Oh how can I make you trust me? You must. May I trespass on your time andcome to seeyou? I shall not need to stay long - but I have that to tell you - -for which you maycome to thank me - or not - hut that is no matter - you must know -
I may befound 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 Black-adder 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: