by Michael Rowe
“Clarence, please.”
“Clarence.”
He paused. “What do you know about them, Jamie?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “I know that Alexander Blackmore was a local politician who apparently had deep pockets. The house must have been particularly striking back in its day. It’s still impressive, but I can only imagine how it must have looked to the townspeople. Blackmore must have set himself up as a minor king out here.”
“Wild Fell was like no house ever seen in this region,” Clarence began. “The source of Blackmore’s wealth was never actually established. It may have been inherited. You know, second sons were often sent out to the colonies to establish themselves in those days, but wherever it came from, he spared nothing when it came to that place. The stone was all local, of course, but I’m given to understand that entire rooms were deconstructed in Europe and reassembled inside Wild Fell. Tremendous art and furniture. Exquisite panelling for the walls.”
“It’s very impressive,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
He paused, glancing at me strangely. Then he went on.
“As I was saying, why he ever picked Alvina as a place to settle, no one really knows. But even then, millionaires from as far away as America were building these palaces along Georgian Bay. It was almost as though Alexander Blackmore wanted to top them all. He married a woman from Montreal—old money. Well, whatever ‘old money’ meant in Canada in the early 1800s, anyway. All of the money was pretty new, but they loved to give themselves aristocratic airs. Her name was Catherine Agnes Russell. According to what I’ve heard, he didn’t build Wild Fell for her. He built Wild Fell for himself, then married her because he felt it needed a chatelaine. Also, he obviously had political ambitions, and he needed a wife and family.”
“There’s a portrait of her in the house,” I said. “I found it this morning.”
Mr. Brocklehurst raised his eyebrows. “Really? A portrait of Catherine Russell? Good Lord, what sort of condition is it in?”
I shrugged. “Excellent, I’d say. I found portraits of all of them. They’d been hidden away in the basement. I don’t know why. They’re beautifully done and they must be worth a great deal of money.”
Again, that strange look. “Well, if you’ve found portraits of them, you must at least know that he had two children, twins. Rosa and Malcolm. Of the two, apparently Rosa was the intellectual. She was a voracious reader, according to my father’s friend, the butler. She wrote poetry, she painted. And she was supposed to be something of a dedicated lepidopterist—she collected moths, of all things. From what I’ve heard, her parents indulged her by ordering specimens for her from all over the world.”
“I found a framed display of them in one of the bedrooms at the house,” I interrupted. “I suspected it was probably Rosa’s bedroom. And there was a box on the mantel with an odd inscription—‘Moths for Forgetfulness’ or something.”
“The Victorians loved that sort of thing,” Clarence said. “The phrase likely refers to the Cornish superstition that moths were harbingers of forgetfulness. That they actually carried away memories, or dreams. I can’t remember exactly. And she was quite a beauty, apparently.”
“Yes, she was quite beautiful. And he was a very handsome man—Malcolm, I mean, judging by the portrait.”
The old man hesitated. “Do you know anything about . . . well, about the family dynamics? You see, I don’t mean to be presumptuous. I don’t want to tell you things you already know. What I know is a mixture of history and second-hand stories passed along by my father, who in turn heard them from Beckett, the butler at Wild Fell. As you can see, it’s a bit of a broken telephone, historically speaking. On the other hand, frankly, the facts of record are fairly dry. Catherine died in 1847 of what we would now call cancer; she was only forty or so.”
I nodded, remembering the pain in the woman’s eyes in the portrait, her preternatural thinness, and what I now realized was premature aging from illness.
“Alexander Blackmore never remarried. He retreated to the house and raised Rosa and Malcolm as a single father, which was pretty unusual in those days, let me tell you. He died under fairly gruesome circumstances in an accident in 1883. The children—well, they were grown by then, of course—were extremely close. They lived on at Wild Fell till they were very old.”
“I’m sorry, you said ‘gruesome circumstances’?”
“Yes,” Clarence said. “He was stung to death. By wasps.”
I felt lightheaded. “What did you say?”
“Wasps.”
“How . . . ?”
“He was out riding. In those days the Blackmores maintained a secondary stable manned by a groom at the edge of the point of land where their boathouse used to be. The ferrying place. If you’ve been there, you know the place I’m speaking about, am I correct?”
I nodded mutely. “I think so.”
“He was on his way into town on some errand or other,” Mr. Brocklehurst said. “The children were on the island. Well, hardly children, really. At that point, they must have been sixteen or seventeen, but no older than that. Blackmore had left them in the care of the servants that morning. He mustn’t have gotten very far because apparently they could hear his screams—and the horse’s—from across the lake. The groom had to put the horse down on the spot. By the time they managed to ferry Alexander Blackmore back to the island, he was dead. Ghastly way to die.”
“Oh my God. What a horrible story.”
“Well,” he said. “That part of it isn’t a story, it’s a matter of historical record. He’s buried in Carlton Cemetery up on the hill. The gravestone is very impressive. After you leave this afternoon, you should stop by and take a look, if you really want to get a sense of the kind of monuments people like Alexander Blackmore built for themselves to be remembered after they were dead. Gravestones, you know, they last forever. Not like houses.”
“You said, ‘that part of it.’ Is there some other part?”
“Ah,” Clarence said. “Well now, that depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“Well, it depends on where you draw the line between history—the kind that’s documented and written down by journalists and historians—and oral history that may or may not be entirely factual, or at least is unproveable.”
“You said your father played chess with the butler at Wild Fell. Did he tell your father these . . . well, these other stories? The unproveable ones?”
“Quite so,” he said. “Would you like some more tea?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Brock . . . Clarence. I’m fine. But please, go on. What did the butler tell your father?”
“You understand, Jamie, that some of this is going to sound ridiculous, don’t you?”
I repeated, “Please, go on.”
“The ‘other part’ is that she killed him. Rosa killed her father with the wasps. She sent them to him. To stop him . . . well to stop him—” Here Clarence actually blushed and lowered his voice. “To stop him from . . . interfering with her. Molesting her.”
“What are you saying? That you believe Rosa Blackmore was some sort of witch?”
“No, I’m not saying that, Jamie,” he said. “I’m just telling you what the butler told my father. Me, I don’t believe in witches. Or magic. But the butler swore to my father that her relationship with her father was never ‘natural,’ as he put it. Not on Rosa’s part, you understand. He was quite clear that if there was abuse—and I’m not saying there was, because this is all hearsay—she was an unwilling participant. But in those days, cut off from everyone on that island, in that house . . .
well, anything was possible, especially something that unspeakable.”
“Of course she was,” I said. “No child is ever a willing participant in abuse. No wonder she was obsessed with moths, if that was the superstition—that they took away memory. Her memories must have been nig
htmarish. But why did anyone think she was a witch? I can’t imagine anything crueller than spreading that sort of rumour about a victim of incest.”
“Oh, believe me, if there were rumours spread, I never heard them,” Clarence said quickly. “And I certainly wouldn’t be spreading them about any child, living or dead. As far as I know, the only person who ever spoke of it was the butler and he only told my father, then swore my father to secrecy. But I don’t think any of the servants would have begrudged her if she had killed her father with witchcraft.”
“But why? Why did they think that?”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, stories,” he said. “We’re not talking about an educated class of people, Jamie—servants in those days. It wouldn’t take much for an old book to be considered a ‘strange book.’ Rosa’s apparent obsession with mirrors might also have inspired superstition. Another story was that she had some sort of ‘secret chamber’ in one of the basements of the house, and that she used it for casting spells. According to my father, after Alexander Blackmore died, Rosa grew obsessed with the idea of escaping him in the afterlife by ‘bending time’ as she apparently called it, whatever that means, and ensuring that he could never come back to hurt her again.”
“It sounds like she had a nervous breakdown.” I thought of the bestial nature I had seen in the portrait of Alexander Blackmore in the cellar of Wild Fell. “It would hardly be surprising, considering what she went through.”
“But at the end of the day, her father was dead and she was free. She was already close to her twin, but according to what I’ve heard, they grew even closer. In any case, they lived together till the end of their lives.”
“Didn’t either of them marry? Leave the island, ever?”
“As far as I my research went, Malcolm got engaged when he was thirty or so. Her name was Ailsa Crane. He’d met her in Toronto when he was there attending to some sort of family business. She was the daughter of a prominent lawyer, E.W. Crane.”
“Malcolm was engaged? Did he marry?”
“No,” Clarence said. “They didn’t marry. His fiancée apparently drowned in Devil’s Lake in 1888. Malcolm had made a visit back home to introduce Ailsa to his twin sister. Presumably he was also going to tell Rosa that he and Ailsa would be setting up housekeeping elsewhere, either in Alvina, or back in Toronto. According to the story my father heard, Rosa and Malcolm quarrelled about his leaving Wild Fell. Rosa didn’t fancy being left alone.” He paused thoughtfully. “Ailsa drowned the following night. It seemed as though she had just sleepwalked into the lake. She was in her nightclothes; she wasn’t dressed for any sort of swimming. God only knows why she didn’t wake up, but apparently she didn’t.”
“Mother of God.”
Clarence shrugged. “Malcolm was disconsolate, but he apparently never left Wild Fell after that night, not even for his fiancée’s funeral. Ailsa’s body was shipped back to Toronto unaccompanied. Her father was livid, threatened all sorts of things, but nothing came of it. The Blackmore name carried a lot of clout in those days. In any case, Rosa and Malcolm died within a day of each other. That,” he said pointedly, “is another one of the very few historical facts in all of this mess. That, and the very sad reality that if the worst suspicions about the actual nature of the relationship between Alexander Blackmore and his daughter are true, then he and her brother are the only two men she ever knew.”
I sat back in my chair. The double meaning of Clarence’s “knew” was not lost on me. I was beyond merely speechless. I had been expecting some biographical sketches, not this northern gothic fairy tale.
Across the living room, Clarence took my measure. He regarded me sympathetically. “I’m sorry, Jamie. You asked. But maybe I should have minded my own business back there in the library.”
“No, I’m grateful,” I lied. “I’d heard a bit of this from the real estate agent when I went out there the first time. Nothing as detailed or graphic as this story. But still, it’s the sort of thing I probably would have appreciated her telling me before I bought the house in the first place.”
He sighed. “Well, in fairness, there isn’t any real way a British real estate agent could have known these details. They’re rather esoteric.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t deal with a real estate agent in England. I dealt with one here in Alvina. She should have warned me about this. It’s hard to imagine going back there now. It’s beautiful, but all the wood and silver and portraits in the world aren’t going to make me forget what you’ve told me about the family, and what happened in that house.”
Again, he looked confused, as he had in the library. “You dealt with a local agent? Who was it? I’m surprised I didn’t hear about it.”
“Her name is Velnette Fowler. She has an office off Main Street. I found her extremely odd. She told me she wasn’t my agent, she was the house’s agent.” I forced myself to laugh. “After what you’ve told me, I can certainly see why the house would need its own agent.”
He whispered, “Say that name again?”
“Fowler,” I said. “Velnette Fowler.”
Clarence Brocklehurst’s face drained of colour. He stared at me with some mixture of horror, anger and, most inexplicably, a new, terrible hurt.
Almost whispering, he asked, “Who are you? Why did you come to my house?
I was stunned by this sudden turn of the conversation. “Why? You invited me. To talk about the Blackmores, remember? Your area of expertise.”
“I remember,” Brocklehurst said coldly. “At that time I was under the impression you were serious about researching Alvina history. I repeat, what are you doing here?”
When I didn’t answer, he pointed to the door. “Please leave, Mr. Browning, if that’s even your name. I had my doubts about you when you pretended to have bought Wild Fell, which you patently did not—if you had, you wouldn’t be talking about what fine condition it’s in. The house is a wreck. I’ve been there. But you seemed to be a nice fellow, and I imagined that your interest was harmless, even if you were lying. But to . . . to . . . use Nettie in your lies, especially after we told you what the drowning did to us all, and what happened to her. What I’d like to know is why you did it. What were you after? Just cruel kicks?”
“Sir, I have no idea what you mean.”
He stood up abruptly. “Get out of my house, you sick, sick bastard. Coming here under false pretenses, getting me to talk like a lonely old fool. Who are you? What’s wrong with you? Get out now before I call the police. I’m warning you. Get out. Coming to a town like this and . . . and manipulating people? Is this how you get your kicks in the city?”
I stepped toward him and reached out with open hands. He flinched and stepped back from me.
“Mr. Brocklehurst, what’s wrong. Are you all right?”
He shouted, “Get out of my house! NOW!”
“What’s wrong? What did I do?”
He reached for the telephone on the table next to his chair. He picked up the receiver and said, “I’m giving you to the count of three. If you’re not out of here by then, I’m calling 911. Leave, and don’t come back.”
I put up my hands and backed away toward the door. “I’m leaving,” I said. “Please calm down. I’m going. And again, I’m sorry to have upset you. But I still don’t understand what you mean by any of this. But I’m leaving.”
Standing outside on the front steps, I heard the sound of a teacup shattering on the other side of Clarence Brocklehurst’s slammed front door.
Outside, a light fog was beginning to blow in from the direction of Devil’s Lake.
I drove for twenty minutes, trying to calm myself and make some sense of what had happened, but if there was a method to Brocklehurst’s bizarre mood swing, it entirely eluded me. This had been the third surreal encounter I’d had with one of the Alvina locals since my arrival—the first was Mrs. Fowler and her refusal to take me out to the island to show me
my house. The second had been the librarian, who spoke of the drowning of Brenda Egan and Sean Schwartz as though it had happened yesterday. And now her father had thrown me out of his house and accused me of being a vindictive fraud.
I pulled the Volvo over to the side of the road and phoned Hank’s number. I needed to speak to her, to tell her what had happened since I’d been here, and to hear her tell me that everything was going to be fine, that I was, as usual, making something out of nothing. I knew I wasn’t, but I needed to hear her tell me I was. After the seventh or eighth ring, Hank still hadn’t picked up, but neither had I been connected to her voicemail. Ten rings, eleven, twelve, all unanswered. I snapped the phone shut and placed it on the seat beside me, resisting the urge to throw it on the floor. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be back in the city, with my father and everything that was familiar.
My instinct was to turn the car around and find Highway 401 without delay. I didn’t want to return to Wild Fell; I just wanted to forget that I’d ever come to Alvina at all.
On impulse, I hit the speed dial key that connected me to the switchboard at the MacNeil Institute. I had planned to call Nurse Jackson in the next few days to check on my father, but at that moment I needed to hear a familiar voice. Again, the phone rang, but no one picked up. I frowned. The switchboard at MacNeil was manned twenty-four hours a day.
It’s an Alzheimer’s clinic, for God’s sake. Someone is always there to pick up the phone.
I continued to let it ring. Fifteen, seventeen, finally twenty rings. After the twenty-first ring I gave up.
I stepped out of the car, intending to try again in the open air in case the signal was being jammed in some way by my location, or more likely by my distance from a powerful enough cell tower.
Across the road, I saw the tall iron spikes of what could only be Carlton Cemetery, the graveyard that Brocklehurst had identified as the location of the tomb of Alexander Blackmore and his wife, Catherine Agnes Russell.
In spite of everything I’d heard that afternoon, and in spite of my own discoveries, I was seized by a powerful need to see the grave—if only perhaps to assure myself that Alexander Blackmore was dead and in the earth here, far from the island, far from the house I’d purchased that bore his name. It might, I felt, remove some of the revulsion I carried with me since finding his slashed portrait hidden away in the cellar. There was no doubt in my mind now about who had done the slashing, or why—or what she had been trying to say with it. Rosa Blackmore may have been a victim, but she had not been a mute one.