The Sealed Letter Read Free Page A

to speak. Her wretched lungs!
    Another few minutes of jolting and shrieking, and then the train halts again: Euston. Anderson's helping her to her feet, and Helen's holding her other elbow. Up a long, twisting staircase—they all three stop whenever Fido's overtaken by a coughing fit. A male passenger's voice behind mutters a complaint, and Anderson turns to snap something about the lady's being unwell.
    Finally they emerge on Gower Street. The sun's gone behind a thick veil of cloud, and it seems a little cooler. Fido's breathing has eased enough to let her speak: "I'm perfectly well now, really."
    "All my fault," Helen is lamenting as they turn down Endsleigh Gardens. "My vagaries so often end in disaster..."
    "Not at all," says Fido hoarsely; "my own doctor recommended the experiment."
    Helen's face brightens. "It is rather a thrill, though, isn't it, to cross the capital in a matter of minutes?"
    She nods, coughing explosively again.
    At the entrance to Taviton Street, the top-hatted gatekeeper expresses such concern for Miss Faithfull's health that Anderson's obliged to tip him.
    "If you please," says Fido, on her steps, loosening herself from her friends' arms, "I'm quite recovered now." Embarrassment makes her voice almost surly. "You've been awfully kind, Colonel."
    "Fortunate to be of any assistance to such a celebrated lady," says Anderson with a neat bow.
    "Will you solemnly swear to rest now?" breathes Helen in her ear. "And a line tomorrow."
    "A paragraph, at the least."
    They part laughing; their hot hands come away reluctantly, like ivy. It's all very strange, Fido thinks; seven years of silence cracked open like a windowpane.
    She uses her own key; she's never seen the need for interrupting the servants' work to make them let her in.
    It's these small, rational reforms that make the Reverend and Mrs. Faithfull shudder so, on their rare visits from Headley. Her father's a clergyman of the old, well-bred, moderate school; he preaches in tailored black, and has equal scorn for genuflecting Tractarians and Low ranters. Fido still feels bad about the enormous expense she put him to by her coming out: all those unflattering flounces, and for what? At twenty-two, finding herself alone in London after the Codringtons' departure, she had a quiet tussle with her parents that ended with her winning their cautious agreement that she was to be treated as a sensible spinster of thirty, with her own modest household, trying to make her way in the literary world. But two years later, when Fido broke it to them that she had taken up the cause of rights for women, and was setting up a printing house as a demonstration of female capacity for skilled labour, Mrs. Faithfull got two red spots very high in her cheeks and asked whether it wasn't generally held that a lady who engaged in trade, even with the highest of motives, lost caste. Fido countered with some sharp remarks about idle femininity that make her wince to remember, especially considering that her mother has never known an idle hour in her life.
    What about these days? Do the Faithfulls consider the youngest daughter of their eight to be still a lady? Best not to ask. Officially they condone her life in the capital— your mission, her mother called it once, which must be how she describes it to her neighbours in Surrey—but Fido can sense the strain. They'd so much rather she were settled in some country town and producing a child a year, like her sisters.
    Upstairs, in her bedroom, Fido catches sight of herself in the mirror. Intelligent eyes in the long, upholstered face of—well, there's no other way to put it—a well-fed dog. Her limp brown hair, cropped to her neck, is pulled back by a plain band. The flesh sags softly under her chin where white lace, grubby from her morning in the City, meets the brown cloth. No corsets, no crinoline: it cost her only a little pang to give them up, and she never misses them now. (They didn't make her look any prettier, only