Chapter 51
Chapter Fifty-One
HENRY
W e lay in Martha’s single bed, every inch of our skin touching. The wall between us had crumbled with every heart-sore word she spoke in the kitchen, like an exorcism of the past. The truth shall set you free, that’s what they say. We were both laid bare now and I knew then and there that she was my destiny. Every stupid, seemingly pointless, difficult, lonely, challenging thing I had done in my life before this had led me here, to Ha'penny Lane.
‘Are you okay?’
I felt her head nodding against my chest and I pulled her even closer into me. My heart felt ten times its usual size. I felt like I could lift a car, if I needed to. Probably best not to try, but the feeling was there nonetheless.
‘There’s something I never told you,’ I said.
‘Oh God, you’re not engaged to somebody else, are you?’
‘Very funny. I’ll engage you in a minute if you’re not careful.’
‘If you’re not careful, I might say yes.’
‘Did we just get married?’
She laughed a little hoarsely, directly into my ear, which was ridiculously sexy.
‘I might give the whole marriage thing a miss for a while, I think, if that’s okay.’
‘Same.’
She rested her chin on my chest, waiting for the thing I’d never told her. Here went nothing.
‘I’ve been in the bookshop.’
‘What bookshop?’
‘THE bookshop. Next door.’
She shook her head slightly, trying to make sense of my words.
‘It exists, Martha. Or at least it did, for a time. The night I arrived in Ireland.’
‘You’ve seen it?’
I nodded.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
I pulled my ‘why do you think’ face.
‘You already thought I was a weirdo.’
‘That’s not true!’ she said, laughing again. ‘I thought you were a perv.’
‘Well, there you are. I didn’t want to be a perv and a weirdo, might have blown my chances with you altogether.’
‘Are you saying you fancied me right from the start?’
‘Fishing for compliments?’
She rolled over and pretended she was going to get up. I hauled her back until she was lying on top of me and I felt a desire for her aching through my body.
‘I think I knew from the minute I saw you.’
She kissed me softly and let her fingers run through my hair. It was like a dream I never wanted to wake from – after all of the times I’d had to leave this house knowing she would never be mine, it hardly seemed real.
‘Wait a second,’ she said, lifting herself up on her elbows and annoyingly removing her lips from mine. ‘Why do you think the shop chose you to see it?’
‘Um, I’m not sure it chose me …’ It was hard to think rationally while lying naked in bed with this woman. Besides, for the longest time, I’d thought it was a drunken mirage, if such a thing existed.
She sat up now and wrapped the sheet around her. It seemed we were taking a break.
‘The book, A Place Called Lost . I just assumed Madame Bowden had put it in here.’
‘Along with your tree.’
She made a face at me. My sarcastic tone was wearing thin.
‘I told you, none of it makes sense. This might sound crazy—’
‘Crazier than seeing a shop that doesn’t exist?’
She looked at me with her head tilted, as though sizing me up. ‘The manuscript. It’s really important to you, isn’t it?’
Was she still doubting my motivation here? I began to explain myself but she interrupted.
‘No, I know that’s not what this is, but I get that you wanted to prove something.’
Hearing those words, it all suddenly sounded so superficial. Trying to win the approval of other people, chasing achievements that weren’t really achievements at all. It’s not as if I wrote anything, I just stumbled across someone else’s work and tried to find my own worth in some kind of second-hand glory. Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe it was time I tried to earn my own respect instead of everybody else’s.
‘Finding the manuscript would have been’—I paused, searching for the right word—‘immense. But in a strange way, uncovering the truth about Opaline and her bookshop and, last but not least, meeting the perfect partner with the kind of laugh that makes my heart race, has sort of surpassed that.’
‘Are we partners?’
‘I’d like to be.’
‘Okay.’
With that, she turned her back to me.
‘Um, what are we doing? Is this some kind of mating ritual? Do I turn my back?’
She was laughing again. ‘The words, Henry!’
Her tattoo. Of course. I leaned closer but couldn’t make out the writing.
‘Shit.’
‘What is it?’
‘I think I might need glasses.’
She bent towards her nightstand and fished out a magnifying glass from the drawer. I tried not to feel like an ageing tortoise. The script began …
Wrenville Hall is a spectre that haunts us all from one generation to the next, crushing every dream, every aspiration in its path. This ground is cursed, as is the lineage of each and every child born here. I am born into darkness and no amount of atonement will grant me the saving light I have sought in her, my darling Rosaleen. Darkness will reign on this place until my last breath, and beyond.
I wasn’t sure what I had expected since seeing Martha’s tattoo the first time, but I know I had not expected this.
‘Can you see the date?’
I searched with my magnifying glass and saw the numbers 1846.
‘What is this?’
She turned around to look at me, her eyes wide and solemn.
‘I’ve never told anyone about this. I never really understood it – I mean, why it was happening – until I saw that photograph of Opaline.’ She reached back and grabbed her phone off the nightstand, pulling up an image of the old photograph we’d found of Opaline at St Agnes’s before handing it to me.
‘What am I looking for?’ I asked, taking the phone.
‘Look at her skirt.’
I zoomed in and saw something I had missed before. There were stitches on the material.
‘Words,’ she said, prompting my brain to kick into gear. ‘A story. The same one that’s on my skin, she sewed it into her clothes.’
‘What the—’
I looked at her back again and saw the initials at the end.
EJB.
My scalp tingled and it felt like my hair was standing on end.
‘Henry, I think this is Emily Bront?’s manuscript.’