Chapter Text
Dear Mr. Solo,
I hope you will forgive my writing to you. When I left London, your mother instructed me to do so in order to send word of my arrival in Wiltshire. I would be grateful if you would convey to her the news that I am safely arrived, along with my affection and respect.
Miss Rebecca Niima
Miss Niima—
As you may know, I do not see my mother, and I wonder why she instructed you to send word to me, when she has a house of her own and a footman perfectly capable of receiving letters. You are unknown to me, and I make it a habit neither to receive messages from strange women nor to play messenger boy. You will henceforth direct any correspondence directly to my mother’s home.
Mr. Benjamin Solo
Mr. Solo—
Since you certainly did not pain yourself to extend any courtesy to a stranger, I feel no compunction in omitting to do the same to you. Until Monday last I was your mother’s secretary, and although I have erred in assuming that my name may have been known to you in that capacity, that is no excuse for the blatant lack of civility you have displayed. If you ever took the time to call on or converse with your mother, you would know that she dislikes receiving letters, since she is then obliged to answer them. I believe there is a great deal you would learn about her if you ever submitted yourself to what you seem to regard as the terrible burden of being a son.
If this is how you treat everyone, I am not surprised that she despairs of your ever marrying.
Miss Rebecca Niima
Miss Niima—
I would advise you to consider, madam, that there may be a great deal that transpires in a family beyond the understanding of a secretary. If you wish to give lectures on filial virtue, pray do so from a pulpit in the town hall of whatever provincial village you have removed to. It could not possibly be of any less consequence to me.
Mr. Benjamin Solo
Mr. Solo—
I give my “lectures,” as you call them, where they are needed, not where they are wanted, and had I not spent so many mornings with your mother, watching her head raise hopefully at every chime of the door bell in the hope that her son had at last come to see her, and seen her poorly-disguised disappointment every single time—had I not had to bear witness to the daily hurt your absence caused a dear, good lady, I would not need to give this particular lecture. If you cannot bear to take one hour from your life to go see her, at least send word by a servant that I am safely arrived.
Miss Rebecca Niima
Miss Niima—
I am not at your disposal to command, and neither are my servants. None of my household, in fact, is subject to any whim of yours. I consider our communication at an end.
Mr. Benjamin Solo
Mr. Solo—
I require of you a straight answer: have you sent word to your mother of my arrival? If you have not, I will write to her myself, though it pains me to disregard her wishes.
Once I have received a response to this final inquiry, I shall be quite content never to write you another letter in the entire course of my life.
Miss Rebecca Niima
Miss Niima—
If you feel so very great a regard for my mother’s wishes, I wonder that you quitted London and gave her the trouble of securing a new secretary, especially if, as you say, she dislikes maintaining her own correspondence.
She has been informed of your safe arrival.
Mr. Benjamin Solo
Mr. Solo—
I thank you not to presume to know me or my reasons for leaving London. An even greater duty than that arising from the gratitude I owe your mother drew me away, and I do not suppose you can fathom acting under the influence of duty of any kind, or indeed any desire but to gratify your own selfish whims.
Miss Rebecca Niima
Miss Niima—
You exhort me not to presume I know you, and yet in nearly the same stroke of the pen you do the same to me. Is that not, I wonder, the very height of hypocrisy? I ask because as an accomplished lecture-giver, you will, I am sure, be able to answer with some authority.
Mr. Benjamin Solo
Mr. Solo—
If there are some mitigating circumstances that explain your complete lack of responsibility to your family, I am only too eager to hear them. And since you wish to sit as judge and jury before my life, I will say that I removed from London and came to Wiltshire to care for an aged person in his last days. This is a man who sheltered and clothed me as a child despite having no legal responsibility to do so, nor any bonds of kinship that would prompt a moral obligation, beyond the circumstance of his business association with my late father.
I will always bear the greatest respect and affection for your mother, and I would never have left her by my own volition except that this previous duty superseded the newer one.
Miss Rebecca Niima
Miss Niima—
In what circumstances are you now living? Are you adequately provisioned? Who is your chaperone? Does this man mean to marry you— is that why he has taken he has sent for you rather than some nurse? Nothing about what you have said of this situation seems at all proper, and I am sure if my mother knew the specifics, she would raise the most strenuous possible objection.
Benjamin Solo
Mr. Solo—
As it is impossible to convey sound with ink, you will not be able to hear my laughter upon having read your last, ridiculous letter. I have never once had a chaperone nor any need of one; my guardian as you call him has no intention whatsoever to marry me; and even if he did, my inheritance would amount to the lease of two dim and squalid rooms, at least half a year late on rent. I do not know why or how you appear you have formed a picture of me as some delicate lady good for nothing more than holding a parasol. I have spent my whole life working for my living, and I am no stranger to the rougher side of a loud, crowded street or a sickroom. I require no protection, which is just as well, because I will certainly never receive any except my own.
Rebecca Niima
Miss Niima—
I cannot think that your present situation is at all safe or suitable, despite your protestations. My mother would not have employed some rough, uneducated girl as her secretary, and from your penmanship and your manner of expression, I know you are not illiterate or ignorant. If you are suited for a morning room in Park Lane, a fetid sickroom is certainly no place for you. I must insist most strongly that you quit your current situation and return to London.
Benjamin Solo
Mr. Solo—
Again, I cannot but despair at the inadequacy of a pen to express the snort of laughter that escaped me upon receipt of your letter. If you had heard it, you would certainly stop fancying me the dainty, well-bred lady you seem to have made me in your mind. Indeed, I have no reason to occupy your mind at all, and I cannot think why any mental image was constructed, let alone one so very much in error.
This morning, I have gone to the market; boiled chicken to make some weak broth; coaxed a bloated, lumbering old man from his bed to a chair so I could remake the soiled bed; situated him back in bed; done my best to convince him I was not trying to poison him so he would let me feed him the broth; filled and boiled a large pot of water and burnt my wrist on the edge as I dropped the blankets in. I sit here on a half-broken stool and wonder when death will come to call, and despise myself for hoping that it might not be too far away. If you must form in your mind an image of me, let it be meaner than the meanest servant in your house, and better able to bear privation and hardship than you can possibly fathom.
Rebecca Niima
Dear Miss Niima,
As you cannot send your laughter in your letters, neither can I send in mine the stillness of this hour of the night, nor the flicker of the candle that lights my abandoned bed and this page as I write to you, for I could not sleep. I do not know what to say. I know that your lip will curl with amused derision upon reading my inarticulateness, but nevertheless it is true: I do not know what to say.
It is true that I have never known anything like the hardship you describe; nor have I ever known anyone who has, except you. You must think me intolerably spoilt, and I daresay I am. You take on the labors of a battlefield medic and worse, and you believe I will not even inconvenience myself so far as to ride ten minutes in a carriage to sit in an opulent house and visit my mother. You have never hidden your disdain, and I deserve it, though for a different reason than you believe.
When I was fifteen, my father was killed. As a punishment for a disrespectful slight toward my mother, he had set me to work in the stables for a week, sparing no task, not even the meanest and dirtiest. I was humiliated. I hated him for it. He was going riding one day, and he sent word that I should saddle his horse. I did a shoddy job, hoping that the saddle would slip to the side and he would fall, and be as humiliated as I felt. The saddle did slip, and he did fall. He landed on his head. He died instantly.
The servants tried to keep my mother away, to keep her from seeing, but she was as strong as five men in that moment. She saw the saddle, sideways around the horse’s midsection, and she looked at me and she knew what I’d done. She was inconsolable for days. She didn’t eat; she barely slept. I went to her room one night, desperate to do anything for her, and she looked straight in my eyes and said that she did not know me, that I was not her son, that I was the man who murdered her husband, and that she never wanted to see me again.
When I finished school and returned home, she had removed to a house in Park Lane, since the other was mine by law as heir. I do not know what she hears of me or how; it may be servants’ gossip or the chatter of other ladies. I presume she hears enough to give the impression that she and I meet on occasion or at least correspond, considering your assumption that I may have heard your name from her. But I have given her her wish. I have not seen her in fifteen years.
I hope you will judge me as harshly as you now know I deserve. And I hope you will believe that I know I will never deserve her forgiveness.
B. Solo
P.S. I cannot sleep any more now than I could two hours ago when I finished this letter, because I cannot stop thinking of your burnt wrist.
Another time I am sure I could give your letter the consideration I know it deserves, but I am selfish and stupid and so everlastingly tired. I do not know how I even manage to put pen to paper except that I needed to say that I understand. That is, I can never understand exactly, but I keep vigil by the bed of a man who hates me and I am tempted at every minute to leave him to die helpless, frightened, and alone, and I cannot sit in judgement of anyone, and I understand.
R.N.
Dear Miss Niima,
I would come to Wiltshire and kill that man with my bare hands if it meant you would be free of him and the immense suffering you endure for his sake. Only say the word and I will, or at least I will hire a nurse to tend to him and I will take you away to sleep for a week in down and silence.
Bid me do anything for you. You consume my thoughts.
B. Solo
I cannot say you should not have sent the hamper, for I was at my wits’ end as to how I was going to be able to leave him long enough to go to the market, but do not let yourself be run away with generosity; the basket barely fits in the room.
Thrice now I have thought, “this is the end,” but then he breathes again, with a wheezing rattle that I think will never leave my ears. Do not send a nurse. I cannot be elsewhere while he lives.
R.N.
Dear Miss Niima,
It is only the fear of your disapproval that stops my coming to you. If I should not, tell me by the first post. My horses are kept in constant readiness.
B. Solo
Do not come. It is over. Perhaps I shall know some other day how I feel.
R.N.