by A. S. Byatt
“I should perhaps add, in case any of you are thinking about the copyright law, that the ownership of copyright is protected from the moment of publication for the author’s lifetime plus fifty years, or in the case of posthumous publication, for fifty years from the date of publication. This correspondence is unpublished, and therefore the copyright remains the property of the heirs of the original writers of the letters. As I have said, manuscripts belong to recipients, copyright to the senders of letters. It is not clear what Lord Ash would wish to happen, but from what Dr Nest has to tell us, it appears that Cropper has induced Hildebrand Ash to promise him both letters and copyright.”
Blackadder said, “He is an infuriating person and an unscrupulous operator, but his edition is thorough and scrupulously researched, and it would be churlish in my view not to permit publication of these letters in the standard edition. I suppose if the letters remained in this country it would be theoretically possible to refuse him access to them, and theoretically possible for Hildebrand Ash to refuse anyone else permission to edit them, thus producing an impasse. There is, of course, Lord Ash himself. He might allow an early British edition which would protect the copyright, before allowing access to Cropper. Do you foresee protracted legal disputes with Sir George Bailey, Mr MacIntyre?”
“Given his pugnacity, and his actual, de facto possession of the letters, yes, I do.”
“Lord Ash is very ill.”
“So I understand.”
“May I ask, Dr Bailey—if you do find yourself in possession of the manuscripts of the whole correspondence—what you would intend doing with them?”
“I think it’s premature to say where they should be, and I also feel a kind of superstitious fear of it—the letters aren’t mine, and may never be. If they were—if they are—I should want them to stay in this country. I should naturally like LaMotte’s letters to be in the Women’s Resource Centre—which isn’t very secure, but the rest of her things—that came from my family—are already there. On the other hand I don’t want—I feel, having read them—the letters should stay together. They belong together. It’s not only that they need to be read consecutively to make any sense—they—they are part of each other.”
She looked quickly at Roland, on this, and away, fixing her eye on the photograph of Ash, which was beyond him, between him and Val.
“If you sold them to the British Library,” said Blackadder, “you could benefit the Resource Centre in other ways.”
Leonora said, “If scholars came from all over the world to the Centre, that would benefit it.”
Roland said, “I wish Lady Bailey could have a new electric wheelchair.”
Everyone suddenly turned their attention to him.
“She was good to us. And she’s ill.”
Maud flushed to her hairline.
“I had thought of that myself,” she said, with a touch of anger. “If the letters are mine—if I sell half or all to the British Library—we could help with the wheelchair.”
“He’d probably throw it back at you,” said Roland.
“Do you want me to give him the manuscripts?”
“No. Just to find a way—”
Blackadder looked at the developing quarrel between the two original researchers.
“I should like to know,” he said, “how you came across the correspondence in the first place.”
Everyone looked at Maud, who looked at Roland.
This was the moment of truth. Also the moment of dispossession, or perhaps the word was exorcism.
“I was reading Vico,” he said. “Ash’s copy of Michelet’s translation of Vico. In the London Library. And all these papers sprang out. Stationery bills, Latin notes, letters, invitations. I told Professor Blackadder, of course. But I didn’t tell him I found—I found two drafts of a beginning of a letter to a woman—it didn’t say who—but it was after he went to breakfast with Crabb Robinson—so I did some research—and found Christabel LaMotte. So I went to see Maud, who was suggested to me—oh yes, by Fergus Wolff—I didn’t know of the family connection, or anything—and she showed me Blanche Glover’s journal—and then we began to wonder about whether there was anything at Seal Court—we went past just to look at it—and met Lady Bailey—and were shown Christabel’s turret—and Maud remembered a poem about dolls keeping a secret, and investigated a doll’s bed—it was still in her room—and there it was—there they were, the letters—hidden in a cavity under the mattress.…”
“And Lady Bailey took to Roland, who saved her life, he forgot to tell you, and said he might come back and look at the letters and advise—so we went at Christmas—”
“And we read them first and took notes—”
“And Roland worked out that LaMotte might have gone to Yorkshire with Ash on his zoological expedition in 1859—”
“So we went up there and found—a lot of textual evidence in both poets that perhaps both were there—Yorkshire phrases and landscapes in Melusina—the same line in both poets—we think she was certainly there—”
“And then we found out that LaMotte had been in Brittany in the lost year before the suicide of Blanche Glover—”
“Ah yes, so you did,” said Leonora.
Maud said, “I was very wrong, Leonora. I took your letter from Ariane Le Minier and went without telling you—because the secret wasn’t mine but also Ash’s—and Roland’s—or so it felt at the time. Anyway, Dr Le Minier gave us a copy of Sabine de Kercoz’s journal, and it became clear that a child had been born there—which can’t be traced—”
“And then you came, and Professor Cropper, and we came home,” said Roland briefly.
“And Euan appeared as if by magic with the Will—”
“I know Sir George’s lawyer, we share a horse,” said Euan to the great puzzlement of Beatrice.
“It seems clear,” said Blackadder, “that Mummy Possest is directed at LaMotte’s association with Hella Lees, and that LaMotte was present at the seance which Ash infamously interrupted, and I would conjecture that Ash believed that LaMotte was trying to speak to her dead child in the seance, which if it was his child, would have angered him immensely.”
“And I know,” said Leonora, “because I have a good friend and sister-feminist who works in the offices of the Stant Collection, that Cropper has been reading faxes of letters containing great guilt from LaMotte to his spiritualist-socialist-feminist-mesmerist great-great-grandma, Priscilla Penn Cropper.”
“Which brings us,” said Blackadder, “to two, or three, final questions.
“One: what became of the child, alive or dead?
“Two: what is Cropper trying to find out? On what basis of knowledge?
“And three: what became of the original letters?”
Everyone looked at Roland again. He brought out his wallet and unfolded the letters from their safe place inside it.
He said, “I took them. I don’t know why. I never meant to—to keep them forever. I don’t know what possessed me to do it—it seemed so easy, and they seemed to be my find—I mean, as no one else had touched them, since he put them away in Vico, as bookmarks or whatever. I’ll have to give them back. Whose are they?”
Euan said, “If the book was a gift or bequest to the London Library, they probably belong to it. The copyright belongs to Lord Ash.”
Blackadder said, “If you give them to me, I guarantee they can go back to the Library with no questions asked, of you, anyway.”
Roland stood up and walked across the room, and handed the letters to Blackadder, who could be seen to be unable to resist reading them then and there, to turn the paper lovingly, possessively, recognising the writing.
“You have been very resourceful,” he said drily, to Roland.
“One thing led to another.”
“Indeed.”
“And all’s well that ends well,” said Euan. “This feels like the ending of a Shakespearean comedy—who’s the chappie that comes down on a swing at the end of As You Like It?”
“Or like the unmasking at the end of a detective story. I’ve always wanted to be Albert Campion, myself. We still haven’t tackled our villain. I suggest Dr Nest tell us what she overheard.”
“Well,” said Beatrice, “they came to look at the end of Ellen’s journal, that is, not the end, but her description of his end, and the mention of that box that Professor Cropper has always been so interested in, the one that was seen to be intact when Ellen herself was buried, you know the one. And I went out to the ladies’ room—it was a day when no one else was there, Professor Blackadder, no one was in your part of the office at all—and as you know, it’s a terribly long walk, to the cloakrooms and back—so when I came, they weren’t expecting me, and I heard Professor Cropper say—this isn’t verbatim but I do have a good verbal memory and I was very shocked—he said, ‘It could remain quite secret for several years, a secret between the two of us, and then when you have inherited it would appear, we could come upon it—you could find it—and I would purchase it from you—all above board.’ And Hildebrand Ash said, ‘Morally it’s mine, isn’t it, whatever the Vicar says?’ And Cropper said, ‘Yes, but the Vicar’s a most obstructive person, and there are all sorts of silly English laws about disturbing burials and needing a Faculty from the Bishop and I don’t think we can afford to risk all that.’ And Hildebrand Ash said again, “It’s my own property.” And Professor Cropper said it belonged both to Hildebrand and to the world, and that he himself would be a ‘discreet custodian.’ And Hildebrand said it would be a Hallowe’en adventure, and Professor Cropper said severely that it would have to be a very serious professional undertaking, and soon, as he was due back in New Mexico …
“And then I thought I should cough, or something, in case they noticed me standing in the shadow. So I took a lot of steps backward and advanced more noisily, so to speak.”
“I believe he is capable of grave robbery,” said Blackadder, tight-lipped.
“I know he is,” said Leonora Stern. “There are all sorts of rumors, in the States. Things that have disappeared from glass cabinets in little local collections, you know, curios of particular interest, Edgar Allan Poe’s pawned tie-pin, a note from Melville to Hawthorne, that sort of thing. A friend of mine had almost persuaded a descendant of a friend of Margaret Fuller’s to sell a letter about her meeting with English writers in Florence, before her fatal voyage—full of feminist interest—and Cropper turned up, and offered a blank cheque, and was refused. So the next day, when they went to look for the MS, it had gone. It was never traced. But we think he’s like those mythical millionaires who pay thieves to get them the Mona Lisa and the Potato Eaters—”
“He feels they are really his, perhaps,” said Roland, “because he loves them most.”
“A kind way of putting it,” said Blackadder, turning the original Ash letter in his hand. “So we are to assume a private, inaccessible inner cabinet of curios that he turns over, and breathes in at the dead of night, things no one ever sees—”
“So the rumour goes,” said Leonora. “You know how it is with rumors. They waft, they burgeon. But I think this one has some foundation. I know for a fact that the Fuller story is true.”
“How are we to stop him?” said Blackadder. “Tell the police? Complain to Robert Dale Owen University? Confront him? He’d brush off the last two, and the first is a bit ridiculous—they’ve not got the men to mount guard at a grave for the next few months. If we put him off now, he’ll just give up graciously and try later. We can’t get him deported.”
Euan said, “I’ve rung his hotel, and Hildebrand’s house in the country, and found out a few things. I pretended to be their lawyer, in a hurry with important information, and got told where they really were. Which is, the Rowan Tree pub, on the North Downs, near, but not very near, Hodershall. Both of them. That’s very significant.”
“We should alert Drax, the vicar,” said Blackadder. “Though that’s not much use, he hates all Ash scholars and poetic trippers.”
“I think,” said Euan, “this may sound melodramatic and toujours Mr Campion, but I do really think, that we have to catch him in the act and take whatever—it—is from him.”
A pleased rumour ran around the room. Beatrice said, “We can catch him in the act before he desecrates the grave.”
“In theory, in theory,” said Euan. “In practice, we may need to safeguard whatever there is, if there is anything.”
“Do you think he thinks,” asked Val, “that the end of the story is there in that box? Because there’s no reason why it should be. There could be anything or nothing, in that box.”
“We know that. He knows that. But these letters have made us all look—in some ways—a little silly, in our summing-up of lives on the evidence we had. None of Ash’s post-1859 poems is uncontaminated by this affair—we shall need to reassess everything—the reasons for his animus against the spiritualists is a case in point.”
“And LaMotte,” said Leonora, “has always been cited as a lesbian-feminist poet. Which she was, but not exclusively, it appears.”
“And Melusina,” said Maud, “appears very different if the early landscapes are seen as partly Yorkshire. I’ve been rereading. No use of the word ‘ash’ may be presumed to be innocent.”
Euan said, “How are we going to foil the body-snatchers, which I take to be the main purpose of our meeting?”
Blackadder said doubtfully, “I suppose I could invoke Lord Ash.”
“I have a better idea. I think we set spies and watch him.”
“How?”
“I think if Dr Nest is right he must be going to dig soon. And I think if two of us stay in the same pub—two he doesn’t know at all—we can alert the others—or if necessary confront him alone, follow him to the churchyard, stop his car with a legal-looking piece of paper—we shall have to play it by ear. Val and I could go. I’ve got a bit of holiday. And you, I believe, Professor Blackadder, have an order preventing the export of Ash’s papers until the Heritage Advisory Board has decided what to do—”
“If he could be stopped from disturbing their rest,” said Beatrice.
“I do wonder,” said Blackadder, “what is or was in that box.”
“And for whom it was put there,” said Maud.
“She leads you on and baffles you,” said Beatrice. “She wants you to know and not to know. She took care to write down that the box was there. And she buried it.”
Val and Euan left first, hand in hand. Roland looked at Maud, who was immediately engaged by Leonora in an intense conversation and a series of demonstratively forgiving hugs. He found himself leaving with Blackadder. They walked along the pavement together.
“I’ve behaved badly. I’m sorry.”
“It’s understandable, I believe.”
“I felt possessed. I had to know.”
“Did ye hear about the posts ye’ve been offered?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You’ve got mebbe a week’s grace. I’ve spoken to them all. Sung your praises.”
“That was kind.”
“Your work is good. I liked that piece ‘Line by Line.’ A thorough piece of work. I’ve got funding for a full-time research fellowship, on Ash. If you’re interested. A spin-off, I believe you’d call it, from the screen appearance I made. A Scottish philanthropic trust run by a lawyer who turns out to be obsessed with Ash.”
“I can’t decide what to do. I’m not even sure I want to stay in academic life.”
“Well, as I said, you’ve got a week. Drop by, if you feel like discussing the pros and cons.”
“Thanks, I’ll think a bit, and then I will.”
28
The Rowan Tree Inn stands about a mile outside Hodershall, in the shelter of a curve of the North Downs. It was built of flint and slate in the eighteenth century, and is long and low, under a mossy slate roof. It fronts a meandering road, now modernised and widened, which cuts acros
s largely bare downland; across the road, a further mile up a long grassy track, is the Hodershall Parish Church, built in the twelfth century, squat and stony, also under a slate roof, with an unassuming tower and a weathercock in the shape of a flying dragon. These two buildings stand apart from Hodershall village, behind the arm of the down. The Rowan Tree has twelve bedrooms, five along the main road front, and seven more in a modern annexe, built in the same local stones, behind the original building. It has an orchard, with tables and wooden swings for summer visitors. It is mentioned in all the Good Food guides.
On October fifteenth it had few visitors. The weather was warm for the time of year—the trees still had their leaves—but very wet. Five of the bedrooms were taken, two of them by Mortimer Cropper and Hildebrand Ash. Cropper had the best bedroom, over the solidly handsome front door, looking out to the track to the church. Hildebrand Ash was next to him. They had been there a week, and had gone for long tramps along the Downs in all weathers, well protected with high boots, waxed jackets and portable parkas. Mortimer Cropper said, once or twice in the bar, which was panelled and dark, with shining gold hints of brass and dark green shades on its discreet lights, that he was thinking of buying a home in the district, a place in which to settle and write for part of the year. He visited various house agents and looked at various estates. He was knowledgeable about forestry and interested in organic farming.
On the fourteenth, Ash and Cropper went into Leatherhead and visited the offices of Densher and Winterbourne. They stopped at a garden centre on their way out of the town and purchased—for cash—various heavy-duty spades and forks and a pickaxe, which they stowed in the boot of the Mercedes. On the afternoon of the fourteenth, they took a walk to the church, which was, as usual, locked against vandals, and wandered round the churchyard, looking at the gravestones. There was a notice at the entrance to the little graveyard, which was fenced with crumbling iron railings; the notice informed them that this parish, the parish of St Thomas, was part of a group of three parishes, of which the Reverend Percy Drax was vicar. Holy Eucharist and Morning Prayer were held there on the first Sunday of every month; Evensong on the last.