The day had begun badly, with wind and driving rain. Alexandra, who never minds the weather, set off early to the reading room at the Musée Guimet, but I had decided to remain indoors.
I was in low spirits that morning and feeling all at loose ends. To occupy my time I began to sort through my few belongings and set my room to right. Tucked away in a drawer I found the very first of my journals, the one my mother had given me. I opened it and began to read, and my throat ached thinking of my family. I mourned as well my own innocent younger self, who wrote with the sound of the Borders on every page. Since then, I have filled a great many notebooks, and in this one, that I have just opened, I will write the last chapter of a story that is as strange as any by Mr. Walpole, or Mr. Poe.
I had just heated myself a cup of chocolate and was about to drink it in the Jourdan’s chilly dining room when poor little Madame Jourdan crept in, and whispered that I had a visitor.
Madame Blavatsky, at last! I leaped to my feet all flustered, thinking how annoyed she would be, left standing in the narrow hallway. But had she come alone? How ever had she managed the stairs? And what could I offer her to eat, when I had just eaten the last pastry? All these thoughts were racing through my mind when outside in the hall a voice said, “Merci, Madame.”
It was the voice I longed most in the world to hear, and believed I would never hear again.
And then he was there in the doorway with rain in his hair, his face reddened by the wind and burned brown by the African sun. He said with a smile, “This is a fine chase you have led me, Jeannie Guthrie!”
“Tom,” was all that I managed to say. “Tom . . . ” And then my throat seized up, and my eyes stung, and I burst into tears.
Tom gazed at me across the dining table as though he feared I might try to escape. A pot of Earl Grey tea and a plate of biscuits sat forgotten between us. In my delighted astonishment I had almost scalded myself with the kettle.
“But you didn’t expect me?” asked Tom, sounding puzzled. “Mr. Dodds said he would write and tell you I was coming to Paris.”
“He only said I might have a visitor. I thought he meant Madame Blavatsky, because I knew she was travelling in France.”
Tom laughed. “I hope I will be a less demanding guest. But Jeannie, what a trail I had to follow to find you! I was determined to see you again as soon as I returned from East Africa, but by then you had left Lansdowne Road and moved to Clerkenwell. And when you did not reply to my letter . . . ”
“But Tom, I did reply!” I cried. “Of course I replied!” How could he imagine I had not? And then suddenly I remembered. When Tom’s letter came, I had been too ill to leave the house. And I had left my answer to go out with the morning post.
“I watched all summer for a letter.” There was regret in his voice, but no reproach.
“Oh, Tom, as did I!”
“And so I finally I went to Clerkenwell, and knocked on your door, and was informed by a rather disagreeable woman that you had run away to Paris.”
“Madame Rulenska, Tom — that was Madame Rulenska.” I could not help myself, the tears kept falling, the words came tumbling out. “She is a vile woman, and she told me your intentions were not honourable, and that I was a freak of nature, but Mr. Dodds said it was only because she needed my help with her tricks and illusions. And Tom, I know what happened. I left your letter to be posted, and Madame Rulenska must have taken it, and it was never sent.”
“She looked like a woman entirely capable of such deception,” Tom said. “But your Mr. Dodds — we are both of us in his debt. He told me you had gone to Paris, and gave me your address. Because there is a question I’ve come to ask you, Jeannie Guthrie.”
He reached across the table, and from the way he took hold of my hand, as though he never meant to let it go, I knew what that question might be. And I knew, to my anguish, how I must answer.
He said, very solemnly — holding both of my hands now — “Jeannie Guthrie, I have come to ask if you will marry me.”
And through my foolish tears I gasped out, “Tom, I cannot.”
He seemed oddly undeterred by this reply. “Because you have a tendency to overturn tables, and fling things about the room? We all have our peculiarities, Jeannie —I dare say I have worse habits than that.”
I shook my head. How could I possibly explain why I must refuse him? How could I tell him how truly wicked I was?
“I love your strangeness, your wild talent, Jeannie, just as I love your goodness and your courage. And now that I have spoken to Mr. Dodds, there need be no more secrets between us.”
No more secrets? My heart flew into my throat.
“When Mr. Dodds saw that my intentions were honourable, and that I would not rest until I found you, he told me about your cousin. He confided to me what George had done — or tried to do — and that you believed you had killed him. An act of justified self-defense which would hardly have constituted murder — but still, that was what you believed, and then I understood why you sometimes had that haunted look, and would never talk about your past.”
“And knowing that, you would still marry me? Tom, I have committed murder!”
“And for both our sakes, dearest Jeannie, I had to prove it was not so. If you remember, our friend Willie Wilde was let go by the Telegraph, and so he was glad of an opportunity to earn a little money with his journalistic expertise. I asked him to go to the Borders and see what information he could unearth.”
For a moment I hardly dared to breathe.
“And happily, I can set your mind at rest. Whatever well-deserved damage you may have inflicted on George, it was hardly fatal. When you fled from the Borders George may have had a sore shoulder, but he was certainly not dead. Nor did he leave off assaulting innocent young women — not all of whom could defend themselves as well as you did. That was what Willie Wilde discovered, when he made discreet inquiries.”
“But George is dead.”
“Oh, to be sure. Now he is. If your mother had known where to write to you, you would have heard by now. George met a sordid end — but not by your hand.”
“But how . . . ?”
“Let me finish the story. Willie made a search of the Berwick papers for death announcements, and sure enough, he found one for a George Guthrie, aged 20, drowned under mysterious circumstances. His body, it appears, was found floating in the Tweed. There was a Fatal Accident Inquiry by the Procurator Fiscal —I take it that’s your Scottish version of a coroner — who in the end decided that it was just that, an accident. George had been seen drinking heavily in a public house, and so it was surmised that he had stumbled, lost his balance, and fallen in. The fathers and brothers of certain young women may have had further information, but they were never interviewed. And there the matter ends.”
George dead — but not by my hand. I thought of the agonies of guilt I had suffered, the haunting dread that one day I would be discovered. I had paid dearly for that act of defiance.
“And now will you marry me, Jeannie Guthrie?”
I fumbled for my handkerchief. Tom smiled, and gave me his. I saw the kindness in his eyes, the steadfast love, and the determination.
This is my beloved, I thought, and this is my friend.
“Yes,” I said. And that is the end of this story, and the beginning of another.