“I have felt considerable anxiety about you these past days.…”

Mr. Godwin’s hand was neat, even, and tight, with a few good round curls here and there, but always the same letters in the same way. His lines sat close together, and out near the margins, but you could feel the weight of his hand.

“We love as it were to multiply our consciousness even at the hazard of opening new avenues for pain and misery to attack us.…”

Mrs. B picked up a second letter, a third that stuck to it.

“I must tell you that I love you better than I supposed I did, when I promised to love you forever—and I will add what will gratify your benevolence, if not your heart, that on the whole I may be termed happy.”

Mary’s hand was taller and thinner than his, with jagged loops, slanted and in a hurry. But there was air between the words and lines, and clear space around them.

“How much tenderness for you may escape in a voluptuous sigh.…

“A pleasurable movement to the sensations that have been clustering around my heart …

“It is not rapture—it is sublime tranquility I have felt in your arms—hush!”

Mrs. B remembered, as a girl who read better than her peers, that she once happened on a conduct book that advised any woman, if she loved a man, never to reveal the full extent of that love, even if she were to marry him, which would show preference enough. A good man, the book told her, would ask for no stronger proof, and a young Blenkinsop had taken it to heart. No other possibility had ever occurred to her.

She picked another letter from the pile. It fluttered in her hand.

“These confessions should only be uttered—you know where, when the curtains are up—and all the world shut out. You are a tender, affectionate creature, and I feel it thrilling through my frame giving, and promising pleasure—Ah me!”

Mrs. B felt her heart thump behind her bosom. This was not who she was, nor how her life had been. When she was a new-married woman, unable to produce a child of her own, she’d determined to wake each day with a short prayer and to count three blessings, then go along her business, whatever it was. She ended each day the same, on her knees, worshipping Him, whom she relied on to make sense of whatever suffering she didn’t know how to hold. She gave succor where she could, and counted that she saw far more good births than bad. Happiness, love, desire—these were never hers, or hers to judge. And yet, here they were, flooding her with feeling.