Roland and Maud’s pact of secrecy

Roland and Maud’s pact of secrecy turns their shared curiosity about the Ash–LaMotte letters into a deliberate alliance: each promises to tell the other of further discoveries and to tell no one else. The agreement protects their joint inquiry from rivals, but its meaning later deepens as the letters’ ownership proves to involve not just secrecy, but competing claims over physical documents, family inheritance, and copyright.

The Agreement and Its Immediate Stakes

Maud voices the proposal after considering what might happen if Sir George Bailey sought advice about the letters. She fears that Mortimer Cropper might become involved; if the papers went to Sotheby’s, she imagines, they could disappear into America, while their transfer to James Blackadder would at least keep them within reach. Yet she recognizes that her own possessiveness is difficult to justify: the letters are not hers. The admission makes the pact less a claim of ownership than a response to the vulnerability of documents whose significance has only just emerged.

Maud suggests that if either of them learns anything more, he or she should tell the other and no one else. Her reason is that the papers concern both poets equally, while many other interests may compete for them. Roland agrees that the arrangement makes sense and hopes that any consultation by Sir George will bring him to Lincoln University, where Maud might be consulted. Their compact thus joins scholarly cooperation to practical control of information: the discoveries are to be shared within the partnership, not immediately released to people with greater institutional or financial power.

From Concealment to Legal Questions

The agreement takes on a further dimension when Maud asks where the originals are. Roland hesitates, then admits that he found the letters in a book and took them. His confession makes the pact’s secrecy concrete: their collaboration began around documents already removed from their place of discovery, rather than around a secure or openly administered archive. The letters’ location, custody, and disclosure are therefore entangled from the outset.

Later, Maud is asked who owns the copyright in Christabel LaMotte’s poems and stories. She says that her family believes it does, and explains that LaMotte’s manuscripts—including Melusina, The City of Is, two fairy-tale books, and scattered lyrics—have been deposited at the Women’s Studies Resource Centre at Lincoln. The family has few letters, though it secretly bought Blanche Glover’s journal at a Sotheby’s sale. This distinction between the manuscripts already deposited and the newly contested correspondence gives the earlier pact a wider context: scholarly access and family custody do not automatically answer who owns each object or the right to reproduce its words.

The Will and the Separation of Rights

Euan MacIntyre later produces a Xerox copy of LaMotte’s will, dictated to her sister Sophia Bailey on May 1, 1890, when LaMotte was too weak to write clearly. The will gives her money, furniture, and china to Sophia, provides £60 for Jane Summers of Richmond if she is alive, and leaves all LaMotte’s books, papers, and copyrights to Maia Thomasine Bailey, in the hope that Maia may become interested in poetry. The document is signed by LaMotte and witnessed by Lucy Tuck and William Marchmont. Euan says that Sophia’s accounts show that the bequest to Jane was paid, while the will itself was preserved among the accounts.

The bequest clarifies one part of the dispute without collapsing all the claims into one. Euan explains that copyright in an unpublished letter belongs to its writer, whereas the physical letter belongs to its recipient, unless it has been returned. He believes that Ash’s letters include one in which he says that he returns the letters to LaMotte’s possession. At a later meeting, he identifies Maud as the heir to the ownership of LaMotte’s letters and probably the manuscripts of Ash’s letters, while distinguishing these material objects from copyright in Ash’s writing, which belongs to his heirs. He also notes that Maud’s father remains the nearer heir in the family line but has already given Maud the manuscripts that came to their ancestress, which she deposited at Lincoln.

The Pact’s Public Afterlife

The compact’s initial rule—tell each other, and no one else—belongs to an early stage of the investigation, when Maud fears the papers may vanish into private or institutional hands before their importance is understood. As the evidence and legal claims become clearer, the question moves into a more public arena. Euan says that he can prove Maud’s legal ownership of the letter manuscripts then held by Sir George Bailey, while also separating those manuscripts from the letters’ copyright. At the churchyard, he repeats that he believes he can establish Maud’s ownership of both sides of the correspondence as physical manuscripts.

The pact therefore does not settle ownership or guarantee secrecy forever. Instead, it establishes a working trust between Maud and Roland at the moment when disclosure could hand control to Cropper, Blackadder, or other interested parties. The later will and legal arguments reveal why that trust mattered: the papers carry distinct rights and histories, and the person entitled to the manuscript is not necessarily the person entitled to its copyright. What begins as a private promise becomes the first practical defense of a shared inquiry into documents whose custody and meaning are contested.