CHAPTER 38 #2
She pulled her handwritten copy of the family tree – such as it was – out of the Emmy folder, checked it against the dates on the letters .
. . May 1913. June, July . . . She read the names once again.
Mary, Elizabeth, George. She didn’t see how .
. . Could the letters have been written by someone in the next generation up?
But that would make her even older, that would make her not the Emmy Joanna had come to know at all.
She would guess from the tone of her letters that Emmy was abroad for the first time, writing excitedly to her – older?
– lover who she missed more than life itself.
Then it hit her. Lover . . . not husband.
Joanna stared into space. How could she have been so stupid?
Of course, Emmy wasn’t Edith or Mary or Elizabeth – because Emmy didn’t live here in Mulberry Farm Cottage.
She never had. She had sent the letters here, yes.
But not because she lived here, rather because her lover lived here. God . . . Her lover . . .
It explained why there was only one painting here – she must have given it to Rufus as a present but kept the others, or sold them maybe.
It explained why Emmy hated to be apart from him.
Their relationship was not one of stability nor security – at least not when the letters had been written.
They weren’t married, but they were very definitely in love.
It even explained why Emmy had referred to ‘finding a way through the mire’ and other comments that had made Joanna suspect their relationship might be more complex than she had at first assumed.
Joanna held the letters closer to her breast, sniffed the old, faintly musty scent of the browned, crinkled paper, tried to get her thoughts in order.
It would be the person who had received the letters who would have them, to keep, to reread, to hide, not the person who had written them.
So . . . She held them away from her once more.
Rufus was not Emmy’s husband, but her lover, her dearest, her heart’s love.
And . . . Oh, my God. Was Rufus a real name?
A pet name? A nickname? Rufus could be anyone.
She looked around the room, her room. It had seen her through her childhood, her adolescence, and now her separation from Martin.
And the Venetian bridge painting had always been here on the wall, so familiar that until she’d found the letters, she’d been almost blind to it.
The signature on the painting . . . She moved closer.
Well, it was definitely an S and then a long squiggle which was slashed across.
After finding the letters, she’d assumed it was Emmy Shepherd.
But she could see now that what she had thought was a ph was more likely to be a double l, and the first h might not be an h at all . . .
She sat down on the bed again. Rufus had lived here.
And he could be older than Emmy – that would work.
Once more, she scrutinised the family tree.
Could Rufus have been William’s father, her great-great-grandfather Edward, whose name had been on the census form as head of the household?
Or would he have been too old for Emmy? Or could it have been an uncle perhaps?
Or even her great-grandfather William himself?
Had he once been in love with Emmy before he married the rather stern-looking Edith?
It was possible. It was even possible, she supposed, that he’d met Emmy after his marriage to Edith.
Edith, as Joanna had already observed, looked neither well nor happy.
Whereas William . . . Joanna began to sift through the photos that Harriet had given her.
Rufus? Didn’t that mean . . . ? She was almost certain . . .
She got to her feet, still holding the contents of the Emmy folder, returned to her laptop and looked it up.
Rufus. Latin. Meaning red-haired. Joanna sat back in her chair.
Yes. So . . . Emmy might have called him (whoever he was) Rufus, not because that was his given name, but because .
. . he had red hair. She thought of the couple she’d seen under the mulberry tree in Lisbon.
Emmy and Rufus – the man with red hair. It was mind-blowingly simple.
And he had lived here. He . . . whoever he was.
She stared out of the window. The farmyard was empty now; Harriet was probably in the barn collecting eggs.
Joanna traced a pattern on the window with her fingertip.
She was no nearer to finding out who Emmy really was – her surname was indecipherable from the signature on the painting and all Joanna had discovered was that it probably wasn’t Shepherd.
Which meant, unless she had gone on to marry a Shepherd – if Rufus even was a Shepherd – that Emmy wasn’t an ancestor of Joanna’s at all.
She sighed. It was a disappointment. And she had felt so close to Emmy.
But was Rufus an ancestor? This was more than possible, given her new theory.
Joanna had all the old photographs that might give her a clue as to Rufus’s identity, but how could she recognise red hair from a faded sepia photo?
As for the red-headed man she’d seen under the mulberry tree in Lisbon, she hadn’t seen his face clearly enough, his features had been little more than a blur.
Still . . . Joanna smiled. She felt more confident than before. She was making decisions. She was on her way to Prague. And things were beginning to fall into place: in this story from the past that had drawn her in; maybe in her own life too.