The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 37 Clara

CHAPTER 37? CLARA

Lake District, England

“But you don’t have to believe me for it to be true.”

I entered the drawing room just as Wynnie said this to Charlie. They stood at the window watching the landscape being transformed by the falling snow. So many times, she’d said the same to me about Emjie. I watched Charlie’s face as he reassured her that indeed he believed her.

“Hello!” I called out, and Charlie turned to me with a smile.

“How do we feel about going to the play tonight?” Charlie asked. “Mum is asking.”

“We feel grand,” Wynnie said, and clapped her hands together. “We must go!” She tried for a British accent and did a much better job than I had in my weak attempt.

The sound of the front door chimes interrupted us.

“Excuse me,” Charlie said. “Probably more Christmas decorations arriving. Prepare to reside in a house of even more tinsel and lights and greenery and wreaths.” He walked out of the room.

“Christmas,” Wynnie said.

“Yes, and I think that means we need to find our way home.”

“Not yet,” she said, and turned back to the window. “Please.”

I bit my lip and told her the truth. “Wynnie, I really don’t want to miss the Caldecott Award ceremony. It means a lot to me.”

“What if something here means even more?”

“Oh, darling,” I said. “Only you mean more.”

The snow stopped just as Archie and Adelaide bid everyone goodbye for London. I’d sent them off with a handwritten note and a plea for them to please send a telegram when they arrived in London. We are in Northern England. Safe. Please call . And I left the number for the Jamesons’ house. Archie promised to send and shooed off any suggestion I might pay them back.

When their taillights faded in the dusky light, the rest of us left for the theater, the Vanguard bumping along the narrow winding road to the village of Hawkshead. First the lake was on our left and then it disappeared behind hedgerows that were so close that if I opened the car’s window, I’d touch them. Charlie drove while Mrs. Jameson sat in the front seat, and Wynnie and I were in the back, where the car retained the smell of soot. Wynnie and I made faces at each other across the bench seat.

I was trying to get a sense of the villages and towns; we’d left Near Sawrey and made our way to Hawkshead. Charlie stopped at the corner, where a post wrapped in black and white stripes held three signs, one toward Hawkshead, one toward Tarn Hows, and one toward Windermere, the road curving and splitting. He took the bend on the left, and there we were in another village, one that looked ancient, timeworn, and solid.

We drove past limewashed homes, stone walls, pastures of sweet-faced sheep. Cobblestone streets and tight curves. We passed the ice cream shop and meat market, the flower shop, and the Queens Head hotel and pub, past the slate roofs and dark green doors, the bright blue doors and the yellow, and everywhere the greenery of Christmas, small lights twinkling from gas lanterns and entryways. Charlie drove down Flag Street and toward a whitewashed building with a peeling sign above it: Burrough Theatre .

“This town,” I said. “Is it real?”

Mrs. Jameson laughed. “Isn’t it marvelous? During the twelfth century it was a sheep walk managed by monks. Then it was a market village in the sixteen hundreds.” She shook her head. “You surely don’t want a history lesson. Just enjoy it.”

“I’d love a history lesson,” I told her. “I enjoy knowing how things started, what they were before they become what they are now.”

“Did you know this is where William Wordsworth went to grammar school?” she asked.

“Really? Right here?”

“Right there,” she said as we passed a whitewashed building. “Right off Leather, Rag and Putty Street.”

“Odd name,” I said even as I heard the great love Mrs. Jameson held for this place and land.

“It’s what was sold on that street. And Christmas fair is next week,” Mrs. Jameson said as she turned her head to look at us in the back seat.

It seemed nearly impossible to believe that only three days ago we’d been trapped in a sickly fog that could have killed Wynnie and now here we were in this place that seemed as if it existed out of another time, a land one could arrive at only through a portal.

Wynnie’s wide eyes were taking it all in. She wore a green velvet dress with a lace collar that Mrs. Jameson had found in a trunk of old clothes. We both wore lamb’s-wool full-length coats with rabbit-fur collars that smelled vaguely of mothballs, and I felt as elegant as if I were to be at a ball.

Charlie dropped us off as he went to park the car, and we stepped across the threshold of the wooden theater. The inside was as charming and rickety as an old sailing vessel, its hull shining and the cracks evident. The wooden seats wobbled as Mrs. Jameson, Wynnie, and I sat down in the front row and waited for Charlie. Players scrambled behind the red velvet curtain that billowed, pulsing in and out. Something dropped and someone laughed.

I remembered Finneas and how he was the first to tell us about this play. I surveyed the crowd to find him, but instead saw Charlie edging his way down the row to sit next to me, shedding his coat and settling in.

“Charlie,” I asked, “do you know a Finneas Andrews?”

“I do!” he said, and smiled. “How do you know him?”

“We met him on the ship.”

“He lives close to here. A farmer and shepherd and expert gardener, he’s a dear friend of Mum’s.”

“How… what a coincidence.”

“Indeed.”

Then music began, a jaunty tune of flutes and piccolo, and Mrs. Jameson made a shushing noise at her son as if he were five years old. He rolled his eyes at me, and I smiled, facing the curtain.

I wondered how they would act out my mother’s novel. I thought it nearly impossible to stage her story, with a magical world at its center. I’d seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream onstage, and it worked, but this was a rustic small-town theater. Ten minutes before the curtain was to rise, the small room filled with patrons. Men, women, and children crowded in, filling nearly all the seats.

“How often does this play?” I whispered to Mrs. Jameson.

“This holiday season we’ve decided to have it every Monday through Friday night for two months. The first two years we played it only in the spring, but we have more people in the village during the holidays, so we moved it. We close January through March, for no one visits here but those of us who love the deep quiet of winter.”

“Aren’t I lucky that I’m here for this one, then.”

“Aren’t you.” She smiled and touched my elbow, gave it a friendly squeeze.

I wondered if Mrs. Jameson would treat me differently if she knew my mother wrote the book for this play. Every hair on my neck and arms tingled with the approaching production, with the hints and clues that might be nestled inside.

If she was a patron of the theater, she must know more about who wrote the adaptation, who directed it, and how they were able to secure the rights. It was possible that Dad had granted rights and I’d never been told. I’d ask him next time we talked.

The lights dimmed and the curtain opened to reveal a fairy girl, a young woman with long dark hair that cascaded down her back in curls—obviously a wig, for only the true Emjie had such thick hair. A crown of red and white roses was perched on her head, and she floated about the stage on silk slippers, tossing flower petals.

Flute music floated from the side of the stage, and she twirled to its tune until it suddenly stopped. She turned on her tiptoes toward the audience. “Oh, you’re here,” she said. “How lovely! I’m Emjie and this is my land. I know you must wonder how I arrived here, for you most likely would love to do the very same.”

The crowd clapped on cue, for who would not want to visit this land of rivers and hillocks of luminescent green trees and small animals hidden in the forest of fairies. This landscape was painted on wood and cardboard, a mirage at best, but the dream was as seductive as it was elusive. Wouldn’t, she asked, any of you want the same?

“It all began…” the Emjie character said in a British accent. She paused while a tapestry of a city dropped behind her. It was, as near I could tell, an anonymous city of tall buildings and smokestacks, of cars and people and not a speck of green to be found. “In a city just like yours, in a house…” She walked to the side of the stage and stepped on a wooden platform. Two men slid the platform into plain sight, and on it was the interior of a house, with a mother and a father sitting at a linoleum kitchen table reading the London Times while Emjie watched them and they paid no attention to her.

“Mama,” Wynnie whispered on the other side of me. “That’s not Emjie.”

I leaned over to speak into her ear. “I know, baby, that’s an actress playing her.”

“I know. But that’s not how she sounds or looks.”

“Shh… For now, let’s just enjoy it.”

“I can’t.” Wynnie covered her eyes and then peeked between her fingers. I squeezed her knee.

The story unfolded in a sixty-minute play that remained true to the book’s plot. A young girl lives in the city with her parents. Her mother and father mostly ignore her for their work while Emjie makes a life outside in the tiny garden behind their home. It is there that she meets a flock of fairies, who sweep her away to their land. She has adventures and misadventures, from sea caves that flood to hailstorms that ruin her house of twigs and leaves, from meeting another child who wants to run away but ultimately doesn’t, to a talking deer and bear who guide her from the mountains to the sea. One day she decides she will throw off the bonds of her earthbound life and join the realm of fairies.

I could have recited her last lines as the actress gently said them into the hushed audience. “I will be invisible to all but the few who believe.” She lifted her arms and fairies of every hue from green to blue to yellow to pink descended from invisible strings in the ceiling and lit upon her arms and face and fluttered around her. Then in the growing dark, a rope descended, and Emjie reached behind her to fasten it to the waistband of ivy and leaves she’d worn for the last act.

I will be invisible to all but the few who believe.

Slowly she rose, high above the wooden stage scattered with paper leaves and flowers.

I knew the ending of the story, and still it took my breath away when she disappeared into the clouds above, the crowd rising to their feet.

If the audience read the rest of the book, they would know that Emjie left her family and her life to discover she was stuck in a dark fairy realm. It was lovely, in theory, for a children’s story like Peter Pan, but in real life it would be both a nightmare and a horror to have your child choose a fantasy life over her life with you.

Or if your mother chose another world over a life with you.

I swallowed around the lump in my throat as the small cast of six came out to bow. Cheers rose with a standing ovation. The production hadn’t varied from the book one bit, and yet a simple stage play could never show the depth and breadth of the novel.

An older woman with graying hair and a swirling patchwork dress seemed to glide onto the stage, waving her hands and then taking center stage to bow.

“Who is that?” I asked, squinting into the dim light, trying to find the woman’s face with a spark of hope. Always hope.

“The director,” Mrs. Jameson said.

“Her name?”

“Louisa Mayfair,” Mrs. Jameson said as she, too, rose to her feet to clap.

Expectancy lifted like a balloon, deflated, and sank.

Louisa looked directly at Mrs. Jameson and held out her hand in acknowledgment, blew her a kiss.

The crowd slowly made their way into the cold night, wrapping coats and scarves, kissing each other goodbye. Charlie, Wynnie, and I waited while Mrs. Jameson went to chat with the cast. I realized even as I was doing it that I was searching every face in the room for something that sparked of my mother. It was useless, but that didn’t stop me.

“Mama, I want to meet the girl who played Emjie,” Wynnie said, and brought me back to myself.

“Don’t you dare tell her she isn’t Emjie,” I teased Wynnie. “It will hurt her feelings.”

“I won’t say any such thing.” Wynnie moved toward Mrs. Jameson, and I followed.

Mrs. Jameson looked down at Wynnie. “Oh, darling, did you love it?”

“Very much,” Wynnie said in an unconvincing voice. Then she looked at Emjie. “What’s your real name?”

“Irene,” the girl said. “And yours?” She still wore Emjie’s costume and flowers spilled from her crown.

“My name is Wynnie,” she said. “This is my favorite story.”

“Well, mine too.” The young girl plucked a red rose from her crown and handed it to Wynnie. “You can keep this. It’s from Emjie.”

“Emjie doesn’t much like roses. She prefers yellow jessamine, violets, and forget-me-nots.”

“Indeed she does. But they aren’t in season now, so she must do with red and white roses.”

Wynnie laughed.

The girl looked up at Mrs. Jameson. “Was that better than last month? I changed the inflection in the middle part of the speech to try and find the emotion in the right place, as you said.”

“It was lovely indeed!” Mrs. Jameson hugged the girl. “With every performance, you improve. I am quite disappointed that soon we’ll have a hiatus.”

“Mrs. Jameson,” I said with a catch in my voice, “you help direct this play?”

“Oh,” Mrs. Jameson said. “I never direct. That is Louisa’s and Eliza’s job. I am just a patron with great interest, and a producer as needed.”

“Eliza?” I asked.

“Eliza Walker. She wrote the play.”

“Mama!” Wynnie nearly exploded off her feet. “That’s your author.”

“Yours?” Mrs. Jameson asked.

But I was mute, stunned into silence. Eliza Walker, author of Harriet the Hedgehog , had adapted my mother’s work into a play.