forgive the intrusion upon your most valuable time and attention. I am a gentlewoman, and at present totally unknown to you, but I have something to impart to you which closely concerns
both of us
and is in my case
no less than a matter of life and death.
Believe me I speak the cold truth, no more
.

Oh how can I make you trust me? You must. May I trespass on your
time and come to see you? I shall not need to stay long—but I have
that
to tell you—for which you may come to thank me—or not—but that is no matter—you must know—

I may be found at all times at the address which heads this letter. Believe me oh believe me, I wish to stand
your friend.

Yours most sincerely
Blanche Glover

Maud closed her face and dropped her eyelids on what must be a glitter of pouncing. She said, trying to make her voice indifferent, “This looks like it. Any more? This looks like the
second
letter she mentions. Is the first one there?”

Beatrice riffled.

“No. No more. At least—unless this is the same writing. It looks like the same paper. It’s got no heading and no signature.”

You did wrong to keep my Evidence. If it was not mine, it is also not
yours.
I beg of you to consider more carefully and to think better of me. I know how I may have appeared to you. I chose my words ill. But what I said was true and urgent, as you will come to see
.

Maud sat, holding this sheet of paper, in an agony of indecision. What Evidence had Ellen kept? And of what? A clandestine correspondence or a trip to the Yorkshire Coast with a solitary biologising poet? What had Ellen felt or understood? Had Blanche handed her the purloined manuscript of
Swammerdam?
How could she make copies of precisely
these
documents without alerting Beatrice, and with Beatrice, surely, Cropper and Blackadder? A kind of imperious will in her tapped at her like a hammer, and was interrupted in its coding of a cunning request by Beatrice’s woolly voice. “I don’t know what you’re up to, Dr Bailey. I don’t know if I want to know. You came looking for something and you found it.”

“Yes,” said Maud in a whisper. She moved her long hands in a gesture of silence at the partition walls behind which lurked Blackadder and the Ash Factory.

Beatrice Nest’s face was bland and patiently questioning.

“It isn’t only my secret,” Maud hissed. “Or I wouldn’t have been disingenuous. I—I don’t know
what
I’ve found, yet. I promise I’ll tell you first when I do. I think I know what Blanche Glover told her. Well, one of two or three things it might have been.”

“Was it important?” asked the grey voice, with no indication of whether the “importance” was scholarly, passionate or cosmic.

“I don’t
know
. It might change our views of—of his work, I suppose, a bit.”

“What do you want of me?”

“A Xerox of those two letters. If it can be done, a copy of the Journal, between those dates. Not to tell Professor Cropper. Or Professor Blackadder. Yet. We discovered this ourselves—”

Beatrice Nest seemed to think for a longish time, her face propped in her hands.

“This—what you’re so excited about—it won’t—it won’t expose her to ridicule—or—misapprehension? I’ve become very concerned that she shouldn’t be—exposed is the best word I suppose—
exposed.”

“It isn’t primarily to do with her.”

“That is not necessarily reassuring.” A maddening silence. “I suppose I shall trust you. I suppose I shall.”

Maud walked briskly out through Blackadder’s office, where Paola raised a languid hand; the Professor himself was not there. In the outer dark, in the corridor, however, a familiar Aran sweater whitened the murk, familiar gold hair shone.

“Surprise,” said Fergus Wolff. “Surprise, ha?”

Maud drew herself up and made a dignified side-step.

“Wait a minute.”

“I’m in a hurry.”

“To do what? Pursue the labyrinthine coilings of the
Melusina?
Or to see Roland Michell?”

“Neither.”

“Then stay.”

“I can’t.”

She stepped. He side-stepped. She stepped the other way. He was there. He put out a strong hand and clasped it like a handcuff on her wrist. She saw the egg-white bed.

“Don’t be like that, Maud. I want to talk to you. I’m suffering terribly in about equal amounts of curiosity and jealousy. I can’t
believe
you’ve got involved with sweet useless Roland and I can’t
understand
what you’re doing haunting the Crematorium here, unless you have.”

“Crematorium?”

“Ash Factory.” He was pulling on her arm while he talked so that her body and her briefcase were leaning towards his body, which put out its remembered flickers of electrification. “I need to talk to you, Maud. Let me buy you a good meal. Let’s just talk. You’re the most intelligent woman I know. I miss you terribly, you know, I should have said that, too.”

“I can’t. I’m busy. Let go, Fergus.”

“Tell me what’s going on at least, go on, do. If you tell me I’ll be fearfully discreet.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“And if you don’t tell me, I shall find out, and consider what I find out to be my own property, Maud.”

“Let go of my wrist.”

A large black-uniformed, black-skinned woman appeared unsmiling behind them. “Please read the notices. Silence at all times in the book corridors.”

Maud wrenched her wrist free and strode away. Fergus called after her “I
warned
you,” and could be seen going into the Ash Factory, followed by the black wardress, rattling chains of keys.

Two days later Roland and Maud met in Oodles, the vegetarian restaurant at the end of Museum Street. Maud had brought the collection of xeroxed sheets that Beatrice had given her. She had had another unnerving experience trying to telephone Roland to arrange this meeting; she was also troubled by an enthusiastic letter
from Leonora Stern, who had been given a grant by the Tarrant Foundation to come to England, and wrote enthusiastically: “next semester I shall be
with you.”

They stood in a queue and bought tepidly microwaved spinach lasagne; they then took refuge in the underground part of the restaurant, hoping to avoid curious eyes. Roland read Ellen’s journal and Blanche’s letters. Maud watched him and then said, “What do you think?”

“I think the only certain thing is that Blanche told Ellen something. Showed her the stolen letters, probably? I want to think Blanche did this because Christabel had gone to Yorkshire with Ash. It fits in beautifully. But it isn’t proof.”

“I can’t think how we could prove it.”

“I did have certain wild ideas. I thought of going through the poems—his and hers—written about then—with the idea that they might reveal something. I thought if I retraced his steps in Yorkshire—with the idea that she might have been there—and the poems in hand—I might get somewhere. We’ve already found one correlation no one could have thought of who wasn’t
looking
for a connection. Randolph Ash wrote to his wife about a Hob who cured whooping cough and Christabel wrote a tale about one. And then Ash relates his interest in drowned Yorkshire villages to the City of Is as well as to Lyell. People’s minds do hook together—”

“They do.”

“One might find a cumulative series of such coincidences.”

“It would be interesting, anyway.”

“I even had a theory about water and fountains. I told you Ash’s post-1860 poetry had this elemental streak—water and stones and earth and air. He mixes up geysers from Lyell with Norse myth and Greek mythical fountains. And Yorkshire waterfalls. And I wondered about the Fountain of Thirst in
Melusina.”

“How?”

“Well, is there an echo here? This is out of
Ask to Embla
. It possibly links that fountain to the one in the Song of Songs, as well. Listen:

Maud said “Say that again.”

Roland said it again.

Maud said, “Have you ever really felt your hackles rise? Because I just have. Prickles all down my spine and at the roots of my hair. You listen to this. This is what Raimondin says to Mélusine after he is told she knows he has looked at her in her marble bath and broken the prohibition:

Roland said, “Shall our hearth’s
ash
grow pale.”

“The image of the hearth runs all through
Melusina
. She built castles and homes; the hearth is the home.”

“Which came first? His line or her line? There are problems about dating
Ask to Embla
—which we’re obviously on the way to solving, among other things. It reads like a classic literary clue. She was a clever and hinting sort of woman. Look at those dolls.”

“Literary critics make natural detectives,” said Maud. “You know the theory that the classic detective story arose with the classic adultery novel—everyone wanted to know who was the Father, what was the origin, what is the secret?”

“We need,” said Roland, carefully, “to do this together. I know his work, and you know hers. If we were both in Yorkshire—”

“This is all madness. We should tell Cropper and Blackadder and certainly Leonora and marshal our resources.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No. I want to—to—follow the—path. I feel taken over by this. I want to
know
what happened, and I want it to be me that finds out. I thought you were mad, when you came to Lincoln with your
piece of stolen letter. Now I feel the same. It isn’t professional greed. It’s something more primitive.”

“Narrative curiosity—”

“Partly. Could you manage a few days’ field research at Whitsuntide?”

“It might present difficulties. Things aren’t easy at home. As you may have noticed. If you and I—went up there—it wouldn’t be liked. It would be misconstrued.”