The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 34 Clara

CHAPTER 34? CLARA

Lake District, England

By Tuesday morning, the only hints of my river plunge and the fever, of the soot and the grime, were the dark streaks left on a towel hanging off the bathroom door’s hook. Morning sunlight fell on Mother’s pages, swords of light hitting the pile as if pointing to it.

A fierce desire for my own bed and the sound of the tide tinkling the oyster bed shoreline washed over me. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I wanted my creaking house and my cracked linoleum countertops, my splintered dock, and the tick of the kitchen clock as I silently made coffee in the morning. I wanted to smell the briny aroma as I drove over the bridge and feel the salty air on my lips as I took Wynnie out in the boat.

I missed South Carolina, the simplicity of it in stark relief against the opulence of this house. They might seem to have everything—the house and money and name—but they didn’t have the shoreline of the May River. I felt the aching pull of home and knew that today I needed to send a telegram to Nat and tell him what happened and how we weren’t coming home on our planned train from New York.

Wynnie and I had slept deeply, and now she stirred, sitting up and smiling at me. “We’re still here.”

“Where else would we be?” I ruffled her hair and swung my legs from the bed to stand.

She laughed. “I’m happy.” She jumped off the bed, her bare feet hitting the carpet as she walked to the window and pushed aside the curtains. “Mama! Snow! We’ve never had snow.”

I realized now that the brightness of the morning sun was the reflection from a soft snow covering the landscape in a mantle of white. “Oh, Wynnie!”

“It’s like a…” She paused and pressed her forehead to the windowpane. “Like the places Emjie shows me. Like the places you paint in your books about Harriet.”

Charlie waited by the back door under the kitchen’s low, wood-beamed ceiling with a coat, a scarf, a hat, and thick wool mittens in his arms. “For you,” he said, and held them out. “You’ll need them today.”

I’d agreed to join him on a walk while Wynnie and Mrs. Jameson played the piano in the gallery. Mrs. Jameson was teaching Wynnie chords, and the notes echoed through the house. I was anxious to get outside in the landscape I’d seen only from my window.

I zipped, buttoned, fastened, and tightened all the wool attire Charlie gave me. Then I stood in that weathered kitchen and said, “I will now need to be rolled out of the house and across the lawn.”

He laughed and then said, “And you’re not done yet.” He reached behind and pulled out a pair of green wellies, knee-high rain boots with splatters of mud dried on the toes. “You’ll need these. With all the rain and snow, it’ll be muddy out there.”

I sat on the bench and pulled on the boots, which were a bit too big but snug enough, while Charlie continued talking. “I called a friend at the embassy today about your passport. He said as soon as they open, the process will be expedited. We’ll get you out of here, but most likely not in time for your original ship’s booking. I’ll call the steam line and tell them the problem—we can rebook the tickets as soon as you are ready.”

“I can call the steam line, but thank you so much. For a moment, I forgot about all of that. Being here feels as if everything else stops.”

He opened the door. A blast of icy air hit my face and I smiled. “I swear I can smell the sea.”

“You can,” he said. “It’s about an hour away, but the wind brings it here. We’re not that far.”

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked as he shut the door and we headed across the grounds.

“Anything.” He set his arm to my elbow to guide me through the winter grass to the stone walkway.

“Why do you know so much about the Gaelic language?”

We walked across a pebbled path, the ground shifting beneath the boots.

“My dad.” Charlie opened a low wooden gate, and we had walked out onto the wide sweeping lawn I’d seen from my window when he stopped and looked at me, right at me. “You are a beautiful woman, Clara. Even hidden under all these layers I’ve bundled you in.”

The heat again, the charge of it up my body and neck. In his words, the way he said them, I believed him. I was, right then, beautiful.

“Thank you,” I said. “But I do believe you’ve seen me at my worst.”

“If that’s your worst, lucky you.” He smiled and began to walk again; I followed.

To our left, on the other side of a low wooden fence, the sheep that had appeared as freckles of white from my window moved along the snowy ground, lifting their friendly faces to us in curiosity and then returning to their grazing. A cow lowed from inside the wooden barn. In front of me, a lane wound its way through the land like a silver river. We crossed the road to the soft ground of pasture; to our right were the three stone cottages. The sky sat as a low ceiling of wool and fluff, holding the snow.

Charlie’s pace quickened now, and I walked next to him as he shifted subjects. “As for Gaelic, the little I do know is from the songs. My father is Irish, although he moved to England when he was twenty-one, after the Easter Rising. He carried all the old stories with him and passed them on to us. But it destroyed his family and broke his heart.”

“What happened?”

Charlie stared off as if he might see it with his father’s eyes; he swallowed. “They were caught in the crossfire of 1916. His mum had passed on years before, but his father and brother were in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is all I really know. He promised that one day he’d tell us the whole story, but I guess that won’t happen now.”

“I’m sorry. These stories our parents took with them should have been told.” I took a step and my boot sank deep into the mud, making a squishing sound as I pulled it out. This land was so soft, a welcoming and tender gentleness in the ground.

“Well, he loved the land and its people; one of his great cousins lives with us in that cottage, and she knows some Gaelic also.” He waved toward the lake’s edge. “Dad told us the stories of the wee folk who live underground, the importance of language to define the world, the hidden secrets of an unseen world.”

“Sounds like the way my mother spoke. She always talked of such things. And often it terrified me.”

Charlie stopped on the path before the expanse of his world, the cottages and home, the sweeping lawn and wicker-caged gardens, the woodlands surrounding it all. Mounds of moss-covered stone walls and boulders leading us down to the lake on green swells of earth. “Your father loved it here?”

“My father was a man who loved everything. His curiosity and absolute wonder about the world made him that way.”

“That’s why his library was so important to him.”

“Yes.”

We continued toward the lake, sloping downhill. “If he was curious about language, maybe he bought Mother’s papers from someone else? From a dealer?” I was grasping for answers even as I was marveling at the sights around us, at the jagged edges of the mountains glowing nearly blue under the cloud cover, and the softer swells beneath.

“He could have, yes. When I first found the satchel, I called his dealer at Sotheby’s, and he knew nothing of it. Which leaves the mystery of why it was in his safe.”

We reached the edge of the frost-crusted lake. A flock of geese startled and honked, scattering across the still waters and creating ripples. I stood quietly and held my hand to my chest and allowed the wild beauty of this place to wash over me. A wind picked up, dancing in the top of the trees, producing a song of wind and branches, a whisper of nature’s ease.

“I’d never leave if this were mine,” I said. “Tell me about your home.”

“Our house was once built for a vicar but has been in my mother’s family for almost a hundred years now.” He turned to the house behind us. “Built from the slate of these mountains. Like everything around here, it was many things before it was ours. There are much grander homes along this lake and just to the east of us at Windermere Lake, manors built by Lancashire and Yorkshire mill owners, by flax and wool and cotton money. But Mum’s family was always in finance, and this was their summer home.” He pointed to the left. “And just beyond there, where you can’t see, is Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top.”

“Did your mother know her?”

“Very well, yes. They cared about the same things.”

“She was my idol growing up, Charlie. I imagined her as my mother when my real one left. A woman who could create an entire world of bunnies and kittens, of mischief and beauty.” I blushed with the heat of realizing I’d said too much, exposed the tender hunger for a mother in the emptiness of not having one.

“That’s so sweet,” he said. “Ask Mum about her, she’ll tell you funny stories. We’ll walk up to her favorite tarn when you feel up to it.”

“Tarn?”

“A small mountain lake, from the Old Norse word Tjorn , meaning ‘teardrop.’?”

“Teardrop,” I said. “That’s so… sublime.”

He pointed toward the woodlands and then the mountains. “That is Grizedale Forest and those are the Coniston Fells.”

“Oh, I want to paint this.”

He smiled at me. “Your art. I want to know more about all of it.”

“I want to know everything about this place.” I meant it; I had an overwhelming need to know how this land had formed and came to be, because if it had something to do with my mother, which it was becoming clearer and clearer that it did, the answers were hidden in this landscape.

“That will take some time,” he said, and jostled me with an elbow, smiling.

I looked to him. “There was a word in Mother’s language she describes as ‘the loneliness at the heart of things; believing you will find what will quench the longing but there is nothing, not of this world.’?” I closed my eyes as I tried to see the definition on the page, the one I’d written out when I’d copied the words alphabetically. “And that is how this feels.”

“It feels lonely?”

“No, it feels as if it might expose the loneliness, as if it hints at something you long for but can’t possess as your own.”

“Yes.” He stared across the lake where the geese settled on the other side, where the mountains cast long-armed shadows toward us. “I’m so sorry about everything for you, Clara.”

“Please don’t feel sorry for me.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you. I am just sorry it happened. Leaving is an awful thing to do to a child.”

“It is. Yes. The not knowing is terrible. And now there’s a new layer—where has she been all these years, and is she gone now?”

“And why my father—”

“Yes. Our families are—”

“Entwined, yes. I believe they are.”

“Is there a way to ask your brother?”

“I will.” He leaned down to pick a white feather from the earth, twirled it in his hand. “I was waiting to see what we could discover first.”

We . The way he said it felt solid, as if we existed.

“Your brother seems so lovely,” I said, needing a change of subject.

“Yes, he’s very protective of me, as is Adelaide.”

“Why?”

“He always has been, just as I have been with him. Because I’m his brother, and his twin, and because they’ve seen me heartbroken in the last year. My fiancée left me for a mate who she’d been seeing on the side for over a year. For our whole life it’s been Archie and me against the world. Side by side.”

This was the hurt I saw in him the first time he sang to us the song in the London flat. “I know what it’s like to have life unravel in that way,” I told him. “Sometimes people are awful to each other.”

He nodded, and the muscles in his face twitched.

“Come now.” I imitated his speech. “Let’s walk before I turn into an icicle at the side of your lake.”

He pointed to the left. “We’ll take the path around the south side and then come back this way.”

“Do you know a lot of people here?”

“Not like Mum. I keep myself to myself most times.”

Yes, I thought, that self-possession I noticed the first day.

We passed an upside-down rowboat and walked out on the protrusion of land that thrust itself into the lake. Boulders as big as cars dotted the edges of the lake, mounds of moss on the edges. The snow turned the world into shapes more than images. “Your heartbreak,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make light. Sometimes I just don’t know what else to say. I’ve always been awkward that way.”

“No, it was okay. I’m tired of the I’m sorry. I get plenty of that.”

We walked in the sounds of the land, the creak of branches rubbing against one another, the soft crack and rustle of the ground beneath our feet. “You said you know that kind of pain?” he asked.

“Yes. My ex-husband, Nat, battled with a different lover—gambling.”

“That’s quite possibly worse,” he said. “Hard to hate an addiction.”

“Oh, but I do. And it’s so sad that my daughter must have divorced parents when I did so want to give her what I didn’t have—two parents at home.”

We’d turned back and headed toward the cottages, the ones I had seen from my window, the rooflines and chimneys. He stopped on the path when we neared one of them. Smoke billowed from its single chimney, and inside, a pale light flickered. “I wish that hadn’t happened to you,” he said.

“Makes two of us.” I pointed at the cottage of gray stone, yellow and green lichen growing in its curves and edges. “Is this Snow White’s house?”

He laughed. “Looks like it. But no, that’s my aunt Nelle’s cottage. She’s my mom’s sister and was born with a disability they’ve never truly labeled. She’s like a child, but a quirky child. The questions she will ask you will startle.”

“Like?”

“Today has a bird flown over your head? Are you worried about the fractures under the earth? Can you tell me the name of three gods?” He laughed. “A caregiver lives with her, and we often must find new ones. As sweet as she is, she exhausts them. But my mum, and Father also, always refused to let her be cared for by others.”

“They sound so kind. Your parents, I mean.”

“They are. Father took in all kinds of strangers and family.” He waved to the other two cottages. “And the two others are full also. One is my grandcousin Isolde from Ireland, and the other is the groundskeeper, who is on holiday in Australia now—smart one to leave during the winter to a place where it’s summer.”

“How is it to have this many people around all the time?”

He pulled a face. “Do I sound like a prig when I describe our life? Forgive me if I do.”

“No, not one bit. It’s just…”

“Unlike yours.”

“Yes. It makes my life seem so small.”

“There is nothing wrong with small and chosen, Clara.”

We made our way around the back edge of the cottages, and my nose felt frozen. I touched it with my mitten and rubbed.

“You’re cold,” he said.

“It’s okay. This is…” I pointed back at his house. “I can’t find the word.”

“But you have a whole list of words in your room.”

I laughed. “Indeed, I do.”

Nearby, a wooden bench sat under a naked oak tree, and I walked to it, sat down. I shivered with the cold held in its seat. Charlie sat near me, and I told him, “There’s another word of Mother’s that is closer to what I feel, but it’s part of the missing pages, and I only remember its definition.”

“Tell me?”

“?‘A desire with despair at its core and with hope at its edges.’ The rhythm and dance of that sentence has stuck with me, but not the word itself.”

“Say it again.” He took my hand, and I allowed it.

“?‘A desire with despair at its core and with hope at its edges.’?”

“Yes.” He held my mittened hand in his and there we sat, and it was this way: ice crackled at the edge of a silver lake; geese flew in a V overhead, squawking their joy at the world; a naked hawthorn tree spread its gnarled arms above the land; and a wet flake of snow landed on my face.

Charlie whispered, “Here it comes.”

The cotton whorl of clouds let loose what it held in its cold fists. Fat wet flakes fell around us, dotting us with the opposite of the sooty flakes of London. Something in this—in the sweet release from the sky of something beautiful and not poisonous—touched my heart and I felt tears slide down my face, warm against my cold skin. I wiped them off quickly before Charlie noticed.

I shivered, Charlie stood, and I joined him silently. We walked back the way we’d come, and he told me all that would arrive in spring: the cheerful yellow of the daffodils the first arrival, and then the purple faces of the eyebright, followed by tall, colorful flowers like the wood cranesbill, water avens, and roseroot. He told of how white-felted leaves hung from the rare downy willow. With his every description, the impossible desire to see his world come to life in spring washed over me.

“And the lakes,” I said. “So many.”

“Sixteen major ones, but ninety-nine if you count all the tarns and ponds and meres.”

“You could spend a lifetime exploring.”

“Yes,” he said. “And I have, and I will. Just like Father.”

“I bet you have a million stories like the Tizzie-Whizie.”

“I do, but may I tell you an Irish story instead?” he asked.

“Tell me.”

We stood facing each other and he told me, “There was once a great Irish warrior who was sent far across the land to retrieve the gold and treasure of a conquest. He took his most reliable and trustworthy fellows. After carrying the heavy treasure for miles and days, the great warrior sat on a rock and would not move. The fellows with him begged him to move and to carry faster, for the king was waiting for his gold.”

He paused and I nudged him.

“The warrior didn’t answer anyone. He sat and sat and sat. Days passed until he opened his eyes, and he told them it was time to go. ‘What were you waiting for?’ they all cried.”

“What was he waiting for?” I asked, feeling a truth draw near, a tingle in my chest.

“The warrior told the others: ‘We traveled too far too fast, and I waited for my soul to catch up.’?”

“Oh,” I said, and placed my hand on my heart. “Incredible.”

“I hope you can sit still here just enough to let that happen to you.”

“Thank you, Charlie. Thank you.” I put out my arms to hug him and he held me close, and even through the wool and the scarves and the coats, I felt his solid body. He let go first, and I knew I would have stayed just like that until my soul caught up with me.

I nearly moved to kiss him, but we began to walk again. Rounding the path back to cross the lane, we came upon a wooden sign planted deep in the ground, a hand-carved sign with a word etched on it and an arrow that pointed down the pathway: Parthanium .

I stopped, feeling a warm sense of familiarity along my ribs, an opening in my heart. “ Parthanium ,” I said. “?‘A walled garden; paradise; to find what you are looking for; a place of one’s own.’?”

I recited as best I could from memory the word and definition I’d read that very morning in Mother’s handwriting, in the last of her pages.

Charlie touched the sign. “This is new. I haven’t noticed it before.”

“Charlie, that is one of Mother’s words.”