Vox Meditantis

Tuesday, 4th December 1877

You must forgive me for speaking to you from this cold garden, but I find the orchard suits my mood better than any parlour fire. The apple trees stand bare now, their branches black against the grey sky, and I confess there is something in their stripped honesty that appeals to me on an afternoon such as this.

I have spent thirty years in the business of making matches – not the sulphur sort that one strikes for a lamp, but the delicate art of bringing together souls who might otherwise have passed one another by in this vast and curious world. It is a strange calling, mine. I unite hearts, or at least I unite fortunes and families and prospects, which amounts to much the same thing in the eyes of society. The paradox of it has not escaped me: that I, who have never married, should be the architect of so many unions. The irony weighs upon me some days more heavily than others.

There was a time when I believed myself quite the master of human nature. I could read a young woman’s character in the tilt of her chin, a gentleman’s prospects in the cut of his coat. But the longer I practise this trade, the more I understand how little any of us truly knows another. We all of us wear faces that are not quite our own – the modest maiden who proves a shrew, the stolid gentleman who harbours poetry in his breast, the wealthy widow who yearns only for kindness. It is masks upon masks, and I have made my living learning to peer beneath them, though I wonder sometimes if what I see is merely another mask beneath the first.

If you were to ask me – and I fancy you are asking, or you would not be listening to an old bachelor’s musings in a winter garden – what skills I possess that have kept me in this profession all these years, I should have to consider carefully. First, I am a most excellent listener. Not the sort who merely waits for his turn to speak, but one who hears what is not said as clearly as what is. Second, I have a memory for detail that borders on the uncanny. I can recall the colour of a lady’s eyes three years after meeting her, or the precise sum of a gentleman’s yearly income mentioned in passing at a garden party. Third, I am discreet. The secrets I carry would fill volumes, but they shall die with me. Fourth, I possess a talent for seeing which temperaments might complement one another – the spirited girl who needs a steady hand, the bookish fellow who requires a woman of practical sense. And fifth, though it is perhaps the least admirable of my abilities, I am able to present any situation in its most favourable light. Some might call it dissembling, but I prefer to think of it as discovering the best truth amongst many truths.

The afternoon grows colder, and I ought to return indoors, but I find myself reluctant. There is something in this stripped season that speaks to me of endings and of beginnings both. I have arranged my final match, I think. A gentleman of good family and a young woman whose face, when she smiles, reminds me of – but no, that is neither here nor there. They shall marry in the spring, and I shall retire to this house and this orchard, and perhaps take up some quieter occupation.

The irony, you see, is that I have spent my life teaching others to remove their masks for one another, to show their true faces in the sanctity of marriage, whilst I have kept my own mask so firmly in place that I scarce remember what lies beneath it. Perhaps in this garden, in these winter months to come, I shall finally learn.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.