by Lorna Gray
His readiness made a mockery of the faint tension that remained in me. ‘Actually,’ I said, working hard to lift my gaze from his hand. ‘I wasn’t thinking about my uncle’s pressing deadlines, or his despair when we both abscond from yet another day of work on the Willerson archive. I was going to ask a question on a somewhat different but related theme about the rhubarb seeds.’
He repeated blankly, ‘The rhubarb seeds?’
‘In my advent calendar,’ I said. ‘I thought you wanted me to unpick the clues from Miss Prichard’s manuscript but she seems to have omitted rhubarb entirely. What are they for?’
I saw an eyebrow twitch. ‘Medicinally? Rhubarb is a mild purgative.’
Robert was teasing me. I remarked dryly, ‘In that case, your choice of ingredients for my advent calendar is a bit immediate, isn’t it? A plant that will rid the body of harmful things?’
That swept the humour clear from his face. He suddenly had his hands on both my arms.
‘The present worry was not,’ he said firmly, ‘foremost in my mind when I first set about leaving you little gifts in your advent calendar.’
He explained, ‘The rhubarb seeds belong to the original recipe. They bear no relation to Miss Prichard’s manuscript, or this work, or in fact any book. They relate to you. And it must be said that you’ve made everything simpler, because yesterday I was still struggling to source the last two ingredients. Then you freed me. I found a new recipe. And, since it uses all the same ingredients bar two, it’s a saving on many accounts because now I don’t have to source sloe berries or the everlasting flower Xeranthemum.’
‘Xeranthemum?’
His hands moved lightly on my sleeves as he met my slanting smile. ‘Your aunt has a sprig of it in her wreath, as I learned yesterday, and I was going to have to perform a minor act of vandalism to get at it. And,’ he added, ‘if you’re fishing for another hint, I have no idea about the plant’s medicinal properties.’
There was a thrilling little pause after that – the sort that made me suddenly very conscious that he was holding me very still before him. Nothing moved except my pulse. Then he bent his head and kissed me.
It was some time later that Robert spoke. His arms had enfolded me very tightly and when I caught the quieter murmur of his voice against my hair, it seemed to be a seamless continuation of the reference he had made to my aunt’s Christmas wreath.
He said, ‘You did understand me, didn’t you, when I said that it wasn’t all my own choice to give you room to come home properly? You did understand that I’m reasonably certain that your aunt has guessed what I think of you?’
I said, ‘I think you’ve just explained what she was trying to ask me about last night as I left her house. She seemed to be convinced that I would either be frightened away or work myself up into hurting you, if she said too much.’
I asked, ‘Are you trying to tell me that she told you to keep your distance?’
‘That isn’t what I’m trying to say. Although, I believe that your Aunt Mabel foresaw the impact you would have on me. And immediately decided that she had no wish to experiment upon your feelings by thrusting us together over her family dinner table.’
It was very quiet up here in my attic. I thought he had noticed my interest in that vacant stairwell. And in that faint line of a cut on his hand.
That same hand was holding me very close. Nothing was stalking him from the shadows here, and he wasn’t being my guardian either. He said almost fiercely, ‘I’m trying to say that we’re all so protective of each other’s welfare that we might forget to simply live. When you’re already pretty formidable, as I said, aren’t you?’
He stayed with me that night. After many hours of work to find the errors, and get fresh blocks made up after dinner, what remained of this time was ours.
I woke to the cold air of a bedroom on a wintery Monday morning to find him sleeping on his side beside me, his back turned to me and his hair ruffled again, this time by my pillow. The weak light of a damp dawn was drifting in through a chink in the curtains to cast a soft line across his cheek and onto me. I had overslept if daylight was beginning to show.
Very gently, I touched my lips to his shoulder. There was a confidence that came from this kind of proximity. It awoke a thrill in me when his eyelashes lifted and his thoughts turned immediately to me; a new sense of determination that grew from being able to recall precisely how this place had felt last night after the building had grown dark; when the only silence had been the one that had fallen peacefully between us, while the sounds of the floorboards had gone on whispering to the shifting air outside my window.
Chapter 23
We found the newspaper office near the point where the bustle of the Cirencester shops gave way to the wide space of a country lane.
The reception was made of wood and more wood, and contained a very crisp young woman journalist who directed us back into the town again. The newspaper archives were held by the town library, a splendid Victorian affair with a front door that opened directly from the street.
Inside, a green-tiled stairwell led us into a room fitted with plasterwork ceilings. Tall bookcases crowded in ranks around heavy oak reading desks where a librarian guarded her drawers of index cards. It was hushed and terribly serious.
‘I had thought,’ remarked Robert in an undertone while the librarian bustled away, ‘that your uncle’s office was unique, but apparently not. Is it a rule do you think that places that house books must line the walls with wood?’
The newspaper archive was yet another Victorian creation. For over a hundred years, every edition had been thoroughly indexed by name or subject and recorded in these drawers of cards. There was no card conveniently marked for Harriet Clare, though.
Diphtheria, on the other hand, featured in thirty-one different articles.
‘This must be the outbreak that claimed her.’ My stilted murmur called Robert away from his own newspaper to examine mine. ‘“Tragic Loss of Church Boys” in March of that year – 1873 – but no mention of Harriet Clare. No mention of anything to do with Walter Ashbrook at all.’
This was the eighth newspaper I had examined, and now we would have to wait for the next in line to be brought out.
I propped myself upon my hands on the tabletop and muttered, ‘I know the librarian is only permitted to bring out two newspapers at a time, one in each hand and dangling from its wooden bar. And I realise that it is fair that the library should wish to protect its historic collection. But I do think the rule is making things far more difficult for us than they need to be.’
I wasn’t being entirely serious. We hadn’t left Moreton until the second bus of the morning as it was, thanks to the complication of waking late and the responsibility of opening the office ready for my uncle. And somewhere in the midst of that morning rush, I had opened the next drawer on my advent calendar.
I had done it at just the moment when Robert had stepped quickly up the stairs from the print room. He had found me standing spellbound, with a packet of powdered yarrow laid in my palm. It had been accompanied by a dried spray of elderflowers and a fragment of paper that had been torn loosely into a question mark.
The ingredients formed an anagram.
The original run of clues, before he had decided to omit the dried flower beginning with an ‘x’ and the sloe berries, would have spelled MERRY XMAS. And the discovery of that detail in itself almost mattered as much as the shorter message … almost.
Because his first effort had been a simple mark of friendship, and he had thought to do it for me long before I had learned how to speak to him.
At this moment, as he approached my side with the mutter of traffic rattling dully past outside, I felt a stirring of that same memory of piecing together the two messages. I could still feel the peacefulness of the office and the consciousness of the fragile question mark held between my fingers.
Here, I controlled the rush by turning my head to him to say quietly, ‘That last article
mentioned the village church. The outbreak was only reported at all because two of the little boys were new recruits to the choir, and that played sufficiently upon the heartstrings.’
The other newspapers I had read covered outbreaks at various boarding schools. Which showed how alarmingly commonplace the infection must have been, if the only time it deserved mentioning was when it wreaked an extra bit of devastation.
There was no article for Harriet though. Her death notice didn’t appear in any of the newspapers that the librarian brought out next. I’d asked for those that fell around the date of the outbreak we’d uncovered.
But Harriet wasn’t mentioned in any of the neighbouring editions, even after allowing for the possibility that she had succumbed more quickly, or lingered. It took some time and the endlessness of it all made the high wooden features of this room feel considerably less like home.
I lifted a hand to my neck to ease the stiffness there and found that I had caught Robert’s eye. He asked quietly, ‘You’re beginning to worry again?’
I smiled at him. ‘Not in the way you mean. Miraculously, today, the thoughts are very definitely in my head, and not looming from the darker corners of the room. Do you know, I’m increasingly convinced that you were right to tackle me about the way I might be letting my own past influence this. This is beginning to feel like that afternoon I spent dragging you about graveyards. Misguided.’
In truth, the silence between these towering bookcases wasn’t absolute. It was closer to tranquillity, as if the stresses of yesterday had abruptly decided to leave me alone, and I could guess why. Beside me, Robert bent to retrieve a fallen pencil from the floor.
On an impulse, I stepped to the drawer holding the index cards for ‘A’. I stood there for some time in the light of a fierce little lamp while my fingers worked their way through the cards until I reached that familiar name. There was a clatter behind me. It was Robert knocking his shoulder against the table as he straightened from his reach beneath the desk. From the noise it made, I thought it might have hurt a little; the librarian simply looked severe.
‘Sorry,’ was all Robert said when he caught us watching.
Then the librarian scuttled off and someone else came in. Robert watched this new person walk to the natural history section and then he waited for me to rejoin him at our desk before asking, ‘What have you sent our tireless assistant to get now?’
Again, it took an infuriatingly long time to work through the references until the librarian brought out the newspapers I thought I wanted, but finally I had the article in my hands. I turned the sheet of newsprint towards him on the desk.
‘What is it?’ he asked, reaching to draw it closer. He had been idly examining the other paper the librarian had brought.
‘Walter’s obituary,’ I told him and saw his eyebrows lift. I added, ‘And, interestingly, the title implies it was written by his daughter.’
‘The person who installed Walter’s memorial in the village church?’
‘The same,’ I said.
‘May I?’ I asked as I drew the paper back again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his concentration as I quoted out loud:
Our beloved Walter John Ashbrook will be forever remembered by the family as an inspiration, a tireless mind and a dedicated source of encouragement.
But here, for the benefit of those who knew him, near and far, I will lay out my respect in the terms of the greatest affection for a great man’s work.
I shivered a little as I read that. I suppose I wasn’t expecting to suddenly encounter this first real remnant of a voice from that time, particularly his daughter’s. Walter was thought to have been a cold, remote father, so it was peculiar to go on to the next section and feel my own mouth speak of her affection in such terms as kindness, generosity and devotion.
I said on a note of wonder, ‘I don’t think she considered herself estranged from him at all. She says here that she admired Walter. She says that he spent his life working to further medical science, as his father did before him. It was their shared legacy.’
I faltered upon that word, legacy. Robert didn’t notice. He was turning his attention back to the other paper. He asked, ‘Walter was a doctor?’
I rescanned the crowded lines. ‘No. I don’t think so. No, here it is. She goes on to say that he edited and delivered the bulk of his father’s research on fevers to one of the great London medical colleges.’
‘London,’ Robert repeated flatly. He was bending closer over his own paper as he remarked on a distracted note, ‘Wasn’t that where he was supposed to have gone while Harriet was lying neglected?’
I straightened as I grasped his meaning. I said on an uncertain laugh, ‘It’d be funny, wouldn’t it, if we’ve just found evidence that will redeem him in Jacqueline’s eyes. She can’t hate Walter if it turns out that when he went away during that fatal diphtheria outbreak, he was fulfilling his dedication to Graham Hanley Ashbrook’s research.’
Then I corrected myself by shaking my head and saying, ‘Actually, I don’t know if she will like this. There’s no mention of the giraffes, or of Harriet.’
Then my eyes caught upon the author’s closing line. She’d signed herself ‘His Daughter, Mrs David Murray’.
Legacies and names stilled in my mind. Because the name Murray was familiar. It was more than familiar to me after that reckless hunt amongst gravestones. During his life, old Mr Sampson Murray had been the estate manager from the farm at Bramblemead, and in death, he had been buried by his son near that little sinking church.
His son had bought the farm later, Jacqueline had said. She believed it had been made possible by the terms of the last Ashbrook’s Will. I thought that David Murray must have been much younger than Walter’s children, if Jacqueline was convinced he had been young enough to have known Harriet as a boy.
‘Lucy?’ Robert’s voice brought life back into my senses like sound being suddenly switched on. Outside, a bus was rattling past the window. Robert drew my attention to the paper beneath his hand.
His newspaper dated from many years before the obituary. It had been brought out by the librarian because it contained a paragraph about a visit to the Ashbrook house by children from the village school at Christmas in 1877. They had been welcomed and presented with their oranges by a young woman of seventeen, ‘Miss Clare Ashbrok’.
‘I—’ My voice failed.
Misspellings of the surname notwithstanding, I knew that Clare could never have been an accidental misspelling of the daughter’s name, Janet. And besides, by Jacqueline’s idea of dates, Janet had been old enough to have been thoroughly installed in a home with her own family by the time these children would have been visiting the house.
In fact, Janet would have been so grown up that her husband couldn’t have been David Murray either.
My incredulous whisper didn’t sound like my own but it was mine all the same. ‘Harriet didn’t die.’
Robert’s expression mirrored my bemusement. ‘Yes. I mean, no. She didn’t,’ he said. ‘And after all that strain.’
He made me straighten from my lean over the desk with a sudden little intake of breath.
It was ridiculous to be so shocked. And yet it was with me still as I said more warmly, ‘That’s why Walter’s affection for his daughter suddenly became such a feature in the housekeeping diaries after Harriet disappeared. Walter didn’t abandon the girl on her sickbed, or expunge her name from the record. She lived and he loved her. He adopted her.’
All of a sudden, it was hard not to give way to laughter. ‘And why did she drop the name Harriet Clare to become Clare Ashbrook? Because it was a tribute to both her parents and her adoptive father?’
By way of a reply, Robert reached out to lightly touch the final line on the other paper. The name of the estate manager’s son was there again.
He gave me a moment to reread the closing words of the obituary, then he remarked, ‘Is David Murray the reason why Walter abruptly wrote that forlorn note about
Miss Ashbrook leaving the house upon the day of her marriage?’
I stared at the lines of Harriet’s tribute to the man who had raised her. Robert added what I had already partially guessed, ‘Walter would have known that she would have no need of a room in his house any more, if she’d married the estate manager’s son.’
No wonder I had been feeling the relief of being left alone today. The obsession could never have sustained itself after the better peace of last night. This was the thrill of knowing that with this discovery, the giraffe book was free to be printed and it mattered that Robert was with me.
I suppose I ought to have felt a fool after making all that fuss. But the release of excitement hadn’t reached that stage just yet.
Instead, I was experiencing that giddying sense of perception tilting once again. The disorientating rush of thinking my way through these past minutes was like that experience on the stairs in the Ashbrook house, where as ever the single dependable presence was Robert.
That time, I had been made blind by the confusion between a past and present grief. This time, the feeling was happy and there was very little I could grasp beyond the many changes of Harriet’s name.
Her final name, her married one, wasn’t in the telephone book, but then hardly anyone was. The electoral register was missing too. It hadn’t been produced for the duration of the war and this library hadn’t yet received a copy of the updated version.
Then the librarian appeared by my shoulder. She was bearing the last list the Commission had issued. Taking it, I said doubtfully, ‘It’s from 1939. It’s nearly a decade old.’
She opened it for me at the right page.
Ten years ago, D. E. Murray and C. H. Murray had been registered voters. Their address was Bramblemead Cottage.
In the next blink, I was outside and getting damp again beneath a sky that was growing dusk-like already. Robert was turning up the collar on his coat.