Just sitting up in bed, like, as you see me now.
The coat being lightish weight, and easy on my back.
Which I did, Mr. Philip, for the first time yesterday.
It was then I found the letter.”
He paused, and, fumbling under his pillow, drew forth a packet.
“What had happened, Mr. Philip, was this,” he said.
“The letter must have slipped down inside the material of the coat and the lining.
T’wouldn’t have been noticed in the folding of it, or in packing.
Only by someone such as me smoothing the coat with my hands for wonder at having it around me.
I felt the crackling of it, and made so bold as to open up the lining with a knife.
And here it is, sir.
A letter, plain as day.
Sealed, and addressed to you by Mr. Ambrose himself.
I know his hand, of old.
It shook me, sir, to come upon it.
It seemed, if you understand, as though I had come upon a message from the dead.”
He gave the letter to me.
Yes, he was right. It was addressed to me, and by Ambrose.
I looked down at the familiar handwriting, and felt a sudden wrench at my heart.
“That was wise of you, Sam, to act as you have done,” I said, “and very proper to send for me in person.
Thank you.”
“No thanks, Mr. Philip, no thanks at all,” he answered, “but I thought how maybe that letter had laid there all these months, and should have been in your hands a long time since.
But the poor master being dead, made it so wisht, to come upon it.
And the same to you on reading it, maybe.
And so I thought it best to tell you of it myself, rather than send my daughter to the mansion.”
I thanked him again, and after putting the letter away in my breast pocket talked for a few minutes or so, before I left him.
Some intuition, I don’t know what it was, made me tell him to say nothing of the business to anyone, not even to his daughter.
The reason I gave him was the same that he had given me, respect for the dead.
He promised, and I left the lodge.
I did not return at once to the house. I climbed up through the woods to a path that runs above that part of the estate, bordering the Trenant acres and the wooded avenue.
Ambrose had been fonder of this walk than any other.
It was our highest point of land, saving the beacon to the south, and had a fine view over the woods and the valley to the open sea.
The trees fringing the path, planted by Ambrose and his father before him, gave shelter, although not high enough as yet to dim the view, and in May month the bluebells made a cover to the ground.
At the end of the path, topping the woods, before plunging to descent and the keeper’s cottage in the gully, Ambrose had set up a piece of granite.
“This,” he said to me, half joking, half in earnest, “can serve me for tombstone when I die.
Think of me here, rather than in the family vault with the other Ashleys.”
He little thought, when he had it put in place, that he would not lie in the family vault ever, but in the Protestant cemetery, in Florence.
Upon the slab of granite he had scrolled some mention of the lands where he had traveled, and a line of doggerel at the end to make us laugh when we looked at it together.
For all the nonsense, though, I believe his heart intended it; and during that last winter, when he was from home, I had often climbed the path up through the woods to stand beside the granite stone, and look down upon the prospect that he loved so well.
When I came to it today I stood for a moment with my hands upon the slab, and I could not bring myself to a decision.
Below me the smoke curled from the keeper’s cottage, and his dog, left upon a chain while he was absent, barked now and again, at nothing, or maybe because the sound of his own yelps gave him company.
The glory of the day had gone, and it was colder.
Clouds had come across the sky.
In the distance I could see the cattle coming down from the Lankelly hills to water in the marshes under the woods, and beyond the marshes, in the bay, the sea had lost the sun and was slatey gray.
A little wind blew shoreward, rustling the trees below me.
I sat down beside the slab, and taking Ambrose’s letter from my pocket placed it face downwards, on my knee.
The red seal stared up at me, imprinted with his ring and the chough’s head.
The packet was not thick.
It contained nothing.
Nothing but a letter, which I did not want to open.