Kidnappings and Recriminations
I know this because I spent the better part of a sunny weekend in August trawling through the local library’s microfilm records of the Milderhurst Mercury.
In retrospect, telling my dad that the origin of The True History of the Mud Man was a great literary mystery was a little like putting a box of chocolates on the floor beside a toddler and expecting him not to touch it.
He’s rather results-based, my dad, and he liked the idea that he might be able to solve a mystery that had plagued academics for decades.
He had his theory: the real-life kidnapping of a long-ago child lay at the novel’s gothic heart; all he needed to do was prove it and the fame, the glory, the personal satisfaction, would be his.
Confinement to bed, however, is no friend to the sleuth, so an agent was necessarily enlisted and dispatched in his place.
Which was where I figured. I humored him for three reasons: partly because he was recuperating from a heart attack, partly because his theory wasn’t completely ridiculous, but most of all because reading my mother’s letters had stretched my fascination with Milderhurst to pathological proportions.
I started my inquiries, as I usually do, by asking Herbert whether he knew anything about unsolved kidnapping cases from the early part of the century.
One of my hands-down favorite things about Herbert—and the list is long—is his ability to find precisely the information he’s after in the face of apparent chaos.
His house is tall and skinny to start with, four onetime flats patched back together: our office and printing press take up the first two levels, the attic’s been sacrificed to storage, and the basement flat is where he lives with Jess.
Every wall of every room is lined with books: old books, new books, first editions, signed editions, twenty-third editions, stacked together on mismatched, improvised sets of shelves, in a glorious, healthy disregard for display.
And yet the entire collection is catalogued in his brain, his very own reference library, so that he has every reading experience of his life at his fingertips.
To see him home in on a target is a thing of beauty: first, his impressive brow furrows as he takes in the query, then a single finger, delicate and smooth as a candlestick, rises and he hobbles, wordlessly, to a distant wall of books, where the finger is given free rein to hover, as if magnetized, above the spines, leading him, finally, to slide the perfect book from its place.
Asking Herbert about the kidnapping was a lazy long shot, so I wasn’t really surprised when it yielded little of use.
I told him not to feel bad and headed to the library, where I befriended a delightful old lady in the basement who’d apparently been waiting there all her life on the off chance I’d show up.
“Just sign in over here, my dear,” she said eagerly, pointing to a clipboard and pen, and shadowing me closely as I filled in the requisite columns.
“Oh, Billing and I realize that there are others who see the world as I do.
Saffy believes that when the war ends, which it must do soon, I have a good chance of getting a place at one of the grammar schools; after that—who knows?
Perhaps even university?! I must keep up with my schooling though, if I am to stand a chance of transferring to grammar school.
So I beg you—please don’t make me come home! The Blythes are happy for me to stay and you know that I’m well cared for here. You haven’t “lost” me, Mum; I wish you wouldn’t put it like that. I’m your daughter—you couldn’t lose me if you tried. Please, though, please let me stay.
With much love and heaps of hope,
Your daughter, Meredith