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CHAPTER TWELVE

Later, when the children were in bed and Betty Sims and I were sharing supper in the schoolroom, I asked her where the flower garden was.

‘Right-hand side of the house looking out, behind the big beech hedge.’

She showed no curiosity about why I wanted to know, because by then I’d asked her a lot of other questions about the house and the Mandevilles – all perfectly reasonable for a new governess. She’d been there thirteen years, from a few months before the birth of Master Charles, but her time of service with Lady Mandeville went back longer than that.

‘She wasn’t Lady Mandeville then, of course, she was Mrs Pencombe. I came to her as nursemaid when her son Stephen was six years old and she was confined with what turned out to be her daughter Celia.’

‘So you’ve known Celia from a baby?’

I wanted to know everything I could about Celia. It might help me decide how far to trust her.

‘From the first breath that she drew.’

‘What was she like as a child?’

‘Pretty as a picture and sweet winning ways. But headstrong. She was always a child that liked her own way.’

‘What happened to Mr Pencombe?’

‘He died of congestion to the lungs when Celia was six years old. We thought we’d lose Mrs Pencombe too, from sheer grief. It was a love match, you see. With her looks, she could have married anybody in London.’

‘And yet she must have married Sir Herbert quite soon afterwards.’

Betty put down her slice of buttered bread and gave me a warning look.

‘Two years and three months, and I hope you’re not taking it on yourself to criticise her for that.’

‘Indeed not.’

‘What would anyone have done in her place? Mr Pencombe hadn’t been well advised in the investments he made and he left her with nothing but debts and two children to bring up. She was still a fine-looking woman, but looks don’t last for ever.’

‘Did she love Sir Herbert?’

‘A woman’s lucky if she marries for love once over. I don’t suppose there’s many manage it twice. May I trouble you to pass the mustard?’

That was her way of telling me I was on the edge of trespassing. It might also have been a gentle hint that she’d made a comfortable little camp for herself and the children in this great house and that it was kind of her to let me into it. At first I took her achievement for granted and it was only when I began to learn more about the household that I appreciated her quiet cleverness. The fact was that we should not have been enjoying our ham, tea and good fresh bread in the schoolroom at all. For all her long service, Betty as nursery maid was only entitled to a place about halfway down the table in the servants’ hall – well above kitchen maids but a notch below the ladies’ maids. I as governess – stranded somewhere between servant and lady – would have been permitted the lonely indulgence of eating in my own room. Over the years, patient as a mouse making its nest, Betty had built up such a network of little privileges and alliances that the nursery area was hers to command. We had our own tiny kitchen with an oil burner for making warm drinks and a bathroom for the children’s use, grandly equipped with a fixed bath, water closet, piped cold water and cans of hot water carried up twice a day by Tibby, the schoolroom maid. Betty was bosom friends with Sally the bread and pastry cook, so tidbits arrived almost daily from the kitchen, in exchange for Betty’s sewing skills in maintaining Sally’s wardrobe. All this I found out later and was ashamed of my readiness to take its comforts for granted. On that first evening, the tea and candlelight were so soothing I could scarcely keep my eyes open.

‘You’re for your bed,’ Betty said. ‘Take that candle up with you, but remember to blow it out last thing. You can sleep in tomorrow, if you like. I’ll see to the children.’

In spite of my tiredness I must have slept lightly because I was aware of the rhythms of the house under me, like a ship at sea. Until midnight at least the sounds of plates and glasses clinking and the occasional angry voice or burst of laughter came up from the kitchens four floors below, as scullery staff washed up after family dinner. Later, boards creaked on the floor immediately below me as maids shuffled and whispered their way to bed in the dormitory. Then the smaller creakings of bedframes and the sharp smell of a blown-out candle wick. After that there was silence for a few hours, apart from owls hunting over the park and the stable clock striking the hours.

By four o’clock it was growing light. An hour after that the floorboards below creaked again as the earliest maids dragged themselves back downstairs. I got up too, folded back the bedclothes and put on my green dress and the muslin tucker. There was still nearly an hour to go before my meeting with Celia but I was too restless to stay inside. I tiptoed past the maids’ dormitory so as not to wake the lucky ones who were still snoring and crept on down the dark back stairs, with only the faintest notion of where I was going. I had a dread of going through the wrong doorway and finding myself on the family’s side of the house, onstage and with my lines unlearned. But I need not have worried because it was mostly a matter of keeping bare boards underfoot and travelling on downwards by zigzagging staircases and narrow landings towards the sounds coming from the kitchen.

The last turn of the staircase brought me into the light, a smell of piss and a glare of white porcelain. Chamber pots, dozens of them, clustered together like the trumpets of convolvulus flowers. They must have been gathered from bedrooms and brought down for emptying. I picked my way carefully through them and out into the courtyard. A kitchen maid was carrying in potatoes, a man chopping kindling, but they took no notice of me. There was an archway with an open door on the far side of the courtyard. I walked through it and the parkland stretched out in front of me, glittering with thousands of miniature rainbows as the sun caught the dew. I bent down and bathed my face and eyes in it, breathing in the freshness.

On the other side of the ha-ha, cows were already up and grazing. Nearer to hand, a narrow flight of steps led up to the back of the terrace, with a stone nymph guarding them. At right angles, a freshly mown grass path stretched to an archway cut into a high beech hedge. I followed it and found myself in an old-fashioned kind of garden, not so grand and formal as the rest of the grounds and to my eye all the better for that. Four gnarled mulberry trees stood at the corners of the lawn, with an old sundial at the centre. Hollyhocks grew at the back of the borders, love-in-a-mist and mignonette at the front, with stocks, bellflowers and penstemons in between. The whole area, no more than half an acre or so, was enclosed by the beech hedges with a semicircular paved area on the south side, a rustic bench and a summerhouse dripping with white roses.

I sat down on the bench and made myself think how to manage the conversation with Celia Mandeville when she arrived. I was reluctant to do it because, instinctively, I liked her. But she wanted something from me and – although she didn’t know it – I badly wanted several things from her. The most important by far was confirmation that Sir Herbert had been in Calais the day my father died. I could hardly expect from her proof that Sir Herbert had killed him. Surely she couldn’t know anything so terrible and be in the same room as the man?

It wasn’t a great wrong I was doing her, after all. Her stepfather was an arrogant, cruel man and she surely could not love him. At the very least, she must be ready to go behind his back, or why should she want this meeting with me?

She was late. Ten minutes or so after the stable clock had struck six she came running through the archway in the beech hedge, face anxious and hair flying.

‘Oh, here you are. Thank you, thank you.’

She was wearing a rose-pink muslin morning dress, thrown on hastily with only the most necessary buttons done up and, I couldn’t help noticing, no stays underneath. Her feet were stockingless in white satin pumps, grass-stained and wet from the dew. Perhaps I should have stood up, since she was my employer’s daughter, but it never occurred to me. She sat down beside me and took my hand, panting from her run.

‘Last night … I couldn’t believe it. What are you doing here?’

‘Your mother was kind enough to engage me as governess.’

‘But when we met in Calais, I thought …’

I think she might have been on the point of saying that she’d taken me for a social equal. She glanced at me, then away.

‘I suppose you’ve had some misfortune in life?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Another glance at my face. She seemed nervous, poised to run away. But she, if anybody, should feel at home on this stage and sure of her part.

‘I liked you, you know,’ she said. ‘Liked you at once.’

‘And you were kind to me.’

Part of me wanted to reassure her, but a harder and colder part that had been born only in the last few days told me to wait and see.

‘Your poor head. Is it better now?’

‘Head? Yes, oh yes. Thank you.’

We stared at each other. Her eyes were a deep brown, not the periwinkle sparkle of her mother’s in the portrait.

‘Can I trust you?’ she said. The question should have been offensive, but somehow it wasn’t. She seemed to be asking herself rather than me. ‘You see, I do very much need to trust somebody.’

Perhaps I should have leapt in there and assured her of my total trustworthiness, but I couldn’t quite bear to do it. I watched her face as she came to a decision.

‘I must trust you, I think. Goodness knows, there’s nobody else.’

That in a household of – what was it – fifty-seven people, not counting the family.

‘You have a mother and a brother,’ I said.

She looked away from me. ‘Stephen doesn’t always do what I want, and my poor mother is … has other things to worry her. Then if he found out that I’d confided in her and she hadn’t told him, he’d be so angry with her …’

‘“He” being your stepfather?’

She looked away from me and nodded. A full-blown rose had dropped down from its own weight so that it was resting on the arm of the bench. She began plucking off its petals, methodically and automatically.

‘Miss Lock, would you do something for me and keep it secret?’

‘What?’

‘Promise me to keep it secret, even if you won’t do it?’

Rose petals snowed round her grass-stained pumps.

‘I promise.’

‘Oh, thank you.’

She let go of the despoiled rose and gripped my hand. I could feel her pulse beating in her wrist, like a panicking bird. I remembered what Betty had said – sweet winning ways.

‘What is it that you want me to do?’

‘Take a letter to the post for me.’

‘Only that?’

I felt both relieved and disappointed.

‘Only that, but nobody must know. I can’t trust any of the servants, you see. They’re nearly all his spies.’

‘Spies?’

‘I’m sure my maid Fanny is, for one. Or they’re all so terrified of him, they’d tell him at the first black look. But he’d never guess it of you, being so newly come here.’

‘This letter is to a friend?’

‘Yes. A gentleman friend. Not a love letter, in case that’s what you’re thinking.’

She glanced sideways at me and must have caught my sceptical look.

‘It’s more important than that. It’s …’

She hesitated.

‘Yes?’ I said, waiting.

‘If … if a certain thing happens, my life may be in danger.’

There was a flatness about the way she said it, more convincing than any dramatics might have been.

‘What certain thing?’

She let go of my hand.

‘I mustn’t tell you, and you mustn’t ask any more questions. But you’ll take the letter for me?’

‘I’ve already said so. But how am I to get it to the post?’

Though Celia was not to know it, I’d been giving the question some thought on my own behalf. With the amount of work demanded from a governess, I couldn’t see how I was to find the time to get to the Silver Horseshoe, let alone make regular reports to Mr Blackstone.

‘There surely must be a way,’ she said.

I let her see that I was thinking hard.

‘There must be some livery stables near here, with carriages that meet the mail coaches,’ I said. ‘If I could take your letter to one of those …’

‘Yes. Oh, Miss Lock, how very clever of you. Could you do that?’

Her eyes were shining. She took hold of my hand again.

‘I think so, yes. I’ve heard somebody talking about a place called the Silver Horseshoe, on the west side of the heath.’

‘Yes. We pass it in the carriage sometimes. I think they keep race horses there as well as livery.’

‘Is it far away?’

‘About two miles, I think.’

‘If I were to walk there, in the very early morning, say, do you suppose anybody would notice me?’

‘You must not be noticed. You simply must not be noticed.’

Which was hardly an answer to my question. She turned her head suddenly.

‘What was that?’

A chesty cough came from the far side of the beech hedge. A bent old gardener in a smock limped through the arch into the garden, trug over his arm. He didn’t glance in our direction and moved on slowly to a bed of delphiniums.

‘I must go,’ she said. ‘We must not be seen alone together.’

‘You surely don’t take him for a spy?’

I kept a firm hold of her hand.

‘It was strange, wasn’t it, meeting in Calais like that?’ I said.

She nodded, but her hand was tense and her eyes were on the old man.

‘Yes.’

‘What were you and your stepfather doing in Calais?’

With an effort, she brought her attention back to me.

‘He had business in Paris. He wanted me to go with him.’

‘Does he often travel abroad?’

‘Not very often, no.’

‘I suppose you stayed several days in Calais?’

‘Not even a day. He’d worked himself into such a fume about getting home, we hardly had time to sleep. It was nearly two o’clock on Tuesday morning before we got to Calais and we were on the packet out by Tuesday afternoon.’

She said it so naturally, with half her mind still on the old gardener, that it sounded like the truth. My father’s body was brought to the morgue in Calais early on Saturday morning. So if she was right, by the time the Mandevilles arrived there, he was nearly three days dead. And yet a memory came to me of the foyer of the Calais hotel, and her stepfather disputing a bill several pages long.

‘You’d built up a very long hotel bill in a few hours,’ I said.

She blinked, as if she didn’t understand what I meant at first.

‘Oh, that was mostly Stephen’s. He was there waiting for us. My stepfather frets if he thinks Stephen’s being extravagant.’

She let go of my hand and stood up. The stable clock was striking.

‘What time is that?’

‘Seven,’ I said.

‘Fanny will wonder what’s become of me. I shall say I couldn’t sleep. Lord knows, that’s true enough. I’ll make some excuse to come to the schoolroom and give you the letter.’

She took a step or two then turned round.

‘I can trust you, can’t I?’

‘Yes.’

Then she was gone through the gap in the beech hedge, a few white rose petals fluttering after her. The old gardener went on cutting delphiniums, not noticing anything.

I went through the back courtyard and the backstairs route to my room in the attic. From there, I hurried down to the schoolroom as if I’d just got up. Betty had the three children round the table, choosing pictures to paste into their scrapbooks.

‘Say good morning to Miss Lock.’

They chorused it obediently.

‘It’s such a lovely morning, I thought we might all have a walk on the terrace before breakfast,’ Betty said.

So we went on to the terrace through a side door and the children played hide and seek among the marble statues.

‘I let them run wild when there’s nobody about,’ Betty said. ‘They’re not bad children, considering.’

After breakfast at the schoolroom table of boiled eggs and soft white rolls with good butter, it was time to start my governess duties. I realised that, with all my other concerns, I’d given no thought to the question of teaching, and with three freshly washed faces looking up at me and three pairs of small hands resting on either side of their slates I felt something like panic. Still, we managed. I devoted most of the morning to finding out how much they knew already, and the results were patchy. They were very well drilled in their tables and the Bible (I thought I detected Mrs Beedle’s influence there), adequate in grammar and handwriting and able to speak a little French, though with very bad accents. Their geography and history seemed sketchy, with many gaps, although they could all recite the kings and queens of England from Canute to the late William. Charles’s Latin was nowhere near as good as he believed and consisted mostly of recognising a few words in a passage then giving an over-free translation from memory. That possibly explained why he had not been sent away to school yet, although he was clearly old enough. I discovered early on that he had a passion for battles. Problems in addition and multiplication that otherwise brought only a blank stare were solved in seconds if I presented them in terms of so many men with muskets and so many rounds of ammunition. It was a principle of my father’s, following the great Rousseau, that learning should be made a pleasure for a child. I decided that in what would probably be a very short time with the Mandevilles, I’d try to put it into practice. After all, whatever had happened was hardly the children’s fault.

Around midday, we moved on to poetry. To my astonishment, they’d never even heard of Shelley so I went straight upstairs to get the treasured volume from my bag and read to them.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on –

The door opened suddenly and Mrs Beedle walked in. She was wearing her usual black silk and widow’s cap and carrying an ebony walking cane. I stopped reading. She came over and looked at my book.

‘I don’t approve of Mr Shelley. If they must have poetry, Mr Pope is best. Mr Pope is sensible.’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’

It was no part of my plan to be dismissed on my first morning. She turned to the children. At least they did not seem scared of her.

‘Have they been good, then? Have they been quiet and obedient?’

Not the occasion either to discuss the educational theories of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘You must keep them working hard. Henrietta, what’s fourteen minus seven plus nineteen?’

She fired questions at them for several minutes and, from the nod she gave me, seemed reasonably satisfied. Yet, now and again, I caught her looking at me in a considering way. Perhaps it was only to do with my suspect taste in poetry, because at the end of it she simply wished me good morning and went with as little fuss as she’d arrived.

Our dinner at half past two was shepherd’s pie and blancmange with bottled plums. In the afternoon I helped Henrietta and James cultivate their plots on the south side of the walled vegetable garden. Henrietta was wrapped in a brown cotton pinafore from neck to ankles to protect her dress. She said she hated gardening because it was dirty. Every time she saw a worm she screamed and one of the gardeners’ boys had to come running over to take it away. I liked the kitchen garden because it felt warm and secure inside its four high walls of rosy brick, with the vegetables growing in lush but orderly rows and the gardeners hoeing in between them in a slow rhythm that was probably much the same when Adam was a gardener.

When the stable clock struck five it was time to take the children back to the schoolroom for their bread and milk and have them washed and changed for their summons downstairs. This time there was no sign of Sir Herbert. Lady Mandeville was on her sofa, Mrs Beedle and Celia sitting by the window sewing. A tall, dark-haired young man was standing looking out of the window with his back to the room and his hands in his pockets. From his manner of being at home and my memory of him in Calais, I knew he must be Celia’s brother. I stopped a few steps inside the doorway and bent down to straighten James’s collar, giving myself time to think. There was no reason to fear Stephen Mandeville would recognise me. As far as I remembered, he hadn’t even glanced my way in the hotel foyer and it had been dark at our second near-meeting on the deck of the steam packet. The question was whether Celia had said anything to him about seeing me at Calais. I glanced towards her, hoping for some signal, but caught Lady Mandeville’s eye instead. She nodded at me to come over to her.

‘Miss Lock, may I introduce my son Stephen. Stephen, Miss Lock, our new governess.’

It was graceful in her, to introduce us properly. Her son’s response was equally graceful, a touch of the hand, a slight movement of the upper body that was an indication of a bow, though not as pronounced as it would have been to a lady. The dark eyes that met mine gave no indication that he remembered seeing me before. Celia glanced up from her sewing.

‘Miss Lock, do you sketch? Should you mind if I consulted you sometimes about my attempts?’

Her anxious eyes answered my question. She hadn’t told her brother. I should be delighted, I said. Soon after that they went in to dinner and we were free to escape to the nursery quarters.

The next day, Saturday, followed much the same pattern in the schoolroom. On Sunday we all went to church, the children travelling with their parents in the family carriage a mile across the park to the little Gothic church by the back gates, the rest of us walking in the sunshine. The family sat in their own screened pew up by the altar, at right angles to the rest of the congregation, so I had only a glimpse of Celia, solemn and dutiful in an oyster-coloured bonnet, and Sir Herbert looking stern, as if he were only there to make sure that God and the clergyman did their duty.

After church, once the family had driven away in the carriage, there was a rare chance for the servants to linger in the sun and gossip. I strolled among the gravestones and round the old yew trees, catching the occasional scrap of conversation. There were quite a few complaints about being worked too hard, not only the usual burden, but something more.

‘… all the bedrooms opened and cleaned, even the ones they haven’t used for years …’

‘… bringing waiters in from London, just for the weekend. Where they’re going to put them all …’

‘So I said I didn’t think it was very respectful having a ball, with the poor old king not even buried yet.’

‘Well, he will be by then, won’t he?’

‘I think they’re going to announce an engagement for Miss Celia.’

‘They’d never go to all that trouble, would they?’

I tried to hear more, but the women who were talking saw me and lowered their voices. I wandered away to look more closely at some of the gravestones. The oldest of them went back two hundred years or more and although they looked higgledy-piggledy, leaning at angles among the long grass and moon daisies, there was an order about them. Ordinary folk were on the outside, nearest the old stone wall that divided the churchyard from the grazing cattle, then upper servants at Mandeville Hall, still defined even in death by their service to the family, forty years a keeper, thirty years a faithful steward. Nearest the church, protected by a grove of yew trees, were the big table tombs of the Mandeville family themselves. I was reading the florid description of the virtues of the fifth baronet, as distinguished in his Piety and Familial Duty as in the high service of his Country, when I heard footsteps on the dry ground behind me.

‘He really was the worst villain of the lot of them,’ a man’s voice said over my shoulder. ‘Made a fortune selling bad meat to the army.’

I turned round and saw Stephen Mandeville standing there smiling in grey cutaway jacket and white stock with a plain gold pin, tall hat in hand. I dare say my mouth dropped open. I’d assumed he’d gone back in the carriage with the rest of the family. He came and stood beside me.

‘I’m sorry. Did I startle you?’

I tried to compose myself and answer him in the same light tone.

‘Not in the least. I suppose he had some good qualities.’

‘Not that I’ve heard of.’

The irreverence for the family surprised me, until I remembered that they weren’t his ancestors. He strolled on to the next tomb and in politeness I had to follow him.

‘The carving on this one is thought to be quite fine, if you have a taste for cherubim.’

To anyone watching – and I was quite sure that some of the servants would be watching – the son of the house was simply being polite and showing some of the family history to the new governess. I knew there was more to it than that.

‘I am glad that you’re here, Miss Lock. My sister needs a friend.’

He said it simply in a quiet voice, unlike his bantering tone when he’d been talking about the tombs. I glanced up at him.

‘I’m sure Miss Mandeville has many friends.’

‘Not as many as you might think. She leads a very quiet life here and we don’t visit much in the neighbourhood, owing to my mother’s health.’

‘If there’s anything I can do to help Miss Mandeville, naturally I will, but …’

‘There’ve been other governesses, of course, but they wouldn’t quite do. You seem to be around the same age as she is, if you’ll permit me to be personal, and I think she’s taken a liking to you already.’

‘Has she said so?’

From the lift of his eyebrow I could see he hadn’t expected a direct question, but I wanted very much to know if they’d talked about me.

‘She doesn’t have to say it. I can read my sister like a book. So, you’ll be a friend to her?’

‘If I can, of course I will.’

‘Thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and join them.’

He smiled, gave a little nod and strode away.

I walked back across the park with Betty and her friend Sally, a cheerful and plump woman with flour from all that bread-making so deeply engrained in the creases of her knuckles that it had even survived a Sunday-best scrubbing. Naturally they wanted to know what Mr Stephen had been saying to me. Talking about the tombs, I said. Betty seemed worried.

‘I don’t blame you, Miss Lock, but he should be more careful.’

‘Careful of what?’

‘The governess and the son. It’s not my place to say it, but people do talk so.’

‘I assure you, it was nothing like that.’

I felt myself blushing and was on the verge of defending myself by telling them about his concern for his sister. Betty looked hurt by my sharpness and for some time the three of us walked in silence. I broke it by going back to the talk I’d overheard.

‘There’s to be a ball then?’

‘Two weeks on,’ Sally said. ‘A hundred people invited and a dinner the day before.’

I have reason to believe they will be holding a reception or a ball in the next few weeks… So Blackstone had been right. But how did he know and what in the world did it matter to him? He did not seem the kind of man to take a close interest in the social calendar.

‘Is it to celebrate anything in particular?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Don’t worry, Miss Lock,’ Betty said. ‘We shan’t have much to do with it, except keeping the children looking nice when they’re wanted.’

‘Her ladyship looks worn out with worry about it already,’ Sally said.

Betty gave her a look that said some things should not be discussed in front of new arrivals and turned the conversation to a bodice she was trimming for Sally. The rest of our walk back was taken up with details of cotton lace, tucks and smocking, leaving me with plenty of time to wonder why Miss Mandeville should be so much in need of a friend.

On Monday afternoon, Mrs Quivering intercepted me as I was bringing Henrietta and James in from the garden.

‘Miss Lock, a word with you.’

She beckoned a maid to see the children back upstairs and led me into her office.

‘A letter has arrived for you, Miss Lock.’

My heart leapt. The only person to whom I’d given my address was Daniel Suter.

‘Oh, excellent.’

I held out my hand, expecting to be given the letter, and received a frown instead.

‘Miss Lock, you should understand that if anybody has occasion to correspond with you, letters should be addressed care of the housekeeper and they will be passed on when the servants’ post is distributed. Is that quite clear?’

Since childhood, I’d never felt so humiliated. When she brought an envelope from under the ledger, I took it without looking at the writing on the envelope, thanked her and marched out.

At least dear Daniel had not failed me. It was sweet to have this link with my father so I carried it back upstairs to my attic room at last and turned the envelope over, expecting to see Daniel’s fine Italic hand. It was like running into a thorn hedge where you’d expected lilacs – not Daniel’s hand after all but the upright, spiky characters of Mr Blackstone.

Miss Lock,

Livery bills will be paid for the mare Esperance at the Silver Horseshoe until further notice. Please let me know of your safe arrival as soon as is convenient.

That was all; no greeting, no signature. When I read it a second time I saw that it contained a small threat. I had not told him the mare’s name. He’d discovered that for himself and used it, I guessed, quite deliberately to show I could hide nothing from him. Well, I was being a good, obedient spy. In my first few days I’d found out something he wanted to know and had even seized a chance of getting it to him with the help of the daughter of the house.

As for Celia, I’d by no means made up my mind about her. Our talk kept coming back to my mind and sometimes I managed to convince myself that she was nothing more than a spoiled young lady with a lively sense of drama. Then I’d remember the tone of her voice saying she might be in danger and at least half believe it. In any event, we had her brother’s approval of our friendship, though whether that would continue if he knew she wanted me to carry secret letters was another matter.