CHAPTER 59 #2
Thoughtfully, Joanna put the letter to one side.
She only held one part of their story in these letters of Emmy’s.
She would never know the other side. Even if Emmy had kept Rufus’s letters, they would probably have been lost or destroyed and it seemed that Emmy had never married, never had children, so there would have been no one to care what happened to them.
And yet, there was an air of bleakness about Emmy’s words that told Joanna everything she wanted to know.
Emmy had sensed what would happen. She knew her Rufus and the kind of man he was.
She knew he would never be able to leave his sick wife for her – his sense of responsibility and duty were too great.
She knew that he would give her up. He had to.
And that’s what he must have done. This was the last letter Rufus had received from Emmy and hidden away in the trunk.
When she returned from the trip to Prague, he must have told her – written to her perhaps – that there was no future for them, that they must part.
And she would have accepted it. What else could she do?
She had always known he was married and had a family.
She knew where his duties and responsibilities lay.
She’d always known the risk she was taking – with her heart. Poor Emmy.
Joanna put the letters carefully back in her bag.
Emmy had been born in 1895 and she died in 1991.
1991 . . . It seemed so, well, recent. But the dates of her paintings spanned only the period from 1910 to 1914.
What did that mean? That after Rufus left her, she stopped painting?
Or that the paintings after 1914 had never been shown?
Sweetest love, I do not go for weariness of thee . . .
There were no further clues in the letters – Joanna had read and analysed them endlessly, and while they told her plenty about Emmy’s state of mind and love for Rufus, they didn’t tell her about afterwards. Afterwards must have been an unhappy time for both of them.
Joanna shifted in her seat. And why was it that she had seen visions on her bridge walks that seemed to echo Emmy’s experiences as well as her own?
In Venice, Joanna had been looking for a place to run to, when she had seen Emmy laughing and running towards her true love, running towards her destiny.
Only, Rufus hadn’t turned out to be her destiny at all .
. . In Lisbon it had all been about love: Joanna’s love for her family; Emmy’s love for Rufus, the man by her side as she stood under the mulberry tree.
And in Prague, there had been the need to escape.
The knowledge that love could slip through your fingers, that love also meant pain, and even death.
Joanna wasn’t sure how she related to that, and yet she was more convinced than ever that Emmy was telling her something.
And then there was Nicholas Tresillion. Joanna stared out of the library window, seeing nothing. She had emailed him again this morning, telling him about her plans to write a travel book.
Perhaps I’ll do a rerun of the Edwardian Grand Tour, she had written, only half seriously. How it would have been for women like Emmy and how it is for me.
Or, the travel book might metamorphose into that novel she’d always dreamt of writing.
Who knew? She didn’t tell Nicholas that the person whose journey she was following was also an artist. He’d seen a woman with some paints, in Prague, he’d said.
Could it possibly be Emmy? Joanna shook her head.
That was mad. But all of this was mad, wasn’t it?
Where did Nicholas fit in? Who was he? Why was it that he’d had visions that uncannily matched her own?
She couldn’t think – not even here, in a place designed for thinking.
There were so many pieces of the puzzle and they were all floating in the air.
Every time she clutched at one and pulled it down to earth, another escaped and floated off again into Never Never Land.
She simply couldn’t grasp the connections. Only that it all belonged to a pattern.
Had she really seen Emmy, or was she a figment of Joanna’s imagination?
Was it possible that somehow she was getting privileged glimpses of Emmy’s life?
Of Emmy running towards her destiny? Of Emmy falling in love?
Of Emmy in pain? But why Joanna? Because she had found the letters?
Because she was following in Emmy’s footsteps?
Because she was related to William Rufus?
It made no sense.
Joanna turned to the penultimate book, flipped through the references listed in the index. There was nothing important. Nothing new.
She checked her watch again. She’d have to make a move soon.
There were still Christmas preparations to be getting on with back at Mulberry Farm Cottage.
This would be her last visit to the reference library and the History Centre too.
Joanna was pretty sure she had found out everything she could about Emily Selleck.
Maybe it was time to put Emmy and Rufus to rest and concentrate on her next project after all.
She turned to the final book. And what did Rufus do next?
After his affair with Emmy was over, he had presumably devoted himself to his wife and family, after planting a mulberry tree and renaming his cottage in memory of their love.
A special love. The love of a lifetime. But a love that was never meant to be .
. . How had he explained that to his family?
There were no photos of him at Mulberry Farm Cottage from this period of his life, though there were plenty of his wife and children.
Joanna knew she should be more sympathetic to poor old Edith, the wronged wife, who was an ancestor of hers after all, but despite her own experiences of what had happened with Martin and Hilary, Joanna’s empathy belonged firmly to Emmy.
She blinked at the pages listed in the index.
She felt a rapid shiver running through her – the kind of shiver she always had when she suddenly realised she was on the verge of a breakthrough.
Because here was a whole section devoted to Emily Selleck, Edwardian artist. She could hardly believe it.
Greedily, Joanna leafed through the pages.
As she found the chapter, she froze. She stared at the top of the page.
There was a photograph of Emmy – the first, the only one that she had found.
She traced the features with a fingertip. Long, delicate nose, fair hair coiled on top of her head, earnest-looking eyes. My God . . .
Joanna really had seen her. Or at least a vision of her.
It had been no figment of her imagination.
Once, running in a field. Once, leaning back against the trunk of a mulberry tree.
And once, in a paddle steamer going up the River Thames.
Looking up at London Bridge and crying. Crying as if her heart would break.
She frowned. If her visions echoed Emmy’s life, then what did this mean? If there were no photographs of William Rufus after that time, did that mean he’d died? Was that it? But how? In the war maybe?
Joanna checked her watch. She needed to get to the Dorset Local History Centre to study the microfiche one last time. She still didn’t know what was happening here. But she knew she couldn’t rest until she found out.