Chapter 46 Clara
CHAPTER 46? CLARA
Lake District, England
Wynnie and I bundled up, slipped on wellies we’d been borrowing, and made our way outside. We walked quietly as we crossed the lane toward the lake. She held tight to my hand with an unusual pressure of insecurity. She, too, felt the world shifting, unsure and unsteady.
A squirrel skittered along the frosted ground and then jumped to land on a chestnut tree’s scarred river of white bark beneath the brown. Its auburn fur shivered as it ran upward to argue in chitters with another squirrel on a low branch.
We walked silently until we passed the three stone cottages below the house. Each one was the same, except with a different-colored door, varied gardens, and pathways to the entry. Smoke feathered from two of the chimneys.
“Mama, there are clues everywhere, and it’s not fair that I can’t figure it out. At least with puzzles, there is a picture on the top of the box. But this is a puzzle without a picture—just odd pieces scattered about: Eliza Walker, a play with Emjie, violets, and now an oil painting. I move the pieces around in my mind and I can’t figure it out.”
“Neither can I, darling. Neither can I.”
To the left was another path leading around the lake. I turned and we made our way toward the woodlands, away from the stone cottages. A black-and-white duck with eyes so yellow they seemed from a daisy slid across the lake, his silver-gray beak pointed straight for shore. Wynnie gathered small remnants of nature in her pockets—a pinecone, a feather, a rock, and a twig. We made our way along the south end of the lake, where we hadn’t yet ventured, a muddy path curving around its pebbled edges. The path was rippled by tree roots and littered with fallen copper leaves.
“Clara! Wynnie!” Charlie’s voice echoed through the woods.
I took my daughter’s hand. “Here!” I called out, as he appeared around the bend.
He rushed toward us, his coat unbuttoned and his scarf loose. His wool cap sat crooked on his head, and it was obvious he’d run out in a rush. “There you are. I was… worried.” His brown eyes squinted against the sun.
“Why?” While stomping through the woods with Wynnie, I’d convinced myself that Charlie Jameson and his family were harboring a secret. I wasn’t in the best of moods to see him, to be accommodating.
“Why am I worried?”
I stared at him without an answer, gauging his looks, wondering if everything he’d told me was a lie—if he, like Nat, hid a darker rot I couldn’t see at first.
“I’m worried because I don’t want you to become lost. There are hundreds of acres out here, and… if you take a wrong path, there are old mines.”
“You’re here to save us?” I asked.
He backed up as if I’d hit him in the chest. “What happened?” he asked, reading between my cold words.
“Tell him, Mama.” Wynnie pulled at my coat sleeve.
“Is this some kind of ridiculous game, Charlie?”
“Game?”
“The dictionary. The satchel. Your father’s old library. The play your mother helped produce. The garden sign. Eliza Walker. The painting. Is this some kind of game where I finally learn the truth? Because if this is a game, I’m losing very badly.”
“Clara.” He said my name gently. “The painting?”
I slumped in on myself, the anger emptied out. I sat on a chair-height tree stump, set my hands on my knees, and took a couple of deep breaths before I looked up.
“There’s a painting in your family study.”
“There are a lot of paintings in my family study.” His voice was as cautious as if he didn’t want to startle a small animal.
“This one is of a cottage by a bay.”
“Yes, that one. It’s lovely. I think it’s Cornwall, but I’m unsure.”
“It’s our house,” I said.
“In Bluffton,” Wynnie said.
“What?”
I stood now. “That painting in your family study is of our home in South Carolina, Charlie. It is not a rendering; it is exact, all the way down to the charred left side where I set our house on fire twenty-five years ago.”
“What the bloody hell?” He began to pace, his leather boots melting the shaded snow as the ground below turned muddy and brown. “Why would my family have a painting of your family’s home? That painting is one of the many that Mum and my aunt and cousin painted.”
“Was Eliza Walker one of Pippa’s friends who painted in the attic? Would she know?” I was grasping for something to hang this anxiety on, something less amorphous than the disconnected clues.
“Yes, she was.”
“Can we go ask her right now?” My voice trembled, electric with desire.
“Follow me,” he said.
Charlie didn’t walk in front of me, but beside us on the well-worn dirt path around the lake, guiding us silently. We returned the way Wynnie and I had already walked, past the upside-down rowboat, the frosting of ice cracking along the reedy edges of the lake, and past the first stone cottage, where drafts of smoke rose like clouds from the stone chimney.
“Where are we going?” Wynnie asked.
Charlie didn’t answer her in any way but to take my hand in his, wrapping his leather gloved fingers around my own. The sun was high now, having shed its cumbersome garments of cloud, and sunlight darted through the bare branches.
We emerged in a clearing, and Charlie stopped. To our right, a path led to a wrought-iron fence that surrounded a gathering of only a few gravestones. They were old and worn, carved out of white stone, the newer ones of shining marble.
What ridiculous hope I’d clung to when the letter was clear: If you are receiving this.
I set my steps to walk into the cemetery, when Charlie tugged at my hand. “She’s not there,” he said.
We walked a few yards until we reached the second stone cottage. Curled and frost-nipped ivy grew along its west-facing side, winding toward a flagstone roof and stone chimney. A goldenrod-hued light shone behind the windows, the flicker of it hinting at a burning fire. A brass knocker shaped like a bird hung on the deep blue door.
Charlie stopped and let go of my hand, set both of his on the low fence of an enclosed garden. It was then that I saw the woman bundled in a green wool coat. She knelt over a leafless bush. In her hands she wielded pruning scissors, and she clipped off each frost-bitten appendage.
We watched her, her back bent over her work, her long chestnut-and-gray hair flowing down her back beneath a knit cap. Her hands were nimble in their gloves.
The world was silent but for nature’s creaking and squawking, and there we were above Esthwaite Water when the woman stood and stretched. “Oh, Charlie dear, hallo!”
“Hallo, Cousin Isolde!”
He opened the gate, and I stood by a peeling white picket fence. The woman took two steps toward us, smiling. Not until she dropped her pruning scissors, not until she let out a cry, not until she fell to her knees, did I know.
The world peeled away: the cold and the wondering, the fear and the irritation. I was a child, I was a woman, and I was myself. I was a daughter and a mother. Fire consumed the curtains, and I watched in awe until my mother’s arms were around me, dragging me outside. Then the sirens and a hospital room with elephants on the wallpaper.
And then now, here, the woman cried out, “Clara.” This woman was on her knees, her arms held out as if I could run into them as a child.
I walked through the open gate and along the flagstones, only ten feet at most, and yet twenty-five years long.
I knelt next to her, the cold, hard ground grinding my knees, and she took me in her arms. “There you are!”
There you are.
She kissed my cheeks, first one and then the other; she wiped the tears I didn’t know were falling, kissed my forehead with chapped lips.
Here she was, whole and alive, on her knees and saying my name in the voice I heard in dreams.
Her face was softly lined, her hair silver-streaked, her blue eyes slightly faded but to a more beautiful aqua seen only in the deepest lakes.
She ripped off her gloves and held my face in both her bare hands as if checking to see if I was real. Then she lifted my right arm, slipped back the sleeve, and gazed upon my scars. She kissed them, first my wrist and then my forearm. At the feel of my mother’s lips, my skin tickled and awoke. “How are you here, my beautiful child?”