‘Well?’ Holroyd asked. Having finished the last page of the diary first, he had waited for me to catch up. ‘What do you say to that?’
‘These violent delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die.’
‘Yes, indeed. A few days after the young man almost brought himself to pray for his mistress’s safety, both of them were drowned. I’ve noticed before that Shakespeare is your poet. Not Shelley.’
‘Shelley? Those lines about the physical union of two lovers are by him?’
‘They’re about Laon and Cythna in The Revolt of Islam. Impressive, wouldn’t you say? I doubt whether just that was ever better recorded by poet. But what of this real-life love affair? Would you call that impressive too?’
‘I don’t know that we can judge. Perdita – Joan Stickleback – may have been a paragon, but we have only an excited boy’s word for it.’
‘Yes – yet at least his experience seems to have been a maturing one. Don’t you notice? At the beginning of September he is an adolescent with his head full of nonsense. By the middle of October he is rash, no doubt, but quite unmistakably grown-up. Which, I suspect, says something for the quality of the relationship. The Reverend Doctor Blowbody never read from his Prayer Book over them. But I’m glad that they had been husband and wife, all the same. It’s the cheerful point in a sad story.’
I saw no need to dispute my friend’s judgement – which might equally have been delivered of Shakespeare’s lovers in the play that had been running in my head. I knew nothing about Laon and Cythna, but Romeo and Juliet had always been very vivid to me. I wondered whether Bertrand Senderhill and his bride would now a little haunt me too.
‘Isn’t it strange,’ I said presently, ‘that after beginning a diary under stress of the affair he should simply have left it behind him?’
‘Perhaps he had a presentiment of disaster, and wanted some record to remain.’ Holroyd glanced at me quizzically. ‘Ho-ho! You think I have precognitive experience on the brain. I dare say you are perfectly right. And as for this diary, young Bertrand had a great deal to think about – one must admire his bringing the thing off as he did – and as a consequence it simply got left behind.’
‘In which case it would have been discovered and brought to his parents.’
‘That’s a probability. Yet it may have been otherwise. Imagine its being come upon by a servant with a fondness for the lad, or indeed for the family. Such a one might think it best simply to shove the thing out of sight. You and I – and such a servant, if he existed – may be literally the only persons in the world ever to have known those young people’s secret.’
‘That’s perfectly true.’ Suddenly, I didn’t understand why, I felt uneasy. ‘Do you know, Holroyd, I rather wish we didn’t?’ I paused, searching for some justification of this remark. ‘Perhaps it’s as if we were disturbing their shades.’
‘Of course, we don’t positively know that they were both on board the Gloriana.’ Holroyd seemed too struck by this thought to attend to what I had said. ‘Young Senderhill, yes. He undoubtedly went down with the ship. But might not there have been a hitch about the girl? She might have been caught by her parents. Or her heart may have failed her. Who knows?’
‘In that case, Bertrand would surely not have sailed tamely for Italy himself.’
‘He might have, in a kind of despair, if the girl had ditched him at the last.’
‘But they weren’t like that, either of them.’
‘I believe that’s true.’ Holroyd said this soberly, and I realised that, like myself, he sensed a strong intensity of passion behind this long-past and disastrous runaway affair. But he rapidly reached for a robust note. ‘Ho-ho! Would you say that it is perhaps Shelley who has sold us something?’
‘Bother Shelley! I suppose it might still be possible to find out for certain whether the girl was on board the Gloriana?’
‘I doubt it. She left home to go to an aunt, and of how she was actually conveyed to Plymouth it is almost inconceivable that any record can remain. And what would happen when she got there, with the barque all set to sail? The vessel’s master, or his purser, would presently take money for her passage, no doubt. But that would simply be on board ship, and any note of the transaction would go down with her.’
‘Perhaps something could be discovered about the Sticklebacks?’
‘My dear chap, it’s most unlikely. Consider how short as well as simple are the annals of the poor.’
‘I doubt whether that quite meets the case. In any civilised society a missing girl is quite something.’ I paused, perhaps to wonder why, since my own instinct was to avoid further investigation, I should be pressing these possibilities upon Holroyd. ‘Surely the magistrates would have ordered some sort of enquiry as soon as the parents reported the thing.’
‘If they ever did report it. They may have learnt the truth, or suspected it – the fact, I mean, of their daughter’s having run away with the young gentleman from the big house. And so they may have kept mum out of sheer fright. Bertrand records, remember, that they were dead scared. And if it was known in the neighbourhood that the girl was to go off to a distant aunt for keeps, no one outside her own home would necessarily give her a thought ever again. No, no – whoever the Sticklebacks were, and wherever that cottage was, depend upon it, we shall learn no more about them.’
‘At least there’s no obscurity about the cottage. On the strength of what Bertrand records, I can take you to it, or to the ruins of it, tomorrow. Incidentally, it appears to be Martha’s favourite haunt.’
‘Martha?’ It was quite blankly that Holroyd had repeated the name. He was staring absently at the vellum-bound book.
‘Mrs Uff’s apathetic daughter.’
‘Yes, of course.’ My friend’s tone was inexpressive, but he raised his alarming eyes to mine in what I can only call a queer look.
We had been talking about the poet Shelley – which is one reason, no doubt, why, at this moment, the poet Keats came into my head. Or, rather, not Keats at all, but simply Keats’s philosopher Apollonius in Lamia – a fellow, I thought, with a gaze just like Arthur Holroyd’s.