Secret Letters

by Leah Scheier

  I finally understood why we had come to Highgate that afternoon, and why she had asked to be alone. The ashes she had scattered were the ashes of her letters; she was kneeling at her first love’s grave. Always practical and ever charming, my cousin would have shocked her family with this unexpected show of romantic yearning, this grief that should have never been. Her mother would have blanched with shame could she have witnessed this; her husband would have turned to ice.

  But I understood my cousin’s feelings. She had pretended to scorn that past, to have left her first love behind. And yet she had kept those letters with her, even risked discovery, to hold on to that precious memory. She must have truly loved him—she probably loved him still, though he was gone.

  I thought of my lost detective hero and my dreams, of Peter Cartwright and my only case. Would those memories be ground to ashes in the coming years? It was impossible to imagine that.

  I had wandered back to Swain’s Lane while I thought of Adelaide’s letters, and now I was facing the entrance to the eastern section of the cemetery. It was a plainer area, but it seemed more welcoming than the grandiose tombs of the western plots. I decided I would stroll through there for a little while and give Adelaide the privacy she needed. I did not want to visit Grandmother Joyce’s plot just yet; I had not been close to her as a child, and, as it had turned out, she was not actually related to me.

  And yet there was one grave that I had wanted to visit. But he was not buried here; he was not buried anywhere, unless a churning waterfall counted as a graveyard.

  Slowly I knelt down beside the fence and pulled an unmarked stone from underneath the shrubbery. It felt smooth and cold beneath my fingers. With the knuckles of my right hand, I clawed a hole into the soil, placed the stone inside, and slowly sketched a ragged halo around my makeshift tombstone.

  It looked small and sad there, my little rock, perched in its shallow pit like an abandoned egg inside a vacant nest. A marble angel looming large beside me cast a frigid shadow across my patch; only a sliver of my stone shone blue and green beneath the fading sun. This would be his gravestone, I decided, a special tribute to my fallen hero. This would be his spot, my secret place, where I, at least, could bury him.

  And I could say something to him now, a few short words, like a little eulogy at a funeral. When it was done I would return to Adelaide and step into my ordinary life again. It was not exactly normal to kneel over an empty grave, perhaps, or to talk to someone who wasn’t listening to me, but nothing about this experience had been normal—and in any case, nobody was watching now. I was alone, with all the luxury and pain of total privacy. These would be my quiet stolen minutes, when nobody could judge or scold me.

  “Dear detective in the sky,” I murmured quietly, my head bowed over the stone, “I’m going home tomorrow. I know that you can’t care about that now. Perhaps if I had come a little sooner, it might have mattered to you. Or perhaps not. But I’d like to think you would have approved of me, of what I’ve done over the last few days. I really miss the thought of you. I miss the hope that my future could have been a brilliant one—that you might have made it so. But I don’t regret the dream, even if it’s gone now. And I want to thank you for inspiring it.”

  IF I HAD NOT BEEN concentrating so hard on my little prayer, I might have heard the rustling sooner. It was only when Peter Cartwright’s shadow fell across my little stone that I finally looked up to see him standing there, half-hidden by the bushes, one hand raised in awkward greeting. By the time I recognized him, he was standing next to me, leaning over the tiny gravestone with a puzzled face. It was too late to hide it now; he had already taken in the scene. I had thought that nothing could have been more mortifying than our first encounter; now I knew what true humiliation was. I sighed and looked sadly up at him, waiting for his judgment, bracing for the final blow to complete my misery. He glanced briefly at the stone again, then once more at my sad face and stretched his arm out to help me rise.

  “I did not mean to interrupt your vigil,” he told me gravely as I scrambled clumsily to my feet. His voice was quiet; there was no laughter in his eyes. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps he had not understood what he had seen. Perhaps he would not tease me after all. I had not fully recovered from the shock of our unexpected meeting, but now it was my turn to speak.

  “Mr. Cartwright—this is a surprise,” I ventured, finally. “How did you know that I would be here?”

  “I didn’t,” he responded simply.

  “But I don’t understand—My cousin brought me with her on a whim, and I wandered off just now to—”

  I stopped and shook my head. There was no way to finish that. What was I to say? To mourn the death of my mysterious father? There really were no words to fit this scene.

  “To say good-bye?” he suggested solemnly. There was no hint of mockery in his question. He leaned down slowly, picked the stone out from its mound, and turned it over in his fingers. “Are you finished with this, then? You’re ready to let him go now?”

  I opened my mouth to speak and stopped, confused. His face was somber, his eyes sad and dark, an emerald shade of black. There was no way he could have understood, I reasoned; there was no way he could have guessed. And yet somehow he had, for as I watched him, he stepped closer to me, put his hand gently over my own, and together we set the rock back in its place, beneath the shrubs and out of sight.

  “There now,” he murmured simply. “Do you feel better?”

  I nodded mutely. That silly gesture had helped me somehow, had made me breathe a little easier, though how he could have known, I still did not understand. And why was he here at all? Highgate Cemetery was nowhere near his home.

  “Why did you come?” I asked him finally.

  But he did not seem to hear me; he was staring past me at something in the distance. Then he turned to me and smiled broadly, as if a new idea had just dawned on him. “Have you ever studied families, Miss Joyce?” he asked me suddenly.

  I shook my head. “What sorts of families?”

  “I’m talking about hereditary traits, about family likenesses. It’s a hobby of mine, you see, tracing those subtle similarities that link sisters to brothers, cousins to cousins, daughters to fathers—” He broke off and stared thoughtfully at me, as if waiting for my reaction.

  “And this hobby is useful to you in your criminal investigations?” I ventured, in an innocent voice. I knew quite well what he was trying to say, of course; I was only pretending not to understand him now, hoping to distract him and so steer him from the truth. Though he’d hinted at it ever since we’d met, I did not want him to speak my secret out loud.

  “My hobby is more than just a detective’s tool, Miss Joyce,” he said. “It also helps me make sense of the people whom I meet, and of this great jumbled city around me. I begin to see a unity, hundreds of tiny little bridges connecting solitary beings to one another. It’s startling and exciting. I’ll show you sometime if you’re interested.”

  “Mr. Cartwright, I don’t understand—”

  “The hands are very telling, for example, the curvature of the ear, the cheekbone. Even when the figure and the features differ—there are subtle signs—if you look for them. But the eyes are my favorite study.” There was a distant smile playing on his lips. “Dora, some people’s eyes give everything away.”

  I could longer pretend to misunderstand what he was saying. And yet I couldn’t admit that I understood him, either. I was too ashamed then, not just because my secret was practically on his lips now, but because it had been so easy for him to guess.

  “Mr. Cartwright, these theories are truly fascinating,” I told him coolly, “but surely you did not wander out to Highgate just to comment on the color of my eyes.”

  “No, it was not the color but the expression which caught my notice. Particularly when you are concentrating on something. Or glaring furiously at someone, as you were on that morning when we first met. Do you remember?” He smiled, as if recalling a pleasant memor
y. And I remembered now, that startled look, his odd expression before we parted that day on Baker Street. He had noticed a faint resemblance between myself and his old master, and so had guessed at my secret from the beginning.

  “Oh, is that why you looked so pleased, then?” I shot back with a little laugh. “You thought you’d made a brilliant discovery? And so now you’ve traveled to a graveyard to tell me all about it?” My voice shook a little at the end, but I did not look away. Until the last, I was determined to pretend confidence. If I spoke lightly, if I teased him, perhaps he would not speak my shame.

  But he was no longer watching me. His jaw had set in angry lines, and his eyes had narrowed. He was looking past me once again, at some point in the distance. “I did not come to Highgate to see you, Miss Joyce,” he retorted. “After I returned the letters to your cousin, I assumed that our acquaintanceship was over.”

  “Oh, I see.” I nodded weakly. “I understand.”

  So he had never meant to speak to me again; he had not wished to see me anymore. He had assumed that it was over. And I’d been wondering if he’d followed me! I was too weary to feel hurt just then, though I was certain that his words would torture me for months to come. I swallowed and moved away from him. “Naturally, it is over, sir. Of course it is. I’m sorry, I never meant—” My voice cracked at the apology.

  He glanced back at me, his features softening. “One moment—why did you think I came here this afternoon? Did you think that I’d been following you? I’m sorry, Dora, I don’t mean to disappoint you. But the truth is that I come here fairly often. Especially to this spot.”

  “I understand.”

  But I did not. It seemed so strange to me. He was not the brooding, morbid type. And this was one of the cemetery’s plainer areas, not nearly as picturesque as Egyptian Avenue or the Circle of Lebanon. I was supposed to ask him to explain, of course. It would have been quite natural to ask, especially for me. But there was something about his look that stopped me. Beneath his quiet statement there was an aching note, like a confession, a hint which he had left for me. I could not speak just then. I had to wait for him.

  “No, I do not think you understand at all,” he murmured finally. “But I appreciate your patience. You know, sometimes I think that you are so intent on seeing details that you miss the person standing right in front of you. Good day, Miss Joyce. I trust you’ll have a safe trip home.”

  He bowed shortly as he spoke, and as he straightened, the knot of his cravat slipped forward and the scar upon his neck gleamed red between the edges of his collar. Perhaps it was the marked whiteness of his skin which made it glow that way, or maybe it was the spirit of the place, but suddenly the cross was burning like a living thing, angry, bloody, and unforgiving. And I was staring at it now; even as he put his hand over the spot to cover it, I could not look away. Once more his eyes flickered past my shoulder, once more he paled, and the little cross went livid.

  What had I missed? What was he seeing when he looked past me?

  Slowly, without a word, I turned around and tracked his gaze, beyond a row of ivy-covered graves, over a hedge of red moss roses, some fifty feet away into the shadows beneath a weeping willow tree.

  There, in a single row stood four small headstones.

  Four little crosses.

  I could not make out the writing from where I stood, but somehow I knew that this area belonged to him, that I had stumbled into his secret sanctuary. Just a few steps would bring me close enough to read the gravestones. Without thinking I moved past him toward the spot, stepping through a break between the shrubs. I heard him call my name, heard him call for me to stop, but I did not heed him.

  As I approached it, I could see the plot more clearly, a little family of marble crosses, four ivory tombstones gathered comfortably in a private cluster, resting together underneath the willow’s pleasant shade. Four gravestones, nearly identical.

  Four gravestones, all bearing my friend’s surname.

  William, Margaret, Trevor, and Charlotte Cartwright

  Four birthdates. Two parents and two children.

  His family.

  And at the bottom of the stones: four identical engravings.

  Died: December 24, 1887

  Safe in the hallowed quiet of the past.

  All in one day. His parents, brother, and sister gone at once.

  How could I have known? How could I have guessed this? What had I heard about him and then forgotten? I think you know Mr. Cartwright pretty well, so you must remember how miserable he used to be. Young Perkins had said that about his friend. Those first few months, I think I only saw him smile once.…

  And I was standing there, in the shadow of his tragedy, gaping at his misery, breaking into a grief which he had guarded from everyone he knew, prodding at a mystery which deserved to rest.

  He had moved to stand beside me. His head was turned away, and I could not read his face, but I could see that the knuckles on his fingers had gone white and that his hands were trembling at his sides.

  “I’m really very sorry,” I began. “I hope you can forgive—”

  “Please come away from here.”

  His voice broke, a faded, pleading whisper.

  “I did not mean to—”

  “Just come away from here.”

  I had no right to be there. He had tried to warn me, and I had casually ignored him. I needed to leave immediately, without a word. I had to go before he felt obliged to speak again.

  I slipped past him quietly, pushing aside the willow branches in my way, and hurried down the winding lane. At the far end of the trail I slowed to catch my breath and looked behind me. Cartwright had followed me up the hill, and he glanced around the garden before settling wearily on a granite bench.

  I wavered briefly on the path, waiting for him to say something, waiting for some shrug of forgiveness and understanding. When he did not speak, I crossed the lane and settled down beside him. He gave me a tired look and put his head into his hands.

  Some minutes passed in silence. I watched the sun sink deeper into the red horizon; the air was light and cool and smelled of evening. My cousin would be looking for me soon. I could not risk her finding me here, sitting all alone in a secluded area with a young man. But I could not leave him like this.

  It was too late now for apologies; he was no longer listening. I needed to turn his mind to other things now, to push away that haunted look. But more importantly, I had to make him trust me once again, to see me as a friend, as someone whose interest in his life ran deeper than simple morbid curiosity. And there was only one way I could think to do that. I had to sacrifice something of my own. I had to tell him the truth about myself.

  “Mr. Cartwright?”

  No sound at all.

  “Peter, please.”

  He gave a grunting sigh. “Well?”

  “The day we met—you asked me why I’d come to London. Do you remember?”

  He had been leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his forehead resting in his palms. At my question he sat up and stared at me, his lips falling open slightly in disbelief. “I asked you more than once. I never really thought you’d answer.”

  “Well, I’d like tell you now—if you’d care to listen.”

  He nodded quietly. “Yes, of course.”

  “You have to understand that I’ve carried this secret with me for near four years—and I’ve never told it to another soul. I cannot imagine what you’ll think of me when I tell you.”

  “Dora—”

  “Please don’t speak just yet. Just let me finish—and then say what you wish. Or leave me afterward without a word, just as you like.”

  He nodded again and leaned back slightly. “All right.”

  I exhaled and looked out into the distance. There was no way to meet his eyes just then. It was best to simply say the truth and have done with it.

  “I know you may have guessed a portion of my secret; you’ve hinted at it more than once, and just now you
almost said it out loud.” I swallowed hard and closed my eyes. “Peter,” I began slowly. “Four years ago I found out that my mother deceived my father before their marriage. When they wed, she may have already been with child.”

  I had finally said the words. There was no reason now to wait, no need to let the shock sink in. The worst of it was almost over. “I was that child. For years no one suspected the truth, least of all my father, who raised me as his own. A few months before he died, he learned the truth about my mother’s past.”

  No word or sound from my companion. I could not even hear him breathing. It did not matter; I would not look at him. I did not want to see him yet.

  “I don’t know exactly how he discovered my mother’s secret. But when he did, I sensed the change, Peter. I was very young then, not yet twelve, but there was no question in my mind that something awful had suddenly come between my father and me. Even then I was always getting into scrapes, so I thought maybe I had done something to anger him. I tried so hard to work out what it was. And then—those few months before his death I was so careful to behave like the perfect daughter, the one I thought he wanted me to be. Sometimes I would catch him studying me with the strangest expression on his face, like he was seeing me for the first time. And I got quieter and more attentive, hovering by his room, waiting for some sign from him, some hint that the clouds had passed, that all was well between us. I think he tried, Peter, I really do. He was not ill for long before he died, but I think if he’d had more time, he would have made peace with it—with me. I really do believe that. We just never had the chance.”