CHAPTER 59
Joanna
Dorset Three weeks later
It was three days before Christmas and Joanna was in the reference library at Dorchester.
She’d spent a lot of time here since she’d returned from London, since that revelatory tea party at Mulberry Farm Cottage where she’d gained a brother and found out so much more about Emmy, and then later an awful lot more about her parents’ marriage.
It had been hard to take it all in. Joanna frowned.
Henry appeared to have had a much better effect on their mother than anything the doctor could have prescribed.
Mother had never got over the loss of her baby, Joanna supposed; she had never stopped grieving for her son, never stopped feeling guilt at having given him away.
And now here he was, a grown man who’d had a happy childhood, perhaps the best childhood Mother could have given him under the circumstances, and he’d not only forgiven her, but also wanted her to be part of his life. It had changed everything.
But what about Harriet? At least she had finally lifted the call barring from the phone.
Her sister obviously felt that Mother didn’t need tradesmen any longer and Joanna suspected she was right.
Why would she, when she had Henry? But would Harriet feel usurped by their new half-brother? Joanna suspected so.
She settled herself in the chair and picked up the first book she’d selected earlier.
It was different for Joanna. Mulberry Farm Cottage was her childhood home, but she had moved on a long time ago and she would be moving out again very soon.
As soon as the house in Crouch End was sold, as soon as she had some money to her name and therefore some security, she would buy a small place somewhere to use as a base.
And from that base she would travel, go somewhere different, maybe get down to writing that travel book she had discussed with Toby.
The sale was going through. It wouldn’t be long, she realised, before she could be gone.
Joanna pulled her reading glasses from her bag and took a swig of water.
It had been a shock to find out about Father.
She felt a small shiver. A shock that she hadn’t yet fully come to terms with.
It might have been only the once and he might have had some provocation.
But even so . . . How little she had known him, how little she had known both of her parents and what had gone on behind the closed doors of her own home.
But again, it would be harder, she suspected, for Harriet.
Joanna turned her attention once more to Emmy.
Every spare moment she had, she’d been continuing to try to solve this mystery from the past. Although she now knew Emmy’s full name, there was little information about her online – Emmy had not been sufficiently well known to be well documented, and now it seemed as if Joanna had to trawl through five books for every skimpy line of information.
She could see, though, how genealogists got sucked into their subjects and their lives.
She was utterly engrossed in this love story from the past. There was no holding back.
The notes that she’d accumulated were still sparse, although they had filled in a few of the gaps in her knowledge of the life of Emily Selleck, little-known Edwardian artist. She knew that Emmy’s father had encouraged her to paint, and that she had probably been influenced by Clara Montalba who had exhibited from 1866 at the Royal Academy and whose reputation was founded on the delicate tones and refined colours she used, combined with her careful composition.
Joanna could see the similarity – in subject matters too, for Clara Montalba had painted scenes from the Grand Canal in Venice and also London Bridge.
Joanna knew that Emmy was not prolific, and that she hadn’t sought professional recognition.
It had come in her lifetime – just – but thanks to an inheritance from her father, she had the means not to have to rely on an income from painting which, for her and other women like her, would never be high.
The more she read, the more convinced Joanna was that Owen’s theory was correct. She knew now that Emmy had indeed lived for a while in Dorset, so she surely must have lived at Owen’s farm, next door to Rufus; the painting she had left there of the ancient aqueduct was further evidence of that.
And now, thanks to Owen’s generosity, Joanna had two of Emmy’s paintings in her possession.
She had been overwhelmed when he had shown it to them, even more so when he gave it to her, and now it hung next to the painting of Ponte Accademia in her bedroom at Mulberry Farm Cottage.
Even without the signature, the two pictures were unmistakably by the same artist. Emmy had painted the sky behind the high Gothic-shaped viaduct in shades of yellow and pale grey, contrasting with the charcoal notes of the high stone aqueduct itself, rising like some great creature of the deep from a sea of dark green forest and a burnt-orange sun setting low on the horizon.
But Joanna was conscious of a continuing sense of frustration.
Something about this story of illicit love wasn’t clear; there was something she still wasn’t seeing.
Her bridge walks and her quest to find out Emmy and Rufus’s story were inextricably linked somehow.
But what happened to the two lovers? And why did William Rufus plant a mulberry tree to remind him of Emmy, when she hadn’t died?
She outlived Rufus and survived to the ripe old age of ninety-six. But . . .
Joanna rifled through her notebook to recap.
When she was nineteen, Emmy had stayed with an aunt and uncle in Dorset, to help out when her aunt was taken ill.
The village itself wasn’t mentioned, but apparently, she stayed on while the aunt was convalescing.
She was there for at least a whole summer.
Presumably that was when she had met her Rufus.
The man next door – as in Pyramus and Thisbe, the story that Owen and Harriet had already discussed together, rather intriguingly.
Joanna doodled a heart in the margin in black ink. Her heart’s love.
And this, she supposed, was the family secret, the reason for that surreptitious look between her father and her uncle. The planting of the mulberry tree, the changing of the name of the cottage, the dangerous liaison of the past.
The library was filled with the studious buzz of silence, punctured only by the sound of a page being turned, the soft whirr of a computer fan, the occasional muffled cough. Joanna could imagine how it had been . . .
A young girl, pretty maybe, with little to do and far from home.
Maybe she was painting already? An attractive man, ten years older than her perhaps, with a sickly and difficult wife.
Perhaps it started with a chance meeting, a random conversation; perhaps he saw her painting the landscape and stopped to exchange a few words of greeting.
Maybe they realised that they had things in common.
Maybe they shared a joke. Perhaps he confided in her about the difficulties and tribulations of his marriage. Maybe there was a spark of chemistry?
Joanna leant back in her chair. Then one day .
. . perhaps they went for a walk together.
They might have shared a love of literature or art?
Maybe, it started to rain. Maybe they ran to a nearby hayloft to take shelter.
And then . . . Well, at some stage they had become lovers.
But he was married. Their love was illicit, dangerous, forbidden.
But it was also as strong as life itself – and that had to count for something.
She checked her watch. She’d love a coffee and knew it would give her a much-needed adrenalin boost. But there were two more books she wanted to check out before she returned to the cottage.
After a while, Emmy would have been summoned home.
Her father needed her; he intended to travel to Europe and she was to accompany him.
It was a great opportunity: she could do lots of painting, spend time with her father, see some of the most spectacular sights in Europe. She would write to Rufus – every day.
But love couldn’t survive on letters alone.
Decisions had to be made, something had to change.
Joanna took the letters out of her bag, turned them over in her hands.
These thin pages smelt of the past too – of wood and dust and some old musty perfume.
She had read them so many times that their edges had become even more frayed and brittle.
Perhaps Rufus too had read them so many times, before he hid them away in the big trunk in the attic, she thought.
Why had he kept them? Couldn’t he bear to let this last part of her go?
I wonder what you will decide, Emmy had written.
Had he told her that he would part from his wife, that he longed to be with Emmy, that he was prepared to leave his family for her?
Was he considering it during their separation whilst Emmy was abroad with her father?
Was he planning how it could be done? It was all or nothing.
Emmy wouldn’t be able to come back to Dorset – she would have to stay with her father.
There would be no more meetings, no more chance encounters, or secret walks along the Down.
They would have to run away together and face the scandal – or give each other up.