The Sealed Letter

by Emma Donoghue

  "I believe I've emerged from the recent unpleasantness with my name quite restored," says Fido, trying not to hear how unconvincing that sounds.

  "Thinly whitewashed, rather," says Bessie Parkes, rolling her big doll eyes. "Judge Wilde was certainly merciful to you in his summing-up, in that he only made you sound like a cretin and turncoat. That's the wonder of it, really: that you managed to betray both your friend and the Cause."

  Fido swallows. "I love the Cause, and you know it."

  "No, I'm afraid I've given you up as a bad job, Miss Faithfull. For all your cleverness and energy, I see now that you have a certain screw loose which may some day—barring divine intervention—bring you to Millbank Gaol."

  "It's not true," she insists. "I'm the same woman I've always been."

  A shrug. "But now the mouths of the world are open, and can't be muffled."

  "So the look of the thing is all you care about?"

  Bessie Parkes flushes. "Keeping up appearances is an underrated virtue. If a working woman wears a clean, mended skirt without a petticoat under it, or turns a teacup so the crack won't show—you might call it hypocrisy, but I say she's doing her best, out of respect for society."

  Something occurs to Fido. "This is what you did to Max Hays, two years ago, when you convinced yourself our falling subscriptions were her fault," she breathes, "and we sheep sat baaing in a circle and did nothing to stop you. What, are we to be purged one woman at a time, and then there was one?"

  Bessie Parkes's face works oddly. "I will always think fondly of poor Max, and remember her in my prayers, but she's as unbalanced as you are. Those terrible, jealous scenes between her and Miss Cushman..."

  Fido blinks at her.

  "No, your type is a menace; I don't know whether you're mad or bad, but either way you can't be allowed to damage the firm."

  "I've poured my lifeblood into it!"

  "Then it's time you were stopped: you're infecting it." Speechless, she moves towards the door. Then turns back. "The Cause needs all of us," Fido says, "flaws included. That includes you, I dare say. But you can't prevent me from carrying on my own share of the work, if not here then elsewhere."

  "Please be sure to pick up all your possessions," says Bessie Parkes, turning back to her paperwork. Her voice quivers—only a little.

  Blinded by tears, Fido feels her way to the desk that's been hers for the past six years, and starts filling her carpet bag with papers, pens, whatever her hands can find.

  ***

  The first day in November, and Fido's in her study at Taviton Street, writing a piece about the three-year anniversary of Prince Albert's death for the Victoria Magazine. She still has the knack, she finds; still puts one word in front of another, though haltingly, like an invalid remembering how to walk.

  She pauses and rereads what she's written so far. While gently urging the Queen to reduce the elaborate rituals of mourning that have paralyzed her court, it's important not to insult her. Can Fido broaden the message, somehow, so it applies not just to Victoria but also to any of her subjects who've ever suffered?

  That dead stillness and passiveness which nature allows to a great sorrow. Ought nature to have a capital? No, Fido's suspicious of capitals, for instance in the case of Woman. Rise up again and resume our daily burden, she writes, then changes it to burthen; the archaic spelling takes the hard edges off the idea. She dips her pen in the ink. Fulfilling unremittingly the duties of our station. After unremittingly she adds and at any personal sacrifice. Had she better mention God? Providence, perhaps; it's a popular notion. She reads the line again.

  Some of us, after a brief season of that dead stillness and passiveness which nature allows to a great sorrow, must rise up again and resume our daily burthen, fulfilling unremittingly and at any personal sacrifice the duties of that station, low or high, to which Providence has called us.

  A knock at the front door. She lifts her head, waits for Johnson to come up.

  It's not a card the maid brings, but a package. Not just any package. The brown paper cover slides off, and inside there's a stiff white packet. Fido recognizes it at once as the one that was brandished in court. The one that bears—like a gobbet of oily mud flung against a wall, it strikes her now—a thick black circle of wax, impressed with the dragon from the Codrington crest, and over it the family motto, IEVV, which means, she recalls with only a slight effort, virtue cannot be conquered.

  A small slip of translucent paper sits on top: With the compliments of Henry J. Codrington. It's a set phrase, but not printed, she registers; the admiral wrote it out by hand. She imagines him at his desk this morning. Back at Eccleston Square, the girls reciting in their schoolroom, a leg of mutton on the boil? She sees him putting his affairs in order, posting bank drafts to the lawyers and the enquiry agent. Pausing, scrupulous, and deciding to send this particular document to Miss Faithfull, as some kind of acknowledgement. A signing off. With the compliments of Henry J. Codrington. She can't be mistaken about the hint of irony in the phrase. Is he offering a wry congratulation on all the equivocating she did in the witness box? On the twists and turns, the serpentine coilings with which she won her survival?

  What's done is done, Fido tells herself yet again, her voice a bark in her echoing head.

  She pictures Harry kneeling down beside the freshly blackened grate in his study, where there must be a small fire this morning, just enough flame to eat up the papers that he's consigning to it one by one. Yes, that would be characteristic of the admiral: to burn all traces of the whole episode. Not just of the trial, perhaps, but also of the woman who was once called his wife: every letter, every picture (the silver frames saved, though; perhaps there might be another wife to put in them someday, a thoroughly English one?).

  And Helen, she wonders, where is Helen now? Not with a friend: she's got none left who would take her in. Not with a lover: they too have fallen away like grey leaves.

  Oh my darling.

  It's not exactly a sentiment that takes Fido unawares, at the thought of Helen adrift in the mean world; it's a sensation so physical it bends her over her desk, like a mantle of lead. How strange, she observes, her mind flailing to hold onto some command of the body that furls and gasps—how strange that even now, after the irrevocable events of the past two months, after blows and counter-blows so shaming that they should have atomized all the old attachments—how thoroughly strange to find a residue of what she can only call love. Spectral, ashy, white-hot.

  Fido covers her mouth, makes herself draw a long hiss of breath between her fingers.

  To business. Here it is, then, on the desk under her elbow, the simple pale packet over which the lawyers snapped like dogs. (What would it be worth to the Times, she wonders?) It bears no inscription, nothing but the oily black seal. Once she's read it she can burn it, Fido promises herself, and then the whole terrible tale will be over.

  The minutes crawl by, and like some older, wiser, more craven Pandora, she can't bring herself to crack the seal. She reaches for the little silver knife with which she opens letters, and her fingers curl around its handle, but she makes no move to slit the paper. Fido's always thought of herself as a femme de lettres, text the element she breathes with ease, but recently she's come to know how dangerous words are, those black, razor-beaked birds whose feints and swoopings are entirely unpredictable.

  But if she doesn't open this letter now, if she locks it away securely enough to thwart the spying eyes of the world—why, its hold on her will only tighten. By day and by night, she'll be aware of it in her safe, propped behind her cash box, beside the Last Will and Testament that leaves everything to be divided between her nephews and nieces because she has no one else in the world. Like some dark lamp it'll keep beaming out its malevolence.

  Come, open the thing.

  Then it occurs to Fido that she ought to burn it instead. Whatever it may say of her, whatever the insinuating theories or lurid threats a maddened husband might have written down seven years ago�
��it would only take a few seconds, this morning, for the document to char and curl to anonymous dust. Why should she make herself read it, after all? What possible good can it do her to fill her head with such words?

  She thinks of what those words might be; she supplies terrible synonyms. But if she burns the thing, she'll never know, which—it strikes her now—may well prove to be worse. No, she can't bring herself to stand up and carry the letter three steps to the wan fire that lurks in the grate. It is as if the whole secret narrative of her life is contained in this thin envelope. Oh, read it and be done with it! Whatever the document may say—

  Below, the door knocker thumps, and Fido flinches.

  When Johnson comes in this time, she announces a Miss Smith.

  Fido's forehead creases. "I don't believe I know a—"

  "Helen Smith, she said to say," mutters the maid, looking away.

  Fido slides the letter under a pile of books so fast the edge crumples. Her throat feels blocked. She has an impulse to say she's not at home—but that will only put the interview off, and besides, you coward, you maggot, you pitiful excuse for a woman. "I'll come to the drawing-room. No, on second thoughts, show her in here." Keeping it on a business footing.

  "Here?" repeats Johnson.

  "As I said."

  Alone, she concentrates on steadying and silencing her breath.

  When Helen walks into the study, Fido realizes that she was expecting a broken woman. Bruised, at least, if not repentant. But Helen is pearly-faced, today, dressed in scarlet and plum.

  "You look very stylish," says Fido. It comes out as a gruff accusation. She's forgotten to offer her visitor a seat. She finds herself toying with her letter-opener, like some vacillating Macbeth; she puts it down.

  "I'm going abroad," remarks Helen.

  Of course. And yet it's a shock to hear.

  "To what country?" Belgium, Fido wonders, perhaps Italy ... Not Florence, no; the bitter old father won't open his doors to this prodigal.

  "Does it matter?" asks Helen, head cocked almost playfully.

  Fido clears her throat. "Not to me personally, no—"

  "Nor to me," says Helen with a little shrug.

  Her destination is that universal no-place, then, the demimonde. Every city has a twilight brigade of ladies with nothing to live on but cards and gentlemen. Could I have saved her? Fido wonders, with a stabbing sensation in her stomach. If I'd been sharper, firmer, stronger? She tries to summon the tone of the proprietor of the Victoria Press. "Your situation is indeed—"

  But a laugh interrupts her, a small, peculiar laugh. "Whether forgiving me or judging me, Fido, the joke is that you've never understood me for a moment."

  Fido stares.

  "You've always thought me a sentimental Emma Bovary, when the truth is much simpler," Helen says as lightly as if they're discussing the weather. "I took my fun where I found it. If I couldn't bear marriage and motherhood without a little excitement, how was I worse than any creature in creation? We are daughters and sons of apes, after all."

  Fido doesn't know how to begin to answer such philosophy. "We are ... we are God's children," is all she can manage.

  Helen leans her knuckles on the edge of Fido's desk. "Well, if God put the itch in me, God must answer for it, don't you think?"

  Silence, a thick miasma filling up the room.

  "But I haven't come for chit-chat," Helen adds in a brisker tone.

  "What for, then?" Fido has to ask, after a moment.

  "Money."

  She's winded by the word. It's rarely spoken, in their circles; people prefer means, emolument, resources. "The admiral—surely, if you made a humble appeal, as the mother—"

  "My capacity for humility aside," Helen interrupts her dryly, "in his view I'm no longer the mother of his children. I was a false start, don't you know, a fifteen-year error of accounting. I'm informed there are to be no visits, not even a last one."

  Only now, and only for a split second, does Fido see a glitter of tears in those sea-blue eyes.

  "Why do you ask me for money?" She's almost stuttering.

  "Because I have none, except for what a few jewels have fetched," says Helen in a reasonable tone. "Until the day I die, I'll always be asking for my bread, one way or another."

  "But why—" Fido tries again. "I thought—because I felt obliged to act as I did, in court—"

  Helen flicks open her watch. "Much as it may console you for the two of us to confess, and recriminate, and fall on each other's bosoms in floods of tears—I'm afraid I can't spare the time today."

  "All I meant was," says Fido, stiff-jawed, "why ask me?"

  "Who better?" Helen considers her, across the desk. "You were the first, after all."

  Fido stiffens. It's as if Helen has put her finger on some exquisitely sensitive scar.

  "You haven't forgotten," says Helen, crossing her arms. "I'd bet you recall every single night of it, in fact, rather more clearly than I do."

  Fido's throat has sealed up like wax.

  Helen's smile has something terrible in it. "We were so very young," Fido whispers.

  Another sharp little laugh. "Oh, old enough to know what we were about."

  "We've never spoken of it."

  Helen shrugs. "There was no need, so I deferred to your squeamish sensibilities. But this appears to be the season for naming names."

  Fido swallows hard. "After all you've put me through, will you now stoop to extortion?"

  "The way I see it, my dear, it's much more simple than that," says Helen. "As you were first to induce me to break my vows—"

  "No," Fido whispers. She can't bear the idea that there could be any likeness between herself and the men who stand like bloody flags in Helen's path. "It was ... not at all the same thing." The silence stretches like a rope on the verge of snapping. "If we've never spoken of it, it's because words would only distort it. There are no..." She strains for breath. "The words don't fit."

  Helen shrugs impatiently. "We took our pleasure like nature's other creatures, I dare say. And now it so happens that someone must pay up. Since you were the first to lay hands on me—long before those others—shouldn't you be that someone?" She waits. "Wouldn't you rather it were you, in a way?"

  Tears are falling onto Fido's hands, her desk, her papers. She nods, speechless. Then she fumbles for her pen. "I can let you have a draft on my bank."

  "I'd rather cash."

  Fido goes to her safe and unlocks it. She lifts out her cash box, which is heavy with a full week's wages for the hands at the press. She hesitates for a moment but can't bear to start counting; she slides it across the desk.

  Helen shovels it all into her bag: not just bank notes but gold sovereigns, silver crowns and half-crowns and florins and shillings, even. All she leaves is the copper.

  Fido watches the rapid pink hands at work. She waits in silence. For what? Some recognition. Some release.

  Helen snaps the clasp of her bag, and goes out the door.

  Fido sits very still after her visitor has gone. She's looking down the long tunnel of her past. Kent, the weeping woman on the seashore, the first exchange of words. She wishes she could wish that it never happened. Oh Helen, Helen, Helen, the name like the wail of a gull. Love found and complicated and lost, found and destroyed again, and was there any way Fido could have shaped the story differently?

  One last thing to do. She reaches under the books for the corner of the letter, and pulls it out. Against the black seal, the paper as white as the neck of a girl. What worse is there to fear, after all?

  The seal cracks between Fido's fingers. The folded paper parts like water. The page is blank.

  Author's Note

  Emily Faithfull (1835-95), "Fido" to her intimates, was one of the leading members of the first-wave British women's movement. Her colleague at 19 Langham Place, Isa Craig, wrote a poem called "These Three," which celebrated Adelaide Procter as Faith, Bessie Parkes as Love, and Fido Faithfull as Hope. Here is the key vers
e about Fido:

  Her clear eyes look far, as bent

  On shining futures gathering in;

  Nought seems too high for her intent,

  Too hard for her to win.

  But by the time this optimistic verse was published in English Lyrics (1870), things had changed utterly: Adelaide Procter was dead; Bessie Parkes had married a Frenchman she barely knew (their children would include the writer Hilaire Belloc) and effectively withdrawn from the movement; the HQ of the Reform Firm had shifted from Langham Place to Emily Davies's home; and Fido Faithfull was a pariah.

  The Sealed Letter is a fiction, but based on the extensive reports on Codrington v. Codrington in the Times for July 30, August 1 and 2, and November 18, 19, 21, and 24, 1864, supplemented by the Daily Telegraph, Spectator, Reynolds's Magazine, and Lloyds's Weekly London Newspaper. Very closely based, in fact: for instance, the letter Helen sends Anderson protesting against his engagement, in this novel, is almost word for word the same as the one read aloud in court. What might seem like anachronistic allusions to the Bill Clinton impeachment, such as the stained dress, or the argument about whether a woman could have sex with a man without that man having sex with her, are real details from the Codrington trial. The only major change I have made is to compress the couple's legal wranglings of the period 1858 to 1866 into the novel's more dramatic time span of August to October 1864.

  It is a matter of record that Emily "Fido" Faithfull, called as a witness by the wife, fled to avoid a subpoena, then returned to testify in the husband's favour. But why? Robert Browning certainly thought he knew, when he sent his spinster friend Isa Blagden the following tidbit on January 19, 1865:

  One of the counsel in the case told an acquaintance of mine that the "sealed letter" contained a charge I shall be excused from even hinting to you—fear of the explosion of which, caused the shift of Miss Emily from one side to the other. As is invariably the case, people's mouths are opened, and tell you what "they knew long ago" though it seems that did not matter a bit so long as nobody else knew.