Chapter 45 Clara
CHAPTER 45? CLARA
Lake District, England
“Dad, did you give anyone in England permission to turn Mother’s book into a play?” I held the phone to my ear while I leaned against the oak table in the kitchen. The aroma of bread baking filled the air.
“Ah yes!” he said. “But to be honest, I’d forgotten about it. That was eight or nine years ago. A small play in a small town in another country by a woman who was enchanted with your mother’s novel.”
I stared at the brick wall where copper pots hung from iron hooks. A window with diamond patterns of iron mullions revealed that outside, afternoon sunlight slanted across the lake, creating shifting cloudlike shapes. “Did it cross your mind that she might be here? That Mother wanted the play made?”
“In England? Of course not.”
“Dad, before you met her, she traveled all over the world on ships and schooners and…”
“I know, ladybug.” His voice was soft, so I kept on.
“From Hawaii to the Pacific to California and Maine, to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.”
“Clara!” A sharp knife of my name. “I know the places your mother traveled. And I know how you’ve harbored hope for so long, but that can be a dangerous thing. A long time ago, a woman sought permission for a play, and I gave it. It’s simple.”
His voice was uncharacteristically cold, but I understood enough about this kind man to know that anger was his defense. His protection from grief and from hope.
He adroitly shifted topics. “Lilia is asking about you. She’s been worried, but she’s also thrilled you’re having an adventure.”
“You told her I was all right, didn’t you? I sent her a letter, but who knows when it will arrive.”
“I told her, ladybug.”
“Dad, have you gotten ahold of Nat? I sent a telegram and can’t get him to answer at home or work.”
“No. Do you want me to go to his workplace?”
“No, I’ll call again.”
Wynnie paced the kitchen in circles listening to every word, and I held my hand up for her to stand still; she was making me nervous.
“Listen, Dad, I know Mother is gone,” I said. “But this Jameson family must know something. Why would Charlie’s father have the satchel and his mother be involved with the play?” I left out the garden sign. I wasn’t sure why, but this didn’t feel the right place for more information. “And, Dad…”
“Yes?”
“Something else.”
“What is it?”
“Eliza Walker lives here part-time. She married someone from Hawkshead. I met her this afternoon.”
“Your Eliza, Harriet’s Eliza?” This time his voice held surprise.
“Yes.”
“My God, what is happening?”
“Clues, that’s what’s happening.”
“Or they’re coincidences,” he said.
“Yes, they are, but they are also something more. It’s like I’m still in that London fog—nothing is coming clear to me.”
“Come home, sweetie. Come home with Wynnie and we can slog through this language and decide what we must do with it.”
“Don’t you care why they have it? How they found it?”
“No. I can truly say I don’t.”
“Dad, do you know anyone named Violet?”
The distance stretched between us. I wanted to see his face, to watch his reaction. “No, I don’t know anyone. Your mother—”
“Was enchanted by them. Yes.”
“Why are you asking?”
“It’s something in her words, some sort of code, I think.”
“Code?” he asked.
“I’ll try and figure it out. I will.”
“Please hurry home, ladybug.”
“I am, I promise. All I’m doing is waiting for our passports. I really don’t want to miss the awards ceremony.”
After we’d said our I love you s and Wynnie had talked to him for a moment and told him about the lake Jemima Puddle-Duck once flew over and how it was right outside the door, I hung up, and Wynnie looked straight at me. “You didn’t tell him we lost some pages.”
“Not yet.”
That was when we noticed Moira in the doorway holding a tray of half-eaten scones. She didn’t acknowledge that she had heard our conversation but instead told us: “The doctor has arrived to check on both of you.”
“Oh, that’s so kind. We are really all right,” I told her. “Healed and rested.”
But despite my protests, Moira motioned for us to follow her along the quiet hallway to a room in the back of the house where I’d never been.
Here, double doors opened to a sweeping view of the east side pasture. Bulky furniture and overstuffed couches gave the room a chubby, comfortable feel. Dr. Finlay stood by a large pine table. He smiled as we entered. He looked as if he’d been born in the wrong era, wearing a suit with a tweed vest straight out of a Jane Austen novel.
Pippa stood next to him, and they’d just finished laughing about something. She turned to us with a smile. Everything in that room was swathed in pastoral green, including Pippa, as if she’d dressed for the setting.
“Well,” Dr. Finlay bellowed, and patted his stomach. “My patients seem to be doing just fine!”
“I hope so,” I said.
He motioned for Wynnie to join him and then reached inside his large black bag to withdraw a stethoscope. After he listened to her chest and back, instructed her to take deep breaths, and checked her pulse, he declared her fit as a fiddle. I nearly asked him how a fiddle was fit. All this talk of language and where words and phrases came from was making me overanalyze nearly everything I said and heard.
“Do you think that sulfur and fog caused any lasting damage?” I asked him.
He pulled his lips back so they disappeared, a straight line across his full face. Then he exhaled. “There’s no real way to know. It doesn’t sound like it now, but you’ll need to watch her, be careful.”
“We’ve been walking outside,” I said. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Yes! The air here is very healing. Bundle up, protect her throat with a scarf. But it will do her good,” he said, and packed his bag of doctor paraphernalia, full of items as familiar to me as every nook and cranny of my childhood home on the bay. These were the tools that Dad used to diagnosis and fix. These were the tools that saved, if saving was possible.
“Thank you so much!” I told him. “It’s time for us to be on our way soon, to travel home.”
He shook his head. “No. Not yet, at least. With the season of colds and sickness, you can’t take that chance with her. You too. I’d say you leave in a week at best. Make sure her lungs are healed and assure there will be no medical emergency halfway across the ocean. It’s best to be prudent in these matters, especially with a child.”
He listened to my chest and took my temperature with the glass thermometer and declared me well. As he bustled out and Pippa walked with him into the large gallery hallway, I looked at Wynnie. “It appears we are here for longer. Your wishes are your command. Or… maybe we should return to London now that it’s clear. We can see all the sights we planned. The museums and the galleries.”
“No,” she said. “I want to stay here. Something is here waiting for us.”
“Darling, that isn’t up to me. We can’t just move into someone’s home.”
“Charlie wants us here,” she said. “I can tell.”
“Well, it isn’t exactly Charlie’s house. It belongs to Mrs. Jameson.”
Wynnie slumped into a chair. Then her eyebrows rose, and she popped up, her hand extended toward the far wall. “Mama!” she whispered, and I turned to see where she pointed.
On the far wall of damask emerald wallpaper hung a gallery of oil paintings. They varied in size, all of them either pastoral or seascape: Black cows belted with white in a pasture with hedgerows as boundary. A schooner on a storm-battered sea. Silver sheep in a paddock with mountains in the background, one I knew from the window in our bedroom. A shingled home on the curve of a bay.
“Wynnie.” I exhaled her name and walked toward the image. “What in the world…”
The painting, about two by three feet, wasn’t an imaginary rendering of our home; it was a clear and precise reproduction of a cedar shake house painted a maritime blue, timeworn and shabby, but solid on a springtime land with a flowering garden of violets. The bay was as smooth as the lake outside the window, the oyster shell curve of beach flickered under an unseen sun, and next to a battered dock, a small silver boat was moored with a thick rope. The windows glowed from within. A low white picket fence surrounded a garden of flowering beds, and the gate yawned open to the dirt path that led down to the bay.
The painting hung at eye level beneath another of a pheasant drooping from the mouth of a brown-and-tan hunting dog. I touched the frame and felt a rush of love for the house that had sheltered me for nearly all my life. This was the view from a boat or from a seagull dropping down to snag a flounder in the bay.
“How?” I asked out loud to the room, to Wynnie, to the unseen forces that had brought us here.
I held out my hand for Wynnie and she took it.
“Look at the left corner,” she said in a whisper.
There, on just an inch of the painting, there was a charred corner of the house, a scab of darkness, like the bark of a tree, peeling and fading into the corner of the garden. In real life, in the world of the house as it was now, there was no evidence of the fire I’d started that sent my mother away, and here was solid proof that the fire remained. The scars might be hidden from sight now, but they never disappeared.
On closer inspection, a vine grew up and across the scab, a vine flowering with brilliant violets.
“Violets,” I said.
“Violets,” she repeated.