There is a house in Mayfair. Charming, freshly decorated, inexplicably cheap. The landlord asks no questions. The neighbours say nothing. But the grocer at the corner of the street has noticed something — he has noticed it for four years, and he does not like to say it aloud.
What happens inside that house comes to us through letters. Two women writing to each other in the warm, confiding way of close friends — about curtains, about dinner guests, about the peculiar mercy of a low rent in a good street.
Something is in that house. It has been seen. And the ones who have seen it cannot say what it was. They cannot say anything at all, after.
Rhoda Broughton published this story in 1873. It has barely aged a day.
Publication details:
"The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth" was first published in Belgravia: A London Magazine, Volume 21, 1873, and later collected in Broughton's Tales for Christmas Eve (1873), subsequently reissued as Twilight Stories (1879).
Author biography:
Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920) was a Welsh-born novelist whose frank, witty fiction made her one of the most widely read and controversial writers of the Victorian era. She outlived her own scandalous reputation, remarking late in life that she had begun as Zola and ended as Miss Yonge.
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