Roland Michell and Maud Bailey's Yorkshire research trip is both a literary investigation and a change in the relationship between its investigators. Following the possibility that Christabel LaMotte accompanied Randolph Henry Ash in Yorkshire, they test poems against letters and local language against the landscape itself. At Thomason Foss, a particular play of sunlight makes LaMotte’s Melusina seem to describe a place she had seen; the discovery convinces Maud that she came there with Ash, though Roland still distinguishes conviction from proof. Their five-day itinerary also becomes a way of discovering one another, with the search’s accumulating meanings at times drawing them closer and at times making them long for a day outside the archive of Ash and LaMotte’s lives.

From Speculation to a Shared Inquiry

The trip grows out of Roland and Maud’s attempt to interpret the evidence surrounding Christabel LaMotte and Blanche Glover. Reading Ellen Ash’s journal and Blanche’s letters together, Roland concludes that Blanche must have told Ellen something, perhaps showing her letters that had been stolen. He wants to believe that the disclosure followed LaMotte’s journey to Yorkshire with Ash, but is careful to say that the idea fits without being proved. The difference between an attractive reconstruction and established fact becomes the investigation’s governing problem.

Roland proposes a method rather than a conclusion: read the poems by Ash and LaMotte from the relevant period alongside an attempt to retrace Ash’s Yorkshire route. He points to suggestive correspondences already visible in their work. Ash wrote to his wife about a Hob who cured whooping cough, while LaMotte wrote a tale about one; Ash’s interest in drowned Yorkshire villages also connects, in his writing, with the City of Is and with the geological work of Lyell. Such parallels cannot establish that the two writers were together, but Roland thinks a cumulative series may reveal a connection that no one looking at either writer alone would notice.

The proposed collaboration depends on what each researcher knows: Roland is familiar with Ash’s work, while Maud knows LaMotte’s. Maud objects that they ought to tell Mortimer Cropper and James Blackadder and involve Leonora Stern, rather than privately pursue what sounds like a wild idea. Roland nonetheless asks that he and Maud conduct the Yorkshire inquiry together. Their decision joins separate scholarly expertise in a field where the evidence has been fragmented, and makes their own shared reading part of the investigation.

A Five-Day Route Through Yorkshire

Maud is concerned about Roland’s financial circumstances when she chooses the Hoff Lunn Spout hotel, a cheap establishment on the road between Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby. The hotel had existed in 1859, although Ash’s letters do not mention it; Ash’s known Yorkshire lodgings included The Cliff in Scarborough, since demolished, and accommodation in Filey. Maud drives Roland from Lincoln in her small green car, and they arrive in time for dinner with their books in hand.

The hotel’s dim restaurant, divided into high, dark wooden cubicles, gives them a discreet place to plan. Conscious that meaningful conversation is difficult, they make their research practical and bounded: they have five days, will spend the first two at Filey, Flamborough, Robin Hood’s Bay, and Whitby, then retrace Ash’s inland walks by rivers and waterfalls, keeping one day open for whatever they might discover. This order takes them from places where they can follow the historical itinerary to landscapes where poems and local features may offer a different kind of evidence.

At Whitby, Maud proposes a more concrete lead: the place where the jet brooch was bought. Her suggestion marks a shift in emphasis from searching for images alone to looking for facts as well. They continue, however, to move between material traces and literary interpretation. On their walk from Goathland along the becks to the waterfalls, they see Mallyan Spout, cross moorland, and follow river paths above peaty water. Near the Nelly Ayre Foss, they discuss the evidence over lunch. Roland, who has been reading LaMotte’s Melusina, now believes she must have been in Yorkshire.

For Roland, the poem’s local vocabulary is decisive in combination with its sense of place: words such as gills, riggs, and ling, and a description of air he associates with Ash’s Yorkshire letter. He argues that the landscapes in LaMotte’s work have been read as Brittany, as Poitou, or as symbolic and Romantic scenery influenced by writers such as the Brontës, Scott, and Wordsworth. Their investigation suggests another possibility: a landscape that readers have not recognized as Yorkshire because they were not looking for that connection.

Thomason Foss and the Landscape as Evidence

At Thomason Foss, Roland and Maud approach the pool below the waterfall by a steep track from Beck Hole. The route brings them down among boulders into a cavernous space beneath the fall. There Roland notices how sunlight reflected from the moving water catches the irregular rock. Bright patches and lines appear across the stone, seeming to rise through its fissures; he watches until his attention is absorbed by the shifting light and his sense of time and place falls away.

Maud connects what they see to the beginning of Melusina. The poem’s opening image and the light in the cavern make the setting newly legible to them: what had been a landscape in a text appears to correspond to an actual place. Maud says she is sure LaMotte saw this effect. When she concludes that LaMotte came there with Ash, Roland adds an important qualification: the correspondence is proof to him, but not proof in the strict sense. Its force depends on the momentary sunlight, which he might not have seen had the sun not emerged. The episode therefore makes the limits of their method visible even as it strengthens their belief.

The discovery changes how Roland reads the poetry. He has been reading Ash’s Ask to Embla and comes to think Ash was addressing LaMotte through the figure of Embla, rather than writing only to himself. He recognizes how uncommon such an address would be in love poetry, which he thinks often speaks to itself. Maud says she likes the poems. Their response at the waterfall is thus at once an argument about literary address and a personal moment: the pair wonder whether their own reactions are part of a broader scholarly pattern or belong only to them, and find it strange that they have come to discover something about each other while investigating Ash and LaMotte.

A Day Outside the Story

After their work at the waterfalls, Roland proposes visiting Boggle Hole. He likes the place-name and suggests taking a day away from Ash and LaMotte’s story, since Boggle Hole appears neither in Cropper’s work nor in the Ash letters. He wants to look at something with interest but without having to load it with accumulated interpretation. Maud agrees, noting that the weather is improving. The suggestion does not end the investigation; it exposes the pressure it exerts, and the pair’s wish for an encounter not already mediated by other people’s poems and documents.

In recalling their time together, Roland remembers their day at Boggle Hole as one of the trip’s pleasures. Maud enjoys the uncompromising Northern place-names, collecting them in notebooks alongside female names attached to meres and standing stones, including Fat Betty, the Nan Stone, and Slavering Ciss. The day passes through meadows and lanes into the cove, where the landscape changes from hedgerows and flowers to the northern sea. This excursion gives the journey a counterpoint: they have gone to Yorkshire to make landscape mean something in relation to Ash and LaMotte, but they also find pleasure in names, places, and observations not required to solve their case.

Investigation, Interpretation, and Intimacy

The trip’s method remains deliberately cumulative. A shared local word, a feature of a poem, or an image that seems to fit a real place can point toward a connection, but none alone supplies a definitive record of LaMotte’s presence. Roland and Maud test their interpretations against the known route, Ash’s letters, and each other’s expertise. At Thomason Foss, close attention to the physical setting brings a literary passage into focus; yet the light’s dependence on a particular instant preserves uncertainty rather than erasing it.

The search also gives Roland and Maud a setting in which their own closeness becomes increasingly difficult to separate from their work. The five-day plan begins in careful, businesslike terms, and Roland initially frames solitude as a possible reason for being there. But the journey’s conversations, their shared response to the landscape, and their decision to step out of the Ash–LaMotte story together complicate that distance. The research trip does not resolve every historical question, but it transforms a private hunch into a collaborative inquiry and makes the present-day researchers, as well as the writers they study, part of the story’s developing pattern.