Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
OPALINE
Dublin, 1922
I t was almost Christmas. Matthew arrived with some sprigs of holly to decorate the shop and little parcels with cooked ham, biscuits and cake. Whatever he bought for his own house, I knew he always set aside a little for me, and the kindness of this gesture made my heart ache. I was in no position to refuse his charity. Whilst my catalogue of books was selling well in Ireland and even in the States, money was still quite tight and I was trying to put small amounts aside for the future. No sooner had he stepped inside the door than the stained-glass windows began to bloom with mistletoe.
‘Stop it at once!’ I said.
‘Stop what?’ Matthew asked, holding a sprig of holly aloft.
‘Oh, nothing.’ I blushed. ‘The baby is kicking.’
He placed the holly on the table and gave me a lopsided smile.
‘I remember when Muriel was pregnant with little Ollie. He used to perform all of his gymnastics at night.’
The baby wasn’t really kicking, I’d only said it as an excuse, but when Matthew took a step closer, he asked if he could touch my stomach. I wanted him to, but I couldn’t even speak. I just nodded. As soon as he put his palm gently on the curve of my belly, she began to move.
‘Ha! There she is.’ He grinned. ‘That’s real magic.’
He hadn’t judged me when I told him about the pregnancy. He didn’t even ask for any explanation about who the father was, or where he was. He simply asked if there was anything he could do.
‘Why didn’t you take over the shop?’ I asked. ‘You must have wanted to, when you were younger.’
He took his hand away and I felt the absence keenly.
‘I grew up,’ was all he said, shrugging and looking over the place with misty eyes. ‘Besides, it’s in the right hands now.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, running my hands along the shelf, wondering if he could hear the spines creak and pages sigh as I did.
‘My father was never a wealthy man, Opaline. At least not financially. Yet I remember when times were hard he would never doubt himself, he would simply say that perhaps the shop was waiting to become a library again. And seeing your books here now, I believe he was right. It didn’t want to be a nostalgia shop or even a magic shop.’ He reached out and patted the wooden walls. ‘It has returned to its roots.’
When he left, I filled the silence with a seasonal recording of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker on the Victrola and took down a copy of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the ballet was based. I recalled a note from the library in Yorkshire, which remarked that he was one of Emily Bront?’s favourite authors. If I remembered correctly, she had read his novel The Sandman in its original German. And it was this simple thread of thoughts that brought to mind a possession I had put away and given no further thought since my trip to London. The sewing box.
The little purchase I had made from Mrs Brown was so plain and uninteresting that I had never given it more than a cursory look. And since I also suspected it had never truly been a part of the Bront? household, I had carelessly dropped it in the bottom drawer of my bureau, untouched.
I leaned down and took it out, placing it in front of me on the desk. I let my fingers run across the surface and closed my eyes as if I could somehow divine its provenance. It wasn’t even a proper sewing box, but an old tin cash box. Inside was a collection of bobbins, needles, thimbles and thread. I removed them all, one by one, as I had done the first time on the boat back from Liverpool. Perhaps I had missed something – a name scratched in the metal or a clue of some sort. Nothing.
I could hear thunder rumbling in the distance and when I looked up, fat drops of rain began to hit the windowpane. I stroked my belly. ‘Don’t worry, little one, the gods are playing games in the clouds,’ I said gently. Normally I hated storms, but I was determined not to pass this on. Besides, there was a magical feel to the air, as though something exciting might happen.
I got up to close the shutters on the windows and wrapped a woollen shawl around my shoulders. I took the sewing box into my hands and again tried to feel the past somehow. I had read of people who could touch an object and have a vision of the previous owner. Silly, of course, but I closed my eyes and as I turned it over in my hands, I found something. I hardly dared to open my eyes, reluctant to prove my sense of touch incorrect, but there it was – an almost invisible groove at the base of the box. If anyone passing by the shop could see my face, I’m sure that I resembled a treasure hunter at the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb!
Slowly, I slid the outer cover back and out slipped a tiny black notebook, the size of a playing card. I gasped. What had I discovered? How long had it been secreted in this hidden compartment and who had put it there? All of the possibilities crashed into one another and for quite some time I was frozen into inaction. I hadn’t even realised how my hand pressed hard over my beating heart while my head bent low to the desk, as if the notebook would somehow speak to me.
While I savoured that delicious moment just before the unknown becomes known, I could delay no longer. My curiosity was at its peak. I reached tentatively for the cover and began to carefully open it. It released a dry, woody smell. Immediately I imagined a young woman scribbling notes by the fireside – as though its fragrance was still imbued with the environment in which it was created.
1846
I have devoted an entire lifetime to escaping the confines of this wretched place, only to find myself further entangled in its gnarled roots and oppressed by its looming towers. I am now satisfied that no one born on this land can wipe the dust of it from one’s heels.
I held my flushed cheeks with the palm of my hands. Was this it? What I had been searching for all of these years?
Wrenville Hall is a spectre that haunts us all from one generation to the next …
I was almost too afraid to touch the paper – I had some irrational fear that, having survived all these years, it might somehow crumble in my hands. I searched the drawer for a magnifying glass, as the script was so small and squashed on the page, it was difficult to make out. I brought my desk lamp closer and leaned over the little booklet. The black ink was messy and words were crossed out with new ones pushed out into what remained of the margins. Having viewed some of the sisters’ original diary entries at Haworth, I felt sure that this was the penmanship of Emily, but I would need to have it authenticated. Unless …
That was when I spotted it – a minuscule signature. EJB.
It felt like fireworks exploding in my veins. The baby kicked, the air crackled and a whooshing sound went through my ears. Was this the second novel, or at least the drafting of it? My head felt light and my feet tapped a jig on the floorboards. I closed my eyes and traced the joy on my face with my fingertips and tried to commit it to memory. My heart was beating against my ribcage like a bird at the window. I read on.
With the death of my father and the forced liquidation of my debts to my creditors in London, I was now returning to the estate in Ireland. … an impervious gloom haunted every corner of its cursed country and a week of driving rain had soaked the ground and reduced it to mud. Famine ravaged the land …
The text became unreadable at this point and the next paragraph seemed to jump ahead of sequence.
This would be my penance, my banishment to this hellish place. I passed through two great pillars and entered the avenue that swept up to Wrenville Hall. Lined with towering yews, it held a singular tranquillity that was tinged with terror. On my one and only sojourn in this place as a child, I recalled the old house servant speaking of spectres and ghouls that lived in the woods beyond. The house stood strongly defined against the dark sky. The gargoyles that came into view at the front-facing aspect of the grey fortress of a house stared down through the afternoon mist in delightful horror …
‘It was night and the candles were lit as I dined alone on a passable meal of turbot in the dining room. A ferocious storm raged outside, driving the rain in sheets against the window, when all of a sudden, lightning flashed and I saw her face at the window. I ran to it and loosened the latch. A flame-haired girl, soaked to the skin, wearing a plain white dress that clung to her fragile frame like a winding sheet. She was deathly pale and did not struggle when I pulled her through the window and we landed on the floor like two drowned pups. Her skin was translucent, white as a ghoul or a vampire, and yet her beauty was like nothing upon the face of God’s creation.
Furious barking of a mastiff; my father’s old dog bounded into the room and had her pinned to the floor, his eyes glowing and his fangs protruding.
‘Helsig!’
The hound stood down at my command, but continued to bark fiercely at the girl.
‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘You are trespassing on private land.’
The remark served to inflame her passion more brightly. She spoke to me then in the native tongue, a curiously expressive and fierce-sounding speech that left me in no doubt as to the message, if not the exact meaning. She folded her arms then and with a haughtiness hardly warranted by her station in life, she took a seat by the fire.
Her cheeks grew red by the glow of the fire and weak as she was, she fell into a soft slumber. I sat there for a time, studying her features while she slept. For the first time since my exile from Paris, I ached to draw, to paint. Being tormented by a love of art but not possessing the talent to succeed at it, had yielded nothing more than a reduction in my pecuniary resources. Yet here, now, it felt as though her spirit was at work within me, challenging me to capture it on the page. In sleep, she surrendered her wild beauty, which, like the landscape that bore her, could be both heaven and hell. I grew frenzied in my attempts to capture her likeness more faithfully still. Every draft seemed to bring me closer to something I had been lacking in all my years at the easel. I was bewitched by her.
Harnessing my passion, the bristles of my brush scratched feverishly against the linen canvas. I decided that no matter how long it took, I would create my masterpiece while this longing to possess her tore at me. My body ached, the night turned to morning and night again until finally, I stood back and saw. I had my Rose, all in bloom on the canvas. It was then I saw that she was still as the grave. Running to her, not believing the horrible truth, I touched her face. Cold as marble. She was dead.
I realised I had been clutching my blouse tightly at my chest. It was real. I had found it. I jumped up from my seat and then sat down again. I let out a shriek, then immediately wondered if it could possibly be true. Was this an excerpt from Emily’s novel? My heart felt as though it were a balloon about to burst! I clapped my hands over my mouth, breathing excitedly into them. It couldn’t be, could it? Was I still in my little shop, reading what would be the greatest literary discovery of modern times? I placed one hand on my heart and tried to steady its beat before reading it again.
It was a rough outline of a story about an Anglo-Irish landowner, Egerton Talbot, who had fallen in love with one of his tenants, Rose, set against the backdrop of the Irish Famine. She was described as a ‘ malevolent, devious creature with all the malignancy of Satan ’ by the land agent and that she had put his lordship under some kind of spell. ‘ Even in the act of the appalling, she enchants! ’
I was fascinated and beguiled and utterly stunned. I was still half-afraid to touch the paper in case I damaged it.
What had inspired Emily’s tale? I knew her brother Branwell was something of a tortured artist; perhaps he provided the raw materials for this Egerton character? It was also he who around that time had visited Liverpool, which was thronged with starving victims fleeing the Famine. Their images, depicted in the Illustrated London News , starving scarecrows with a few rags on them, would have been known to Emily. Some scholars even argued that Heathcliff himself, ‘a dirty, ragged, black-haired child’, who spoke a kind of ‘gibberish’ was Irish and labelled a savage and a demon.
My head swam with images of Millais’ Ophelia and how his muse, Elizabeth Siddall, almost perished while sitting for the portrait in a cold bath. Or Oscar Wilde’s painting, which seemed to be a doorway between two worlds, death and youth. It seemed to me that the slightly deranged Egerton could not see that his muse was dying, just as the English aristocrats refused to see that Ireland was starving from the Famine.
I checked my notes and the dates, which seemed to correspond with the letter Emily had sent her publisher, Cautley. This was it – I had, quite inadvertently, solved one of the twentieth century’s most important literary mysteries!
I couldn’t wait to tell the world of my discovery. I went back to my desk and picked up the receiver and then quietly replaced it. This was a rare moment – nay, a once in a thousand lifetimes moment. And it was all mine . I wanted to savour it. So I sat back down and began to write out a copy of the manuscript. It was something I used to do as a child; I would write out entire passages from books that I loved, just to know what it would feel like to write those words. Besides, I wanted to keep my own copy once the original found its proper home – I hoped within the public walls of a museum. It was hard to imagine what kind of price it might fetch at auction.
I brought my thoughts back to the present. Fifteen pages scrawled upon a miniature notebook, translated to almost double that amount in my own handwriting. I wondered if she had visited Ireland herself? This discovery was presenting more questions than answers! Perhaps that was why scholars analysed her work so intensely, in a futile effort to get to the woman who wrote so passionately and violently – a courageous writer whose novel carried us to the very depths of the human heart and the outer reaches of the supernatural environment. I felt her presence on the page, full of vitality, as though she were communicating still. Some things defy explanation. Emily Bront? was one of them.