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Updated: May 20, 2025
He had filled three sides of a sheet of note-paper, when he threw down his pen and folded his letter. He put this letter into an envelope, and delivered it, unsealed, to Robert Audley. The address which it bore was: "Monsieur Val, "Villebrumeuse, "Belgium." Mr.
Robert escorted Lady Audley to Villebrumeuse, where she was presented to Monsieur Val as Madame Taylor. When Monsieur Val retired from the reception room, at my lady's request, she turned to Robert, and said: "You have brought me to a living grave; you have used your power basely and cruelly." "I have done that which I thought was just to others, and merciful to you," replied Robert.
Traveling by the Dover and Calais route, they would reach Villebrumeuse by the following afternoon or evening. It was late in the afternoon of the next day when the diligence bumped and rattled over the uneven paving of the principal street in Villebrumeuse.
It is more than a year since a black-edged letter, written upon foreign paper, came to Robert Audley, to announce the death of a certain Madame Taylor, who had expired peacefully at Villebrumeuse, dying after a long illness, which Monsieur Val describes as a maladie de langueur.
"Madam will have an attendant entirely devoted to her service." said Monsieur Val. "Madam will have all her wishes obeyed; her reasonable wishes, but that goes without saying," monsieur adds, with a quaint shrug. "Every effort will be made to render madam's sojourn at Villebrumeuse agreeable. The inmates dine together when it is wished.
She moved away from the door, and Robert passed her without a word, without a look. Half an hour afterward he was in one of the principal hotels at Villebrumeuse, sitting at a neatly-ordered supper-table, with no power to eat; with no power to distract his mind, even for a moment, from the image of that lost friend who had been treacherously murdered in the thicket at Audley Court.
He gave Robert a letter addressed to Monsieur Val, Villebrumeuse, Belgium, who, he said, was the proprietor and medical superintendent of an excellent maison de santé, and would, no doubt, willingly receive Lady Audley into his establishment, and charge himself with the full responsibility of her future life.
Robert had consulted a volume of Bradshaw, and had discovered that Villebrumeuse lay out of the track of all railway traffic, and was only approachable by diligence from Brussels. The mail for Dover left London Bridge at nine o'clock, and could be easily caught by Robert and his charge, as the seven o'clock up-train from Audley reached Shoreditch at a quarter past eight.
"That letter," he said, in answer to Robert Audley's inquiring look, "is written to my friend Monsieur Val, the proprietor and medical superintendent of a very excellent maison de sante in the town of Villebrumeuse.
No feverish sleeper traveling in a strange dream ever looked out more wonderingly upon a world that seemed unreal than Robert Audley, as he stared absently at the flat swamps and dismal poplars between Villebrumeuse and Brussels. Could it be that he was returning to his uncle's house without the woman who had reigned in it for nearly two years as queen and mistress?
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