Bethlehem Road

of Etheridge's next letter.

Dear Mrs. Ivory,

I regret to inform you that I am looking further into the matter of your husband's plea for the custody of your daughter. I find that the circumstances are not as I first surmised, or as you led me to believe.

Therefore I am obliged to withdraw my support from your cause, and to put my weight behind your husband's effort to give his guardianship and care to both his children, and to raise them in an orderly and God-fearing home.

Yours faithfully, Vyvyan Etheridge

Mr. Etheridge,

I could hardly believe it when I opened your letter! I called upon you immediately, but your servant would not admit me. I felt sure that after your promises to me, and your visit to my home, that you could not possibly so betray my trust.

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If you do not help me I shall lose my child! My husband has sworn that if he obtains custody I shall not ever be permitted to see her, much less talk and play with her, teach her what I love and believe, or even assure her that it is not my will that we part, and that I shall love her with all my strength as long as I live!

Please! Please help me.

Florence Ivory

You do not reply! Please, Mr. Etheridge, at least hear me. I am not unfit to care for my child! What offense have I committed?

Florence Ivory

And from the last one, written in a scrawl ragged with emotion:

My child is gone. I cannot put my pain into words, but one day you will know everything that I feel, and then you will wish with all the power of your soul that you had not so betrayed me!

Florence Ivory

Pitt folded the note and put it together with the rest of the correspondence in a large envelope. He stood up, banging his knee against the desk without feeling it. His mind was in the darkness on Westminster Bridge, and with two women in a room in Walnut Tree Walk, a room full of chintz and sunlight, and pain that spilled out till it soaked the air.

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7

-Lr was the day after Pitt went to Lincolnshire that Charlotte received a hand-delivered letter a little before noon. She knew immediately when she saw the footman with the envelope in his hand that it was from Great-aunt Vespasia; her first dreadful thought was that some illness had befallen the old lady, but then she saw that the footman was in ordinary livery, and his face bore no mark of grief.

Charlotte bade him wait in the kitchen. Hurrying into the parlor, she tore open the paper and read Vespasia's thin, rather eccentric hand:

My dear Charlotte,

An old friend of mine, whom I am perfectly sure you would like, is greatly afraid that her favorite niece is suspected of murder. She has come to me for help, and I come to you. With your experience and skill we may be able to discern the truth-at least I intend to try!

If you are able to accompany my footman to visit me and begin a plan of campaign this afternoon, please do so. If you are not, then write and let me know the soonest that 144

you will have a moment to spare. Already it grows late, and time is short.

Yours affectionately, Vespasia Cumming-Gould

P.S. There is no need to dress glamorously for the occasion. Nobby is the least formal of people and her anxiety far outweighs her sense of occasion.

There was only one possible reply. Charlotte knew very well what it is like to have someone very dear to you suspected of murder, and to feel all the fear of arrest, imprisonment, trial, even hanging racing nightmarishly through your mind. She had known it with Emily so very recently. Aunt Vespasia had stood by them then. Of course she would