The Duke’s Fiancée Threw Water at the Maid — She Wiped It Off and Said, “You Will Remember This Day”

Part 9

It took eleven years, as Cora had predicted.

The Duke began it in the year after the trial, in a small way: a letter to the Colonial Office, asking who had been responsible for the correspondence of transported convicts at the settlement where Thomas Bell had served his sentence. The reply was polite and useless, and contained the phrase the records are incomplete.

So he wrote again.

And again.

He wrote to the governor of the colony, and to the superintendent of convicts, and to the shipping company that had carried the mail, and to the bishop who had visited the settlement in 1812, and to the widow of a clerk who had died in 1816 and whose effects had included a bundle of unopened letters from England.

He wrote to the man’s son, who was a stationer in Bristol, and who wrote back, in some confusion, that his father had indeed brought home a bundle of letters from the colony, and that they had been kept in a box in the attic, and that he did not know what they were and had never been able to bring himself to burn them.

The Duke went to Bristol himself, in the winter, and came back with a box.

There were forty-one letters in it.

Three of them were from Thomas Bell to his wife, written in a cramped and uncertain hand, sent in 1813 and 1814 and never delivered.

Thirty-eight of them were from other convicts, to other families, in other counties, and each one was a small unbearable thing — a man writing to tell his brother that he was alive, a boy writing to his mother that he had learned to read, a woman writing that she had been assigned to a decent household and was treated kindly, and that they should not worry, and that she thought of them every day.

None of them had ever been delivered.

The Duke hired a solicitor. He hired a clerk to make copies in a neat hand. He wrote to every family named in those thirty-eight letters, and enclosed a copy, and asked whether they wished to have the original.

Eleven of the families could not be found. Six wrote back refusing, because the wound had closed and they did not want it opened. Twenty-one wrote back.

The Duke of Ravenshollow spent the next four years paying the postage on letters that should have been sent forty years earlier, and he never mentioned it to anyone outside the family, and when the last one had gone, he sat down in his study, and poured himself a brandy, and did not drink it.

In 1831, he laid a formal complaint before the Colonial Office, with copies of all forty-one letters, and a schedule showing the names and dates and the names of the officials who had served at the settlement during those years.

The complaint named no living man, because by then every official involved was dead. It asked only for a change in the regulations: that convicts’ letters be registered on receipt, that a receipt be returned to the sender, and that undelivered correspondence be subject to a yearly audit rather than a superintendent’s discretion.

The Colonial Office rejected it.

He rewrote it and submitted it again in 1833. He had it introduced in the House of Lords by a man he had never met and did not like, and he spoke for it himself, in the chamber, for forty minutes, in a voice that was perfectly flat.

He described a wooden box in an attic in Bristol. He described a woman named Ellen Bell, who had kept thirty-seven letters tied with string on the top shelf where she could not reach them. He described a man who had stopped writing home because nothing ever came back, and who had believed, for four years, that his wife was dead.

The chamber was very quiet.

The regulation passed in 1834, by a margin of eleven votes.

It is, by any measure, a very small thing: a register, a receipt, an annual audit. It did not free a single convict. It did not shorten a single sentence. It did not return a single man to his family.

But over the following thirty years, in a great many small rooms and rough barracks on the far side of the world, men and women who had stopped writing home began to receive small slips of paper acknowledging that their letters had arrived.

And some of them began to write again.

The Duke of Ravenshollow never told anyone that he had done it. Cora found out from a newspaper, in 1834, sitting at breakfast with a cup of tea in her hand, and read the paragraph twice, and then looked across the table at her husband, who was reading the agricultural news and did not look up.

“Edmund,” she said.

“Mm.”

“Edmund.”

“Yes.”

She folded the newspaper very deliberately and set it down in front of him.

He looked at it. He read it. He looked up at her, and had the grace, at the age of fifty-six, to look slightly embarrassed.

“I did not want to make a fuss,” he said.

“You are impossible,” said Cora Bell.

“I know,” said the Duke of Ravenshollow. “You have mentioned it once or twice in twenty years.”