My Lord,
I beg you to excuse what must seem discourteously abrupt in this letter. You have heard of my illness; there is now no hope for me; my weakness makes it an effort to put pen to paper; there is the further difficulty that I wish to conceal what I do from those who are in almost constant attendance upon me.
You were for long – until your present elevation took you to a distant part of the country – my spiritual adviser, and you have remained my trusted friend. Did you ever guess, I wonder, that the confession of something momentous at least to myself often trembled on my lips?
It is not, thank God – and as it might be with many women of apparently unblemished reputation that I know – a confession of adultery. It is a confession that I have borne an illegitimate child. Do not condemn me harshly until you have heard me out. The secret is my dear husband’s too.
We met in Baden – a resort much frequented by my father. His wealth, as you know, had been acquired in trade, and it was in such watering-places that he found a first ready means of entry into good society. There was much of which he could not approve in such places, since both he and my mother, together with all their kinsfolk, were of the strictest religious principles. Social advancement, however, was almost equally dear to him!
Otho and I met in the gardens of the Kursaal. Later—and how grave a folly!—we used to make small clandestine expeditions amid the gentle Baden hills. Yet our love prospered, and eventually a formal alliance was approved by both Otho’s parents and mine. How happy was I in the prospect of a lifetime with my lover! And how happy was my father that this same lover was the Marquess of Melchester’s grandson!
The fell hand of war separated us, for Otho had suddenly to join his regiment in Spain. At the same time – but this was a blessing in disguise – such was the incivility of the Corsican tyrant that English persons even of quality were incommoded in many places of sojourn throughout the continent. My father judged it prudent to withdraw for a time to a more obscure resort. We had scarcely reached this refuge when I discovered myself to be with child.
Otho, meanwhile, had been taken prisoner, and we learnt that it must be many months before he should be released on parole. Yet correspondence was possible, and he and my father agreed on a plan.
It would have been unnecessary had my family been Senderhills. Our aristocracy did not at that time take much account of what would be judged the venal fault of a pre-nuptial mischance. But my own Aunt Dinah was another matter. As you will recall, my father’s fortune, although considerable, was engaged to my brothers, and it was only the great wealth which was to come to me from this relative that had prompted the Marquess to sanction the proposed marriage. My Aunt Dinah was a spinster of the most exact piety. A breath of what had happened would seal the well-springs of her benevolence forever.
You can imagine—my dear and reverend friend!—what had to be contrived. My daughter’s birth was of a like guilty secrecy to that which had attended her conception. Bavarian foster-parents in respectable circumstances were to receive her. Yet this plan my maternal fondness forbade. The child was returned to England, and placed with persons of humbler station (since nothing else could safely be contrived) on one of the more remote Senderhill estates. And with that my troubles ended (worldly troubles, that is to say; of others, this repentant missive is a witness). Otho was released with unexpected expedition, and our marriage immediately followed. My dear son Bertrand (whose unhappy and untimely death at sea I must ever regard as a heavenly judgement executed upon me) was born but one year to the very day after his innocent but untimely sister.
My dear Lord Bishop, my confession is over. The chronicle is closed. I shall have been brought to another judgement ere this reaches you. Pray for my soul, dear bishop, in your heart. Protestant theology, I am told, forbids that you should do so publicly.
Your Lordship’s obedient daughter in God,
LYDIA SENDERHILL.
Post scriptum. You may wonder what happened to the child. Many years ago now, I was startled to learn that Otho had nonchalantly moved the foster-parents (and our daughter with them) to employment and a cottage on the Vailes estate itself. Otho himself has been quite without concern or curiosity over what he calls ‘the wrong-side-of- the-blanket one’. Yet she was only, I have been used to tell him, ‘the wrong-side-of-the-altar one’. And I myself dared only to see the child; never to speak to her. She emigrated to the colonies with a lover, it seems, very much about the time of poor Bertrand’s death. But I have never had particulars. The foster-parents have been strangely evasive. Their name—an absurd name—is Stickleback!
L. S.