Ash and Lamotte met at Richmond Park

The Richmond Park meeting between Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte marks a change in their relationship: a correspondence threatened by loss and interception becomes an encounter in person, where attraction and trust are felt through shared weather, gestures, and silences. The walk does not dissolve their reserve. Instead, its contrast with their intimacy on the page makes the meeting newly consequential, prompting a further appointment and exposing how presence unsettles what letters had made familiar.

Causes and Invitation

LaMotte proposes the meeting after declaring that she cannot be sure any further communication will reach her intact, or reach her at all. The danger gives urgency to a relationship conducted through letters, and the lost poem sharpens the sense that their exchange is vulnerable to interruption. Yet she refuses to surrender her autonomy in response to that risk: she has fought for it against family and society, and will not give up now. She asks Ash to walk with her in Richmond Park at about eleven on one of the next three days, when he is free, and says she has an apology she wishes to make face to face.

The invitation is framed as an olive branch but also as a deliberate act of self-direction. LaMotte anticipates that Ash may object to the inclement weather; she describes the Thames rising with the tides, overtopping its banks and flooding gardens and paths. Still, she will enter the park by the Richmond Hill gate, accompanied by her dog, Dog Tray, in solid boots and carrying an umbrella. Her decision makes the meeting possible on her own terms: the weather is not a reason to retreat but part of the conditions she knowingly accepts.

The Walk in the Flooded Landscape

Ash’s account afterward begins with the practical details of seeing LaMotte safely home, then dwells on the striking mismatch between the person he expected and the one who appeared. He had looked for a small dog; instead, Dog Tray seemed to him a huge, gaunt creature from an Irish fairy tale or Northern saga. The image revises his idea of LaMotte’s Bethany House as well: the imagined house changes shape, its eaves and windows shifting in his mind. The physical meeting unsettles the neatness of what he thought he knew from letters.

The walk itself is remembered through weather and movement rather than a conventional description of conversation. Their umbrellas clash and tangle as they lean toward one another; wind carries their words away; torn green leaves pass them, while deer run across the hill beneath a mass of leaden cloud. The meadows are drowned, and Ash compares the flooded scene to the city of Is. This is LaMotte’s watery world, as he understands it: a landscape transformed by water and wind, as changeable as the image of her house that the encounter has left behind.

Amid those elements, a small gesture carries particular weight. Ash remembers holding LaMotte’s hand at the beginning and end of the meeting, and hopes that it rested in his with trust. The walk therefore brings a tentative physical closeness, but not a confident declaration. Its emotional force lies in the limited contact, the shared exposure to the storm, and the silence when the wind briefly drops.

Letters, Presence, and Further Meetings

Ash’s letter transforms the walk into a written memory for both participants. He asks why he is telling LaMotte what she witnessed with him, and answers that he wants to share the words as they shared the blast and its sudden pauses. The letter does not merely report the meeting; it tries to carry their common experience back into the medium that had brought them close in the first place. At the same time, Ash admits that in person they were shy, despite knowing one another so well through paper. He finds LaMotte more mysterious in her presence than in ink and scribbled symbols.

Their exchange after the walk makes that tension explicit. LaMotte says that embodied conversation unsettles the letters; she nearly writes that it is a confrontation before choosing conversation instead. She is overawed by Ash’s voice and presence and cannot readily decide what to write. The meeting thus changes the terms of their correspondence without replacing it: written intimacy remains precious, but it can no longer be treated as an undisturbed substitute for being together.

A further meeting remains an open question, poised between possible good and harm. LaMotte lets the decision stand and suggests Tuesday; if Ash does not come, she will look for him at the Poste Restante. Earlier, Ash had asked whether they would walk again the following week, promising that he was no ogre but a mild and apprehensive gentleman. The exchange continues through invitations and uncertainty rather than a settled declaration, keeping the relationship in motion while preserving its hesitation.

Significance

The scene makes the contrast between letters and embodied encounter part of the relationship’s action. In their written exchange, the two poets can appear to know one another deeply; in the park, their shyness and the unsettled question of what presence means become newly visible. The correspondence both enables their intimacy and registers its limits. The meeting does not resolve those limits: it gives them a shared memory, a gesture of trust, and the prospect of another walk, while leaving LaMotte unsure what the encounter will do to their letters or to them.

Weather gives that change a physical form. The Thames crosses boundaries and carries debris into gardens; the park’s familiar ground becomes flooded, and Ash’s picture of LaMotte’s home keeps revising itself. His memory of the walk likewise cannot be fixed as a simple romantic tableau: words are blown away, umbrellas tangle, and conversation alternates with silence. Richmond Park is therefore not merely a place where the correspondents meet but the landscape through which the instability of their new intimacy becomes legible.