Another letter, written a year after she’d left.

Mary Grady was delivered of a son this morning. A happier man than John Grady you’ve not seen. The boy is healthy and has a full cry, and he took to suckling straightaway. The midwife says he will be a healthy lad. I am pleased for Grady, but may I confess to you that my heart is leaden. My hope for my own son is now in England...

There were nine letters in all to her, written in dates spread over the course of her absence. He’d written more frequently at the beginning, expelling his frustration and hurt with her in heavy strokes on the page. But in the last year or so, months had passed between letters. Two or three of them were quite sentimental, telling her of this birth or that death, of people she wasn’t sure she’d ever met, much less remembered. One or two of them were written more formally, the words cold, his anger simmering between the lines.

But every single one of them expressed how he missed her.

And then there was the last one, written seven months ago. It was shorter than the others. He began,

This is the last letter I shall ever write to you. I have resigned myself to the fact that I made a mistake in marrying you. But it is done and it cannot be undone. From the moment I swore to God and the queen that you were my wife, you became the beginning of my world and the end of it, and this is as it shall always be. It is my failing that I never imagined the end could be like this, my burden to bear for the rest of my life. But I release you, Margot.

Tears were clouding Margot’s eyes as she carefully folded and stacked the letters. She’d never known he felt like this. She’d wondered many times why he didn’t come for her, at least send a letter, and had assumed he was glad to be rid of her.

She held the letters in her arms and bent over them, her eyes squeezed shut, her heart pounding painfully. If she’d known...if she’d understood that he esteemed her somehow, would it have made a difference to her? Would she have ever left? Would she have spent the last three years dining with friends and laughing around the gaming tables and sending for gowns from London and feeling so empty, so bereft, so despairing of her future?

She tucked the last letter in between her stays and her stomacher, tied the bundle together again, then returned the rest of the letters to their dark hiding place and shut the cabinet door. She used her hat pin to lock it, picked up the knife and slowly gained her feet.