The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 42 Clara

CHAPTER 42? CLARA

Lake District, England

“Since the moment you told me about your mother I have been restless,” Pippa said. “I want to help.”

By the lake’s shore, in the early morning mist, Charlie and I were a mixture of both shy and familiar with each other. We laughed about yesterday’s “American lunch” of soggy meatloaf and macaroni and cheese baked to burnt and woke the sleepy glacier waters by tossing pebbles across the smooth surface and watching the circles grow outward. A low mist sat on the water, clouds that fell to earth.

That was where Pippa found Charlie and me the day after Wynnie and I had visited Hill Top. She pulled her scarf tighter as she faced us. “In my sleepless night, I found a few things if you’d like to hear about them.”

“Tell us,” I said, no longer feeling the dreaminess of the morning, alert now.

“Charlie, darling, all of those pages and pages that your father typed in his room?”

“Yes.” He stepped closer to his mother and dropped the pebble he held.

“I went through the piles in his cabinets.”

“You’d never done that before?”

“No. Why would I?” She looked quizzically at him as if invading anyone’s privacy wasn’t even worth a thought. “Even now I feel guilty about doing it. One of the secrets to a loving and long marriage is that one must always have a place for oneself, within oneself. These were his private rooms. I trusted him. What I found has nothing to do with your mother, Clara. And I’m sorry for that.”

“What did you find?” Charlie asked.

“All these years as your father refused to talk about his family, as he was quiet about his absence during the Easter Rising, about his history and losing everyone he loved except Isolde… he hasn’t talked about it because he has been writing about it. We have his entire family history, Charlie.” Her face trembled as a single tear fell down her right cheek. She brushed it away.

“Oh, Mum, that is brilliant. I don’t know what to say!”

I grasped Charlie’s arm. “You have them! You have your father’s stories now. He didn’t leave without telling you, just like he promised.”

Pippa nodded. “These stories will break your heart. We have them now. We have them forever.” Pippa looked to me. “Nothing of your mother, I am so very sorry to say. But I made some phone calls. Eliza is in the village. She arrived just last night in time for the Christmas festival and to visit her husband’s family.”

“May I—”

“Meet her?” Pippa asked. “Yes.”

“We’ve met on the bridge between our work—illustrations and story—but never once in real life. Not even on the phone. Eliza Walker changed my life.”

“How so?” Pippa asked.

“My work had been published a few times before, and editors were suggesting me for other work, but Harriet the Hedgehog brought me the Caldecott and everything that will come after. I would love to meet her and thank her.” I wanted even more than that from her. I wanted answers.

“You won the Caldecott,” Charlie said. “Not Eliza, but I understand you’d love to meet her. It seems astounding that you never have.”

“Today at three o’clock for tea?” Pippa asked.

Eliza Walker was one more clue in a long line of them that made no sense and didn’t connect. Maybe she was the one who could attract the random pieces of filament like a magnet and draw them all together.

Charlie and Pippa stared at me, and I realized I wasn’t answering. “Yes,” I said. “Please.”

I would finally meet the woman whose books I illustrated, a woman I had collaborated with yet never met anywhere but on the page and in my imagination.

Nestled in the middle of Hawkshead, Eliza Walker’s home was only a block from the theater where my mother’s play was performed. We stood in front of a whitewashed stone house with a gray slate roof and a bright yellow door. Charlie and Pippa walked briskly up the stone pathway. Wynnie and I held back. I wanted to take this all in, I wanted it to mean something, to remember the day I met the woman who changed my life by hiring me to illustrate her stories I once believed were set in Maine.

The door opened, and voices rang out from inside. “Charlie! Pippa! Come in, come in.” A booming voice soaked with a British accent. He was a stout man, thick and short, with a ruddy face and a bulbous nose, charming as an elf.

Wynnie and I made our way to the front door, and he held out his hand. “Thomas Walker. And who do I have the pleasure of meeting?”

“I am Clara Harrington, and this is my daughter, Wynnie,” I said.

He shook our hands with vigor and smiled as if we’d brought him a gift. Then he looked over his shoulder to the inside of the cottage and hollered out: “Your brilliant illustrator is here, Eliza! Come, come and meet her.” He looked back to me as he stepped aside to let us all enter the warm home. “How astonishing that you are here in Cumbria.”

Once inside, all I could do was look for Eliza. An unnamed hope fluttered inside, and I was afraid of it, afraid to nurture it.

Eliza entered the living room where we all stood by a blazing fire as it crackled and warmed the room. She smiled at me, and I looked so closely that I must have been rudely staring and squinting.

I hadn’t voiced my hope, but it was alive all along—a wish and a longing that I’d been illustrating my mother’s books, that she’d wanted me alongside in her creative endeavors, that I was with her even though she’d left me.

The hope fizzled as quickly as I recognized it, gone. This woman carried nothing of my mother in her. Sure, she was as Pippa described her, but she was older, not nearly as tall as Mother.

“Welcome,” Eliza said, and first turned her attention to Charlie and Pippa, hugging them and exclaiming how very happy she was to see them on her first full day in Hawkshead.

“Thank you for your kind letter about Callum,” Pippa said as she held Eliza’s hands. “It means more than I can say.”

“It seems impossible that he is gone,” Eliza said. “He was such a force of vibrancy, such a tender and wonderful man. They don’t make men like that much anymore.” Next to her, Thomas coughed and Eliza grasped her husband’s hand. “But for you, darling, but for you.”

Then she turned to me and to Wynnie, nearly holding our breath.

She walked to me and held out her hand. “And you must be the enchanting illustrator who has brought my Harriet to life. How wonderful that I can finally meet you. I thought it would never happen! I must say I could not have hoped for any better. You have enlivened my stories, and I will forever be grateful.” Her mixed Boston and British accents were a jumble of sounds.

I shook her hand. “Lovely to meet you, too, and this is my daughter, Wynnie.”

“I love Harriet,” Wynnie said. “I’m happy she came to visit you. What will you do with her next?”

Eliza laughed, the warm sound of a grandmother who might pull a child on her knee and tell a story. “Now that’s a mystery until I sit down with her to tell another story.”

Wynnie bounced with excitement. “Can you hurry?”

I chimed in: “Thank you so much for having me be part of Harriet’s world. It’s been an honor.” I pushed past the flash of disappointment and reminded myself of the gratitude I owed this woman.

“Come now, let’s have tea, and I want to hear all about how you have found your way to Cumbria and then to me.”

Settled in the living room, each with our cup of tea and plates balanced on our laps as we nibbled the most buttery scones I’d ever eaten, we chatted about Eliza and Thomas’s journey back to Cumbria, how a squirrel had made a nest in their bedroom while they were gone, and how very happy they were to return.

The subject turned to my arrival. “It all has to do with my mother,” I said. “And a large stack of old papers that were found in Mr. Jameson’s library.”

“What kind of papers?”

“Her writings,” I said. “My mother was…”

In my pause, Eliza gently said, “Yes, Pippa told me that your mother was the author of The Middle Place . How astounding.” She looked to her friend. “But, Pippa, you didn’t tell me about the papers.” She focused on me now. “Are they connected to the sequel the world was always hounding her for?”

“Close. They were words, a list of words she’d made up.” I hesitated. “But that is exactly what brought us here. Well, that and the poisonous fog.”

“Oh, wasn’t it awful?” Eliza said. “Well then, it looks like we have Callum and his library to thank for this lovely meeting.”

“Pardon?” Pippa asked.

“Callum was the one to suggest I ask my publisher about you, Clara.”

Pippa took a sip of her tea as if nothing was amiss, as if they were talking of the beautiful day. “And how did that come about?” she asked.

Charlie sat next to me, and he pushed his knee against mine, a quiet reminder that he was there.

“Don’t you remember? You were there, too,” Eliza said. She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them as if she’d been retrieving the memory. “The spring festival of 1947. It was storytime in the theater, and every child in town was there, as a rainstorm sprang up.”

“We gave out Flakie bars,” Pippa said. “That might have helped. It was packed—children on the floor and in every seat, mums in the aisles.” Pippa’s voice pitched higher with the memory. “I remember. And you read your first hedgehog story out loud to the children. But her name was different back then… is that it? Am I remembering correctly?”

“Exactly! Her name was Hermione, but the publisher in the end thought the name was too British, so we changed it to Harriet. Too difficult for children who were learning to read to pronounce, they said.”

“Yes.” Pippa smiled. “That spring day while a storm rattled the old theater, you mesmerized every child and mum under your spell when you read that first book.”

“I’d just sold it to a small press in Boston,” she said. “And I was trying it out for the first time. No pictures, then.”

Eliza smiled and her eyes nearly closed with it. “You and Callum and the aunts were there, do you remember that?”

“Yes, we’d all come for the festival and wanted to hear you read.”

“When it was over, Callum came to me and said he knew of an incredible illustrator. He’d seen her work in several Little Golden Books and thought I might suggest you, Clara, to my publisher.”

“Is that so?” Pippa asked. “Callum always did know so much about children’s books.”

I couldn’t keep quiet any longer; I fairly burst with the question. “That’s what I was told—that you found my work in a Little Golden Book and thought we might pair well together. But I thought the publisher suggested me, not the other way around.”

“No, I brought your name to them, from Callum. Everything I know about you came from him.”