TWENTY

Even though I had told John I would save him Chance’s next letter, the correspondence passing between us now was such a heated thing I knew I could not do what I had promised.

Chance had ended his last letter to me, I wonder, Emma, often: What do you look like when you are not wearing any clothes?

Well, I certainly could not show that to John.

I looked through my letters from Chance, searching for some of the more benign ones, but they were all dated. Having told John I had thrown all his letters out, I could not now produce a letter dated months before.

I realized the natural solution was to request Chance provide me with a few letters to show John, but I immediately rejected that idea. What I had created with Chance, despite the…nature of some of our correspondence, felt pure somehow. I could not now soil that purity by asking him to write something that would be a lie, even if it was to protect us. If one of us had to lie, it would be me. John was my husband. John was my problem.

But what was I to do?

With nerves shaking my hand, I practiced at forgery. But all attempts failed. Even disguising my handwriting, the individual letters that made up the words, even the tone, were still undeniably feminine. I could no more make myself into a man than I could make myself into a lion.

In a half-mad moment, I considered asking Paul Jamison for help. He wanted to see if he could be a novelist—then let him try his hand at this! But I knew insanity lay in such a scheme. Surely, I could not depend on someone from our inner circle, however ambitious, to keep such a secret.

Then I remembered John talking of a young novelist, one Harry Baldwin, whom he had met while in the company of Herbert George Wells. John said Mr. Wells was a great champion of Mr. Baldwin’s work, indeed envisioned a successful future for Mr. Baldwin as a novelist, as successful perhaps as John’s own. But, when John had tried to read Mr. Baldwin’s work, he found he could not in good conscience lend his own support to the young man’s career—to me, he referred to him as “that hack”—and an enmity had grown up between them. Unlike John, Mr. Baldwin had not been able to afford to leave his own career as a chemist in order to devote his full energies to writing and, as far as I knew, was still at the same apothecary. I resolved to seek him out there.

The odor in the apothecary, located in a questionable part of the East End, assaulted me, the smell of chemical compounds cloyingly sweet. Had I not known better, I would have thought I was in an opium den.

A haggard man came out from behind the counter to help me, a hank of greasy brown hair falling down over one tired gray eye. He looked badly in need of a decent meal.

“Mr. Harry Baldwin?” I asked.

He seemed at first greatly taken aback. Perhaps he thought me a creditor? But I quickly put his fears at rest as I set out my story.

Explaining I was the wife of John Smith, whom he had once met with Mr. Wells, I further explained I needed his help in a little joke I wanted to play on my husband. I had, in fact, concocted what John, in one of his looser moments, might rather scathingly refer to as a cock-and-bull story.

“You, of all people, Mr. Baldwin, must realize how smart novelists are. Well, my husband has given me the task of corresponding with a prisoner in Hollowgate.” That was true enough. “But I find I have not the stomach to go on with the correspondence. It turns out the prisoner is too…crude for my sensibilities.” I hated telling that lie about Chance, but if it served my end, I would do it. “And so I have cut off all communication between us. But now, as it happens, my husband has expressed an interest in seeing the letters. And I don’t have any to show him!”

“So,” said Mr. Baldwin, a sneaky grin coming for the first time to his face, “you want me to impersonate your prisoner?”

“Oh,” I said brightly, “John was right: You are a smart man!”

“I am a very busy man too,” he said, more sneakily yet. “Between my work here and my writing…”

“Of course!” I said, opening my reticule. Having anticipated this, I was well prepared. I pulled out several notes. “Do you think this a fair amount for, say, four letters? I do think if you sent one each week, it would be sufficient. If you do it properly, I would imagine my husband will grow bored with it by then…”

I could see Mr. Baldwin was thrilled at the prospect of playing a trick on my husband, whom he undoubtedly resented greatly. Seeing his pleasure at duping John, a part of me recognized it was wrong of me to deceive my husband in this fashion. But what choice did I have?

“But what shall I write in the letters?” Mr. Baldwin asked.

“Oh,” I said, “you are a novelist. Surely you can imagine the kinds of things a prisoner would write about: write about the boredom, the awful food. I suppose you could write just a little bit about the loneliness too.”

He laughed, a harsh sound. “I think I could manage that.”

“Here,” I said, producing some crude paper I had bought cheap. It was as close as I could find to the prison stationery Chance used. “Use this.”

I had thought of everything.

Within a week, the first letter arrived:

                  

Dear Mrs. John Smith,

It is still boring here. The food is still lousy. Sometimes, I get lonely for the outside world.

Chance Wood

                  

I suppose a more finance-conscious woman might resent that the generous sum that had been paid to Harry Baldwin for that letter had produced so few words, and those ones that had been virtually spoon-fed to him. But it did not matter, since his meager note served my purpose perfectly:

John looked satisfied.