In the professional judgement of Dr James Curlew, his unfortunate daughter had, at the very most, five years left before it was all over. Not her life, you understand; her prospects for marriage. The same physical features that made him such a distinguished-looking man — tall, rangy build, aquiline nose, long face, strong jaw — were a calamitous inheritance for a girl. If she acted quickly, now while she was in her teens, there was still hope.

'Oh, but I don't wish to marry, father,' she told him. 'The world has enough married folk in it. What it hasn't got enough of is missionaries.'

'In that case,' he joked, 'it's damn naughty of the savages in Africa to keep eating them, isn't it?'

'You mustn't call them savages, father,' Emmeline chided him solemnly. 'Such disparagements are precisely why slavery is still with us.'

Dr Curlew clenched his jaw — the same jaw he'd passed on to his blameless daughter — and did his best not to argue. Rancour between him and Emmeline would have grieved his wife, had she lived to see it.

'I don't know why you say "still with us",' he couldn't help remarking. 'We don't have slavery in England.' And he rang the bell for the housemaid, as the room was too cold.

'We must regard the whole world as our home, father,' said Emmeline, wiping her fingers on the breakfast napkin. Pale sunlight was shining through the parlour window onto her face and upper body, a cool glow aided by the white tablecloth and the snowy landscape outside. The jingling of horses' harnesses as the nearby shops received their deliveries mingled with the tinkling of Emmeline's spoon in her teacup. 'This is the 1850s,' she reminded her father, as if the modern age had arrived while he'd been occupied elsewhere. 'Every place on Earth is connected by the web of our Empire. I have correspondents as far-flung as Kabool and New York.'

'Oh?' This was promising. 'Might some of these correspondents be of the male sex?'

'Oh, most of them, father,' grinned Emmeline. 'Males are in far more desperate need of salvation than females, I've found.'

She was quite winsome when she smiled. Her lips still had something of the childish rosebud about them, and there were dimples in her cheeks. Her eyes were bright, her face unlined, her hair glossy. Five years, at most, she would retain these qualities, then the sap would begin to drain out of her, and she would be left only with the aquiline nose and the Curlew jaw. Moreover, arithmetic would be against her; she would strike suitors as unfeasibly old. Emmeline could prattle all she liked about modern Society and how unrecognizably changed it was, but some attitudes were eternal.

The maidservant padded into the room and, without needing to be told, perceived at once what the trouble was. She got on her knees in front of the hearth and started coaxing the flames. Worth her weight in gold, that girl. Or, if not quite that, then at least worth the £8 a year he paid her.

Emmeline was indeed writing to many mysterious gentlemen all over the world. Her father, curious about this, had a word with Gertie who, in addition to her other duties, also had the task of walking to the pillarbox to post Miss Curlew's letters.

'Yes, sir,' said the servant. 'Never less than one a day. Sometimes five or six.'

'Always to the same person?'

'No, sir.'

'Replies?'

'Sometimes, sir.'

'From… from what part of the world, usually?'

'America, sir.'

'How tantalising,'

'Yes, sir.'

In point of fact, most of the letters that Emmeline sent went unanswered. She tried to write at least half a dozen each afternoon, but sometimes her wrist grew weak or she got the urge to go out walking. It really would be a great boon to mankind (and womankind!) if someone could invent a mechanism for making automatic copies of a page of text. All this fuss in the newspapers recently about Mr Sobrero inventing nitro-glycerine! What did the world need another method of destruction for, when there were all sorts of useful things yet to be invented? However, she would scribble on regardless. There was a war to be fought — her own just and gentle war — the war against slavery.

The gentlemen to whom she wrote were mainly located in Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, the Virginias and the Carolinas. Modifying a generic text with a sprinkling of local details gleaned from imported newspapers and journals, she would address each man as well-informedly as she could, imploring him to renounce slave-owning and allow his hard heart to be penetrated by the love of Christ. She quoted passages of Scripture. She quoted Charles Dickens' American Notes. She hinted that if the recipient should be inspired to recant and set his slaves free, there would, in this world, exist at least one person — Miss Emmeline Curlew — who would venerate him as a hero. Moral courage, she argued, is the manliest of virtues, and few men possess it.

Most of these letters vanished into a void. A small proportion provoked replies, slim envelopes arriving weeks and months afterwards, single sheets suffused with varying strengths of nasty temper.

I will thank you to keep your ignorant and impudent babblings to yourself, said one.

Has it occurred to you, Miss, said another, that the very clothes you are wearing as you pen your imperious missive may have their origins in my cotton fields?

Our postal system, averred another, is superior to yours, but it may not long remain so if it is burdened with unsolicited and mischievous piffle.

Some respondents went to greater effort, quoting passages from the Bible apparently condoning slavery, and wishing Miss Curlew a measure of wisdom and tolerance of other folks' customs as she grew older. One man in Port Hudson said that if she spent half an hour in the company of the niggers she spoke of so glowingly, the brutes would make her wish she'd never been born, and then most likely murder her. She even received one letter from a plantation-owner's wife, threatening her with hellfire, hired assassins and savage dogs if "you damned English hussy" dared to write again.

May our Lord forgive you, Emmeline wrote back, for your unkind and, if I may say so, blasphemous words…

One day, a most unusual item of mail was delivered. The bulk of the Curlews' correspondence arrived at their house either in the first post, early in the morning, or in the last post, at evening. This item arrived at midday, while Emmeline and her father were being served luncheon. It was a handsomely wrapped box, on which the sender had affixed slightly insufficient postage. Dr Curlew had to pay the postman ninepence, and his brow was wrinkled as he carried the parcel into the parlour. He wasn't acquainted with anyone in Chickamauga, Georgia.

'It's for you,' he said, handing it over to his daughter.

Emmeline laid the parcel in the lap of her skirts, and returned her attention to the cold galantine on her plate. She carved off another slice and conveyed it to her mouth, her big jaw swinging down as she did so.

'Aren't you curious to see what it is?' said Dr Curlew.

The girl chewed, swallowed. 'Of course I'm curious.'

'So am I. Would it be very presumptuous if I asked you to open it now?'

'Yes, it would, father,' smiled Emmeline, 'but I forgive you.' And she fetched the package up onto the table and tore its layers of brown paper off. Inside were a letter, a photograph and a box of chocolates. The letter and photograph Emmeline laid unexamined behind the teapot. The chocolates she opened for her father's inspection.

'Very fancy,' he commented, extracting, from under the powdered paper cups of dark, luxurious-smelling confectionery, a slip of paper detailing the varieties. The slip of paper itself was impregnated with a delicious aroma, and he sniffed it briefly before studying what it had to say. Terms like 'delectable', 'exotic', 'rich' and 'luscious' recurred throughout.

'Who is this gentleman?' enquired Dr Curlew, laying the paper over the glittering assortment of pralines and caramels.

Emmeline fetched up the letter and frowned at the signature.

'I'm not sure,' she said. 'I have so many. I must have read about him in an article somewhere.'

'The photograph — is it of him?'

Emmeline picked up the thick rectangle of card.

'I presume so. I can't recall ever seeing this face before.' After a moment's hesitation she handed the photograph to her father. He studied it just as he had studied the fragrant slip of paper.

'Presentable-looking chap,' he conceded. 'Upright carriage, broad shoulders. Firm jaw. Healthy, I expect. His trousers could use a press. But not a bad specimen.' Dr Curlew was keeping his tone as calm and offhand as he could, but in truth he was already imagining the offspring of this union. A grandson, maybe even two. Fine, robust boys, calling him grandpa in barbarous accents.

'A remarkably… amiable gesture on his part, sending you these chocolates,' he observed.

Emmeline gestured across the table, with a somewhat ink-stained hand. 'Do have one, father.'

'Thank you, I will.' And he popped a hazelnut-encrusted globe into his mouth, allowing it to melt against his palate while his daughter read the letter in silence.

Emmeline looked up from her reading.

'Well?' said her father. 'What's your opinion of this fellow?'

Emmeline folded the letter in her strong fingers and wedged it under the saucer of her teacup. Then she gazed past her father's shoulder at the snow-frosted window, her eyes half-closed. The grey terraced houses of Bayswater, the iron lamp-posts and the hearse-like delivery carts, had lost some of their solidity for her; they were semi-transparent, shifting ephemera in a monochrome kaleidoscope.

'He can't spell "paroxysm" or "conscientiously",' she remarked, in a faraway tone. Her eyes grew more and more unfocussed. She was picturing the lush fields of Georgia, endless acres of fertility. Her man's property was a vast bed of soft green enlivened with ripe cotton, a wholly mysterious substance she imagined resembling snow-white poppies. And, standing erect in the middle of those fields, his hands on his hips, there he was, silhouetted against the cloudless sky, his outline shimmering in the heat. An ecstatic dog ran up to him, leaping against his chest, licking his neck, and he embraced it, laughing. To the far left, in the corner of her mind's eye, stood a dark figure, a Negro bearing an uncanny resemblance to an illustration in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, one of several novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Emmeline's bookcase. 'Anyway,' she added, 'he keeps slaves.'

Dr Curlew harrumphed. 'Is that the only reason you wrote to him?'

Emmeline blinked, looked away from the window, returned home to England.

'Have another chocolate, father,' she said.

'Might you perhaps write to him again?' asked Dr Curlew. 'Or is he past saving?'

Emmeline lowered her head and smiled, blushing a little.

'No one is past saving, father,' she replied, and fetched up the letter and photograph. The mute form of Gertie was hovering in the doorway, waiting for permission to clear the table. Luncheon had run overtime; Dr Curlew must call upon his patients, and Miss Curlew must retire to her bedroom, her favoured place, always, for correspondence.

Copyright © 2003 by Michel Faber

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