Her Gentle and Fruitful Grace, Ruth, Lady of the
Green Caves, formerly Princess of the Hidden Land and Lord of the
King’s Forests, to their Excellent and Estimable Lordships
Randolph, King’s Counselor, and Fence, Council’s Wizard,
greetings.
3 September 490
Dear Fence and Randolph,
I did try to write this in your manner, but I
was afraid you would never unravel it. I am going to write in plain
English, and trust to your perspicacity to understand.
I am not Lady Ruth of the Green Caves. Edward,
Patrick, Ellen, and Laura are also not who you think they are. We
come from somewhere else, where, for years and years, the five of
us played a game. The game was you, The Secret Country. We had the
characters, the people, right, except for Claudia. We had never
thought of her. And we didn’t have the story exactly right. But we
would play the Banquet of Midsummer Eve, and Randolph’s poisoning
of the King, and the battle with the Dragon King; and in the end
Edward found out that Randolph had killed his father, and so he
killed Randolph in the rose garden. These events and people seemed
strange and wonderful to us, and altogether different from the
lives we led.
This summer we couldn’t play. Ellen and
Patrick and I were living about as far away from Ted and Laura as
it’s possible to be, and we were all very unhappy. But Patrick
found a sword under a bottle tree. It glowed green. It’s the one
you called Melanie’s. Ted and Laura found a sword under a hedge.
That one glowed blue, and you called it Shan’s. The hedge was the
same as, or like, the hedge in front of the House by the Well of
the White Witch. And that house was also in our world.
If you hold Melanie’s sword and crawl under
the bottle tree, you come out in a place called New South Wales. If
you hold Shan’s sword and crawl under the hedge, you come out in a
place called Illinois. And if you begin in those places and crawl
under with the swords, you find yourself in the Hidden Land. That’s
how we got here. Benjamin thought we were your royal children. And
yours weren’t around to contradict him. So we played our parts as
best we could. You must understand that we did not, in the
beginning, necessarily intend any deception. We were not certain
that you were real at all; and yet you were the people we wanted
most to meet in the world, and the Secret Country was the place we
wanted most to be, and the princesses and princes you knew were the
people whose parts we most dearly desired. We had doubts even then,
and these doubts grew on us as we found our parts more difficult to
play in truth than they had been in semblance; but by then we were
entangled, and feared to do ourselves, and perhaps you also, more
harm than good by a confession. Nor did we know what to confess. We
thought we were in truth your royal children, or as near as you
could get. It seemed to us that, if they were not back in our
places contending with the strangeness of our lives, which we knew
they were not, then they were nowhere except within us.
But when Ted was in the land of the dead,
waiting for Lord Randolph and me to ransom him, he saw and spoke to
all five of them. Edward told Ted that Claudia had killed them with
a stratagem and a potion. This was not of our game. We grieve for
your loss. If there were anything we could do to Claudia, we would
do it. We think it best to go home, leaving you an account of what
we know. We have left the swords, one under the hedge before the
house, and the other under a bottle tree perhaps fifty yards to the
right of it.
There is one other thing. Time flows in your
world just as it does in ours. This startled us, because in the
stories we’ve read, matters were better arranged. If we were a long
time in the Secret Country, our guardians at home missed us and
were angry, and if we were a long time at home Benjamin and Agatha
missed us and were angry. So we bethought us of the Riddle of
Shan’s Ring, that it might blow time awry, so we could stay a long
time in your country and be gone but a moment from ours.
Ellen and I took Shan’s Ring to the hedge
through which Ted and Laura had come into this country. And we
tried diverse methods; and when we stood in our own world, and I
stood outside the hedge, and Ellen stood in the yard of the house,
I threw the Ring over the hedge to Ellen and said the verse aloud.
There came a flash of purple light, and a gap opened in the hedge.
I saw the Secret Country in it, so I came through back to this
place. But Ellen saw the house light up, and a woman burst out of
the door brandishing a broom and shouting incomprehensible things.
This woman was the Lady Claudia, whom you know. Ellen ran for the
hedge, and Shan’s sword, which she held, pulled her down to show
her where the Ring lay, and when she retrieved it, she came through
the hedge back to this place and fell in the stream.
Now I thought that what had happened to Ellen
had taken longer than what had happened to me. So I took Shan’s
Ring and went through the hedge. And I was in a strange country
that looked like the Secret Country, in that it held the Well of
the White Witch, and the plain, but that looked most unlike it in
that the air and sky were glassy and felt altogether odd and
unpleasant, and there was an army on the plain. So I came back
quickly to the Secret Country. But you should note that this place
in which I had found myself was the selfsame place in which Lord
Randolph and Fence and I stood much later when we bargained with
the unicorn for Edward Fairchild’s life.
Now, once I had gone through the hedge with
both the Ring and Shan’s sword, I found myself back in our world
again, and sat there for a little while, and came home. But for
Ellen hours passed and the sun rose and she was greatly vexed. So
we thought that Shan’s Ring had changed the rate at which time
passed, and we would be safe to stay here until the story’s
end.
But we find now that, knowing you and knowing
Lord Randolph, we do not like the end of the story, and fearing to
give you more pain than joy if we stay, we have gone.
Two more matters. First, in our game, Lord
Andrew was a spy of the Dragon King; so have a care of him. And
second, in sober reality, Randolph pledged his life for the return
of Edward Fairchild. But he didn’t get Edward Fairchild. He got Ted
Carroll, whom he knows not and doesn’t want. So you might try that
on the unicorns if they get fussy.
We thank you for our sojourn in your country,
which is one of the best ever we saw or heard tell of; and we
repent of our deception; and we wish you well.
Believe me, good sirs, your most
obedient,
most affectionate, most humble servant,
most affectionate, most humble servant,
Ruth Eleanora Carroll