The floorboard surrendered with a sound like a held breath finally released, its edge curling upward as the swollen oak yielded to Eleanor's careful pressure. Dust motes swirled in the grey morning light, catching the thin beams that slanted through the study's tall windows, and for a moment the only sound in the room was the faint creak of the ancient house settling around her. Eleanor Marbury knelt on the worn Persian rug, her knees pressing into wool that smelled of cedar and mouse droppings and the particular mustiness of rooms left unventilated for too long. The floorboard came free in her hands, and beneath it lay a hollow she had not expected, a darkness that seemed deeper than the mere four inches of space the gap should have allowed.
She had been cataloguing the study's contents for three days now, working through the detritus Great-Aunt Beatrice Whitmore had left behind when the house passed to her late father's cousin, and through him, by a twist of genealogy she still found improbable, to her. The Whitmore estate sat on a hill overlooking the village of Ashford-under-Browne, its grey stone walls softened by a century of climbing ivy, its rooms filled with the particular silence of places where time had moved more slowly than it ought. Eleanor's employer, a London dealer named Harwood who specialized in seventeenth-century cartographic curiosities, had given her the assignment with the sort of vague instruction that suggested he expected little: inventory the contents, assess any items of value, report back within the fortnight. He had not expected her to find anything of consequence, and neither, until this moment, had she.
The space beneath the floorboard was lined with what appeared to be oilcloth, the kind used to wrap goods for sea voyage, and within that protective layer Eleanor could see the edges of paper, yellowed and brittle, bound together with a ribbon that had once been blue but had faded to the colour of a winter sky just before snow. She drew the bundle out with both hands, feeling the weight of it settle into her palms, and the ribbon came away at her touch, crumbling slightly at the knot, though the letters themselves held together with the stubborn cohesion of things preserved against time. The topmost envelope was addressed in a hand she did not recognize, the ink faded to sepia, the postmark smudged but legible enough to read: WHITMORE HALL, 1852.
Eleanor sat back on her heels, the bundle cradled against her chest, and her breath slowed as she read the return address written in a different hand, smaller, more feminine, across the sealed flap. The name was not one she knew, and the address was a posting station in Somerset she had never visited, but what caught her attention was the initial at the end of the direction, a single letter C, and beneath it, in parentheses, the words for the astronomer. Her pulse quickened in a way she did not entirely care to examine, the instinct of a researcher scenting something significant rising through the professional calm she had cultivated over twenty years of work. She set the bundle on the floor beside her and drew the first letter from its envelope with fingers that she was annoyed to find were not quite steady.
The paper was heavy, the sort of laid stock that had gone out of fashion by the time Eleanor was born, and the handwriting that covered its surface was a copperplate hand, each letter formed with the deliberation of someone who had been taught penmanship as an accomplishment rather than a mere skill. The date at the top read March 14th, 1852, and the salutation was a single word: Dearest. Eleanor's eyes moved down the page, and she read:
I write to you from the window of the small parlour, where I have positioned my chair so that I may watch the sky as the dusk gathers. There is a particular quality to the light at this hour that I have found myself craving in the months since last I saw you, a quality that recalls the evenings we spent together upon the terrace with your instruments, when the stars were still considered permissible subjects of study and not the province of those whom polite society has deemed unserious. I have taken to making notes of the phenomena I observe, though I lack your skill at rendering what the eye perceives into the language of the celestial. Tonight there is a clarity to the constellations that suggests frost before morning, and I have set my lamp upon the sill so that its reflection will not trouble my viewing of the southern sky.
Eleanor turned the page over, though she did not yet read the continuation. Her mind was working through implications: the phrase for the astronomer in the address, the reference to instruments and a terrace, the date corresponding to a period when astronomical observation was still considered a gentleman's pursuit rather than a profession. She had read enough of the period's correspondence to know that such references often meant a relationship of some intimacy, and the salutation Dearest, so much warmer than the conventions of the time typically permitted, confirmed that impression. The letter was signed with a single initial, the same C that appeared on the envelope, and below it, in a different ink, a postscript: I have placed this where the morning sun will not fade the ink. I pray it finds you.
The second letter was dated three days later, and the hand was different, broader, more confident, the penmanship of someone accustomed to writing rapidly and without much attention to ornament. The salutation was My dear friend, and Eleanor felt a small disappointment at the shift in register before she reminded herself that the conventions of the time would not have permitted sustained warmth in correspondence that might be read by others. The astronomer, for she was now certain the second correspondent was the one referred to as such, wrote:
Your letter reached me this morning, having travelled by the post that comes through Frome, and I confess I read it three times before I could compose any reply of coherence. The frost you predicted did indeed come, and on the morning after I observed the most remarkable transit of Mercury that I have been privileged to witness in twenty years of study. I have made the calculations and enclosed them, though I know you will find the mathematics beyond your immediate interest. What I wished most to convey was the quality of the light during those minutes of transit, the way the planet presented itself as a small dark wound against the sun's surface, and how the experience recalled to me the evenings we shared upon your terrace when the constellations were still permitted to us. I have resigned my position at the observatory, though the reasons for that decision must wait until we may speak privately.
Eleanor looked up from the letter, her eyes adjusting to the dimmer light of the study. Outside the tall windows, the grey morning had begun to brighten, the clouds thinning to allow patches of pale sunlight to fall across the cluttered desks and the stacks of books that filled the room. She was aware of the coldness of the floor through the rug, the particular ache in her knees from kneeling too long, and the distant sound of a wood pigeon's call from the garden. The house settled around her with its customary creaks, and she realized she had been holding her breath and let it out slowly through her nose. The bundle contained more letters, she could feel the thickness of them, perhaps two dozen envelopes in all, and the prospect of reading through them was both thrilling and slightly daunting.
She chose the third letter at random, sliding it from its envelope with care, and found it was from the astronomer's correspondent again, dated a week after the second. The salutation was My dear C, and Eleanor noted the informality with interest, the first letter replaced by the initial as if the relationship had progressed beyond the need for formal address. The letter was longer than the previous one, and the hand more agitated, the letters formed with a haste that suggested strong feeling:
I have been unable to sleep for thinking of what you wrote concerning the resignation, and I confess that my first response was a selfish one, a terror that you had acted precipitously and that I might be in some way the cause. But upon reflection I find that I cannot regret any choice that has brought you to the certainty that you must pursue your own path, whatever the cost. The cost, I know, will be considerable. Your family will not understand, and the institution that has been your home for these many years will close ranks against you, as institutions do when one of their number steps beyond the bounds they have set. I would offer you what comfort I can, though I know the comfort of a friend at a distance is poor compensation for the loss of a life's work. If there is any way in which I might assist you, any refuge I might provide, you have only to ask. I find I am writing in the small hours, the candle guttering, and I shall seal this now before I commit to paper any sentiment I might later regret. Yours, in whatever way you will have me, B.
The signature was B, and Eleanor's mind supplied the connection immediately: Beatrice. Great-Aunt Beatrice Whitmore, who had lived in this house for sixty years, who had died in the previous autumn at the age of ninety-three, who had left behind a reputation for eccentricity and a house full of objects no one had taken the trouble to catalogue. Eleanor had assumed, from the sparse family records she had been able to consult, that Beatrice had been unmarried, had lived a quiet and unremarkable life in this corner of the countryside. The letters suggested something rather different, a life of considerable emotional intensity, a friendship or perhaps a love affair conducted in the careful language of the time, hidden from view, preserved in the darkness beneath a floorboard for reasons that were now becoming clearer.
She set the letter down beside her on the rug and flexed her fingers, which had grown stiff from the cold and from the particular tension of handling fragile documents. The bundle still held many letters, and she was aware that she could not read them all now, that she would need to set up a proper system of transcription, that she would need gloves and a proper light and the careful attention that such documents deserved. But she could not stop herself from drawing out the next envelope, which was addressed in the astronomer's hand, the same broad confident script, and which bore a date six weeks later than the last. The salutation was different: My dear Beatrice. The letter was short, no more than a paragraph, and the hand was unsteady:
I write to you in haste, as I am to leave for the coast on the morning tide, having accepted a position at a small observatory in the south of France. The decision was made more quickly than I had anticipated, and I find myself with little time for the explanations that are owed. I cannot say more in a letter than I have already said, and I cannot trust the contents of any letter I might send to the discretion of the post. I ask only that you remember what we were to one another, and that you do not think unkindly of me when the years have carried us far from this present moment. I shall write when I am settled, and I shall trust that the letters will find you, though I know the addresses I have for you are not the most current. C.
Eleanor turned the letter over, but the other side was blank, and the envelope contained nothing else. She felt a curious tightness in her chest, the particular ache of reading a correspondence that has been interrupted, that ends without the resolution one wants for the people who wrote it. She sat with the letter in her hands for a long moment, the morning light growing stronger around her, the wood pigeon still calling from the garden, and then she carefully returned the letters to their bundle, rewrapped them in the oilcloth, and set the bundle back in its hiding place beneath the floorboard. She replaced the board with care, pressing it down until it sat flush with its neighbours, and then she rose, brushing the dust from her knees, and went to the window to look out at the garden and the pale sky above the trees.
There was a figure walking up the drive, a man in a dark coat, his stride purposeful, and Eleanor felt a flicker of recognition before she could place it. She had seen him before, she was certain of it, though the context eluded her, and as he drew closer she saw that he carried a small case in his left hand, the kind of case that might contain a notebook or a set of documents. He paused at the front steps, looking up at the house as if assessing it, and then he mounted the steps and knocked, three sharp raps that echoed through the empty hall. Eleanor heard the sound of her own footsteps as she crossed the room to go and answer the door, and she was aware, as she went, of a strange anticipation, the sense that the morning was about to become more complicated than she had expected.
The knock came again before she reached the hall, three more sharp raps that suggested impatience rather than urgency, and Eleanor quickened her step, smoothing her cardigan with one hand as she went. The door was heavy oak, swollen slightly with the season, and she had to put her shoulder to it to swing it open, which gave her a moment to compose her face into what she hoped was polite inquiry rather than the inward fluster she actually felt.
The man on the step was taller than she had expected, with a face that was handsome in an uneven sort of way, the kind of face that suggested a youth spent out of doors and a manhood spent in places where one learned to charm or to bluster. His coat was good cloth but worn at the cuffs, and his collar was slightly askew, as if he had dressed in haste. He took in the house behind her, the dust motes turning in the shaft of morning light from the open door, and then he smiled, a quick and practiced expression that reached his eyes a beat too late.
"Miss Marbury," he said. "Edmund Pryce, from the Globe. I wrote to you some weeks ago, though I don't suppose you got the letter, given how far you live from anything resembling a post office. May I come in?"
Eleanor did not step aside immediately. She looked at him, at the case in his hand, at the way he shifted his weight from one foot to the other as if he expected to be turned away and was already preparing his arguments against it. "I did receive your letter," she said. "I had not yet decided whether to reply."
"Ah," he said, and the smile became more genuine, or at least more rueful. "That is honest, at least. May I come in regardless? I have walked a very long way and I am willing to be persuasive if you will let me."
She stepped aside. He came into the hall with the ease of a man accustomed to entering other people's houses uninvited, shedding his coat and hanging it on the nearest hook without asking permission, and then he turned to her with the expression of a man who has decided to be charming and is committing fully to the enterprise.
"The letters," he said. "You have found them."
Eleanor felt a prickle at the back of her neck. She had not mentioned the letters in any of her replies, because she had not written any replies, but he spoke as if he already knew they existed, as if her finding them was a foregone conclusion rather than a discovery. "I beg your pardon," she said, her voice cooler than she had intended. "What letters?"
"The ones beneath the floorboard in the parlour," he said. "The ones left there by Cyprian Ashworth before he went back to West Africa and never came home. I have been looking for those letters for three years, Miss Marbury, and I have been told by three separate people that you were the person most likely to find them, given your interest in maps of the region and your late mentor's connection to the whole wretched business. I am not here to take them from you. I am here to ask what they say."
Eleanor held his gaze for a long moment. She could hear the wood pigeon still cooing in the garden, and the sound of the wind moving through the laurels at the side of the house, and somewhere in the distance the lowing of cattle in a neighbouring field. She was aware that she had a decision to make, and that the decision would shape the rest of her morning, and perhaps the rest of her week, and possibly the rest of her year.
"You may sit down," she said, and gestured towards the parlour. "I will make tea, and then I will tell you what I have read so far. But I will not let you take the letters with you when you leave, and I will not let you copy them without my supervision. Those are my conditions."
"Agreed," he said, and followed her into the parlour, and sat down in the chair by the empty hearth, and set his case on the floor beside him, and looked at her with an expression that was equal parts relief and calculation. "Where shall I begin?" he said.
Eleanor went to make the tea.
When she returned, carrying a tray that rattled slightly because her hands were not quite steady, she found him examining the replaced floorboard with the attention of a man who has spent many years looking at the wrong end of a story. He glanced up as she came in, and she saw that he had taken a small notebook from his case and was holding a pencil loosely in his right hand, though he had not yet written anything in it.
"I will read you the relevant passages," she said, setting the tray down on the table between them and pouring for them both. "And you will tell me what you know of the writer. But first I must ask you a question, and I require an honest answer."
He inclined his head, waiting.
"How did you know the letters were beneath the floorboard? I did not write that to anyone, and no one was in this house when I found them."
He considered the question, and she watched him decide how much truth to tell. She was practised at reading the faces of men who dealt in partial information; her late mentor had been one such man, and so were most of the dealers she had encountered in her years of work.
"I was told by a woman in Accra," he said at last. "A woman named Adwoa Mensah, who had been a servant in the household where Ashworth stayed during his last trip. She had known him only briefly, but she remembered him talking about the letters, about where he meant to hide them, about his intention to retrieve them when he came home. He never came home, Miss Marbury, as you know. He died in Lagos of a fever that the doctors could not name, and his effects were sent back to England, and somewhere in the process the letters were lost, and Adwoa Mensah assumed they had been destroyed, or thrown out with the rest of his papers. She carried that assumption for forty years until I met her last spring, and then she told me what she remembered, and I came to find you."
Eleanor handed him his tea. "And you believe her."
"I believe she had no reason to lie," he said. "She is an old woman, and she is tired of carrying secrets that do not belong to her. She wanted someone else to know, and I was the one who asked. That is how these things work, in my experience. You ask enough questions of enough people, and eventually the right person tells you the truth."
Eleanor sat down opposite him and took a sip of her own tea, which was too hot and burned her tongue slightly. She set the cup down and picked up the bundle from where she had placed it on the side table, and she untied the string and unwrapped the oilcloth, and she felt the weight of the letters in her hands, the particular gravity of paper that has been waiting a long time to be read.
"I will read you the early letters first," she said. "They are the ones that will interest you most, I think. The writer is a young woman, and she is writing to a man she loves, and she believes they are going to be married in the spring."
Pryce leaned forward, and she began to read.
The first letter was dated the second of March, 1898, and it was written in a round, careful hand that suggested both education and an attempt at elegance. The young woman was named Clara, though the surname was not given, and she wrote from a house in Herefordshire where she said the rain had been falling for three weeks without pause and her father had begun to speak of selling the estate and moving them all to a smaller house in Bath. She did not mention the young man by name either, but she referred to him constantly, circling back to him the way a compass needle circles towards north, and the tenderness in her words was almost painful to read aloud.
He is everything I had hoped for and several things I had not dared to hope for, she had written. He has a way of listening that makes me feel I am the only person in the room, and a way of speaking that makes me feel the whole world is larger than I had supposed. We have agreed that we will be married in the spring, when the daffodils are out at Dymock church, and we will travel to Paris for our honeymoon, and we will live in a small house near the river, and we will be very happy. I have not told my father yet because I know what he will say, but I will tell him soon, and then it will be done, and nothing will be able to prevent our happiness.
Eleanor read the letter through to its close, and then she looked up at Pryce, who was watching her face rather than listening to the words, as if he could read the content from her expression. His pencil had not moved.
"The tone shifts in the next one," she said, and turned to the second letter.
The second letter was dated nine days later, and the hand was the same, but the ink was different, a darker blue, and the paper had been folded more sharply, as if the writer had been in a hurry or a temper. Clara wrote that she had told her father, and that her father had said what she had known he would say, which was that the young man was unsuitable, that he had no prospects, that he was the sort of person who promised everything and delivered nothing, and that Clara must break off the engagement immediately or be prepared to forfeit her inheritance.
I have refused, Clara wrote. I have told my father that I would rather have nothing than give him up, and he has looked at me as if I had struck him, and then he has gone out of the room without another word. I do not know what he will do. I do not know whether he will relent or whether he will cast me off entirely. I only know that I cannot do what he asks, and that I will not, and that whatever comes next I will face it with my head held high and his hand in mine.
Eleanor paused, and took a sip of her tea, which had cooled enough to drink. Pryce was watching her still, but his expression had changed; the practiced charm had fallen away, and what remained was a quieter thing, an attentiveness that suggested he was hearing not just the words but the woman behind them.
"There are eleven letters in all," she said. "The next six are from Clara, and they grow shorter and more subdued as the weeks pass. Her father does not relent. He engages a solicitor to write to the young man, and the young man does not reply. He brings his eldest son home from India to talk sense into his sister, and the eldest son writes to Clara afterwards to say that he has tried to see the young man but has been turned away at the door. Clara writes that she is not surprised. She writes that the young man has always been proud, and that pride will be the ruin of him, and that she wishes he would let her help him, but she does not know how to ask without bruising him further."
"And then?" Pryce said, when she paused.
"Then the letters stop," Eleanor said. "There are no more from Clara. The remaining four are from the young man, written over a period of nearly a year, and they are addressed to her at the Herefordshire house, but they are returned through the post, marked 'not known at this address.' He does not know she has been sent away. He writes first in fury, then in bewilderment, then in a kind of resignation that is worse than either. The last one is dated the following February, and in it he says that he has booked passage to Paris for them both, that he has found a small house near the river, that everything will be as they planned if she will only meet him at the station on the appointed day. He does not say what he will do if she does not come. He only says that he will wait."
Eleanor set the bundle down on her knee and looked at Pryce.
"She did not come," she said. "There is no record in any of the letters of her receiving his final appeal. Whatever happened to her, she did not know he was waiting."
Pryce was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the wood pigeon had stopped calling, and in its place there was only the wind in the laurels and the distant lowing of the cattle. He looked down at his untouched tea, and then he picked it up and drank, and set it back in its saucer with a small, precise motion that suggested he was using the action to give himself time to think.
"Ashworth," he said at last. "The young man is Cyprian Ashworth."
"Yes," Eleanor said.
"And you knew that before you opened the bundle."
"Yes."
"And you did not write to me to tell me you had found them."
"No."
He met her eyes, and for the first time she saw something behind the charm that was neither calculation nor performance. It was, she thought, a kind of loneliness, the particular weariness of a man who has spent his life chasing stories and has begun to suspect that the chase is the only thing he knows how to do.
"Why not?" he said.
Eleanor considered the question. The morning light had shifted while they had been talking, and it now fell in a long slanting bar across the parlour floor, illuminating the dust motes and the grain of the wood and the place where the floorboard sat slightly proud of its neighbours, as if it had been lifted and replaced too many times.
"Because I wanted to read them first," she said. "Because they are not only evidence, Mr. Pryce. They are also a record of two people who loved each other and were prevented from being happy, and I wanted to give them the attention they deserved before I handed them over to someone who would only see them as material for a story."
"And do you see them differently now?"
She thought about Clara's round, careful hand, about the dark blue ink of the second letter, about the young man waiting at a station for someone who would never arrive. She thought about the map in her study, with its surveyor's marks that did not correspond to any known feature of the terrain, and about the stories that Mr. Holworth had told her when she was a girl, about Cyprian Ashworth who had gone away and never come back.
"Yes," she said. "I see them as the beginning of something, not the end."
The knock came again, sharper now, and Eleanor crossed the parlour in three swift strides. She opened the front door to find Edmund Pryce on the step, his hat in his hand, his dark hair disordered by the wind, a leather satchel slung across his shoulder. He looked as though he had been walking for some time, and his shoes were dusted with the pale grit of the lane.
"Mr. Pryce," she said.
"Forgive me." His voice was warmer than it had been the previous afternoon, the London edges softened by something that might have been genuine contrition. "I was passing, and I saw the ladder against the cottage, and I thought I might have a look at the tiles while the weather held. The southerly is forecast to turn tonight."
Eleanor studied him for a moment. The wind pressed at her back, cold through the wool of her dress, and somewhere in the lane a rook called its rough, rusted note.
"You were passing," she said. "At seven in the morning. From London."
"From the station," he said. "I took the early train."
"Because of the roof."
"Because of the roof," he agreed, and she saw the flicker at the corner of his mouth, the thing that was not quite a smile, that acknowledged the absurdity of the pretext without abandoning it.
She stood aside and let him in. He stepped past her into the narrow passage, and she noticed that he had brought the satchel with him, that he moved with the particular care of a man who has learned to be conscious of his own presumption. He set the satchel down by the hat stand, and she saw him glance at the coat pegs, at the willow-pattern bowl on the half-table, at the framed photograph of her parents on their wedding day.
"The kettle has just boiled," she said. "I assume you take it strong."
"You assume correctly."
She left him in the parlour and went through to the kitchen. The range ticked softly as it cooled, and the cat had reclaimed her basket by the hearth. Eleanor measured the tea leaves into the pot with hands that were steadier than they had been an hour ago, and she let the steam rise against her face, and she thought about what she had read in the hours before dawn. About Clara Marbury and Cyprian Ashworth, about the survey of 1891 and the contours that did not correspond to any known feature of the terrain, about the shape on the map that looked, when she tilted the paper to the light, like the bowl of a cradle or the hull of a small boat.
When she returned to the parlour with the tray, Edmund was standing at the window, looking out at the lane. The ladder was still propped against the eaves, its shadow a long dark line across the gravel. He turned as she entered, and she saw that his expression had changed. There was no longer any performance in it. He looked, for the first time since she had met him, like a man who was unsure of his footing.
"You have been up since the small hours," he said.
"Yes."
"Reading."
"Yes."
He did not ask what she had read. He crossed to the chair opposite the sofa and sat down, and she saw that he had brought something with him from the satchel. A folded newspaper, the broadsheet he wrote for, the ink still fresh on the front page. He set it on the low table between them, and she saw the headline: WEST AFRICAN GOLD DISPUTE REOPENED. The byline was his.
"I should not have brought this," he said. "I brought it because I thought I owed you the truth of what I am about."
She set the tray down. She did not touch the paper.
"I know what you are about, Mr. Pryce."
"Then you know I cannot let this go."
"I know you do not want to. Those are different things."
He looked at her then, and she saw it again, the thing behind the charm. The weariness. The loneliness of a man who had spent his life pursuing other people's stories and had begun to suspect that the pursuit was the only thing keeping him upright.
"Will you tell me what you found?" he said. "In the floorboards."
Eleanor poured the tea. The liquid was the colour of dark amber, and the steam rose between them and dispersed in the cold air of the parlour. She handed him his cup, and their fingers brushed against the porcelain, and she was aware of the warmth of his hand and of how easily she could have let it linger.
"Two letters," she said. "And a surveyor's mark, drawn in private cipher, that corresponds to a feature on a map in my study which does not match any known terrain in the region of the Gambia."
Edmund set his cup down. He did not pick up the newspaper.
"C. is Clara Marbury," he said quietly. "My grandfather's sister."
"I know."
"You knew when I came yesterday."
"I suspected. The station at Didcot. The train that was delayed. The initials. It did not take a great deal of deduction, Mr. Pryce. I have spent my life reading old documents. You begin to recognise the hands."
He nodded. He picked up his cup again, and she saw that his hand was not quite steady.
"My grandfather never spoke of her," he said. "Not once, in all the years I knew him. He would talk about his childhood in Abingdon, about the river, about the garden his mother kept. But Clara was never mentioned. I found her name in his papers after he died, in a letter from a solicitor in Oxford, and I asked my father, and my father said that it was a family matter that had been put to rest a long time ago and that I should let it lie."
"And did you?"
"I am a journalist, Miss Marbury. I do not let things lie."
The rook called again in the lane. The wind had dropped, and the cottage was very still, and she could hear the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece and the soft, papery sound of the cat breathing in her basket by the hearth.
"I could have told you yesterday," she said. "When you came to the door. I could have seen that you recognised the name, and I could have handed you the letters, and you could have written your piece, and the matter would have been at an end."
"Why did you not?"
"Because the letters are not only about your family. They are also about mine. And they are about a survey that was falsified, and about a man who was sent to penal servitude for a crime he did not commit, and about a woman who waited at a station for someone who never came, and I do not believe that those things belong in a broadsheet, Mr. Pryce. I believe they belong to the people who lived them."
He looked at her for a long moment. The tea cooled between them. The morning light had shifted again, and now it fell in a thin bright line along the edge of the table, catching the dust on the surface and the grain of the wood beneath.
"I am not asking you to give me the letters," he said. "I am asking you to let me help you understand what they mean."
"I understand what they mean."
"Do you?"
"Yes. Clara Marbury was in love with Cyprian Ashworth. Cyprian Ashworth discovered that a survey of colonial territory had been falsified to conceal a site of some kind, a geological feature, possibly a deposit, possibly something else. He confided in Clara. Someone discovered the breach of confidence. He was accused of a crime he did not commit and sent away. Clara spent the rest of her life trying to find the truth of what had happened to him, and she died before she could."
Eleanor paused. She looked at Edmund, and she saw that he had gone very still.
"The truth would only hurt you," she said. "It would not bring him back. It would not undo the years he lost. It would only confirm what Clara already knew, and it would give you a story to write, and your editor would put it on the front page, and the people who were responsible for what happened to Cyprian Ashworth would either be dead or beyond the reach of the law, and the whole business would be nothing more than a paragraph in the morning papers and then it would be forgotten."
"That is not certain."
"It is almost entirely certain. I have spent twenty years studying the way in which inconvenient truths are received. They are received with indifference, Mr. Pryce. They are received with irritation. They are received, occasionally, with a brief and inconvenient flurry of attention, and then they are forgotten. The people who are hurt by them are the people who were already hurt, and the people who are vindicated by them are the people who are no longer alive to care."
He set his cup down. He looked at the newspaper on the table between them, and then he looked at her, and she saw the thing behind the charm and the weariness and the loneliness, and she saw that it was not calculation at all. It was a hunger. A genuine, inarticulate hunger to understand something that had been hidden from him for his entire life.
"What was the feature on the map?" he said.
"I cannot tell you."
"Why not?"
"Because I am not yet certain. And because, until I am certain, I do not want it written down in a place where someone else can find it and use it for their own purposes."
"You do not trust me."
"I do not yet know you, Mr. Pryce. There is a difference."
He was quiet for a moment. The clock ticked on the mantelpiece. The cat stretched in her basket and resettled, and the sound of her claws on the wicker was a small, dry rustle.
"You are right," he said at last. "About the broadsheet. About what would happen if I wrote it. I cannot pretend that you are not."
"I do not ask you to pretend."
"Then what do you ask?"
Eleanor looked at him. She looked at the ladder propped against the eaves outside the window, and at the dark line of its shadow on the gravel, and at the thin bright line of morning light along the edge of the table. She thought about Clara Marbury, who had kept the letters under the floorboards for sixty years, and about Cyprian Ashworth, who had gone away and never come back, and about the surveyor's mark in private cipher that corresponded to a feature on a map which did not match any known terrain in the region of the Gambia.
"I ask you to come back tomorrow," she said. "With the ladder. And to look at the tiles. And to have breakfast with me in the kitchen, if you are willing to eat kippers at half past seven in the morning."