Roland and Maud secretly set off for Brittany at a point when academic discovery, private desire, and evasion converge. A call made in the wake of Mortimer Cropper’s visit and new information about Christabel LaMotte’s disappearance becomes the occasion for them to leave London and pursue the Brittany trail together. Their journey carries them toward Sabine de Kercoz’s papers, but it also turns the scholars’ own uncertain intimacy into a secret that must be managed alongside the historical one.

Causes and Background

The plan emerges through a private telephone call. Roland reaches Maud in a call-box; she moves the conversation into a bedroom so that Leonora Stern will not hear. Maud reports that Cropper has come and that a solicitor has telephoned James Blackadder. Their research has become publicly contentious, and Maud says that those involved will be seen in a bad light by Cropper, Blackadder, and Leonora. The scholarly work is no longer safely separate from personal loyalties or professional consequences.

Maud also conveys Leonora’s latest discovery: Christabel went to her family in Brittany, where a cousin wrote poems, and a French scholar has those poems. Christabel stayed there for some time, a possible explanation for the year in which her whereabouts were unknown. The lead gives Roland and Maud a research reason to cross the Channel, while its suggestion that Christabel once disappeared from view resonates with Roland’s own wish to escape being summoned by Blackadder.

Their proposal grows out of memories of the Yorkshire journey. They recall empty beds at Thomason Foss, the white light on stone, and the sun at Boggle Hole, places associated with knowing where they were together. Roland suggests that they should disappear as Christabel did; Maud asks whether he means Brittany, then lets the possibility stand. The comparison makes the trip both an investigative pursuit and a rehearsal of withdrawal from the demands of their ordinary lives.

The Decision to Leave

Practical obstacles sharpen the decision rather than stopping it. Roland says that he has no money; Maud answers that she has money, a car, and good French. Their different resources make the journey possible as a joint undertaking. The decision is also explicitly clandestine: they expect that others will not know where they are, and Maud considers lying to Leonora, who believes she has a secret lover. She recognizes that using Leonora’s confidence to conceal the trip would betray her, so secrecy is not presented as cost-free.

The departure follows a further concealment. Roland admits that he has run away from being sent for by Blackadder, while Maud has arranged access to a French source without explaining the full connection between the request and Leonora’s absence. Once in Brittany, the secrecy acquires a concrete research consequence: Maud has taken Ariane Le Minier’s address without Ariane’s knowledge. Their methods place them uncomfortably near the scholarly conduct they criticize in Cropper and Blackadder, even as the journey gives them room to pursue evidence unavailable at home.

Crossing the Channel

The two travel on the Prince of Brittany. At night they sit together in a cabin after watching Portsmouth’s lights recede; earlier in London they had rushed into each other’s arms, but on deck they stood apart without touching. In the cabin they drink duty-free whisky and water from toothmugs, and Roland calls the venture madness. Maud agrees, describing the lies and the address she has taken, and comparing their scholarly obsession with the dangerous excesses of Cropper and Blackadder. Her admission joins the trip’s ethical unease to its exhilaration: they know they have crossed boundaries, yet are glad to be away from London and Leonora’s flat for the next few weeks.

The journey’s physical arrangement sustains that tension. Roland lies on the lower bunk while Maud showers above him; he imagines her unseen and inaccessible, and the two exchange good-night wishes without turning the moment into a declaration. The scene makes proximity and separation coexist. Their crossing is at once an outward movement toward the archive and an inward suspension of the unresolved terms of their relationship.

Research in Brittany

In Nantes, Maud and Roland meet Ariane, who is young, warm, and decisive, with a scholarly interest in Melusina. Ariane and Maud find common ground in their precise, passionate approach to scholarship and discuss liminality and Melusina’s monstrous form as a transitional area that can free a woman from fixed gender identification. Roland says little, absorbed instead by his first French meal in France and its seafood, fresh bread, and sauces. The meeting gives Maud an intellectual counterpart as well as a route into the material connected to Christabel’s time in Brittany.

Maud’s request for access to Sabine de Kercoz’s papers is delicate: she needs the papers without explaining exactly why she wants them or how the request relates to Leonora’s absence. Ariane is about to leave for a holiday, and the archive is locked, making access impossible in her absence. She nevertheless makes a photocopy for Maud, both to share information with a scholar whose work on Melusina she admires and to compensate for the closed archive. Ariane expects that the journal will surprise Maud and hopes to discuss its implications after she has read it.

The following day Maud and Roland drive through Brittany toward Finistère, passing through the forests of Paimpont and Brocéliande before reaching Fouesnant. They stay at a hotel at le Cap Coz, above a sandy bay, and spend the next three days reading Sabine’s journal. The journey therefore ends, for the moment, not with a definitive answer about Christabel but with access to a new first-person record. By placing Roland and Maud beside the journal as readers, the episode transfers the investigation from a scattered trail of scholarly leads to the intimate testimony that will shape what they understand next.

Significance

The departure binds together two forms of secrecy. Roland and Maud pursue the concealed history of Christabel’s disappearance while concealing their own movements from colleagues and friends. Their decision is partly enabled by an established research partnership, but the recollection of Yorkshire and the image of disappearing like Christabel give the expedition a personal charge. The source they seek is not merely a destination: the journal’s eventual arrival in their hands makes the journey a threshold between inference and testimony.

The episode also complicates the investigators’ moral position. Maud’s lie to Leonora and her taking of Ariane’s address are not treated as neutral logistics; Maud herself sees betrayal in the first and later admits the second. Yet the trip brings her into contact with Ariane’s cooperative approach to scholarship and with a photocopy shared in the name of feminist collaboration. The contrast makes the Brittany expedition both an ethically compromised escape and a passage toward knowledge obtained through another scholar’s generosity.