The Lost History of Dreams

by Kris Waldherr

  “Ah yes. Ada’s Folly. I’ve heard it’s called that.”

  Isabelle sank into a chair before the fire, grasping the brown paper envelope tight against her bosom like a baby. Her purple gown puddled about her legs, as though she’d lost control of her limbs.

  After a deep breath, she broke the envelope’s seal.

  “It’s Hugh’s handwriting all right,” she said, pulling the pages close to her face. “I’d recognize it anywhere. Plus he used only brown ink. An affectation of his. Among others.” Her hands shook as she turned the papers over as she read. Once she finished, she set them back inside the envelope on her lap and stared into the fire.

  After some moments, Isabella muttered, “There’s a poem. His last one.”

  “That must make his bequest all the more precious.”

  Do it now Tell her about Hugh’s last request. Robert began to sweat, but not because of the port.

  “I’ll leave you to your reading, Miss Lowell. I hope you find comfort in it.”

  Gratitude softened her lips. “Thank you, Mr. Highstead. I . . . I misjudged you. I’ve been unkind.”

  “This is a difficult time. I’m pleased to be of service.”

  The vein on Robert’s neck began to throb. Ask her now.

  He cleared his throat. “Before I retire, there’s one last thing . . .”

  Isabelle looked up, her face blotchy. “What would that be?”

  “It’s an unusual request.” His voice sounded weak. Wheedling. “It regards Ada’s Folly. The chapel I understand you possess the only key for.”

  “Yes?”

  He forced himself to meet her gaze. “His request is very simple. Mr. de Bonne would like his earthly remains interred in the chapel beside your aunt. It’s part of the terms of his bequest to you.” He couldn’t find the nerve to explain about the daguerreotype.

  Isabelle snorted. Still, her aspect remained benign. “That’s not possible. It’s to remain locked.”

  “If I understand correctly, the chapel has remained locked all these years only out of respect for your uncle’s wishes.” He pointed toward the envelope in her lap. “But now this has changed . . .”

  To Robert’s surprise, any sympathy he’d gained fled Isabelle’s face. “That’s why you’re here! You nearly tricked me with your kindness. You did want something, just like the pilgrims—”

  “Not for me. For Hugh.”

  “I thought you came here to bury him in the churchyard. Not to disturb my aunt’s resting place.”

  “He built the chapel—it’s his right. He also requested a daguerreotype of his corpse before the interment as proof—”

  “But he’s been dead for over two weeks!”

  “I can assure you your uncle’s remains have been embalmed.” He didn’t dare confess Hugh required her presence in the daguerreotype. “If it makes any difference, I’m employed as such, and can assure the utmost discretion and professionalism.”

  She shook her head. “A daguerreotypist! Your brother wrote you were a scholar. Your story grows more and more sordid. What sort of gentleman are you?”

  Robert’s voice rose. “I am a gentleman. Everyone deserves proof of memory—daguerreotypes offer this. And I was a scholar. A writer—”

  “A poet like Hugh? Lord help me!”

  “No, a writer of history. I’d published a book, one about Ovid. I was writing my second at Oxford until my marriage three years ago.”

  She wagged her finger. “Now I understand. You were disinherited because your family didn’t approve of your wife. You had to take employment that paid in pounds, not prestige. You want to make amends to your family.”

  He lied. “Surely you can understand my situation.”

  “Then you traveled here with false hope. Hope, Mr. Highstead, is the most unsatisfying of meals. It grants the appearance of substance but melts like ice in the mouth. It would have been wiser of you to choose another path than to come here on such a fool’s errand.”

  “I did not intend to offend,” Robert said, thinking desperately. He pulled at his collar, which had grown too tight. “As executor of your uncle’s will, my brother is required to give you Mr. de Bonne’s bequest. Until it is fulfilled, the estate remains my brother’s responsibility. He had hoped you could indulge a dead man’s last wish. If not for the sake of family, then for your own welfare.”

  “Mr. de Bonne was my most beloved aunt’s husband. An uncle by marriage, not blood. That scarcely makes you family, sir. As for his last request, I doubt the courts would care much.”

  Robert bowed. “Perhaps we can revisit this tomorrow, Miss Lowell.”

  “No need, Mr. Highstead. You’ll leave in the morning with my uncle’s corpse. You’ll have to bury him elsewhere.” She nodded in dismissal. “We shall not meet again.”

  She threw the envelope containing Hugh’s last poem into the fire. Despite the low coals, it burst into flames.

  “There,” she pronounced with satisfaction. “The matter is done.”

  III.

  Robert couldn’t sleep that night. It wasn’t the thought of Hugh’s corpse downstairs in the stable, or that he was away from his wife. Nor was it that he was in a foreign bed, or that he’d be leaving this same bed in a few hours to travel in the cold with a coffin. Neither was it his hunger, or that he still felt unsteady from the port. It was because he couldn’t still his mind from turning over all that happened since his encounter with Isabelle Lowell.

  After Isabelle dismissed him, he scarcely noticed Mrs. Chilvers’s ceaseless chatter as she showed him to the guest chamber. He’d expected he’d feel relief to be leaving Weald House so soon. Wasn’t this what he’d wanted? To return posthaste to his ghost wife? As for his brother, he’d find a way to work around the terms of Hugh’s bequest in spite of Isabelle; he was clever like that. Instead, John’s last words in their mother’s garden reverberated even after Mrs. Chilvers had bid good night. “You of all men should understand—Hugh only wants to be reunited with his wife. To go home to her.”

  “Nothing to be done,” Robert murmured to the walls in the bedchamber. “John will have to understand.”

  The room was little better than the rest of Weald House. Though the linens seemed clean on the narrow hard bed, the walls were scored with peeling plaster dusted with mold. He supposed only so much could be done with so few servants. Still, an attempt had been made to welcome him. The pitcher was filled with fresh water for washing, the towel scented with dried lavender. Someone had placed on the nightstand a stack of books, a candle, and a hand mirror.

  Robert shut the door to his room and opened his daguerreotype traveling case to make sure nothing had spilled during his journeys: the bottles of mercury and silver salts, the sodium thiosulfate, the spirit lamp for the fuming box. Reassured all was as it should be, he loosened his collar from his neck. A new growth of beard scraped against his fingers; he hadn’t shaved that morning in his ambivalence to leave London. Though he’d brought his shaving-tackle with him, he couldn’t be bothered.

  His collar at last detached from his shirt, Robert folded his jacket and overcoat over the rail of the chair. Finally, he removed from his waistcoat pocket a miniature watercolor portrait of his wife’s eye set inside a brass watch fob. It was the only image he possessed of her.

  Once upon a time, Robert would spend long summer afternoons bent over his desk—his first book had just been published to acclaim and he’d been eager to finish his second before returning to Oxford that fall. One morning, a note fell out from his journal. Meet me on the heath at noon, Sida had written. Your book will wait. This day won’t. Unable to resist, he found her waiting for him just beyond the stile, her sketchbook in hand. “I’ve an hour before I’ll be missed,” she’d explained. Soon they were meeting there regularly to conduct their courtship in secret.

  The afternoon of the watercolor miniature, Robert had begged her to draw herself standing beneath their favorite willow tree—“I could bring a mirror,” he’d said—but she’d
refused. “What if someone discovered the drawing? Then we’d never be able to meet. I’ve a better idea. I’ll paint my eye, and only that—no one will recognize it as mine. After all, the eyes are the window to the soul.” He’d been moved by her offering; eye miniatures were a tradition dating from the previous century, created as private tokens of devotion. She’d painted herself with a surprising accuracy: the coal-dark iris flecked by gold, the slender arch of her brow. When she’d finished, she’d reached for his hand and smoothed his fingers open—his skin then had been unmarked, protected by kid gloves and privilege. She pressed the watercolor into his hand and their lips met hungrily. They’d sunk together onto the soft moss, whispering secrets they’d never confided to anyone.

  Once Robert set Sida’s eye miniature beside his pillow, he washed his face, relieved himself in the chamber pot, and undressed. He arranged himself beneath the covers. Blew out the candle. And this was when his thoughts especially began to circle like flies on a carcass.

  Try as he might, he couldn’t stop remembering the anger—no, hatred—Isabelle had shown when she’d confronted him over his intentions for Hugh’s corpse. Yet he couldn’t blame her. He had arrived wanting something. If the sin was in the desire rather than the act, he was everything she’d accused. He had wanted something from her, just like the pilgrims.

  As the hours passed, Robert stared into the dark. He considered holding the miniature of Sida. Finally, he gave up. He lit a candle and reached for the stack of books left on the nightstand. He ignored the King James on top and opened the thickest volume. It bore Hugh’s name on the spine. He felt that thrill of anticipation that occurs when encountering a new book. Books were easy, unlike people. Writing them, however, was another matter.

  The title page read rather loftily:

  The Collected Letters and Ephemera of Hugh de Bonne

  Edited and Translated by George Douglas

  Published 1847 by Chapman & Hall

  London

  The pages were numerous. The text was small. The book would have been difficult to read even if he wasn’t in a candlelit room. Robert couldn’t turn away.

  A tingle rode up his fingertips as he turned to the frontispiece, where at last Hugh was revealed to his eyes while he lived. The engraving of his cousin presented what Robert had already noted in his corpse: thick hair, a sensitive cast to the brow, which bore a thin scar along his left temple Robert hadn’t noticed before. A light-colored coat with a thick fur collar, probably of beaver, was set across his broad shoulders. Atypical for the era, Hugh wore a full beard; his corpse had been clean-shaven. There was a sensuality to his lips, a fullness, that suggested an appetite for sensation as strong as Robert’s yearning for emotional control. He gave an involuntary shudder. How strange that an engraving of a man in the full of life should disquiet him more than his dead body. Regardless, Robert found himself paging through the book, insomnia forgotten.

  Hugh’s editor had chosen the route of inclusion rather than exclusion: there were nearly two thousand numbered documents spread out over seven hundred pages. Some were notes no more than a sentence long. Others were missives that continued for several pages. The book was organized in chronological order. They began with Hugh’s first attempts at poetry as a boy of eight (Il était une fois un garçon de Marseille . . .). His juvenilia included notes to his nurse regarding his tea, letters to French authorities regarding lost relatives, and translations from Latin. The last year covered was 1837—the year before Hugh disappeared after finishing the glass chapel and publishing The Lost History of Dreams. Before this came letters to tailors requesting updates on Parisian fashion, notes to publishers about typefaces, and even laundry lists (starch only, please: five Waistcoats, one embroidered, two brocade, two broadcloth; three Cravats, finest silk . . .).

  As Robert read, he had the sense of viewing a man’s life reduced to words. Black ink on white paper. Sentence after sentence. The grey minutia of daily routine flashed with occasional color: a review of a poem cycle, a receipt for stained glass, a list of fairy tales for inspiration. These items of interest would inevitably be followed by yet another bill or list.

  The hum of tedium was deafening until Robert arrived at the year 1834. To Miss Ada of the Doves, Hugh’s note had begun:

  I pray your indulgence for this letter. I am hoping you could relay the following message to your guardian regarding your cote in the rose garden. (I trust the cote was built as recommended, and that the dove still abides.)

  This marked the first of a dozen courtship letters from Hugh to Ada. To Robert’s disappointment, they were surprisingly lean of sentiment—he wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this. The phrase locus amoenus—Latin for “pleasant place”—was repeated within them, employed by Hugh to describe his devotion to Ada. Robert recalled Ovid had written ironically of the locus amoenus in the Metamorphoses, presenting it as a deceptively beautiful setting that drew the victim toward destruction: Orpheus to the Furies, Narcissus to the reflecting pool. Was the glass chapel such a place? At first glance, it had appeared enchanted to Robert. Not cursed.

  There was little else revealed in Hugh’s letters to Ada beyond this poetic intimacy: no flowery renditions of love’s euphoria or remembrances of the first blissful brush of a hand. Little wonder the pilgrims had no notion of Ada’s life: it was all about Hugh. Yet as Robert read the letters, he had the sense Hugh had written them with the expectation that someone would read them one day, like throwing a bone to a dog to distract him from the roast. Robert had seen this before in his research at Oxford. The historian’s challenge was to find the story in what was absent. Insomnia or no, his mind was too fatigued for that.

  Robert was about to throw the book aside to attempt sleep again when he arrived at a letter dated the year before Ada’s death.

  He read the letter slowly at first, like treading ice; then quickly, like inhaling water after a parched night.

  Letter 1579

  Dr Friedrich Engelsohn to unknown recipient

  20 December 1835

  My dearest sister—

  As promised, I have been writing you daily since leaving home, as if we are continuing our usual conversations with each other. Though I have yet to receive a letter from you, I tell myself yours have not found their way to me because winter has fallen here in the Black Forest. Some say that nothing will arrive until the snow ends, that we should think of ourselves as crocuses suspended beneath ice, waiting for our lives to recommence with spring.

  Tonight, though, I am writing for a reason besides our daily communion. I am writing because I need your help. The disturbance of my mind is such that I cannot sleep despite it being after midnight.

  I will write exactly what occurred, as though you were there beside me, so you may comprehend my distress.

  This evening, just as I was finishing my hours at the surgery, and just as another snow storm had started its inevitable assault, a gentleman arrived. The gentleman was tall, almost to the point of intimidation. He was forty years of age at most—his russet hair was sprinkled with grey. His face was one I liked instantly: he had a strong nose that spoke of integrity; his eyes were lively and bright, connoting intelligence. Fine lines about his mouth suggested he possessed a sanguine temperament. His hands were long and sensitive. Snow covered his thin wool greatcoat, which looked of high quality. His German was hesitant and laced with the cultured accent of another land. He had a refinement about him that drew me, friendless as I have been here these past months.

  That afternoon, though, the gentleman appeared weighed by worries—his face was blanched of color, his brow furrowed. What had brought him to this God-forsaken place, which so many yearn to leave?

  “You must return tomorrow. The doctor has finished for the day,” I heard my housekeeper tell the gentleman.

  “I won’t leave,” he replied, clutching his walking stick. “My wife is dying.”

  At this, I opened my door and presented myself to the gentleman. How could
I not after such a desperate statement?

  We immediately departed. Outside the surgery, the snow was heavier than I expected. If this wasn’t determent enough, the sky was darkening with alarming rapidity. For the sake of expedience, I insisted we take my carriage, which has runners for the snow. Within a half hour his cottage emerged from a grove of oak trees. By then, the snow was so thick I could take little note of the forlorn abode beyond its construction of timber and plaster.

  And it is here I must relate the strangest part of my tale, my sister. Once we’d stomped the snow off our boots at the threshold, the gentleman said, “Forgive me for not introducing myself, Herr Doktor—you have been so kind to come so far on a snowy night with a stranger.” He inclined his head. “My name is Hugh de Bonne.”

  “The poet?”

  When he nodded, I considered if I was imagining things. Never in my life had I expected to meet Hugh de Bonne, especially under such circumstances! Surely you recall my admiration of his poetry, and how I’d written him last year after reading his Cantos for Grown Children. His publisher answered he’d departed England after his marriage—and here this same Hugh de Bonne stood before me, his beloved wife near death. I’d imagined him living in Paris in a gilded hotel, or enjoying the patronage of royalty in a palace. Not residing in a hut few would choose save out of desperation.

  However, there was no opportunity to speak of this, or to wonder at its peculiarity. Herr de Bonne rushed me to his wife, exclaiming gratitude all the while.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom inside the cottage, for the sole illumination came from their fireplace (“to allow my wife’s eyes to rest,” he explained). I made out the slight curves of a petite woman lying on a pallet beside the fire. She appeared some years younger than Herr de Bonne. I could tell she had been exceptionally beautiful before illness had overtaken. The texture of her alabaster skin was as fine as that of a fairy-tale princess. Her dark hair glistened over her shoulders, though tangled with fever. She was so emaciated as to appear ghost-like.