another continent altogether. His nose was broad and his lips thick. At the sight of his wife, his brown eyes lit up and he smiled.
‘Watch your hem, Bess.’ A rivulet of blood was trickling towards her. ‘You’re in your good shoes too. I’m nearly done here, I’ll be indoors in a little while.’
Then he saw the look on her face and the duet of knife and stone came to an end.
‘What is it?’
For all the differences between the two faces, a single emotion animated their expressions.
‘One of the children?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Robin.’
The first-born. His face fell. ‘What is it this time?’
‘This letter …’
His gaze fell to her hand. She held not a folded piece of paper, but a pile of ripped pieces.
‘Susie found it. Robin brought her a jacket to mend last time he came to visit. You know how dainty she is with her needle, though she is only twelve. A very fine jacket too, I dread to think what it cost. There was a great gash in the sleeve, she says, though you wouldn’t know it now. She had to unstitch the pocket seam to get some thread the right colour, and while she was about it, she found this letter, torn to pieces. I came across her in the drawing room puzzling it out like some kind of a game.’
‘Show me,’ he suggested, and he took a handful of her skirt to keep it out of the blood as they stepped towards the ledge that ran along one inner wall. She laid out the fragments.
‘rent,’ she read aloud, lightly touching one of the pieces. Her hand was a working one, she wore no rings except her wedding band and her nails were short and neat.
‘Love,’ he read; he did not touch the paper he read from, for there was blood under his nails and on his fingers.
‘at an end … What is at an end, do you suppose, Robert?’
‘I don’t know … How did it come to be torn into pieces like this?’
‘Did he tear it up? Is it a letter he received and didn’t like?’
‘Try putting that piece with this,’ he suggested. But no, the two did not fit together. ‘It is a woman’s hand.’
‘A good hand too. My letters are not so well formed as these.’
‘You do well enough, my dear.’
‘But look how straight she writes. Not a single blot. It is nearly as good a hand as yours, with all your years of schooling. What do you make of it, Robert?’
He peered silently for a while. ‘There is no point trying to reconstitute the whole. What we have is only a fraction. Let’s try something else …’
They moved the pieces round, her deft hand operating according to his instruction, and arrived at an organization of the fragments into three sections. The first was of pieces too small to be meaningful: halves of words, ‘the’s and ‘of’s and bits of margin. They put them aside.
The second set contained phrases which they read now aloud.
‘Love’
‘entirely without’
‘child will soon entirely’
‘help from no quarter but you’
‘rent’
‘wait no longer’
‘father of my’
‘at an end’
The final group was a set of fragments all containing the same word:
‘Alice’
‘Alice’
‘Alice’
Robert Armstrong turned to his wife and she turned her face to him. Her blue gaze fretted anxiously and his own was grave.
‘Tell me, my love,’ he said, ‘what do you make of it?’
‘It is this Alice. I thought at first it was her name, the letter-writer. But a person writing a letter does not say their name so many times. They say, I. This Alice is someone else.’
‘Yes.’
‘Child,’ she repeated wonderingly. ‘Father …’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t make it out … Does Robin have a child, Robert? Do we have a grandchild? Why has he not told us? Who is this woman? What trouble is it that has made her write a letter like this? And for the letter to be torn like this. I fear …’
‘Do not fear, Bess. What good can fear do? Suppose there is a child? Suppose there is a woman? There are worse mistakes a young man can make than falling in love, and if a child has come from it, we will be the first to welcome it. Our hearts are strong enough, aren’t they?’
‘But why is the letter half destroyed?’
‘Supposing there is some trouble … There are few things that cannot be put right by love and there is no shortage of that here. Where love fails, money will usually do the trick.’