The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 41 Clara

CHAPTER 41? CLARA

Lake District, England

I imagined a long path and winding road to the cottage where Beatrix Potter had lived, an enchanted forest and shaded glen. I was wrong. A simple white fence on the road bordered her patch of garden and home. Wynnie and I walked out the front door of the Jamesons’ home, down the lane, past the next-door farm and the Tower Bank Arms, and there it was—Hill Top. The land hay-colored and covered in frost.

The simple house, which was made of stone walls topped by a slate roof, sat at the end of a long flagstone pathway, gardens leading us forward on either side.

“She lived here?” Wynnie asked.

“Yes,” I told her. “Moved here after her fiancé died. Just up and made her own life with her art and her stories.”

We reached the front door, where a woman in a blue uniform stood with pamphlets to hand us. But first we turned to look at the brick-walled garden, the rows of wicker cages, the wheelbarrow and watering cans. Behind it, the fells rose and sank like waves, the house cupped in the trough.

A man stood by the garden gate. He held a branch and then broke it in half, held it out to a woman bundled in a thick brown coat. As Wynnie made her way to the green iron gate that led into the yard, I smiled with a realization.

“Finneas,” I called out.

He turned with a surprised look, and then he spied Wynnie and burst out with a “Greetings, ladies! Very fancy meeting you here!”

“Indeed,” I called in return as I rushed over to greet him.

He shook my hand vigorously. “How did you find me? I am so pleased.”

“I didn’t on purpose.” I laughed as Wynnie came to us.

He greeted Wynnie and then looked inquiringly back at me. “You just happen to be here?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s quite a story.”

“I have time,” he said when the woman beside him made a coughing noise in the back of her throat. “Oh, how rude of me. Clara, please meet Susan Ludbrook, director of the museum.”

She smiled. “Lovely to meet you. Seems we didn’t collar the rosebushes correctly. He’s here to put us to rights.”

“Not sure anyone can do that,” he said, and then smiled at me. “Wonderful to see you.”

“I thought you were a farmer,” I said to him.

“Oh, I am. But gardening is my passion. And although I’m no expert, I help when I can.”

Mrs. Ludbrook laughed. “Oh, he’s an expert all right. Don’t be fooled by this man’s utter humility. We couldn’t keep these gardens as they are without his help.”

I stared at the charming vine-covered cottage. “Did you know her? Beatrix, I mean?”

“Yes, I did,” he said. “And no one can truly do her garden justice like she did, but I try.”

Mrs. Ludbrook spoke. “You know she didn’t live here in the end; she lived across the lane. When she was here in Hill Top working, she was Beatrix Potter, but when she walked across this path to the house over there”—she lifted her chin at the pasture and the house beyond—“there, she was Mrs. William Heelis, and when she died, she left over fourteen farms, all donated to the government, which is why you can visit today.” She nodded at Finneas. “Now off to work I go. Lovely to meet you both,” she said to us.

Finneas and I wandered the lanes of the garden, Wynnie next to us interjecting questions about everything from the real Peter Rabbit to Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, until I finally asked what preoccupied me. “Charlie Jameson said you know his family?”

He laughed. “Know them? I love them dearly. Callum was my mate, God rest his soul, and Pippa loves her gardens nearly as much as I do my own. May I ask how you know them?”

“We are staying with them,” Wynnie said. “And you should see our room. It’s made for a princess.”

“Oh?”

“Remember those papers I told you about?” I asked him.

“Yes.” Curiosity had him leaning forward.

“It was Mr. Jameson’s library where they were found.”

Finneas slapped the edge of a fence line and laughed. “How did I not see this? Of course it would be my old mate. I should have known the minute you told me about it. This is the kind of thing that obsessed him—literary mysteries.”

I squinted into the sun, which had burst from a low cloud. I lifted my palm to shield my eyes. “How is it that the man I meet on a ship is friends with the man who has my mother’s papers?”

“Because England isn’t so big a country?”

I looked at him and he said, “But more likely because when the alltar conspires to show you something, if you are paying attention, you will see it and your life will be revealed.”

“Alltar?”

“The unseen world.” He smiled. “Now you think I’m batty.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “Now I think we can have a real conversation. Sorry to pepper you with questions, but do you know Eliza Walker also?”

“I do.”

“Well?”

“No, just casually in the town. But she’s lovely. A writer, you see.”

“Yes, I know. I illustrate her children’s books.”

“Pardon me? You illustrate Eliza Walker’s children’s books? You draw Harriet?”

“I do.”

“Wow.” He stared off for a minute. “You are awfully tied to this place without ever having been here.”

“I know. It’s… odd, and I am trying to piece it together.”

“Did you know Eliza lives here part-time?”

“I didn’t until yesterday. I thought she lived in Maine.”

“My, my.” He rubbed his hands together. “The mystery deepens.”

“Best explanation I’ve heard yet,” I said.

His smile went to a thin line. “I didn’t mean to make light, Clara.”

“You didn’t. It’s all a mystery and I don’t know if there’s any way to solve it, but I’m here.”

He smiled and Wynnie stopped next to us. “I can see Peter.” She pointed at the far corner of the garden against the brick wall. “Do you?”

I bowed down and pretended to search. “He must have scurried away,” I told her, and wished I truly could view all she saw.

“Do you?” she asked Finneas.

“I don’t see him right now, but I have at other times.” He smiled at Wynnie, and I thought she might hug him.

“Let’s get out of the cold?” he asked, and nodded toward Hill Top.

After a tour of the charming house, a view from the window seat of Beatrix’s bedroom, a few stories of her talents from sheep farming to horticulture to conservation, we heard the story we already knew about how Peter Rabbit was born from a letter she’d written to a sick child, and how she once fell in love with her publisher, who died, and how the man she married was once her solicitor.

Mrs. Ludbrook noticed I was staring at a page of indecipherable words under glass. “That’s a page from her journal,” Mrs. Ludbrook said.

“Can’t really read it,” I said leaning closer. “It’s—”

“Written in her secret language.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, yes. It seems that our industrious Beatrix created her own coded language so she could write whatever she wanted in her journal without her parents being able to read it.”

“That’s utterly fascinating.”

Mrs. Ludbrook smiled at my interest. “Indeed, and there is a man trying to decode it, but I’m of the opinion that if Beatrix didn’t want us to read it, then, well, maybe we shouldn’t read it.”

“Exactly,” I said, thinking of my mother’s sequel, of how it was quite possible she never wanted anyone to read it… until now.

After we inspected every square inch of the cottage—the hidden corners and tiny cupboards, the places where she drew inspiration, the way she made art out of the pieces of her life—I told Finneas it was time for Wynnie and me to scurry home for lunch. “They’ll be worrying about us. We’ve given them all quite the scare, and I don’t need them traipsing off to find me.”

“Have you found what you were looking for? What you need?”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t. Unless you’re asking if I’ve found the most enchanting land I’ve ever seen.”

“I meant answers about your mother.”

“None. If you know anything…”

“I don’t,” he said. “Callum never said a word about any of this. Not once to me, anyway.”

“That’s what Charlie and Pippa say, too.”

He laughed. “Oh, she’s Pippa to you now? Looks like you are nearly family.”

I smiled.

“Well, I guess we all have secrets.” Then he grew slightly serious. “I’ll stop by and visit in the next few days. I’ve promised Pippa. I was just giving her some time to settle.”

Wynnie lifted her head from a drawing from The Tale of Mr. Tod. “I’ve heard her cry, but when we see her, she’s perfectly all right.”

“That’s the private part,” Finneas said gently. “I’ve had my own private grief.” He stood before I could ask why.

With promises to see each other again, we parted. As Wynnie chattered like a squirrel about all the wonders she’d seen, we made our way back down the lane. Across the meadow sat the white house of Mrs. Heelis and paths leading up to the hills. I wanted to walk those paths, to be led toward something I couldn’t name.

We reached the Jameson house, where Charlie waited for us in the warm drawing room. We plopped down on the couches, and he asked us how it all went.

Last night’s kiss seemed to linger between us, and I wondered if he wanted another in the same way I did. I folded my hands so as not to reach for him. The embarrassment faded with his presence, and now I just wanted more of him.

“It was so interesting to see where she lived,” I said about Hill Top. “I had imagined something grander. Isn’t that silly? I mean, we make our art from whatever life we have. It doesn’t need to be grand to make something beautiful.”

He smiled. “I’m glad you think so. Now,” he said, “Moira has prepared an American lunch for all of us, or so she says.”

“What is an American lunch?” I asked.

“We shall see.”

“Charlie, I’m glad Pippa suggested I go today. It was the first time in a long time that I wasn’t thinking about the mysteries that have been plaguing me. It was glorious. Time stood still for a while, and I let it all in.”

“When here and now cease to matter,” he said.

A tingle of recognition. “Eliot,” I said, “T. S. Eliot. The line is ‘Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter.’?”

“Yes!” His smile was full.

“A nearly perfect poem in my opinion,” I said. “It starts with ‘In my beginning is my end.’?”

He raked his hand through his hair. “And ends with ‘In my end is my beginning.’?”

“Mother taught it to me,” I said.

He nodded. “I don’t remember where I learned it, probably university.”

I smiled at him and felt our connection, these threads of our lives pulling and pulling until finally here we sat. My God, I wanted to kiss him again. Wynnie watched us with a smile.

We stood up to go into the dining room when I stopped to face him. “Oh,” I said. “And we ran into Finneas Andrews, our friend from the ship.”

“He’s a good man. How strange all the ties you have here,” Charlie said, and placed an arm over my shoulder in a sudden gesture of such tenderness that I hugged him and lingered in his arms long enough for Wynnie to wiggle her way into the embrace.