Chapter 19 Charlie
CHAPTER 19? CHARLIE
London, England
Charlie Jameson packed up his rosewood bodhrán drum and grabbed his thickest wool coat from the closet in the back of the house. The aroma of mothballs and dust wafted out as he buttoned up.
Tonight he would play the instrument his father had custom-designed for him, the eighteen-inch drum along with the bulbous beater that was hand-carved from the same rosewood from Ireland. The flat custard top reminded him of crepes his mother made. The beater was worn smooth by his hands. The sound from this instrument was deeper and more resonant than Charlie’s other bodhráns, and he played this one only with the full band, the Lads, with their Irish flute, mandolin, fiddle, and guitar.
“Moira,” he called out toward the kitchen.
“Yes, Mr. Jameson.” She appeared in the doorway, an eager smile always on her face, her round cheeks flushed with the heat of the kitchen.
“I’m headed out. I’ll spend the night at my own flat. If you need anything, just let me know.”
“Would you like me to stay, sir?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind.”
She nodded with a shy smile. He was quite sure she loved being alone in this six-bedroom house in London. She’d been with the Jameson family for over ten years and probably knew a lot more about Callum than she let on. Maybe Charlie should ask her about the mysterious pile of Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham’s language, but Moira was already lost to the back of the house.
Loss. A simple four-letter word that carried so much more than it could hold within its tall start and curved end.
Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.
These were the words of William Faulkner, spoken by his father to Charlie when he was eighteen years old one afternoon at the edge of Esthwaite Water. The sentence returned to Charlie now. Father’s bits and bobs of wisdom, usually borrowed from books, often rose in Charlie when he needed them most. At least those things hadn’t died with him, or wouldn’t unless Charlie let them.
Charlie always wanted to be like his father, but now he was left with only himself as he hoisted his canvas case with the drum tucked safely inside, an emblem of his father, of old music, and of the days he wished he could retrieve and live again.
People left. People died. People changed. Love arrived hot and fast and then found its way into the arms of another.
This was the way of the world, and always had been.
You have a word for any of that, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham?
He found himself asking this out loud as he opened the front door and stepped onto the front stoop. He shivered. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees, as near as he could tell. He thought of Clara and Wynnie when they’d left him only a few hours before, shivering in the cold, headed back to a flat in Covent Garden, walking through an unfamiliar city in this thick fog.
If Father hadn’t told him about Bronwyn, who was Charlie to nose into their private business? He did what he’d been instructed in the note: Give this to Clara Harrington. He wasn’t required to do any more than that.
Clara of the long, dark eyelashes with something ethereal about her, as if she had alighted from the fog and floated into his house. Clara, it was clear, was desperate to know where the papers came from and why they found their way into Father’s library. There was something familiar and tender about her, something he couldn’t place, even as he stared at her.
But Charlie had other things to worry about. There was the cataloging of the library, oil paintings, and antiquities Father had collected. Concerts with the Lads. Visiting and checking on Mum and the land in Cumbria. Company meetings.
Tonight Charlie would put all that aside, for only in playing with his band, only in losing himself in the music, did the demands of the mad world quiet. The beater moving back and forth in his hand to the rhythm of a folk song sung in Gaelic took him somewhere peaceful. Sure, this world always waited for him, but to step out of it for a bit was a gift.
He pulled back the wool sleeve of his jacket and checked the Bulova watch that his father had left him: four fifty p.m. There was enough time to check on Clara and Wynnie, if that was what he felt like he should do.
Was that what he felt like he should do?
Charlie slammed shut the front door more forcefully than was necessary by half.
He walked down the marble front steps and into the fog. Flakes of soot floated through the air as dark snow. The cheap coal that Londoners were forced to use in these lean days was filling the air with its debris, clogging lungs, eyes, and mouths. He looked up; smoke rose from nearly every chimney on this bitter evening, adding to the soup of sulfur.
He thought of the little girl, Wynnie, whose blue eyes saw everything in the room, her gaze alert behind those thick pink glasses. It burns , she said. It burns.
He wondered if they’d gone to the museum or if they’d found their way back to their flat in this mess.
Charlie hustled toward Covent Garden.
He’d be quick, just check in on the way to the pub. It was the least he could do after summoning them across the ocean.