Do any of your siblings still live close by?
She didn’t dare write any longer, for fear of what else she might say. And she’d left off the honorific in the salutation, so she signed it simply:
Griffin
The letter hadn’t been sent out an hour before Agatha was ardently regretting every last mortifying word.
How had she managed to fit so much embarrassing material in such a short note? Stale wit, childhood tantrums, and a truly treacly flight of fancy involving a dead relative.
Such a letter deserved to be discarded.
It deserved to be burnt.
Annually, as a caution against similar sins.
It ought to be shown to schoolchildren for the next hundred years to teach them how not to write melodiously in English. Like an anti-Shakespeare, or the opposite of Burke.
It was worse than poetry.
Agatha felt as though she’d wantonly sliced off a piece of her beating heart and sealed it within the envelope. How would Penelope—how wouldanyone?—react to being the recipient of such a gory, messy missive?
She cut the lines of her next engraving extra deep out of pique, and was particularly sharp about Jane’s inattention and poor Crompton’s perfectly common compositing errors—but her agony only subsided when the Tuesday post brought a reply that was obviously several pages in length.
Agatha tucked it hastily into her skirt pocket, where it smoldered like a banked coal until she could dismiss her employees for the day, send Eliza and Sydney off to the theater, and lock herself in her study with the curtains drawn.
Dear Griffin, the letter began, and set Agatha’s heart racing in gorgeous terror:
My condolences on the loss of your brother. He sounds like a charming, stubborn, eminently lovable young sailor.
It is terribly hard having family at sea. My father was a merchant captain and his sons mostly followed him into the trade—the brother I mentioned in Edinburgh runs accounts for a shipping company there. My youngest brother, Owen, was the vicar here until we lost him some years back. My second-youngest brother, Harry, and my husband are in whaling, and often gone for two or three years at a stretch. They could have been drowned or devoured or anything years ago, and the letter just not reached me yet.
They could be dead even as I write this.
I think about it sometimes and it chills the breath right out of me. You are right, it is a solace to think that should they perish, I could stave off grief for some short while by imagining them still braving the swells together somewhere.
At this point the words started dancing and Agatha had to put down the paper to dash the water from her eyes.
It was nothing. Truly nothing. She’d thought she would embarrass herself, and she hadn’t. That was all. She’d sent a tender, bleeding part of her heart blithely off on a thoughtless impulse, and such an error obviously deserved to be consigned to the yawning depths of a polite and awkward silence.
Penelope Flood had sent that humiliating weakness back as carefully, cushioningly wrapped as a treasured heirloom. As if Agatha would be incomplete without it.
Her mother-in-law had been right: Penelope Flood was extraordinarily kind. Far kinder than Agatha deserved.
Thinking poorly of herself was familiar, and helped steady her whirling thoughts. She glanced again at the door and read on:
The nearest of my living siblings is my brother, Philip, who married a Welshwoman whose father owned a mine. The rest have scattered in the course of pursuing fair love and fortune. Mostly the latter, to be frank. Only I have stayed in Melliton, in the house where we all grew up. It rings a little emptier now that it’s just myself.
Perhaps that’s one reason I work so hard to stay busy. There are a number of farming families in the area whom I visit regularly—beekeeping is not very demanding when a keeper has only one or two hives, but as soon as you have moths or mice or foulbrood showing up it is helpful to be able to call on someone with expertise. The families enjoy the honey and wax their hives produce, I have a chance to observe how variations in nearby flora affect things like honey production rates and hive strength, and it keeps me out in the fresh air and not brooding alone at home.
However, at the moment, I also have the benefit of a witty and talkative guest: my friend Joanna Molesey, whose name you’ll recognize, has come to stay with me after the loss of her patroness. She has family in the north, but some small legal matters—including a missing diamond snuffbox—require her to remain in the neighborhood for some indefinite length of time. If you have a moment to spare, I can tell you the whole story...
Agatha read the letter twice more beginning to end, then folded it back up along its creases. As a businesswoman she was careful to preserve all her correspondence; such records often came in handy when disputes arose over payment rates and deadlines for delivery.
She could not, of course, put Penelope’s letter with these. It was far too personal.
Nor could she put it in the small dresser beside her bed, where Thomas’s letters rested, the fragile stack tied with a blue silk ribbon. Scraps of delicate poetry he’d found, printed flowers just for her, lines he’d typeset himself as a youth—these were also personal, also secret, but not quite in the same painful way. Youexpectedlove letters to be intimate and embarrassing.
What they weren’t, Agatha realized, wasspecific.
