She stopped reading. She understood it now.... The scamp Toby Cane had been more than merely a cousin to Savina Pentland; he had been her lover and that was why she had hidden the letters away beneath the beams of the vast unfinished attic, intending perhaps to destroy them one day. And then she had been drowned before there was time and the letters lay in their hiding-place until John Pentland’s wife had discovered them one day by chance, only to hide them again, forgetting in the poor shocked mazes of her mind what they were or where they were hidden. They were the letters which Anson had been searching for.
But she saw at once that Anson would never use the letters in his book, for he would never bring into the open a scandal in the Pentland family, even though it was a scandal which had come to an end, tragically, nearly a century earlier and was now almost pure romance. She saw, of course, that a love affair between so radiant a creature as Savina Pentland and a scamp like Toby Cane would seem rather odd in a book called “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.” Perhaps it was better not to speak of the letters at all. Anson would manage somehow to destroy all the value there was in them; he would sacrifice truth to the gods of Respectability and Pretense.
Thrusting the letters into her pocket, she descended the dark stairway, and in the north wing Miss Egan met her to ask, almost with an air of impatience, “I suppose you didn’t find anything?”
“No,” said Olivia quickly, “nothing which could possibly have interested her.”
“It’s some queer idea she’s hatched up,” replied Miss Egan, and looked at Olivia as if she doubted the truth of what she had said.
She did not go downstairs at once. Instead, she went to her own room and after bathing, seated herself in the chaise longue by the open window above the terrace, prepared to read the letters one by one. From below there arose a murmur of voices, one metallic and hard, the other nervous, thin, and high-pitched—Sabine’s and Aunt Cassie’s—as they sat on the terrace in acid conversation, each trying to outstay the other. Listening, Olivia decided that she was a little weary of them both this morning; it was the first time it had ever occurred to her that in a strange way there was a likeness between two women who seemed so different. That curious pair, who hated each other so heartily, had the same way of trying to pry into her life.
None of the letters bore any dates, so she fell to reading them in the order in which they had been found, beginning with the one which read:
Carissima,
I waited last night in the cottage until eleven and when you didn’t come I knew he had not gone to Salem, after all, and was still there at Pentlands with you....
She read on: