Possession ends with a Postscript that shows us one final scene from the life of Randolph Henry Ash. In it, we learn something that the novel's twentieth-century scholars will never know—that is, not unless they break out some CSI-level DNA testing.
Although the events of Chapter 28 lead us to believe that R. H. Ash died without learning that he had a daughter, Possession's Postscript tells us otherwise. As it turns out, Ash did meet Maia Thomasine Bailey, and he did recognize her for who she was. He even traded a crown of flowers for a lock of her hair, and although the novel's twentieth-century characters find that same lock of hair in the specimen box that Mortimer Cropper steals from Ash's grave, they all assume that the hair was Christabel LaMotte's.
So much for the deductive abilities of literary scholars. Sherlock Holmes would not be proud.
There's another big reveal here, and it's that Christabel LaMotte probably went to her own grave without ever learning that Ash had met their daughter. Ash sent Maia Thomasine back to Seal Court with a message for her "aunt" Christabel: "'Tell your aunt,' he said, 'that you met a poet, who was looking for the Belle Dame Sans Merci, and who met you instead, and who sends his compliments, and will not disturb her, and is on his way to fresh woods and pastures new'" (Postscript: 26).
Maia Thomasine tells him that she'll "try to remember," but this girl isn't about to win any awards for prompt delivery. In the novel's final sentence, we find out this: "And on the way home, she met her brothers, and there was a rough-and-tumble, and the lovely crown was broken, and she forgot the message, which was never delivered" (Postscript: 27-29).
Nice going, Maia Thomasine.
So, while Possession's twentieth-century scholars sit around feeling bad for Ash because they figure that he died without ever learning that he had a daughter, we readers can save our tears for Christabel. After all, she died without ever learning that her former lover had forgiven her for all her years of anger and secrecy.
Excuse us while we go ugly cry to Adele.