Wedderburn's Letters to the Hattersleys and Blessington

Wedderburn's Letters to the Hattersleys and Blessington connect Bella Baxter to the missing Victoria Hattersley and turn a disputed identity into the basis for an investigation. Their importance lies not simply in what they claim, but in the uneven way their information travels: one recipient treats a letter as madness, another receives it too late to act, and Godwin Baxter uses a further letter to seek independent evidence. The correspondence is both a source of clues and a test of how far those clues can be trusted.

The Correspondence and Its Recipients

The letters enter the account through a conversation among the people gathered with Baxter, rather than through a reproduced document. Blaydon Hattersley, Victoria's father, reports receiving a letter from a man called Wedderburn one week before the meeting. It told him that his missing daughter was living with Baxter. Hattersley then contacted his son-in-law and learned that he had received a similar letter a fortnight earlier, but had done nothing about it. The sequence gives the communications distinct consequences: the earlier delivery produced no action, while the later one brought Hattersley information he had been seeking for years.

The title groups the letters to the Hattersleys with the communication that brought Bella's identity to Baxter's attention. Baxter says that a letter from Wedderburn, received the previous month, described Bella as a reincarnation of Victoria Hattersley. He responded by employing Sergeant Cuff to investigate Victoria's history. The evidence therefore presents correspondence moving among separated recipients, with each letter altering what its reader can know or choose to do. It does not reproduce the documents themselves; their contents reach the reader through the accounts of Hattersley, the General's lawyer, and Baxter.

Claims, Clues, and Credibility

The letters make a startling claim about identity: Bella Baxter, living with Baxter, is the woman the Hattersleys had known as Victoria. They also attribute an extraordinary sexual past to Victoria. The General's lawyer says Wedderburn described her as his mistress and as the mistress of Robert Burns, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and a succession of celebrated figures extending back to the Garden of Eden. That extravagant reach supplies the lawyer with an argument for dismissing the correspondence as the work of a madman. The letters' sensational content weakens their standing even as their concrete claim about Bella's whereabouts gives them practical force.

Hattersley's response reveals how much was at stake beneath the dispute over credibility. He says the letter was the only clue to his daughter's whereabouts in three years. When Victoria first disappeared, Dr. Prickett advised against calling the police, presenting the disappearance as temporary derangement and warning that public scandal might make her condition worse. Hattersley now believes Prickett was saying what Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington wanted him to say. By the time Scotland Yard was informed, the matter had been handled quietly; Hattersley suspects the General's public standing helped keep the story out of the newspapers. Against that history of delay and silence, even a letter he distrusts can matter because it supplies a lead where official attention had yielded none.

From Letter to Investigation

The communication to Baxter does not settle Victoria's identity or establish the General's conduct. Instead, it prompts Baxter to seek evidence beyond Wedderburn's assertions. He says he employed Sergeant Cuff the previous month to find out all he could about Victoria after receiving the letter identifying Bella as her reincarnation. Baxter then invokes Cuff's report and says it names people prepared to testify against the General, most of them servants who left or were dismissed soon after Victoria disappeared. The letters thus initiate a chain in which an alarming personal allegation leads to an investigation and, in Baxter's account, to potential witnesses.

That chain also clarifies the limits of the correspondence. The letters can disclose a location, propose an identity, and direct attention toward an unexamined past; they cannot by themselves make the allegations admissible or persuasive in court. The General denies the connection and disparages the reliability of servants who testify against former employers. His solicitor likewise argues that such witnesses have little credit in an English court. The communication has opened a path to testimony, but the path remains contested: the dispute shifts from what Wedderburn wrote to who can corroborate it and whether that evidence will withstand legal challenge.

Narrative Function and Significance

Because the letters are described by people with different interests, the reader encounters them as contested reports rather than transparent documents. Hattersley emphasizes his lost daughter and the years in which no effective search was made; the lawyer emphasizes the letters' absurd-sounding claims; Baxter emphasizes the lead that justified Cuff's inquiry. These accounts do not make the letters equally reliable in every respect. They distinguish the actionable information about Bella's whereabouts from the grander claims about Victoria's lovers, while leaving the correspondence to serve as the trigger for further scrutiny.

The letters also reverse the direction of knowledge in the family search. For years, Hattersley had no clue where Victoria had gone; now Wedderburn's message places Bella with Baxter, while Baxter's separate inquiry gathers a record of the General's household. What begins as a letter dismissed because of its extravagant assertions becomes the means by which an old disappearance is reopened. Its significance is therefore procedural as well as personal: the correspondence does not pronounce a final verdict, but forces a private family mystery into a public contest over memory, reputation, witnesses, and proof.