Chapter 12 Charlie
CHAPTER 12? CHARLIE
London, England
Light glowed from the library windows, beacons in the foggy morning. The gray and creamy Portland stone of 14 St. James’s Square, the London Library, overlooked the iron-fenced park.
In Charlie’s quest to learn more about the author whose papers were in his father’s collection, he stood outside the library around the corner from his parents’ home, fifteen minutes before opening time, waiting in line for the door to swing open. That chilly November morning, the men in line chatted about Agatha Christie’s new play set to open at the New Ambassadors Theatre, about the Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash, about their support or objections to Churchill. Charlie waved at a neighbor who was walking his beagle across the park.
Clara Harrington from America and her eight-year-old daughter would sail here in two weeks’ time. They rejected his tickets and bought their own. Charlie Jameson’s logical plan was this: hand over these papers, remove their declarations of charms and secret words from the library, and move on with all the other matters surrounding his father’s estate.
As his mother often told him, Charlie’s logical plans rarely went as expected, curiosity yanking him as surely as the tides changed the course of unmoored ships. And she was right. He’d been unable to pluck the splinter of this missing author’s story from his mind. For a week he’d been researching and reading, trying to find the story of the author’s life and understand why she wrote new words, only to abandon them all in Callum Jameson’s office.
The heavy wooden door opened, and Charlie climbed the marble steps of the sixteenth-century building and made a beeline for his favorite desk under the eaves in the philosophy section. The back of the library had been bombed only eight years ago, destroying over sixteen thousand books, and still the building stood proud, draped with the scaffolding and dust of repairs. Every room was a solace of reading, with the floor-to-ceiling bookstacks, the plush chairs, the labyrinth of rooms and stairs to hidden corners.
Grief was a strange and oppressive burden, tossing him from fatigue to manic organization, from one all-night bender to a week of solitude, during which he wanted only the sound of birds and the sights of nature, of something alive, growing, and thriving. Now, it seems, he was diving into the world of a stranger, and it was a relief to walk into the familiar lamplit room, where long oak tables glowed with brass desk lamps.
How he loved this building! If it was possible to love a building, and he didn’t see why not. People loved food or music, but he was enthralled with the stories inside the stone dwelling. Virginia Woolf, Bram Stoker, and Agatha Christie—all were inspired or wrote in the Victorian building that seemed built of books. This mysterious place with thirty-seven staircases and over seventeen miles of books enchanted him. He thought of all the precious things it stood to protect and hold.
He passed the mythology section when the pang, the ache of missing his father, hit him like a blow to his chest.
“Mr. Jameson!” a voice bellowed, and Charlie turned to see T. S. Eliot, the newly appointed president of the London Library, making his way toward Charlie. He hadn’t seen Thomas since Callum’s funeral, and Charlie hoped condolences weren’t forthcoming. Charlie was right tired of making other people feel better about the passing of his beloved father.
“Hello, Thomas.” Charlie held out his hand. “Good day.”
“Good day, chap. Here for research?” Thomas’s accent was more Boston than British, as he hadn’t come to England until he was twenty-five. But dressed in a tweedy three-piece suit, a white collar, and a dark tie, he was thoroughly English in his mannerisms.
“I’m researching an American author named Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham.”
Thomas stared at Charlie and frowned, smoothed his oiled hair, and said, “Name sounds familiar.”
“She was a famous American author who disappeared in 1927. Wrote a bestselling children’s book in 1909. That’s about as much as I know.”
“Ah! Yes, yes, she was also a Bostonian. I remember now. Wrote that book as a child. What’s your interest there?”
“Curious, that’s all. Doing a recent investigation into literary mysteries, and her name came up. I assume the library will have something interesting.”
“I am sure we will.” He threw his arms wide as if to encompass the Victorian temple to literature. “Some believe we should dismantle this place.” He stroked his clean-shaven cheek. “An atrocity. Civilization would be damaged by such an idea.” He shook his head as if waking from a dream. “You go on now. Do your work.” Then he paused. “I miss your father something fierce.”
“As do I,” Charlie said. “Thank you.”
Thomas walked off and Charlie made his way toward his favorite desk—up two flights, to the left, and back down a small side stairwell—only to find someone had beaten him to it.
Choosing instead to sit in the maroon-and-cream reading room, he set down his briefcase and made his way to the reference desk to ask about books by or about Fordham.
Hours later, he’d skimmed Child Genius: The Wild and Tragic Life of Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham . Her children’s book, The Middle Place , sat at his side unopened. The biography contained police notes, scraps of information, and the history of her life. There was only one photo of the tall, willowy woman in the book; she stood in a forest, looking over her shoulder.
Charlie scribbled notes on a paper pad and fell into the lost life of the author. Clara Harrington in South Carolina, who had her own eight-year-old daughter, had herself been abandoned at eight by a mother who sounded both charming and tragic.
From what he gathered, Bronwyn had been wounded by her genius and then scarred by a family who believed they protected her by never sending her to school and then slowly abandoned her in stages.
Excerpt from The Wild and Tragic Life of Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham
B RIAN D AVIS
Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham was destined to become a writer. Born in the forested lands of New Hampshire in 1897, no one knew how early that prophecy would come to pass. Her parents, Martha and Wendall, understood they had been gifted with a special child by the time Bronwyn was speaking in full sentences at ten months old. At two years old she insisted on knowing every letter and its sound and then formed those letters with crayon on coloring paper, trying to string them together into words.
The label genius was first whispered in hopefulness and then uttered out loud with hubris. Out of the genetic threads of their ancestry and a wise choice in partner, Martha and Wendall unwittingly but proudly produced a verifiable child prodigy. Martha and Wendall rearranged their life, for there would be no common school for Bronwyn, no children as playmates or the silliness of small games. They would treat her as the extraordinary creature she was born to be. She was reading books by three years old and making up her own stories by three and a half. She played the violin and piano and memorized long passages of poetry before she turned four years old.
This family of three lived in a rambling, brown-shingled house with acres of forest out the back door, piles of books in every room, and warm fires during the coldest months. Bronwyn had wild brown hair and large brown eyes that absorbed everything around her. Like the stories she would one day write, Bronwyn saw the animation and light in every living thing in the natural world. She was stifled when inside the house unless she was reading or writing.
Bronwyn reveled in the natural world behind their home, digging for seeds, roots, and answers to the questions that kept her buzzing: Was there a reason for it all? Was there a force that made things grow? What and who was she to this world? She was most preoccupied by what she could not see, what lay just beyond the edges of her sight and knowledge, the unseen world, the invisible world, the one she believed was just as real and that she could find if she just tried hard enough.
She built forts in the forest and then insisted her mother and father spend the night outside with her, for she was afraid to miss anything the natural world might tell her. She collected flowers, bug carcasses, and rocks. She kept these things on windowsills and shelves all over the house. She dragged her father’s typewriter into her room and began to write stories of fairies and imaginary creatures.
Her mother told her of the Tír na nóg and the magical world beneath the earth in Ireland, where time passed differently, one year there equaling one minute in our world. Bronwyn believed in this land, and she wanted to create one just like it. Martha taught Bronwyn Latin and Greek, and both seemed as casually easy for Bronwyn as English.
Bronwyn was shunned by children her own age, something she never understood. Teased about her references to astronomy, nature, and literature, she never found a way to connect with the children around her. Sitting on the hill outside her house, she watched other children play tag and felt excluded in a way that left her angry and deeply hurt at the same time. By the time she was near to eight years old, she understood that the only friends she might find were the ones she created, so she began to build her fantasy and imaginary worlds, as well as her own language.
The adults who visited her parents and gathered in the living room to talk about academic theory bored Bronwyn. “Find more interesting friends,” Bronwyn once told her parents after sitting at the top of the staircase and listening to the party below.
Martha and Wendall didn’t dare have any more children, for who could match Bronwyn’s precocious spirit? No one. This creature of such intelligence and imagination made them believe that they’d been given more than they could ever ask for in a child. Anyone else would be a disappointment.
On Bronwyn’s eighth birthday, she wore a dress of pink taffeta and a headband of yellow silk. After she blew out the candles in the buttery icing of an angel food cake, she announced that she’d made a gift for her parents. All those hours at the typewriter were for a purpose, she told them. She’d written a book called The Middle Place , a magical story about a young girl named Emjie who could move between her world and the world of faeries.
“Just you wait,” she told them. “There is a shocking ending that will keep you guessing.”
She understood suspense and drama, having already read enough Shakespeare and Kipling, enough Dickens and Melville, to know that a story must have conflict and mystery, love and hate, romance and evil.
There were others there that night for the party—her three older cousins and two sets of grandparents, an aunt and uncle—but only her parents understood that she was serious, that their eight-year-old daughter had actually penned a novel.
But no one ever read that version of The Middle Place because that same night flat, black clouds moved quickly across a stormy New Hampshire sky. The pages sat on the kitchen table, with a blue ribbon wrapped tightly around the pile of story. A twister touched down in the small, quiet neighborhood, ripping the roof from the Fordham home and flooding the first floor. Bronwyn’s story was scattered across the neighborhood and forests of Willingham. The pages were lost for good.
For months, locals would find a page here or there and not know what it was, a remnant of something larger to be sure, but of what they had no clue, and they’d toss a page into the trash or leave it in the gutter where they found it.
While a tarp covered the Fordham house and workmen dried the water from the floors and carpets, Bronwyn spent weeks searching the forest for her story. She wept to her parents that it was possible that Emjie sent the storm to keep the story from being told, that Emjie didn’t want her existence to be exposed.
This was the first time Bronwyn’s parents feared that Bronwyn’s imagination might be a bit too much, that their isolation of her hadn’t done her any favors. It was the first time they tried to get her some help, some professional help from a specialist in child prodigies.
Under the psychiatrist’s direction, Bronwyn’s schedule grew stricter, her schooling more focused, and tutors were brought in. With these new structures around her, a seed of sadness found its way into the soil of Bronwyn’s heart, and with each day it seemed to grow. Her freedom was curtailed, and panic blossomed from melancholy. The cure for feelings she’d never felt and had a hard time labeling could be found only in writing—Bronwyn would not let Emjie be scattered to the winds. She set out to write the story again, this time using the carbon copies she’d seen her mother use when she wrote stories for the newspaper.
She had to begin again, to start over, and by the time she had rewritten the novel at eleven years old, her parents understood that what they had once been proud of was creating a fracture in their child’s psyche that might be far too deep to mend. Bronwyn’s imagination was too bright and too clear, and it terrified her family. She believed in make-believe. She told them of her own world as she babbled in a language she’d created, saying that the words they’d taught her weren’t enough for the beauty of the unseen world.
This wasn’t the kind of intelligence they’d expected or wanted. This kind of wild intelligence needed to be curtailed and bound.
The strain on the marriage pulled a worn rope to its breaking point. When Wendall announced his great love for his secretary and moved to New York for a new job with a publishing house, Martha and Bronwyn were left stunned and bereft. Wendall unequivocally completed the triumvirate of their world.
Wendall had decided that quite possibly genius wasn’t so wonderful. He wanted an ordinary life—a wife and a child who didn’t read by three and sing songs created of her own language and rattle the house with her questions, worrying them with her disappearance into the wilds of New Hampshire.
“She’s yours now,” he told his wife. “You fought me at every turn to do it your way, and now you can.”
And he was gone.
From that moment on, Bronwyn was reckless and irresponsible, a behavior born of confusion and heartbreak.
One afternoon in November of 1908, when Bronwyn was eleven years old, she rode the train from New Hampshire to New York and begged her father to return. Meanwhile, Mother wrote letters and enlisted friends in their campaign. Nothing worked. He stayed in New York with the petite secretary, and then he married her, and they had their own children. His penance? He helped publish his daughter’s book.
Twelve-year-old Bronwyn’s novel, The Middle Place , was released in 1909 to great acclaim.
The success didn’t sate her broken heart, and at only fourteen years old, bereft, Bronwyn somehow talked her way onto a steamship as a cabin boy, taking up with a captain twenty years her senior. She then convinced her mother to sail the world with her so they could write about their adventures together. Eventually her mother became disenchanted with a life at sea and with a daughter she did not understand, and dropped Bronwyn off with family friends in San Francisco.
Abandoned to strangers, this wounded girl turned sixteen while living with a family she didn’t know. Miserable, she ran away to eventually be discovered in a slum hotel in downtown San Francisco. She was promptly sent to a juvenile detention facility, which caused such despair she tried to jump out a window.
Finally, Martha came to retrieve Bronwyn, and they lived together in Boston, where Bronwyn took a job as a copy editor, a daily chore that she described as moths eating her soul.
Then came along Timothy Harrington. True love . And together they moved to Bluffton, South Carolina, where they settled down and raised their daughter, Clara Harrington.
Charlie looked up from his reading. This might have been where Charlie could say, “And thus her happy ending.” But alas, it wasn’t.
Afternoon light fell lazily through the windows when Charlie read:
These are believed to be the last words Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham ever wrote:
I want the sky to split open.
I want the sky to split open and reveal the secrets of the Universe.
I want the sky to split open, to rend down the middle and rain down its stars and its secrets. If destruction is the result, so be it, for I want—no, I need—to know if there is anything that truly matters beyond what I can see.
I want the sky to split open…
To no avail, scholars, students, and journalists have been searching for her lost sequel and the dictionary of her language ever since.
Charlie had read enough, and his mind was full with facts of a woman’s life that somehow intersected with his father’s. He roused himself to leave the library. He’d promised Archie he’d stop by the bank to sign some papers, before heading on to a gig at the Penny Pub with the Lads.
After gathering his books he waved goodbye to a few friendly faces before entering the sunlight of a crisp afternoon in St. James’s Square. It was always a shock to leave the hushed rooms and dusty light.
He flung his briefcase strap over his shoulder and headed toward the bank, his thoughts circling around a secret language that a woman from America had created and hidden from the world.
He thought about the daughter, Clara, and the granddaughter, and tried to imagine them. He thought about his father and whether he had anything to do with the author’s disappearance. He thought about the curse of Bronwyn’s genius and wondered how a father could desert a daughter after turning her into the prodigy that she became.
He was astute enough to realize that he was avoiding his own life by dwelling on another’s. He sought a respite from grief in the mystery of a woman whose papers were hidden in his father’s library, a connection he didn’t understand but one that lured him irresistibly into her secret world.