The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 3 Charlie Jameson

It was a bitterly cold and damp November evening, but as Charlie stood in his father’s library, in his world of books, he felt warm. The room overflowed with everything his father once was to the world and to Charlie.

Three weeks had passed since burying his father. This day marked the first time Charlie had ever entered his father’s library without knocking and hearing the gruff but friendly Join me, Son.

The London house was dark at seven p.m., and Charlie was alone. Outside the windows, lanterns flickered on St. James’s Square, and the second-floor library was as still as the crypt they’d lowered Callum Jameson into.

Charlie had put this off long enough.

He’d canceled the Lads’ gig that night, the first time in eight years. But his Celtic band members understood. They could do without him for one night, they told him with a slap on the back.

Charlie flicked on every lamp in the library and inhaled the room’s faint aroma of charred wood. In the brick fireplace where granite quarried from his mother’s family’s land in the Lake District surrounded the grate, ash, dusty and gray, settled beneath charred logs. The Jamesons were among the fortunate few who could still use natural wood, while most of London suffered with the cheap, nutty coal that put out more smoke than heat. The spent remains of the fire had settled under the grate for three weeks now, an artifact of the moment when Charlie’s father had placed his hand over his heart, looked up at his son, and said, “Well, isn’t this odd? I do believe I’m having a heart attack. Come, Charlie.”

Those were his last words, one hand on his chest, one reaching out.

Come, Charlie.

Callum Jameson had celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday with a grand party in this very house only four months ago. He’d left his twins, Archie and Charlie, and their mother, Pippa, far too soon.

Directions were clear: The family’s finance company was to be inherited by the two brothers. Archie was to take over the investment firm, founded in 1690, built from scratch by Mother’s Burrough family and grown into a megalith of success by her Irish husband. Charlie was to remain at Burrough’s Holdings under his brother’s leadership, continue in his music career, and manage the house in the countryside.

In addition, Father had instructed Charlie to preserve and catalog his extensive library here in London.

Charlie understood the direct imperative to continue his music career: the Celtic drum he played was the last remnant of Callum’s Irish descent. His father played the round calf-skinned drum and attempted to teach both of his sons as well. Only Charlie took to it.

There was no other direct family but a second cousin surviving Callum’s passing. His mother, father, and brother had been killed in a 1916 IRA uprising in Dublin when Callum was twenty years old and off in America studying mathematics.

Archie, Charlie, and Pippa were his family. And this library—well, it was most definitely beloved, as well.

Charlie sat behind his father’s mahogany desk in the library while his mother grieved at their country home and Archie waded through paperwork at the company’s London office.

When Charlie was a young child, he sat on his father’s lap at this desk while his father pored over history books and maps. Father read wild tales of the Nordic and Celtic myths, and together they listened to Verdi’s operas and Celtic folk music. Callum knew how to speak the old Irish-Gaelic language but rarely did so, though he taught his sons a few Gaelic songs, as if the pain of all Callum lost could be imparted only through music.

This room was his father’s domain, his geography, always in perfect order. No one walked through the door without Father’s permission, but when they did enter, they gained passage to another world—or so Charlie had once thought.

Where should he begin in this room of floor-to-ceiling pine bookshelves, where oil paintings of their lands and the wildlife it contained hung? The oak walls glowed with the honey hues of aged wood; the evergreen damask curtains shielded the evening light from entering the lamp-lit room. Leather-bound volumes filled the shelves, and a tall rolling ladder stood in the middle of it all. This library was his father’s doing, his lifelong creation. Antique maps, leather volumes, and rare editions filled every crevice.

Callum Montcrest Jameson III seemed to have been a man of contrasting interests: money management and mythology. With his booming voice, his tall, imposing presence, Callum embodied both archetypes confidently. Friends and family said that Callum’s twin sons split his personality into two parts. Archie inherited the logic, and Charlie the mythos. Charlie earned a master of studies in history from Oxford, while his brother’s degree was in finance from Cambridge.

It was easy to categorize the twins this way, but they were one family, both with their own interests, both caring deeply about the family’s investment company.

On the desk, Callum’s walnut pipe bowl spilled tobacco onto a leather blotter the color of soil, exactly where he’d dropped it that evening when he’d collapsed. A silver-framed photo of Philippa and Callum on their wedding day in the country. One of Archie and Charlie sat to the right: the twins at five years old in a blue rowboat on their beloved lake, Esthwaite Water. The twins posed with a trout they’d caught and would cook for dinner, so small it would only provide a single bite for the four of them. You’d think they were whale hunters by their prideful grins.

A neat pile of papers sat stacked in the center of the blotter: a report from the bank that Charlie would need to pass along to Archie. And then, as always, there was a book of history, this one about the Vikings who invaded Ireland and brought with them the Celtic culture that endlessly fascinated Callum.

What happened to all that knowledge that Callum collected and carried in his soul? What happened to all that wit and wisdom? Where was it all now? Charlie sagged with grief.

With a deep breath, Charlie stood and walked to the phonograph. The record playing the day Father died still sat on the turntable. Charlie clicked the on button and dropped the needle onto the vinyl. La Bohème . Charlie wondered if he would ever be able to hear the opening strains of the opera without thinking of his father—without mourning his father, to be more exact. No one had read more than his father, from the prophets to the poets, from the classics to modern literature. The loss of Charlie’s father made the world feel deeply empty and unsteady, wobbling beneath his feet.

Music fueled his melancholy, and he paced the rectangular room, his eyes scanning each section: Mathematics, Fiction, Art, Antiquities, History, Maps. On the lectern that displayed whatever book, map, or illustrations Father was studying sat a 1745 map of the family’s six acres of land in the Lake District.

Halfway around the room, Charlie stopped pacing when his gaze snagged on something new. On the bottom shelf, atop a pile of leather boxes that held ancient maps, sat a brown leather satchel, worn and scratched, its brass buckles tarnished.

He crouched and slid out the heavy case. The thrill of the old hunt with his father returned. How many times he and Father had browsed through antique shops and attended auctions to find just one more map, one more book, one more…

Charlie set the satchel down on the desk. He was certain the leather bag hadn’t been in the library before. It would have caught his eye among the many piles of books and carefully boxed and labeled papers. The tarnished latch was designed as an eagle, the beak clutching the hook.

Charlie folded back the flap to glance inside, seeing nothing but papers. On top sat an envelope, and he pulled it out to read the words on it: For Clara Harrington only. Further instructions inside.

He grabbed the stack of papers, at least three inches thick, and slid them out. Reaching inside, he felt only the disintegrating silk lining. He thought about the legendary story of Hemingway’s suitcase, how early in his career his first wife, Hadley, had lost a bag carrying years of the famous author’s work on a train. It was never recovered.

These were the kinds of stories that sent Callum and Charlie on joyous hunts. Once, as they traipsed down Cecil Court, Charlie asked his father, “What if we found Hemingway’s suitcase?”

His father laughed and jostled Charlie. “What if we find the lost papers of Shakespeare?”

Point taken. Maybe it was all a dream, but it was nevertheless a dream they’d happily pursue. The joy was in the journey, not the execution—or so Father always said. Charlie wasn’t so sure.

Charlie lifted his reading glasses from the desk and slid them on. He bent over and spied a note, carefully handwritten in a near-perfect script on the top sheet. The contents of this satchel are to be given only to Clara Harrington of Bluffton, South Carolina . Then a phone number and address. She must retrieve these papers in person. They must never be mailed. The sealed letter inside is to be read only by her. Le draíocht.

The author scribbled one more note on the bottom left side: Please tell Clara that I’ve saved this language for her, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham.

Charlie knew that name, but how?

Lifting the note from the pile, he saw foreign words with pages and pages of what appeared to be a dictionary of terms. Even as curious as he was, he would not show these papers to anyone: they were meant for one Clara Harrington in America.

Charlie’s father had soaked him in old Irish folklore as a child, and he knew enough Gaelic to know that there were mallachtai —Celtic curses and spells when breaking a draíocht , a charm or enchantment. He wouldn’t dare bring either onto his head. Charlie would heed Bronwyn’s request.