Roland’s investigation of the Ash–LaMotte connection

Roland Michell’s investigation of the Ash–LaMotte connection turns a chance encounter with Randolph Henry Ash’s draft letters into a sustained pursuit through nineteenth-century diaries and surviving papers. It uncovers a record of Ash and Christabel LaMotte meeting, then follows the faint traces around LaMotte’s Richmond household: a diary entry about an undisclosed letter, a sense of an intruder at the threshold, and the abrupt end of Blanche Glover’s account. The investigation advances by documents, but its central difficulty is the distance between a compelling inference and what the archive can actually prove.

From discovery to archival pursuit

After finding Ash’s draft letters in the London Library, Roland makes a fair copy and records the borrowing in the departmental notebook. He could return the originals quietly, but does not want to: the letters feel as if they belong to him. The conflict between responsible access and private possession accompanies the investigation from its first stage. Rather than immediately show his discovery to James Blackadder, Roland seeks to satisfy his own curiosity and restore the papers only afterward.

Roland turns to Dr Williams’s library to consult Crabb Robinson’s monumental diary. He has to invoke Blackadder’s name to gain access, yet still intends to withhold his discovery from him. Beginning with Robinson’s records for 1856, the year Ash’s Gods, Men and Heroes appeared, Roland reads through successive years and into 1858. The investigation thus proceeds not by a single decisive disclosure but by patient searching in an archive whose entries were not written to explain Ash’s private life.

In June, Roland finds the passage he has been seeking: Robinson’s account of a breakfast party attended by Ash, LaMotte, and LaMotte’s friend Blanche Glover. Robinson records that Ash had never met LaMotte before. She had come especially to speak with her father, whose mythological work Robinson had helped introduce to English readers. Their conversation ranged over Dante, Shakespeare, and spiritual manifestations. LaMotte spoke with unexpected force; Glover, usually taciturn, affirmed her belief that spiritual phenomena could occur. The entry establishes a documented first meeting, but it does not itself establish the later correspondence Roland hopes to trace.

A meeting recorded, and the limits of the record

The breakfast-party entry captures a revealing intellectual contrast. Ash says he would require experimental proof of spiritual manifestations. He also explains that historical imagination demands a poetic belief in the mental world of a character, a capacity so strong in him that he risks having no beliefs of his own. When the group appeals to LaMotte for her view of spirits, she declines to state an opinion, answering with a Mona Lisa smile. Her reserve is present in the very record that makes her meeting with Ash visible.

Roland copies the passage and reads on, but finds no further reference to LaMotte, although Robinson frequently hosted or visited Ash. Robinson praises Ellen Ash’s housekeeping and remarks that she never became the mother she seemed ideally suited to be; he does not record any exceptional knowledge of Ash’s poetry in either LaMotte or Glover. Even the circumstances of the remembered conversation remain uncertain: it may have occurred somewhere else or on another occasion. The documentary trail confirms an encounter while leaving its significance and setting partly unsettled.

The act of copying gives Roland another reason for caution. His cramped transcription may introduce errors, and he knows that even deliberate professional methods cannot produce a wholly error-free text. Mortimer Cropper’s students repeatedly transcribe, re-transcribe, type, and check passages; Blackadder, by contrast, corrects errors while disparaging his students’ education. Roland’s own work sits uneasily between those standards. His investigation depends not just on what an old diary says, but on the fragile chain by which its words reach the present.

LaMotte’s archive and Richmond household

When Roland travels to Lincoln, he has prepared by reading two books about LaMotte: the slim 1947 biography White Linen and the 1977 collection of feminist essays, Herself Herself Involve, LaMotte’s Strategies of Evasion. This reading introduces a biography shaped by both family history and later critical interpretation. LaMotte’s grandparents fled the Terror of 1793 for England. Her father, Isidore, was a historian and mythographer with a mystical Breton Christianity; her mother, Arabel Gumpert, came from a firmly religious family. Her elder sister Sophie married Sir George Bailey, while LaMotte herself lived with her parents until an inheritance from her aunt enabled her to establish an independent household in Richmond in 1853.

At the Lincoln archive, Maud Bailey explains what survives among the papers deposited there. They are essentially the contents of LaMotte’s desk at her death, sent at her request to her niece May Bailey in the hope that she might come to care about poetry. May did not: she married a cousin, moved to Norfolk, and raised a large family. Maud, a descendant of May, persuaded her father to place the papers in the archive. The collection includes manuscripts of the Tales, undated lyrics on loose slips, a commonplace book, letters from friends, and revisions of Melusina, which LaMotte rewrote at least eight times. It also contains a diary by Glover covering three years, beginning when the women moved to Richmond. Maud warns that the collection is small and that earlier papers were not carefully preserved; more may once have existed, but none has surfaced.

Roland approaches Maud cautiously. He had imagined showing her Xeroxes of the purloined letters, but her cool reception makes him decide not to. Instead, he says only that he is researching Ash, has learned that he may have corresponded with LaMotte, and knows that the two met. He hands Maud his transcription of Robinson’s diary. Maud points him toward Glover’s diary as a possible source for the meeting and the period. The exchange gives Roland access to another witness’s account, while his concealment of the letters keeps his research at odds with the openness that archival collaboration might require.

Glover’s diary: domestic life and a new presence

Glover’s diary first portrays Richmond as a hard-won refuge. She describes the small house as genuinely their own, in contrast with the precarious life she had expected: a marginal place in someone else’s drawing room or a servant’s garret. She records simple meals, walks in the park, reading, music, and shared work. The women read The Faerie Queene aloud and take pleasure in daily life and in the freedom to pursue art and thought without anyone forbidding or criticizing them. Glover calls Richmond Beulah; LaMotte jokes that they must hope no wicked fairy envies their good fortune. The household’s privacy is both material—its own rooms and routines—and intellectual, a space where their work can proceed without outside permission.

The diary also records Glover’s artistic frustration. She sketches oak trees in Richmond Park but finds her lines too light for their powerful solidity. She wonders whether a painting of Nimue imprisoning Merlin, or of the Maid of Astolat, could give form to the force she wants. LaMotte’s picture of Christabel hangs in the bedroom where morning sunlight exposes its imperfections. Meanwhile, LaMotte receives a long letter, smiles over it, and folds it away without showing Glover. Glover’s attention to this private correspondence marks an emerging division within a home previously defined by shared confidences.

After three and a half weeks of meals, walks, reading, and music, Glover writes that she is not meant to see or know about the letters. She insists that she is neither a blind mole nor a trained lady’s maid, and reminds LaMotte that she had been rescued from the fate of a governess. The declaration mingles gratitude with hurt: she will not claim a right to the correspondence, but makes clear that its concealment has changed the terms of their intimacy. The letters are important not only as clues for Roland but as the material sign of something Glover believes she has been excluded from.

Two weeks later, Glover describes a prowler around their retreat, testing the shutters and the door. She plans to hang mountain-ash berries and a horseshoe over the lintel as protection against fairy folk; Dog Tray bristles and snaps at the empty air. The domestic refuge that had seemed safe now appears vulnerable, its locks suddenly more conspicuous. In another entry, Glover calls the intruder a Peeping Tom who peers through a crack in the walls. LaMotte says he means no harm and cannot see what the women know and keep safe. Glover fears that LaMotte assumes the prowler will remain tame, and worries about the effect on her writing. LaMotte replies that she is learning and will have new things to say when that learning is complete. They reconcile for the moment: LaMotte comes to Glover as she prays, raises her, and promises not to give her cause to doubt her. Glover believes she means it, though she records LaMotte’s agitation and tears.

Inference, uncertainty, and interruption

The next day Glover announces that the wolf is gone from the door and Dog Tray can have his hearth to himself. She has begun painting the Maid of Astolat, the subject that has suddenly seemed right. The image of the wolf’s departure appears to close the immediate crisis, but the diary does not identify the prowler or explain what has changed. Its supernatural and domestic language makes the threat vivid without turning it into verifiable evidence about the letter-writer.

Glover’s diary ends abruptly, not even at the close of the year. Roland wonders whether other diaries existed and places slips of paper among the entries to hold together what he calls a fragile narrative—or perhaps a non-narrative. He cannot connect the prowler to the writer of LaMotte’s letters, or conclusively connect either to Ash. Nevertheless, he feels strongly that all three may be the same person. That conviction is precisely what the documents do not confirm. The investigation’s suspense arises from the gap between the pattern Roland perceives and the statements the archive actually preserves.

At the end of the episode, Roland still needs to ask Maud about the prowler, but doing so risks exposing how much he knows and concealing how he obtained it. His concern about Maud’s censorious gaze echoes the earlier concealment of the letters from Blackadder and his reluctance to show Maud the copies. When she appears to say that the library is closing and asks whether he found anything, the research remains suspended between discovery and disclosure. Roland has found the first meeting, a surviving account of LaMotte and Glover’s strained privacy, and a suggestive figure at their door—but not yet proof that closes the case.