Autograph Letter Signed ('A Berry') from Agnes Berry, sister of the poet Mary Berry and friend of Horace Walpole, to the Berry sisters' landlady the Hon. Mrs George Lamb of Richmond, describing Mary Berry's ill health.

2pp., 12mo. 30 lines. Good, on lightly-aged paper. She begins by explaining that it was 'by an entire mistake' that Mrs Lamb's money (presumably the rent for Devonshire Lodge, owned by Mrs Lamb) was not paid, and that the mistake is 'now cleared up, & the money is to be paid this very morning by Coutt's into your Banker's'. Her sister Mary is not able to pass on this information herself, as 'she has been for above a fortnight so very unwell as not to be able to write, or occupy herself in any way - a severe fit of & Influenza has confined her, & kept me in great agony about her'. Agnes 'does not yet see any steady steps towards amendment' in her sister's health, 'one day a little better, & the next a little worse, is all the changes I have yet seen - but I go on trying to hope that a few better days may still be allowed us'. The sisters are expecting Lady Scott in town the following day, accompanied by her friend Miss Murray, who is 'just arrived in London with her two nieces, one of whom with a very serious ill, comes for medical advice'. She ends by asking Mrs Lamb to inform her when she returns to Richmond. Richard Crisp's 'Richmond and its Inhabitants from the Olden Time' (1866) refers to Mary's severe illness of 1844, and quotes Mary in the following year stating that she is 'once again in Mrs. Lamb's house'.