Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter. Cathy’s First Letter

14 August 1023, The Abyss, nearing Armorica

Amelia—

Manners dictate that I should write “My dear Amelia,” or some other polite formula of the kind, but I have pledged myself to honesty in future, and at present I do not find that you are particularly dear to me. And yet, you have extended yourself on my behalf.

Captain Grier tells me that we will reach Mont-Havre on the morrow, where he will touch down briefly, and then will continue on to Bois-de-Bas. I am glad, for I have spent much of this past month staring out the window at the Abyss, cursing it and you in the most unladylike way, though under my breath, and using it to dispose of ill-advised letters.

Yes, I have written many ill-advised letters on this journey, most of them to you, chance take you! This is the first in which my language has been temperate enough for His Majesty’s post.

Most of my other letters have been to Octavian Archer.

You will have observed, as my brother did not, that I am not so poorly disposed to Octie as I have feigned. As Cathy Sloane-Price I could not seem otherwise, though it tore at my heart. And now, thanks to you, I know that my supposed husband has been dead for years; and that, even if we had been truly married I was free to receive Octie’s advances when he first came to me.

Those letters, too, I have cast into the Abyss. It is too late, far too late; any genuine attachment on Octie’s part has been replaced by horror, and if the Abyss has done its work I suppose that by now he is engaged to the Markham girl.

You needn’t remind me that this is all my own doing, and a just recompense for how I treated poor Bartholomew Sloane-Price. I have been a fool; I have no taste for remaining one.

Bartholomew was a kind and earnest young man and would have been a good husband for a like-minded woman; and instead he met me. I do not know how I am to go on from that, now that I have faced it.

But though I have blasted and damned you from Cumbria to Armorica, I must at last confess that you were right. All I could have earned in Nexing Cross was the censure of all, for the ruining of Octie and his estrangement from Sir Alexander and Lady Cressida. And now, instead, I am free; and so are they. Octie will marry, and have sons; and the line of the Archers will continue apace.

You would have made a fine Sir and Lady Archer, you and your Maximilian, had Octie never married; had that ever occurred to you? I cannot tell you how many times over the last weeks, in my darker moments, I have rejoiced to think that by sending me here you have most likely put that out of your reach.

In my better moments, of course, I am quite aware that you have no desire to be lady of the manor in Nexing Cross.

What shall I be, I wonder, now that I am free? Perhaps not my brother’s dogsbody.

I have just heard the call: the Edge of Armorica is in sight. I suppose I must go look ere the light fails.

Cathy

Next letter

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Photo by Samuel Ferrara on Unsplash