Chapter Eighty
I CANNOT TELL YOU IF WHEN AMALIE PACKED THAT KEY along with all of my other personal artifacts going off to Harvard, she did it on purpose or not.
The ribbon that held the winding key to my desk clock also happened to have the key to my armoire drawer attached to it.
I always kept the two of them together in the front drawer so I could access them with ease.
The “starling” armoire that stood in my bedroom had been part of a set my mother bought on a shopping trip in France just before I moved my living quarters from the one that was next to my grandfather’s upstairs, to a more private ensuite on the ground floor after I returned from college.
The tall cabinet and headboard each featured two carved birds and their crests.
While my study was designed with a classical air in mind, with its oak panels, bookshelves, and carved moldings all imported from London and my writing desk and chair also acquired from British dealers, my mother had decided on a more whimsical tone for my bedroom.
“The place where you dream, Harry, should feel different from where you study,” she reminded me as the furnishings she had handpicked for me were uncrated. “And what better way to send you off on your reveries each night, if not with the evocation of birds.”
It suited me to have these two rooms in contrast to themselves. One place where I could be focused on my books, my correspondence, and my collecting, and through a connecting doorway, a few steps away, a second one where I could rest my head at night and restore.
I easily could have stored Ada’s letters in the secret compartment in the desk in my study. The one that contained my prized second copy of Treasure Island. But I wanted them close to me when I slept. When the birds cast me off at night, it was Ada whom I wanted to take along with me in my dreams.
On that afternoon when my mother threw Ada’s letter in the trash pail, Amalie had later gone back to the room and retrieved it.
Instead of allowing it to be burned with the estate’s garbage, she put it in her pocket, went to my study and grabbed the ribbon with the two keys from my desk, and then walked directly to my bedchamber.
The place had been kept exactly as I’d left it the day we departed for London. A chandelier dangled from the white plaster ceiling. My suits hung in a tidy row in the armoire. My bed had been made by one of the servants, the down pillows fluffed and the brocade coverlet pulled smooth.
Now clasping the key with its starling birds between her two fingers, Amalie knelt down and unlocked the bottom drawer of the armoire.
There next to my folded white shirts, just as the maid who’d seen me reading Ada’s letters one morning had informed Amalie, was a lacquered box.
Amalie opened the lid and saw the same scrolling handwriting on all the other letters inside that matched the one she now held in her hand.
Amalie never unsealed Ada’s last letter.
She simply dropped it into the box and closed the drawer, locking it away like a stone in the bottom of the ocean.
Why did she do this? you may ask. I actually have no idea.
Perhaps she didn’t have the heart to discard a piece of my story.
Or maybe she thought one day my mother might regret that she’d thrown out a letter from a young woman she suspected had captured my heart.
That said, after she had locked the drawer, she went to my study and returned the keys to the desk drawer.
And when my mother later told Amalie to pack up the contents of my study, she did so obediently.
My desk was emptied of my papers. My ledgers were packed and sent to the archives at Harvard. The ribbon with the two keys was taken out from my front drawer and wrapped along with the crystal inkwell and watch.
When it was unpacked, the first curator of my memorial room would suggest the winding key to the watch be placed in the front drawer of my desk so it would not get lost. But no one spent too much time or effort pondering the significance of the other key on that ribbon.
It would take over a century before dear Violet would finally suspect it was the one most connected to my heart.