Chapter 26 Clara
CHAPTER 26? CLARA
Leaving London
Evening was turning to night, the fields now glowing and the salmon-tinted horizon melting away. The leafless trees turned haunting.
“How do you know that word?” I asked again. I could see the word on the first page of Mother’s language collection shimmering in the air.
Moira set her lips straight. “It’s a word I saw in those papers. That one word rose off the page and went to my heart straight like an arrow.”
“You read the pages? The note said that they were meant only for me.”
“What note?”
“The one inside that said the pages were meant only for Clara Harrington? That one.”
Moira looked at Charlie, who smiled and told her, “Yes, there was a note.”
“I didn’t see that. I swear. All I saw was all those words, one after the other, with translations, and I thought it was a secret book of Callum’s, that it was… his. And after finding it in his safe, I thought that putting it in the library was the right thing to do. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong at all. I didn’t take anything.” Her thoughts words rushed out in a river of words. She stopped, took a breath. “I loved him like a da, like one I never had. I love the family.” She paused and then said softly, “Loved him.” She rolled back her shoulders. “The papers were important to Mr. Jameson; that much I knew, but not why. I wanted Charlie to find them, so I put them in a place that would be obvious.”
I stepped closer to her. My heart raced ahead of her and toward her answers, which were coming too slow.
“The day after he… died, I went in to clean his study. The safe was unlocked and open. I am sure he meant to lock it before bed as always. But instead…” She took a breath. “I saw it there, that satchel half in and half out. Maybe I should have let it be, but I didn’t.
“I opened the bag, and I saw all those words and knew it must be for you, Mr. Jameson.” She looked to Charlie. “I have never, in all the years, not once, seen that bag before. He must have never taken it out. I took it to the library.”
“Why not leave it where it was for Charlie to find there? Or Mrs. Jameson?” I exhaled audibly.
“I wanted to peek at it, I did. I thought they were his words and I wanted to read some of it. I was mighty sad, and I wasn’t thinking right. I took it all down to the library. I’m sorry about that. But I never saw a note—just a few words on paper. I thought they were Callum’s. I was looking at those words, wondering about them, when Charlie arrived home that evening. I didn’t have time to take them and put them back, so I placed it where it might be seen.”
My rising rage fizzled quick and sharp, like touching the end of a match with wet fingertips. Moira was desperate to understand a man she loved and seemed to worship. She was looking for some understanding of him in his absence. I was no different. I sacrificed so much, traveling across an ocean, putting my daughter in danger, emptying my savings, all because I was desperate for understanding my own mother and what she loved and created and wrote.
We weren’t so different, Moira and me. My self-righteous anger did us no good while we stood on the side of the road with only a picnic basket and a few clothes.
“I understand,” I said.
She looked up from beneath grit-coated lashes. “I am terribly sorry, ma’am. I lost my da and I have never understood any of it. He left when I was but two. This life takes so much from us, and I just wanted a little something of my own. My very own. And to understand a secret piece of Mr. Jameson seemed like something of my own, but it was not. I didn’t know it wasn’t his and his words.”
Charlie stood with his hands on the picnic basket as if frozen by the admission, by the image of Moira in his father’s personal effects, by a young woman so enchanted with his father. But I knew the deep longing to understand someone you loved who seemed far from you, someone impossible to truly know unless you found an artifact of their life you could turn over and analyze.
“You have something of him,” I told her. “You have your relationship with him. That is only between the two of you. What he taught you, what he showed you, and how he respected you, that is your secret piece of him. I have my own secret pieces of my mother, and I don’t know what it means yet, but I know you don’t need to be sorry anymore.”
The sound of tinkling bells made us all turn to see a figure emerge from the side of the misty field, a woman in a long, flowing yellow skirt. Her dark hair was held back by a headband. She called out. “Yoo-hoooo!”
We all stared at her as if she were made of mist and trees, as if she’d risen from the earth.
Charlie spoke low, almost in a whisper. “A rough sleeper,” he said.
“A what?” I asked him.
“A vagrant.”
The woman made her way to us and stopped with a smile. “You appear to be lost.”
Charlie nodded. “Yes, could you possibly tell us exactly where we are?”
“I can,” she said. She stared at us, her face round and her nose and eyes the same, as if she’d been composed of circles. “If you’ll offer me a ride, I can take you where you need to be, as well as getting me nigh on the road a bit farther.”
“Where do you live?” Charlie asked, in a voice as cold as the winter air.
“I was separated from my people last night. I am sure they are a bit up the river. If you don’t mind taking me, I can guide you.” She paused. “Where do you need to be?”
“On the road toward Cumbria.”
“Ah, you are so close, now, in Cheddleton, too far east to get to the main road. Now you must navigate past the McWalters’ farm and farther west.”
Wynnie hid behind me, and Charlie stepped close to the woman. “Can I pay you for your trouble?”
“I’d just like a ride,” she said. “Merely a ride. You know, just because I ain’t fancy doesn’t mean we are the demons you make us to be.”
“Only demons are demons,” Charlie said. “Now, we’re getting back on the road if you can guide us.”
“I surely can,” she said.
“Sir,” Moira said, stepping close to him, murmuring something I could not hear.
Charlie’s voice carried, even as he tried to whisper. “We need her help, and we shouldn’t leave her alone on the side of the road.”
“Yes, we could,” Moira said.
“She has dark edges,” Wynnie said quietly, and I wasn’t sure if anyone but me heard her.
Charlie looked at the woman as she walked toward the car where the door had been left open.
She climbed into the back seat, and we followed, Wynnie and I on the other side so she sat against the left passenger door. With the aroma of something herbal I could not name, of cigarette smoke and a sweet, overripe smell I associated with sickness, the woman leaned forward and guided Charlie through the streets. Finally, we stopped at a field across from a blue-painted farmhouse, lamplight in the windows like small suns too far away to reach. “I can walk from here,” she said.
I thought about the life of those living out here in the country, of how close and yet how far away they were from London that they had no real idea of the peril we’d escaped.
The woman tapped Charlie’s shoulder. “Now you will take a left up there at the crossroad. Follow Parkland until you reach Sutherland Road near the Newspring Fishery, then bear right. That will take you straight to where you need to go.”
“Thank you.” Charlie parked the car at the soft edge of the road, and the woman, who had never told us her name, opened the left passenger-side door, and then reached down. I thought for a moment she was tying her shoe or adjusting her skirt. Then in a movement so fast it took too long to register, she jumped from the car and ran.
“Stop!” I hollered at her as Wynnie screamed, “No!” in a yell so loud that Moira gasped while Charlie sat squinting into the fading sunlight, unable to see what had just happened.
But I could see. I could see that as she ran, she held in her left hand my purse, and in her right, a worn leather satchel.