The First Letter

They began on Thursday, in a small back room he had set aside for the purpose, with a window that looked over a courtyard where a cat lived an enviable life among the chimney pots. The interview did not go as Catherine expected. She had imagined drawing facts out of him like splinters. Instead Mr. Ashworth sat across the table with a list — an actual list, in his squared hand — of things he believed she ought to know about Miss Pellinore, and he read it to her in the tone of a man delivering a quarterly report. "She is nineteen. She prefers green to blue, though she will wear blue if her mother insists. She plays the pianoforte adequately and sings better than she plays. She has a younger brother who torments her and whom she defends to anyone outside the family. She finds the city noisy. She told me, at the assembly rooms, that she did not care for dancing as much as she cared for the supper afterwards, because at supper one might actually be heard." He paused. "I thought that an unusual thing to say. I have not been able to decide whether it was clever or merely hungry." Catherine looked up from her notes. "It was clever." "You think so." "She was telling you she would rather be known than admired. A girl who says that to a man she has just met is either very honest or very lonely. Possibly both." Catherine wrote it down. *Would rather be heard than danced with.* "You should have written back about supper, Mr. Ashworth. Not the assembly rooms." He was quiet a moment. The cat in the courtyard stretched and resettled. "You see," he said, "this is precisely the thing I cannot do. I heard the same words you heard. I simply did not — hear them." It was not an apology and not quite a confession, but Catherine recognised in it a man laying down a weapon, and she softened, though she did not let him see it. "Tell me how you mean to address her," she said. "My dear Miss Pellinore. Dear Miss Pellinore. By her Christian name, if you have leave to use it." "I have leave. It is Honoria." "Then we begin with Honoria, and we do not waste her time." Catherine drew a clean sheet toward her and uncapped the ink. "I will write it now, while you are here, so that you may stop me if I put a word in your mouth you would never own. That is the bargain. I will not make you say anything untrue. But I will make you say it *warmly*, and you must let me." He inclined his head. He had a way of agreeing that still felt like negotiation. She wrote. She wrote that he had been thinking, since the assembly, of her remark about the supper — that he had turned it over and found he agreed; that he too would rather be heard than admired, and had spent a great many evenings being neither. She wrote that the city was indeed noisy, and that he hoped, if she would permit the correspondence, to be one of the quieter things in it. She did not write that he loved her, because he did not, and the letter would have known it. When she finished she turned the sheet and slid it across the table, exactly as he had slid his four failures to her three days before. Mr. Ashworth read it. He read it the way he had read the passage on pears, slowly, checking each line against some inner ledger. And Catherine watched his face and saw the strangest thing happen to it — saw it arrive, sentence by sentence, at the edge of an expression it did not have a name for. "I did say that," he said at last, very low. "About the evenings. I never said it aloud. But I did say it." "I know," said Catherine. "That is why it is in the letter. I do not invent, Mr. Ashworth. I only listen on your behalf, since you will not." He looked at her then for rather longer than the work required, and Catherine looked back, and the cat in the courtyard watched them both with the lazy contempt of a creature that has never once needed a letter to say what it felt. "Copy it fair," he said, "and I will sign it." She copied it fair. He signed it. And neither of them said that the letter, in its first honest paragraph, had stopped being entirely about Miss Honoria Pellinore.