The Sealed Letter (7 page)

At that moment Fido realizes something with a sickening sensation in her chest, like a tendon snapping:
I'm jealous.
That's what lay behind all her stern words yesterday: not ethics, so much as hurt. With his spaniel curls and his flippancy, Anderson hardly seems worthy of Helen's burning attention. (But then, what man would?) Something glorious happened on the last day of August on Farringdon Street, a friendship that seemed extinct flared up red and phoenix-like—and what business has a blond puppy to be blundering into such a story?

"On a more practical note," says Sarah Lewin, breaking the silence with her throaty whisper, "I must announce that subscriptions to the
Journal
are down this month."

"Heavens!"

"Not again!"

"Mm, I'm afraid they've slipped below six hundred."

Bessie Parkes lets out a long sigh. "Would you be so good as to look into it?" she asks their secretary. "Sound out a few subscribers who've decided not to renew..."

"I hear from many sides that our serial novel's popular," puts in Isa Craig.

"Ah, but what has the novel to do with the advancement of women?" asks Bessie Parkes.

Fido shrugs, her mind still wandering. "Every pill needs a little sugar."

It's just at this point that Emily Davies glides in and takes her seat at the table. "I do apologize for my lateness, but I bring rather extraordinary news," she announces in her usual brisk staccato. The
Journal
's editor is looking particularly doll-like today, Fido notices: bands of mouse-coloured hair framing her diminutive features. She slides a paper out of her thick pocketbook. "This morning I received a letter—they call it a
memorial,
in their stiff way—from the University of Cambridge..."

The members of the Reform Firm are all agog.

"...approving, on a strictly once-off basis, our request to have girls admitted to its local examinations."

"After all this time," Fido whoops, seizing the document.

"Oh Miss Davies, felicitations. Laurels to the conqueress," cries Bessie Parkes, shaking her hand.

"Nonsense, it was teamwork," says Emily Davies. "Those breakfasts you hosted for influential men, Fido: I believe they were crucial. But the fact is, I'd almost given up on the dons."

Not that anyone in the room takes this literally, since in the short time since the vicar's daughter from Newcastle has come south to work among them, she's shown no signs of dropping any fight. Emily Davies is like a terrier who won't let go of the stick, Fido thinks, only calmer.

"Our long struggle is at flood tide," says Bessie Parkes in the thrilling voice with which she gives readings from her poetry. "Soon we sail into port!"

As always, Emily Davies ignores such outbursts. "The local exams will at least nudge open the door to university admission. I intend that our daughters—I speak metaphorically," she tells the group, very dry, "will be able to enroll in a women's college at Cambridge."

Fido is thinking back to her boarding school in Kensington, mornings memorizing a dozen pages at a stretch out of Woodhouselee's
Universal History
while four out-of-tune pianos banged away overhead. If as a tomboyish bookworm Fido had glimpsed the possibility of attending university, how different everything might have been. She'd never have wasted two seasons as a debutante, no matter how much her mother doted on the idea. Nor ever met Helen Codrington, perhaps: now there's a strange thought.

"Some of us may have literal daughters yet," remarks Bessie Parkes in a low voice.

Fido exchanges a covert grin with Isa Craig. The rest of them are spinsters by vocation, but not Bessie Parkes: she's spent seventeen years fretting over whether to accept her older, debt-ridden suitor. Jessie Boucherett claims that Bessie will say yes before her dreaded fortieth birthday; Fido argues that she'd have done it by now if she meant to at all.

Emily Davies is tapping the page. "Look at the date: the gracious dons have given us only a matter of weeks to prepare our candidates. What kept me late this morning was that I've set about hiring a hall, finding examiners, accommodation ... In a postscript, you notice, we're urged to make
all necessary arrangements
for dealing with any candidate's
faints and hysterics.
"

Laughter all around.

***

The note Johnson the maid brings into the study bears Fido's name in a familiar, sprawling hand. It has a green wax seal that Fido recognizes at once.
Semper Fidelis,
the motto of the Smiths, Helen's family:
always faithful.
The two of them used to joke that it should have been Fido's instead, given her surname. And when the letters never came from Malta, in those miserable months after the Codringtons' departure in '57, Fido had come to think of it as a hollow phrase. But Helen, for all her eccentricities, has turned out to be loyal after all. Fido cracks the verdigris wax between finger and thumb and reads the letter through in one rush.

Eccleston Square

September 6, 186

My seelin-freund, my soul's mate,

I've brooded over everything you said by the Serpentine. You're a dark mirror but an accurate one. I see now that I've somehow stumbled into a dreadful story'the oldest kind. I haven't been able to find my way out of the maze by myself, but now you, my Ariadne, have offered me the thread.

Somehow it reminds me of what you were telling me the other day, that one should never buy silk flowers because (if I've recalled it aright?) the vapour rots the mouths of the girls who make them. You added something that struck me very much: "Knowledge brings responsibility." Well, you've opened my eyes, dearest Fido, and now I'll let myself delay no further in cutting the thing off at the root, at no matter what cost to my feelings or those of others.

You know what a wandering nature I've always had, and what a rebellious heart. I've been so alone, these past years, without a single real confidante to keep me steady . . . But now I have you back, and I mean to mend. To be "true to myself," as you put it. If I can always have you near, for the rest of my life, I believe I'll grow a little better every day.

May I come to you this afternoon?

Your
Helen

***

Fido's eyes rest on the framed photographs of her sisters and brothers and their infinite progeny, and they remind her of something; she jumps up to look in her writing desk. "Oh, I must give you my latest picture," she tells Helen, "in return for your lovely carte de visite."

Helen scrutinizes it. "It captures your majestic forehead, but it makes you look older than you are."

"Do you think?"

"Next time, some side lighting, perhaps."

A pause. Fido can't think of any subject of conversation except one.

"It must make such a difference," Helen remarks suddenly, "having an establishment of one's own."

Following Helen's gaze, Fido surveys the narrow drawing-room.
Establishment
seems a grand word for her skinny house on Taviton Street. The decor strikes her as shabbily old-fashioned, compared with Eccleston Square; how bare the little tables, how few bibelots for her visitor's eyes to rest on. "Such a difference?" she repeats, confused.

"To how one feels. You've such an independent spirit."

"If I do, you think I owe it to these four walls?" asks Fido, amused.

A graceful shrug. "Don't discount bricks and mortar. You can't imagine what it's like to live out one's days encompassed by a gloomy, ageing husband, my dear. I live between his four walls, wearing clothes he must pay for, obeying his minutest orders..."

"From what I recall, you ignore quite a few of Harry's
orders,"
Fido can't resist saying.

Helen purses her coral lips. "Whether or no—they have a suffocating effect. I signed myself away at twenty-one," she adds, "as carelessly as a girl fills in her dance card at a ball!"

"Your letter—" Fido feels it's time to address the subject on both their minds, "it moved me very much."

Helen's smile irradiates her cheekbones, like a candle in a lantern. "Is Anderson—" His name comes out rather gruff.

"He took the train to Scotland for a couple of nights; he's only just come back," Helen tells her.

"It's really not fair to leave any doubt in his mind—"

"That was my thought exactly; that's why I've invited him here."

Fido stares at her. "Here?"

But in comes Johnson, her narrow shoulders hunched over the tray that bears the steaming urn, pot, caddies and all. (More than once, over the years, Fido has had a quiet word with her maid about posture and health, but it does no good.) It takes several minutes for Johnson to unload everything.

When they're alone, Fido brews the tea. "You might have asked me before making free with my house," she says under her breath.

"But I knew you'd say yes." Helen grins at her, rather wanly. "I can hardly speak to him at Eccleston Square, can I?"

Something occurs to Fido. "I thought you told me your husband didn't mind Anderson's squiring you all over town."

"I don't think I said that."

Fido tries to remember; perhaps she'd just assumed that the admiral, toiling away in his study, had no objections. "Don't tell me he ... suspects the colonel of having feelings for you?"

"Feelings? I doubt it. Since Harry hasn't found me desirable in years, he can't imagine anyone else would," Helen says acidly. "But you see, I'd rather he didn't know that Anderson's back. It may seem rather coincidence, I mean," she says, rising to look out the window, "that the colonel's home leave should happen to overlap with the very month of our return."

Fido finds herself breathless. "Oh Helen! You mean to say that Anderson took leave in order to pursue you to London, and Harry believes him still in

Malta, all this time?"

"I knew nothing of it myself till the man's letter turned up on my tray," mutters Helen, eyes on the glaring street.

"But—"

"Don't fuss and fret," she says mildly, "I'm going to set it all to rights. But now you see that I can't invite him into my own house, and I can hardly begin such a speech on the street, or in a carriage: what if he were to make a scene?"

Fido frowns. "Surely he's too much of a gentleman—"

"Yes, but he's a desperate man too." Helen turns, speaking in a thrilled murmur. "The things he's said, in the past few weeks—threats against his own life..."

Fido clamps her teeth together.
Vulgar, vulgar.
"Very well, let it be here:
if it were done when 'tis done, 'twere well it were done quickly,"
she quotes. "On what day am I to expect the colonel?"

Helen glances at the clock on the mantel. "He should be here any minute."

Fido recoils.

"Four, I said in my note."

"I don't want to be a party to such a scene!"

"Dearest, I wouldn't ask that of you," Helen assures her, coming over to press Fido's hands between her own surprisingly cool ones. "Simply make some excuse and leave the room for half an hour."

"But—"

The doorbell chimes below. A pause, then Fido hears Johnson's heavy footsteps cross the hall. "You're a force of chaos," she growls. "My life has been infinitely calmer without you in it."

Helen's eyes are glittering. "Don't be hard on me just now; I don't believe I can bear it. I'll need all my courage for this interview."

"Bless you, then," says Fido, giving her a crushing hug, and a kiss on her bright hair.

"Won't you go to the top of the stairs to receive the poor man?" asks Helen. "He thinks such a great deal of you."

That's humbug, Fido knows: the officer's only met her twice. But yes, she does pity Anderson, despite her squeamishness; pities his state of enthralled fascination; pities his puppyish look as he hurries up the stairs, unaware of the coming blow. Falling in love with Helen has probably been the great drama of his life; it'll all be humdrum regimental routine from this point on. He should have kept his mouth shut, Fido decides; should have adored his beloved in manly silence, or consigned his feelings to bad verse and locked them up in his desk. But that kind of gallantry's dead and gone. And can Fido really blame him for speaking his love, when Helen—in her loneliness and, yes, vanity—has clearly been all too ready to hear it? (A prim old adage of her mother's runs through Fido's head as she's walking towards the stairs:
A gentleman is always a gentleman unless a lady forgets to be a lady.
)

So she greets the colonel kindly, and brews fresh coffee, as he doesn't care for tea; she even offers him a little chasse-café from the brandy decanter, to cushion his spirits. She remarks on the delicious cooling of the weather; she speaks highly of Mr. Gladstone's speech on the secret ballot. "Perhaps its time has come. After all, they've adopted it in France and Italy already."

"Exactly," says Anderson with a snort. "It's a Papist notion. A Briton casts his vote openly and without shame, in the sight of his neighbours."

"A man of independent means, may, certainly," Fido concedes, "but too many voters are under the influence of their squires, or employers, or rich customers, so come Election Day they act as so many timid sheep. Wouldn't the secret ballot give them protection from reprisal—and the courage of their convictions?"

Anderson makes a face. "To my mind there's something sneaking and unmanly about it."

"But that's the paradox, isn't it, Colonel? In the case of democracy, it may take secrecy to bring about sincerity. Behind the veil, the truth will out!"

His eyes are sliding away from her again, towards Helen, on the other sofa, pale as a marble.

It's time. Fido stands and says quietly, "I've promised Mrs. Codrington to allow her to speak to you tête-à-tête, because I know she has something very important to say."

Anderson blinks, jumps to his feet.

There,
Fido thinks, giving Helen a look over her shoulder, that should screw her courage to the sticking-place.

Downstairs in her study, she can't settle to anything. She leafs through the September number of the
English Woman's Journal,
making a few desultory notes about what could be done to liven it up. (For years now she's been aware of the paradox that although all the members of the Reform Firm have a raging passion for the Cause, their
Journal
has the earnest, mildly querulous tone of the newsletter of some minor craft guild.) She finds a squashed piece of layout, and hisses with irritation: she's always reminding her typos at the press of the importance of maintaining the spaces between things. To pass a little more time, she brings her account book up to date, and replies to a short but affectionate note from her mother.
We've received permission from the University of Cambridge to put forward a few really superior candidates in the local examinations,
she writes,
an experiment which we do hope will contribute in some small way to raising standards in the proper education of girls, something that I know has always been dear to your heart, Mama.