The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 50 Bronwyn

Bronwyn watched as her daughter leaned forward into the story, and her friend Pippa clasped her hands on her lap with her jaw set tight, as if she held back tears. Bronwyn longed to take Clara in her arms and rock her as if she were a child. But Clara wasn’t a child. She was a woman abandoned by her mother and might at any moment walk out of this room.

Bronwyn took a long, deep breath.

She’d offered them a summary that held within it a thousand other stories, but how was she to tell it all in one sitting? There would be years, she hoped, to narrate the intricacies, but for now she must try for the overall sweep of it without alienating those she loved with all her heart.

Bronwyn looked around the room with tears in her eyes. “When I planned to leave, and I did plan it, God help me, I thought of Callum, for we had a deep friendship. That year of 1915, all I’d wanted was a friend and to get away from Brian. After Callum returned to England, we kept in touch for about a year, and then I met Timothy. But the last time we communicated with holiday greeting cards in 1920, he was married to his great love. He was married to you, Pippa, and he was living at St. James’s. I knew his address and he’d said, ‘If you ever need anything or find yourself in London’… and I did need something. I needed protecting and he’d done it once before.”

“He’s a protector,” Charlie said. “Yes, he is.”

“I became his second cousin Isolde, who’d been educated in the United States and wasn’t in Ireland during the bombing, and thusly had taken on an American accent,” Bronwyn explained. “When my resolve melted and I wept into the night for you, Clara, and for Timothy, I reminded myself of a life of medications, a trial, institutions where they would lock me away. I imagined Clara with a mother damaged by drugs or shock therapy, and knew, as deep as my bones, that an absent mother was better than a damaged one, a locked-up one, a medicated one.”

“The rest,” she told Clara, Charlie, Wynnie, and Pippa as they sat around her table, “the rest was deceit, but my love and devotion was as real and true as the earth beneath our feet. I love the Jameson boys. I loved Callum and love you, Pippa. When the weight of pretending became too much and it was time to run again, Callum told me that it was time to quit running.”

“Your love for Callum?” Pippa asked with a tight voice.

“And the love I feel for you, Pippa. The love anyone would feel for a friend who saved them, protected them, and understood them.”

“Stop!” Clara stood now, as if she’d been jolted from the chair. Bronwyn watched her daughter’s face change from anger to soft need to anger again, and yet her voice was young. “What did you do here?”

Pippa answered Clara while still staring at Bronwyn. “Everything from tutoring to watching the children to helping in the garden. We employed her as well as the truth that she became part of the family.”

Clara shook her head and bit her lower lip. “I’m glad you knew her for all of that.” Then she turned back to Bronwyn. “And I love that you’ve lived this great life full of love and understanding, Mother. Bronwyn. Isolde. I don’t even know what to call you!”

Bronwyn sensed the hurt emanating from her beloved child, and it pained her, a cleaving in her chest. She could explain and explain her story, but the words were inadequate to heal the hurt of being abandoned. Bronwyn knew that as deeply as she knew her own heartbeat, for her father did the same to her. Even to her own ears her explanations sounded hollow.

She left to save her daughter. That was the truth.

“I know there is so much still to tell us. Tell me.” Clara’s voice was thick with unshed tears.

Bronwyn nodded. “I pray I have many more days and years to tell you the parts that matter.”

“Can I hear about the wall?” Wynnie chimed in now. “You built it, didn’t you?”

“I did, darling. I did. I built it one stone for every day I have been away from your mother and from you and Timothy. I started it the day I arrived here. I carried each one back from my long walks. Every single day, I add a stone and think of Clara and Timothy. I wanted to build something beautiful from the grief, a place where flowers and vines would grow.”

“The stone wall around the garden is about us?” Clara stopped pacing and went to Charlie’s side, absently placed her hand on his shoulder.

“Yes,” Bronwyn said.

“What word could possibly describe how I feel right now?” Clara asked. “The anger. The relief. The childish dream come true, and yet… Even you, Mother, even you don’t have a word for any of this. I know I don’t.”

“An important assignment for us all,” Bronwyn said. “We can and we will.”

“I am unsure I want one,” Clara said. Then she shuddered and headed toward the door. “I need to leave. I need to… take a breath… and leave.”

Bronwyn reached out her hand. “Please stay a bit longer. If you need or want to leave me after we talk, you may. Please don’t go. Listen to me, my daughter. I always threw myself headlong into happiness, chasing it with a fervor and frenetic need that never satisfied. It was how I got myself into many of my troubles—that desperation for happiness, when I had no idea what it actually was. But it wasn’t until you came along that I knew—you gave my life meaning.”

Clara lingered at the door and then opened it, sunlight streaming into the room, along with a shiver of cold air.

Bronwyn stood and walked toward Clara, who was deciding whether to run.

“I know I ran,” Bronwyn said, “and I have no right to ask, but can you stay? Please.”

“Why?” Clara turned toward her mother.

“Have you ever been locked in a room without windows or light?”

“No.” Clara placed her hand on her chest.

“I have been.”

“I read about it. When you were a teenager, and you ran away from that family in California.”

“Yes. And one more time when I was a teenager. I would rather die, and that is the awful truth, Clara. I would rather die than have that happen to me again. When the police came to the house after the fire, when the whispers started that I was accountable for a young fireman’s mortal injuries with my negligence, that I was to blame for your injuries, I knew what was coming, Clara. I knew where I was headed, and where that would leave you and what it would do to me and to you and to the man I love.”

“You aren’t talking about the asylum or jail, are you?” Clara said. “You were afraid you would take your own life and leave us with that.”

She bowed her head. “I am ashamed, possibly a coward, but yes. I was afraid I would remove myself from the world.”

“Then why not come back later? You could have come back any time after things… settled down.”

“No! It was too late by then. I couldn’t leave here. Your life had moved on.”

“That’s an excuse and you know it.”

“Maybe so. I was terrified to upset the balance I found within myself here.”

Clara paused. Then she spoke what must have been an awful truth for her. “I always thought something was wrong with me.”

“No!” Bronwyn cried out. “It was me. Something was wrong with me. Broken in me. Shattered in me. I could not let you see it!”

“Mama?” Wynnie called, and Clara reached for her daughter and returned to the room, leaving the door open.

Bronwyn closed the door and continued as best she could. She was growing tired, all the years unwinding in such a short time, but she could not give up.

She told them how she had met Beatrix Potter in 1930 while she was out walking in the woodlands, how they became friendly even as Bronwyn no longer wrote imaginative stories, for it broke her heart. Their conversations, during long walks, taught Bronwyn she could remake her own life.

Eventually Bronwyn gave Pippa her book, The Middle Place , and she opened her life to the children in the village, tutoring them in art and language. She focused on gardening and painting, on finding lost words that could touch her own heart.

“But what made you stay?” Pippa asked. “What made you finally stay put after all your years of running?”

“You. Your family. This land,” she said. “I was done running.”

“You sewed yourself into your secrets,” Wynnie said, repeating the line Bronwyn had written in the note to Clara.

“Yes. Yes I did.” Bronwyn felt the tears rising.

“I wish you would have stayed with us,” Wynnie said. It was a simple wish.

Clara dropped her face into her hands, and Charlie set his hand on her shoulder. Bronwyn watched them. If Charlie and Clara didn’t already know it, she could see they were falling in love.

“When did you give the language to Callum?” Pippa said, and Bronwyn looked at her dear friend. The distress in her eyes was nearly too much to bear, but Bronwyn would not look away.

“When I wrote the last word over ten years ago, I packed my papers and asked Callum to hold on to all of it, and then give it to Clara when I was gone. Then someone else could decide what to do with the words and the sequel of Emjie’s fate.”

“Emjie!” Wynnie exclaimed. “What happens to her in the sequel? We can’t translate it now because Mama… because that lady stole the papers and—”

“Oh, darling,” Bronwyn said with a break in her voice. “Our Emjie. We will unfold her story, don’t you worry.”

“M-mother.” Clara stuttered over the word she hadn’t used in twenty-five years. Bronwyn felt a pressure of pleasure in her chest. Clara leaned forward now. “Have you written anything since that day of the fire?”

“No.” She paused and told her daughter the truth. “That was also my penance.”