Chapter 15 Charlie
CHAPTER 15? CHARLIE
London, England
Charlie paced his childhood home waiting on the woman and child who were meant to arrive in the next hour.
Moira, the Jamesons’ housemaid of many years, bustled upstairs. Mum was away in the country. Since his father died, it’d been said numerous times that Charlie might as well move into this St. James’s Square house. But this was the place of his youth, not of his adulthood. The oak floors creaked, and he knew where to stop to avoid the house’s song under his feet. His nursery was on the third level, his playroom on the second, and both were remnants of another time.
Now, he sat for a quick lunch of grilled sausages and tomatoes that Moira had prepared. The Fordham biography lay next to him on the mahogany table with the family crest in the center. He’d been reading the book in slow bits over the past week, noting how the writer’s life was completely unorthodox until she met Timothy Harrington, settled down, and moved to South Carolina.
He skimmed an article once published in Vanity Fair , in which Bronwyn and Timothy spoke of their first meeting.
Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham: We met on a snow-white day in January. I sat in the library, not a student, but young enough to be one. I was meant to be working on an essay for Harper’s Bazaar about my travels to Tahiti on a sailing schooner. But instead, I worked on creating a dictionary of my invented language. I lifted my pen to see Timothy standing under the domed light as if life had spotlit him for me. I stared; he felt familiar and deeply intimate, as if I’d known him before—a long time before—and then forgotten him. And there he stood, waiting for me in the Harvard Library.
Timothy Harrington: I was there looking for an edition of Great Expectations for my literature class. I felt her eyes on me, a pleasant sensation, a tingling, and warmth. I turned to see who had found me, and I saw Bronwyn sitting at a desk beneath an east-facing window. Snow fell outside and gathered on the sill in small drifts. Her right cheek rested in her palm as she propped herself on her elbow and looked at me with a playful smile. Her thick glasses created mirrors in the light, and I saw my own face in her eyes, something I will never forget. I saw myself in her eyes.
BNF: He walked over to say hello and spied my work on the desk. The first thing he said to me was…
TH: What is that?
(Laughter)
BNF: Not even a hello.
TH: And she told me, “It’s my language.”
BNF: Mine, I told him. And I’d never told anyone before. Well, except for my god-awful father and distant mother. They had once cared… but now…
TH: But now I cared.
BNF: We haven’t stopped talking since.
This account was so delightful. Until now, reading about Bronwyn, Charlie found a bitter brew of a short life with so much tragedy. So why, after such a happy marriage, did she run?
The author, Brian Davis, believed it was the 1927 fire that sent Bronwyn away. He surmised that the fireman’s death and the police coming to question her caused her to panic and run.
Charlie now understood that Fordham’s The Middle Place sequel was the mystery that kept her alive in certain literary circles. A lost novel written in a secret language was bait for anyone who loved a good mystery. If Charlie hadn’t read her biography, he would have thought she had disappeared on purpose to gain notoriety and interest. But she eschewed notoriety; she avoided being known.
As Charlie folded his napkin and rose from the table, nervous energy ran through him while he waited for Bronwyn’s daughter. He found himself again in the library.
Charlie ran through the numerous options of how this language had found its way into his father’s library, just as he’d been doing for three weeks.
The first assumption was that his father had found it in an old antique shop or at an auction. But the personal letter to Clara led Charlie to believe it was much closer to the bone than a simple find. Or it could have been dropped off by a friend or given to him by someone else to hold for safety. Charlie’s mind rattled from morning to night with unfounded guesses.
The front doorbell jangled through the house.
Charlie walked toward the foyer, imagining the woman and child who stood on the other side on the flagstone entryway. He prepared himself for Clara Harrington with the lyrical southern accent. He imagined her as a tall and handsome woman, someone with the aquiline nose and almond-shaped eyes of her lost mother, whom he’d seen in the one photo in the biography.
Charlie walked down the hallway, past the gold-framed stern faces of his ancestors, and around the center table, where winterberry and myrtle flowers spilled from an iron urn.
He opened the door.
The woman on the threshold was startlingly different from the one he’d expected. She was tall, about that he’d been correct, but she was a wisp of a thing, nearly fragile, bundled in her coat and hat and gloves, her chin tucked into her scarf. Chestnut curls framing her face, a shy smile on red lips, and round blue eyes beneath thick eyelashes. She emanated a sense of still beauty, a caílin álainn .
“Hallo,” he said. “You must be Clara and Wynnie.”