"Will you read it to me?" he said, hoarsely. "I cannot. I find that I cannot."
"Of course, my lord."
She broke the seal. The wax cracked cleanly. Inside was a single sheet, written close on both sides in the sloping brown hand, and she smoothed it flat on her knee and began, in a low, even voice, as she had read a hundred letters to a hundred strangers.
My dear Adrian,
I do not know whether this will ever reach you, or whether, if it does, you will read it. I have written to you on the fourteenth of March in every year since you were ten, and I have never once had an answer, and I have long ago stopped expecting one. I write because I find I cannot stop. It is the one day of the year on which I am permitted to be your mother.
I read in the newspaper at Easter that your father has died. I will not pretend that I am sorry. But I am sorry for what it must have been, for you, to lose the last of your family, and I am sorry that I was not there. I should like to say that I could not have been. That is not quite true. I could have been. I chose, in the year ninety-seven, to go quietly, and to keep silent, because he told me that if I did not I should never see you again, and that if I did, and if I kept to the terms, I should be allowed to write. He said he would give you my letters. I believed him. God forgive me, I believed him for a very long time.
I do not know what he told you. I do not know if you think me dead, or faithless, or merely careless. I am writing this to say that I am none of those. I am alive. I live in a small white house at the top of Cobb Lane in Lyme Regis, with a cat and a great deal of lace, under my maiden name, which is Marsh. I have lived here for nineteen years. I am not ill. I am not poor. I am only, as I have always been, your mother.
If you wish to come, the door is not locked. If you do not, I shall understand. I have had a long time to practise understanding.
I love you. I have loved you every day. I wanted you to know that, in case nobody else has ever told you.
Your Mama.
Clara's voice had failed on the last line, and she sat for a moment with the sheet shaking in her hand.
When she looked up, Adrian Ravensdale was weeping.
He wept silently, without moving, the tears running down the hard lean planes of his face as if they had been waiting there a long time and had only now been given leave. He made no attempt to hide it. It did not seem to occur to him. He sat with his hands hanging between his knees and looked at the fire, and the rain fell on the limes, and after a time Clara put the letter down on the table and knelt on the hearth rug and laid her hand over his scarred one.
He turned it over, and held on.
They sat like that, without speaking, for a very long time.
"He told her," said Adrian at last, in a thick voice, "that he would give me her letters."