A Letter of Mary (33 page)

Perhaps before too many years, my heir will judge the world ready to see Mariam's letter. I do not know if I envy her, or pity her.

* * *

Death, and life, and the written word that binds them. The first letter to hit my desk brought with it an all-too-brief refluorescence of a friendship and led to the deaths of four people. The next letter gave life to a voice which the world had lost for more than eighteen hundred years. And a last letter, reaching out from the grave to assert the will of its writer and ensure the continuance of her life's work, coincidentally condemned those who would have brought that work to an end. The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.