Emma Donoghue - The Sealed Letter

A long sigh. "Is this conversation really necessary? What good do you imagine it can do?"

"Was it necessary to renounce me so publicly, to make a scapegoat of me?" roars Fido.

"Hardly a scapegoat," snaps Bessie Parkes. "You've brought notoriety on yourself as well as the Reform Firm: it's we who have a grievance. All the enamel's already been rubbed off your name, professional as well as personal. The SSA can hardly continue publishing with you, and if you brazen it out, no doubt the Queen will be obliged to withdraw her patronage from the press."

"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.