The Sealed Letter (36 page)

***

The first day in November, and Fido's in her study at Taviton Street, writing a piece about the three-year anniversary of Prince Albert's death for the
Victoria Magazine.
She still has the knack, she finds; still puts one word in front of another, though haltingly, like an invalid remembering how to walk.

She pauses and rereads what she's written so far. While gently urging the Queen to reduce the elaborate rituals of mourning that have paralyzed her court, it's important not to insult her. Can Fido broaden the message, somehow, so it applies not just to Victoria but also to any of her subjects who've ever suffered?

That dead stillness and passiveness which nature allows to a great sorrow.
Ought
nature
to have a capital? No, Fido's suspicious of capitals, for instance in the case of Woman.
Rise up again and resume our daily burden,
she writes, then changes it to
burthen;
the archaic spelling takes the hard edges off the idea. She dips her pen in the ink.
Fulfilling unremittingly the duties of our station.
After
unremittingly
she adds
and at any personal sacrifice.
Had she better mention God? Providence, perhaps; it's a popular notion. She reads the line again.

Some of us, after a brief season of that dead stillness and passiveness which nature allows to a great sorrow, must rise up again and resume our daily burthen, fulfilling unremittingly and at any personal sacrifice the duties of that station, low or high, to which Providence has called us.

A knock at the front door. She lifts her head, waits for Johnson to come up.

It's not a card the maid brings, but a package. Not just any package. The brown paper cover slides off, and inside there's a stiff white packet. Fido recognizes it at once as the one that was brandished in court. The one that bears—like a gobbet of oily mud flung against a wall, it strikes her now—a thick black circle of wax, impressed with the dragon from the Codrington crest, and over it the family motto,
IEVV,
which means, she recalls with only a slight effort,
virtue cannot be conquered.

A small slip of translucent paper sits on top:
With the compliments of Henry J. Codrington.
It's a set phrase, but not printed, she registers; the admiral wrote it out by hand. She imagines him at his desk this morning. Back at Eccleston Square, the girls reciting in their schoolroom, a leg of mutton on the boil? She sees him putting his affairs in order, posting bank drafts to the lawyers and the enquiry agent. Pausing, scrupulous, and deciding to send this particular document to Miss Faithfull, as some kind of acknowledgement. A signing off.
With the compliments of Henry J. Codrington.
She can't be mistaken about the hint of irony in the phrase. Is he offering a wry congratulation on all the equivocating she did in the witness box? On the twists and turns, the serpentine coilings with which she won her survival?

What's done is done,
Fido tells herself yet again, her voice a bark in her echoing head.

She pictures Harry kneeling down beside the freshly blackened grate in his study, where there must be a small fire this morning, just enough flame to eat up the papers that he's consigning to it one by one. Yes, that would be characteristic of the admiral: to burn all traces of the whole episode. Not just of the trial, perhaps, but also of the woman who was once called his wife: every letter, every picture (the silver frames saved, though; perhaps there might be another wife to put in them someday, a thoroughly English one?).

And Helen, she wonders, where is Helen now? Not with a friend: she's got none left who would take her in. Not with a lover: they too have fallen away like grey leaves.

Oh my darling.

It's not exactly a sentiment that takes Fido unawares, at the thought of Helen adrift in the mean world; it's a sensation so physical it bends her over her desk, like a mantle of lead. How strange, she observes, her mind flailing to hold onto some command of the body that furls and gasps—how strange that even now, after the irrevocable events of the past two months, after blows and counter-blows so shaming that they should have atomized all the old attachments—how thoroughly strange to find a residue of what she can only call love. Spectral, ashy, white-hot.

Fido covers her mouth, makes herself draw a long hiss of breath between her fingers.

To business. Here it is, then, on the desk under her elbow, the simple pale packet over which the lawyers snapped like dogs. (What would it be worth to the
Times,
she wonders?) It bears no inscription, nothing but the oily black seal. Once she's read it she can burn it, Fido promises herself, and then the whole terrible tale will be over.

The minutes crawl by, and like some older, wiser, more craven Pandora, she can't bring herself to crack the seal. She reaches for the little silver knife with which she opens letters, and her fingers curl around its handle, but she makes no move to slit the paper. Fido's always thought of herself as a
femme de lettres,
text the element she breathes with ease, but recently she's come to know how dangerous words are, those black, razor-beaked birds whose feints and swoopings are entirely unpredictable.

But if she doesn't open this letter now, if she locks it away securely enough to thwart the spying eyes of the world—why, its hold on her will only tighten. By day and by night, she'll be aware of it in her safe, propped behind her cash box, beside the Last Will and Testament that leaves everything to be divided between her nephews and nieces because she has no one else in the world. Like some dark lamp it'll keep beaming out its malevolence.

Come, open the thing.

Then it occurs to Fido that she ought to burn it instead. Whatever it may say of her, whatever the insinuating theories or lurid threats a maddened husband might have written down seven years ago—it would only take a few seconds, this morning, for the document to char and curl to anonymous dust. Why should she make herself read it, after all? What possible good can it do her to fill her head with such words?

She thinks of what those words might be; she supplies terrible synonyms. But if she burns the thing, she'll never know, which—it strikes her now—may well prove to be worse. No, she can't bring herself to stand up and carry the letter three steps to the wan fire that lurks in the grate. It is as if the whole secret narrative of her life is contained in this thin envelope.
Oh, read it and be done with it!
Whatever the document may say—

Below, the door knocker thumps, and Fido flinches.

When Johnson comes in this time, she announces a Miss Smith.

Fido's forehead creases. "I don't believe I know a—"

"Helen Smith, she said to say," mutters the maid, looking away.

Fido slides the letter under a pile of books so fast the edge crumples. Her throat feels blocked. She has an impulse to say she's not at home—but that will only put the interview off, and besides,
you coward, you maggot, you pitiful excuse for a woman.
"I'll come to the drawing-room. No, on second thoughts, show her in here." Keeping it on a business footing.

"Here?" repeats Johnson.

"As I said."

Alone, she concentrates on steadying and silencing her breath.

When Helen walks into the study, Fido realizes that she was expecting a broken woman. Bruised, at least, if not repentant. But Helen is pearly-faced, today, dressed in scarlet and plum.

"You look very stylish," says Fido. It comes out as a gruff accusation. She's forgotten to offer her visitor a seat. She finds herself toying with her letter-opener, like some vacillating Macbeth; she puts it down.

"I'm going abroad," remarks Helen.

Of course. And yet it's a shock to hear.

"To what country?" Belgium, Fido wonders, perhaps Italy ... Not Florence, no; the bitter old father won't open his doors to this prodigal.

"Does it matter?" asks Helen, head cocked almost playfully.

Fido clears her throat. "Not to me personally, no—"

"Nor to me," says Helen with a little shrug.

Her destination is that universal no-place, then, the demimonde. Every city has a twilight brigade of ladies with nothing to live on but cards and gentlemen.
Could I have saved her?
Fido wonders, with a stabbing sensation in her stomach.
If I'd been sharper, firmer, stronger?
She tries to summon the tone of the proprietor of the Victoria Press. "Your situation is indeed—"

But a laugh interrupts her, a small, peculiar laugh. "Whether forgiving me or judging me, Fido, the joke is that you've never understood me for a moment."

Fido stares.

"You've always thought me a sentimental Emma Bovary, when the truth is much simpler," Helen says as lightly as if they're discussing the weather. "I took my fun where I found it. If I couldn't bear marriage and motherhood without a little excitement, how was I worse than any creature in creation? We are daughters and sons of apes, after all."

Fido doesn't know how to begin to answer such philosophy. "We are ... we are God's children," is all she can manage.

Helen leans her knuckles on the edge of Fido's desk. "Well, if God put the itch in me, God must answer for it, don't you think?"

Silence, a thick miasma filling up the room.

"But I haven't come for chit-chat," Helen adds in a brisker tone.

"What for, then?" Fido has to ask, after a moment.

"Money."

She's winded by the word. It's rarely spoken, in their circles; people prefer
means, emolument, resources.
"The admiral—surely, if you made a humble appeal, as the mother—"

"My capacity for humility aside," Helen interrupts her dryly, "in his view I'm no longer the mother of his children. I was a false start, don't you know, a fifteen-year error of accounting. I'm informed there are to be no visits, not even a last one."

Only now, and only for a split second, does Fido see a glitter of tears in those sea-blue eyes.

"Why do you ask me for money?" She's almost stuttering.

"Because I have none, except for what a few jewels have fetched," says Helen in a reasonable tone. "Until the day I die, I'll always be asking for my bread, one way or another."

"But why—" Fido tries again. "I thought—because I felt obliged to act as I did, in court—"

Helen flicks open her watch. "Much as it may console you for the two of us to confess, and recriminate, and fall on each other's bosoms in floods of tears—I'm afraid I can't spare the time today."

"All I meant was," says Fido, stiff-jawed, "why ask
me?"

"Who better?" Helen considers her, across the desk. "You were the first, after all."

Fido stiffens. It's as if Helen has put her finger on some exquisitely sensitive scar.

"You haven't forgotten," says Helen, crossing her arms. "I'd bet you recall every single night of it, in fact, rather more clearly than I do."

Fido's throat has sealed up like wax.

Helen's smile has something terrible in it. "We were so very young," Fido whispers.

Another sharp little laugh. "Oh, old enough to know what we were about."

"We've never spoken of it."

Helen shrugs. "There was no need, so I deferred to your squeamish sensibilities. But this appears to be the season for naming names."

Fido swallows hard. "After all you've put me through, will you now stoop to extortion?"

"The way I see it, my dear, it's much more simple than that," says Helen. "As you were first to induce me to break my vows—"

"No," Fido whispers. She can't bear the idea that there could be any likeness between herself and the men who stand like bloody flags in Helen's path. "It was ... not at all the same thing." The silence stretches like a rope on the verge of snapping. "If we've never spoken of it, it's because words would only distort it. There are no..." She strains for breath. "The words don't fit."

Helen shrugs impatiently. "We took our pleasure like nature's other creatures, I dare say. And now it so happens that someone must pay up. Since you were the first to lay hands on me—long before those others—shouldn't you be that someone?" She waits. "Wouldn't you rather it were you, in a way?"

Tears are falling onto Fido's hands, her desk, her papers. She nods, speechless. Then she fumbles for her pen. "I can let you have a draft on my bank."

"I'd rather cash."

Fido goes to her safe and unlocks it. She lifts out her cash box, which is heavy with a full week's wages for the hands at the press. She hesitates for a moment but can't bear to start counting; she slides it across the desk.

Helen shovels it all into her bag: not just bank notes but gold sovereigns, silver crowns and half-crowns and florins and shillings, even. All she leaves is the copper.

Fido watches the rapid pink hands at work. She waits in silence. For what? Some recognition. Some release.

Helen snaps the clasp of her bag, and goes out the door.

Fido sits very still after her visitor has gone. She's looking down the long tunnel of her past. Kent, the weeping woman on the seashore, the first exchange of words. She wishes she could wish that it never happened.
Oh Helen, Helen, Helen,
the name like the wail of a gull. Love found and complicated and lost, found and destroyed again, and was there any way Fido could have shaped the story differently?

One last thing to do. She reaches under the books for the corner of the letter, and pulls it out. Against the black seal, the paper as white as the neck of a girl. What worse is there to fear, after all?

The seal cracks between Fido's fingers. The folded paper parts like water. The page is blank.

Author's Note

Emily Faithfull (1835-95), "Fido" to her intimates, was one of the leading members of the first-wave British women's movement. Her colleague at 19 Langham Place, Isa Craig, wrote a poem called "These Three," which celebrated Adelaide Procter as Faith, Bessie Parkes as Love, and Fido Faithfull as Hope. Here is the key verse about Fido:

Her clear eyes look far, as bent
On shining futures gathering in;
Nought seems too high for her intent,
Too hard for her to win.

But by the time this optimistic verse was published in
English Lyrics
(1870), things had changed utterly: Adelaide Procter was dead; Bessie Parkes had married a Frenchman she barely knew (their children would include the writer Hilaire Belloc) and effectively withdrawn from the movement; the HQ of the Reform Firm had shifted from Langham Place to Emily Davies's home; and Fido Faithfull was a pariah.

The Sealed Letter
is a fiction, but based on the extensive reports on
Codrington v. Codrington
in the
Times
for July 30, August 1 and 2, and November 18, 19, 21, and 24, 1864, supplemented by the
Daily Telegraph, Spectator, Reynolds's Magazine,
and
Lloyds's Weekly London Newspaper.
Very closely based, in fact: for instance, the letter Helen sends Anderson protesting against his engagement, in this novel, is almost word for word the same as the one read aloud in court. What might seem like anachronistic allusions to the Bill Clinton impeachment, such as the stained dress, or the argument about whether a woman could have sex with a man without that man having sex with her, are real details from the Codrington trial. The only major change I have made is to compress the couple's legal wranglings of the period 1858 to 1866 into the novel's more dramatic time span of August to October 1864.

It is a matter of record that Emily "Fido" Faithfull, called as a witness by the wife, fled to avoid a subpoena, then returned to testify in the husband's favour. But why? Robert Browning certainly thought he knew, when he sent his spinster friend Isa Blagden the following tidbit on January 19, 1865:

One of the counsel in the case told an acquaintance of mine that the "sealed letter" contained a charge I shall be excused from even hinting to you—fear of the explosion of which, caused the shift of Miss Emily from one side to the other. As is invariably the case, people's mouths are opened, and tell you what "they knew long ago" though it seems
that
did not matter a bit so long as nobody else knew.

Because the document was not opened in court or entered into the trial record, we are unlikely ever to know what was in it.

William E. Fredeman in "Emily Faithfull and the Victoria Press: An Experiment in Sociological Bibliography"
(Library,
5th series, 29, no. 2 [June 1974]: 139-64) was the first to spell out Browning's sly hints about the "sealed letter"; he argues that Admiral Codrington must have used it to blackmail Faithfull into changing sides.

By contrast, James Stone's biography of his wife's great-great-aunt,
Emily Faithfull: Victorian Champion of Women's Rights
(1994), attributes her volte-face to her sense of betrayal that Helen had broken her promise not to drag her into court.

The first thorough reading of this complex case was an essay by Martha Vicinus ("Lesbian Perversity and Victorian Marriage: The 1864 Codrington Divorce Trial,"
Journal of British Studies
36 [1997]: 70-98, also included in her book,
Intimate Friends).
Based on exemplary research into all the participants as well as a close study of the newspaper coverage and legal documents, this brilliant analysis was invaluable to me in writing
The Sealed Letter.
Vicinus is not convinced by Stone's theory that Helen Codrington and her lawyer conned a naïve Faithfull into approving Few's affidavit. In this account, Faithfull emerges as an astute businesswoman who gave a brilliant performance in the witness box, drawing on Victorian preconceptions (for instance, about the naïve girl led astray by the older married woman) to get herself off the hook.

In creating my own "Fido," "Helen," and "Harry," and attempting to solve the ill-fittingjigsaw puzzle that is the Codrington case, I have borrowed ideas from these three historians and others.

Four years after testifying in the trial, Fido mulled over her experiences with Helen Codrington, more in sorrow than in anger, in a bestselling novel called
Change upon Change
(1868). The persona she adopts is that of a sober man called Wilfred, helplessly devoted and secretly engaged to his flighty cousin Tiny. "Women have so many natures," he concludes wistfully; "I think she loved me well with one." In the preface to the American edition of 1873 (renamed
A Reed Shaken in the Wind),
Fido admitted

I have seen with my own eyes the curious combination of intellectual power and instability of purpose portrayed in Tiny Harewood; I have watched with an aching heart the shifting weaknesses and faint struggles for redemption described in these pages.

At least some of the Faithfull clan seem to have stood by Fido. At the time of the trial, she also had one loyal friend I have left out of the story, Emy Wilson (discussed in Martha Westwater's
The Wilson Sisters).

I have simplified and compressed many events at Langham Place in the early 1860s, including the death throes of the
English Woman's Journal
and the founding of the
Victoria Magazine
and
Alexandra Magazine.
I have used quotations, paraphrases, incidents, and details from the papers of Bessie Parkes Belloc, her father Joseph Parkes, her daughter Marie Belloc Lowndes, and her colleagues Barbara Smith Bodichon, Emily Davies, and Adelaide Procter. Some of these papers are published, but most are held in manuscript at Girton College, Cambridge—the college for women that Davies founded in 1869. (When I did my PhD at Girton in the 1990s, I had no idea I would be returning one day to research a novel, and I want to thank archivist Kate Perry for her help and insights during my week-long visit in 2005.)

Though voluminous, the letters of the "Reform Firm" are often tantalizingly euphemistic. At points of crisis—such as the ousting of the fascinating Matilda "Max" Hays from the
Journal,
or Bessie Parkes's breaking off of relations with Fido—letters or entire sequences have been lost or (more likely) censored by heirs. For instance, the letter in which Parkes reports discovering Fido's involvement in the Codrington case is missing at least the first page. This means that much of my novel's depiction of relations among the women of Langham Place has to be guesswork. For factual accounts of these key years in British feminism I recommend Pam Hirsch's
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist and Rebel,
Candida Ann Lacey's anthology,
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group,
and Jane Rendall's essay on the
English Woman's Journal
in her
Equal or Different: Women's Politics 1800-1914.

In her
Family Chronicle
for 1864, Emily Davies summed up the Codrington crisis as discreetly as possible:

Miss Faithfull was obliged, owing to some references to her in reports of a Divorce case, to withdraw for a time, from society, & I, & others, ceased to be associated with her.

But Fido did very little withdrawing, in fact. For all Bessie Parkes's dark predictions, the Social Science Association did not take their custom away from the Victoria Press, and they resumed inviting Fido to address their annual conferences after a few years, in 1869. Nor did Queen Victoria ever withdraw her personal title of "Printer and Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty." Fido and William Wilfred Head legally partitioned the press in 1867, and it was not wound down until the early 1880s.

Despite having been cast out of Langham Place, Fido remained active—and does not seem to have been ostracized for very long—in the broader women's movement. She founded the Ladies' Work Society and the Victoria Discussion Society in 1869, and in 1874 the Industrial and Educational Bureau for Women, to offer training, jobs, and emigration opportunities. In 1871 she was presented with a silver tea and coffee service by colleagues (including Lady Goldsmid of the SPEW committee), and Emily Davies resumed cautious dealings with her later in that decade. Fido continued to promote the Cause (including votes for women) in her
Victoria Magazine,
as well as in her cheaper weekly,
Women and Work
(1874-76), her
West London Express
(1877-78), and in her columns for the
Ladies Pictorial
in the 1880s and 1890s. Interestingly, she does not seem to have held a lasting grudge against Bessie Parkes, and often paid tribute to her in print.

Not content with being a campaigner, lecturer, publisher, editor,journalist, and novelist, Fido formed a small drama company that toured London and the provinces in 1875. Her reputation grew as a result of extensive U.S. speaking engagements, described in
Three Tours of America
(1884). In 1888 she received an inscribed portrait from the Queen in recognition of thirty years of work on behalf of her sex.

Nor was she lonely. After Fido's friend Emy Wilson got married in 1868, actress Kate Pattison acted as Fido's secretary and companion from 1869 to 1883. This long partnership was followed by one with interior decorator Charlotte Robinson. From 1884, Fido and Charlotte shared a quiet, thickcarpeted home in Manchester and ran a women's decor college and business that earned Charlotte an appointment as "Home Decorator to Her Majesty."

Despite her lifelong lung troubles, Fido remained a keen smoker: during her first U.S. tour in 1872-73, a Chicago journalist wrote that the "fat, famous and frolicsome Emily Faithfull smoke[s] like a Lake Michigan tug boat." She died of bronchitis in 1895, a few days after her sixtieth birthday. In her will she left a tactful but firm message for the Faithfulls:

I feel sure that any loving members of my family who may survive me will appreciate my desire that the few possessions I have should be retained for the exclusive use and as the absolute property of my beloved friend Charlotte Robinson as some little indication of my gratitude for the countless services for which I am indebted to her as well as for the affectionate tenderness and care which made the last few years of my life the happiest I ever spent.

Fido destroyed almost all her private papers, except for some that she left to Charlotte to be passed on to her favourite nephew, Ferdinand Faithfull Begg, which have since disappeared.

But though she survived the Codrington case, both personally and professionally, it did cast a long shadow over her name; she remained vaguely associated with sex scandal. At least one obituary by a woman journalist
(Illustrated London News,
May 15, 1895) criticized her for having adopted a mannish style of dress—which by then carried sinister implications of what doctors were starting to call "inversion," "sex perversion," or "homosexuality." As James Stone documents in his biography, the death of this tireless maverick was followed by a conspiracy of silence on the part of her comrades, who wrote her out of the history of the first British women's movement.

As for Vice-Admiral Henry Codrington, he remarried—Catherine Compton, the widow of another admiral—in 1869, and ended up living two doors away from his brother William in Eaton Square. He never was sent on active service again; he received the titles of Admiral of the Fleet and Knight Commander of the Bath before he died in 1877, leaving £30,000 each to his two daughters. (Nan later became the mother of Denys Finch-Hatton, made famous as the hero of Isak Dinesen's
Out of Africa.)
Harry's sister Lady Bourchier published two volumes about the family,
Memoir of the Life of Admiral Sir Edward Codrington
(1873) and
Selections from the Letters of Sir Henry Codrington
(1880), classics of euphemism that manage to make almost no reference to Harry's first marriage.

From the day Helen Jane Webb Smith Codrington was divorced, nothing more is known of her. One genealogical website claims that she died just twelve years after the trial, in 1876.

***

In Britain from 1670 to 1852 there were fewer than two divorces a year (and men were the petitioners in all but four of them). After the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 this rose rapidly to several hundred a year, and despite legal and financial hindrances, women were the petitioners in almost half of the divorces and almost all the judicial separations. In 1923 the double standard was finally abolished: a wife could now ask for a divorce on the basis of a husband's adultery alone. (Interestingly, the double standard was a peculiarly English institution; in Scotland, women and men could both divorce for simple adultery as early as the sixteenth century.) The Guardianship of Infants Act, in 1925, finally gave father and mother an equal right to custody and established the welfare of the child as paramount. The Herbert Act of 1937 extended the grounds for divorce to include cruelty, desertion (three years), incurable insanity, and habitual drunkenness: the divorce rate doubled the following year. The 1969 Divorce Reform Act restated the three main "fault" grounds as adultery, desertion, and unreasonable behaviour (a broader concept than cruelty), and made it possible for a couple to obtain a divorce on the basis of incompatibility after simply living apart for two years.

In 1996 the Family Law Act tried to make divorce an even simpler, faster, and entirely "no fault" business, but met with opposition on several sides, and that section of the act was never implemented. In August 2006, calling in the
Independent
for a reform of British divorce law, Lord Justice Wall admitted, regretfully, that making divorce a "no fault" process will be difficult, as "people actually don't like not being able to blame someone."