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To: Mistress Verline Versierdholte Halt-by-Wall Boschenberg City Hergoatenbosch Newwich 1st Jude-was- Narcis, HIR 1601 Dearest, most precious Verline, So much has happened since my last, too-short letter.Yet, all that I have to tell you now that matters is that my service as the factotum to Europe, Duchess-in-waiting of Naimes, has come to an end. Miss Europe has done all to keep me safe, but even she cannot defeat the whole world, and now she is gone to Sinster where I cannot go, and it is too dangerous for me to stay in Brandenbrass-or in any city at all. Frans and Pin are set on returning to you to take up their foundlingery mastering again, yet, as much as they urged me otherwise, I will not be coming with them.
I do not wish to startle you, but I am about to write something of such strangeness I would not blame you for disbelieving every word. It is the reason for the danger and for the hurts that drive Miss Europe to take her journey to the surgeons and has all to do with what troubled our dear cryptical Master Frans before he left you. For, when Master Frans first got to Madam Opera's, he did not find just a babbie on the doorstep-like the story usually goes- but a sparrow bogle with the babbie in his arms. It was this bogle who gave Master Frans the babbie, saying that it was not normally born but had come from the living mud far out in threwdish places.With his usual wisdom, Master Frans took the baby at once and gave it to Madam Opera.That babbie was me.
I am a rossamunderling, Miss Verline, a manikin, just like Biarge the Beautiful, who you might know from Master Frans' or Master Pin's sea stories. I am sorry if this is hard to read; it is not at all my intention to worry you or burden you with things too big to fathom or bear. It has been said to me that I am as much a man as a monster, neither more one nor less the other. I do not know what to reckon; I am just me. I have always been me. Not all monsters are monsters, just like Master Frans always rightly said.
Hard as this is to write and harder yet to act on, it is time for me to leave. Where I go I will not say, but I have tried the path of an everyman and now I go to find my proper place. I am sorry to write this, dearest Verline. Please do not take it too hard, nor fret, for those I go to have proved true friends. Farewell. Forever your
P.S. It would be best to destroy this letter as soon as you have done reading it.
If I can, I will write you again.
I love you.
In the cool gloom of a late spring evening-while the heiress of Naimes, bound by fast-sailing sloop for Sinster, rounded the stony headlands of Needle Greening-a boy, a sparrow and a wizened little bogle left Brandenbrass. By hidden unfrequented paths and the covering shadows of night, these three traveled about the northern shores of the Grume to cross the mouths of the Marrow, finally passing on to the Sparrow Downs and out of the accounts of men.
