Roland and Maud agree to keep their findings secret from other scholars, including Roland’s employer James Blackadder Beatrice Nest, a forlorn academic and keeper of the diaries of Ash’s wife Ellen the omnisexual Leonora Stern, Maud’s friend and former lover and especially Mortimer Cropper, a chilly aesthete who aggressively pursues any discoveries concerning Ash. Though initially wary and skeptical of Roland, Maud agrees to help him, aware that a relationship between Ash and LaMotte would be a major discovery, disrupting received notions of Ash as a happily married man and of LaMotte as a lesbian. Roland meets Maud Bailey, a feminist academic and expert on LaMotte, to whom she is distantly related.
Roland steals the letters and undertakes further research, concluding that the letters were written to Christobel LaMotte, an Anglo-French poet and fairytale author. Roland Mitchell, a meek and disaffected academic, discovers two handwritten letters in the London Library, written by the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash to an unknown woman.
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