Chapter Nine #2
The prospect of meeting a person whose thoughts she had come to know, who had asked her questions no one else except Mr Thwaite thought to ask and received her answers with complete understanding was a great deal.
However, the other part of her thoughts was overcome by a healthy sense of caution.
Elena was a stranger. She knew Elena's mind, or at the very least what parts Elena had committed to paper, as a result of months of dedicated exchange on subjects that mattered. That stirred the development of a trust she did not consider illusory. The letters were what Elena composed, a meeting would illuminate Elena physically, and Mary’s hope was for those two details to reconcile into the woman she thought of as her friend.
She had not told anyone about the correspondence.
This had seemed a decision with reasonable justifications, such as her mother's tendency towards excessive enquiry, Lydia and Kitty's capacity for mockery and the preference for a friendship that was wholly her own, unmediated by her family's various opinions of it.
These justifications remained available to her, and she utilised them now, with somewhat less ease than before.
What gave her most pause was Mr Thwaite.
He was a careful man, especially because he had cause to be.
She knew, without specific detail, that his first wife had died in circumstances involving misadventure of some kind.
A robbery gone badly wrong and the loss had produced in him a vigilance about the people he admitted to his trust. He did not speak of it, but she had felt it in the deliberateness of his relationship with her family, in the thoroughness with which he satisfied himself about a person's character before he offered his own. She respected this in him.
She was less certain he would respect an extended correspondence with a woman she had never met, conducted in private, based on a missive circulated through a parish network.
Mary tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She reminded herself that she had simply not yet found the right moment to tell him about Elena.
She put the letter in the writing box with the others, and sat for a moment looking at the box.
She wanted to meet Elena. This was true.
She felt a strong connection to her friend, one she did not often find easily and did not take lightly.
Rather, she valued it because it had been built on the kind of exchange that most of her existing relationships did not accommodate.
Elena asked questions that aligned with her interests and responded patiently to Mary’s own questions, which was, in Mary's experience of friendship, not common.
But she was not ready. Not yet. The proposition wanted more thought before she committed to it, particularly because it involved a meeting.
She would write back, Mary decided, and ask for more time. And she would be honest about the fact that her doing so was not due to mere reluctance. It was because she was a person who took matters seriously and with matching caution, a trait she hoped Elena would recognise and respect.
She adjusted in her seat and began to draft a response.
Sweet Elena,
I received your letter this afternoon and set about offering a reply with great haste and excitement.
I am glad you are in London, and gladder still that your cousin is improving.
I hope the improvement continues steadily, and that the anxiety of these past days has not been too great a tax on your own health.
Your proposal fills me with a joy I will not attempt to disguise. The prospect of meeting you properly, in person, with a face to attach to the voice I have been reading for so long, is one I have thought about since your first mention of the possibility. I want you to know that.
But I find I must ask, with all the honesty our correspondence has always permitted between us, for a little more time before I give you a firm answer about the meeting.
This is not due to reluctance or unwillingness.
I am merely someone who knows that the passage from written acquaintance to personal meeting deserves to be managed as well as can be, and who wishes to do so such that I can feel settled about afterwards.
There are considerations I have not yet fully thought through, and I would rather do so and meet you properly than act irrationally.
I hope you will understand this and not take offence. You said you feel you know me already. I believe you, and I believe the same of you, and I think the foundation of our friendship is strong enough to permit me the time I am asking for without diminishing what we have built.
I am glad, at the very least, that the distance between us is now measured in streets. Your replies will arrive within a day, which is a considerable improvement on what we have been accustomed to, and a comfort in itself.
Write to me soon. Tell me more about your cousin, and about your lodgings on Jermyn Street.
Your friend, Mary
She sanded the ink and sealed the letter and set it aside to be delivered the next morning.
Then she sat for a moment, staring into the fireplace, which had burned lower while she was reading and writing.
She hoped Elena would understand. She believed she would.
That was precisely the thing about Elena, that she was the kind of person who could be counted on to see one’s point of view when needed.