The destruction of Ash and LaMotte’s letters is a rupture in their secret correspondence, reported in LaMotte’s own broken, still-unfinished letter to Ash. She has reason to believe that their post has been intercepted: the letters have not reached her, the poem she hoped to receive is gone, and the papers she was trying to recover have been torn to shreds. The loss destroys more than written evidence. It deprives the correspondents of their chosen means of contact and forces LaMotte to decide how to proceed under surveillance and uncertainty.

Discovery of the Interception

LaMotte begins by confessing that this is not the first attempt to write the letter. She cannot decide how to start, and even the word “Circumstance” seems inadequate to describe what has happened. The image of an event as a creature she cannot make appear gives the account its first defining feature: the violence is plain, but its circumstances remain difficult to articulate. Her opening hesitation makes the letter itself a record of shock, not a retrospective explanation assembled after events have settled.

She tells Ash that his letters have not reached her, and that she has almost ocular proof they were taken. The immediate clue is a struggle with the postman. LaMotte says she ran faster than usual to greet him, only for there to be “almost a papery—Tussle”; she and another person both snatched. The fragmentary account conveys a physical contest over the post while withholding the identity and full actions of the other participant. The papers’ disappearance is thus presented through the small, hurried gesture at the point of delivery, rather than through an explicit account of who removed or destroyed them.

Loss and Conflicting Responses

LaMotte’s first response is not simple denunciation. She asks Ash not to condemn her and says her honour was being guarded, even though she does not share the conception of honour that prompted such zealous care. Gratitude and objection coexist: she feels obliged to acknowledge the protection offered in her name, but cannot accept that it gives anyone else the right to interfere with her correspondence. In her view, even if she had chosen not to answer Ash, the decision belonged to her; another person’s motive could not make the intrusion legitimate.

The letters cannot be found. LaMotte has been told that they were torn to shreds, and she associates their destruction with the loss of Ash’s poem. The damage reaches into the intellectual and imaginative exchange between them: she names the destruction of “Swammerdam” alongside the missing letters, then insists that Ash’s poem is lost. The correspondence is not merely a cache of private documents in this account. It carries work, thought, and the possibility of reply, all of which are made vulnerable by someone else’s claim to guard her honour.

The consequences spread through the house. LaMotte describes a home once happy now filled with weeping and wailing, while her black headache hangs over it like a painful pall. Dog Tray slinks back and forth, Monsignor Dorato is silenced, and LaMotte paces, unable to settle on whom she can turn to. She calls Ash the unwitting cause of so much woe, then immediately recognizes that the situation is a misunderstanding. This does not erase the injury: it shows how the interception has made private correspondence entangle affection, protection, blame, and an absent explanation.

The Letter as Evidence and Action

The account reaches the reader through LaMotte’s attempt to write to Ash at the very moment when she doubts that any further communication can reach him intact—or reach him at all. That form makes the letter both testimony to the interruption and an act that risks being interrupted again. Its incomplete starts, dashes, self-corrections, and sudden shifts between address and reflection reproduce the difficulty of speaking under the threat of interception. LaMotte can tell Ash what she has learned, but cannot be certain that he will receive it.

The narrative also preserves an asymmetry of knowledge. LaMotte reports what she suspects, what she has been told, and what she cannot find; she does not provide a complete account of who seized or shredded the correspondence. Her testimony makes the loss and its consequences clear without resolving every circumstance behind it. That gap is part of the event’s force: the reader encounters interference as LaMotte does, through missing papers, a half-described tussle, and information that arrives second-hand.

From Interruption to a Proposed Meeting

The loss does not make LaMotte give up. She frames her refusal as a continuation of the autonomy she has fought to preserve against family and society, acknowledging that others may call such persistence inconsequential, fickle, infirm, or feminine. Instead of relying on another letter, she proposes meeting Ash in Richmond Park, on one of the next three days at about eleven in the morning. The suggestion is practical and precarious: she expects him to object to the weather, but says she will go out with Dog Tray in solid boots and an umbrella regardless.

Her description of the recent high tides gives the proposed meeting a setting of encroachment. The Thames has risen over the foreshore and quay wall, crossed cobbled pavements, entered gardens, and carried waste, feathers, soaked garments, and dead small creatures past flowers and toward hollyhocks. The flood’s movement through boundaries echoes the human trespass at the centre of the correspondence’s destruction, without making the two events identical. Against both the rising water and the broken channels of the post, LaMotte asserts a course of her own: she will enter by Richmond Hill gate and walk near there if Ash chooses to come.

She closes by saying that she has an apology to make in person. The proposed meeting gives the letter a forward movement that the lost letters and poem might seem to have foreclosed. It does not restore the destroyed papers or guarantee that the new message will arrive. Instead, it converts the failure of the written channel into a request for face-to-face contact, while leaving its success unresolved. The episode therefore marks both the vulnerability of the secret correspondence and LaMotte’s determination to retain control over whether, and how, she answers Ash.