The Girl at the Window

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Darling …’ He’d taken his drawing of the brown snake thing down from the fridge and handed it to me.

  ‘Mum, it’s OK, I understand. Promise you’ll pack the drawing?’

  ‘OK, I’ll do it right now.’ He’d stood and watched me zip it into my pack, before throwing his arms around me.

  Now Ma laughs as she watches us play. Will’s disappearing in and out of doors; we hear him chuckle in one room one minute, and then another at the opposite end of the house the next, and it’s full of delight.

  If this moment should become impressed into the air as so many other Ponden moments have, I hope that when it replays, the people walking in these rooms in the years to come will feel how happy we were, how hopeful.

  ‘I got you!’ I hear Ma outside in the garden with Will, and I go into the library, to sit on my own for a moment, because before long this room will be gone and the library will be returned to the way it once was. And when the restoration is finished, I am going to put every single one of the Ponden books back on the shelves. Flopping back onto the bed, I drink it in, this room of mine, where so much of me still remains. And I suppose, even when it’s gone, it will still be here, a version, at least, a trace that remains forever.

  My phone rings, a novelty since we had a signal booster fitted, and I see Marcus’s name on the screen. It looks as if he will escape a custodial sentence, which I’m glad about, if I’m honest. Marcus would not do very well in prison. And even though Ma sent the police to him moments after he left Ponden, he kept up his end of the bargain, and, perhaps as a way to show his good character, he gifted the miniature book to the Parsonage. I let him keep The Birds of America and the First Folio, and the last time we spoke I told him they were my gifts to him, as long as he never sold them, and as long as he wills them to my son, and gives me a copy of his will for safekeeping. Will’s a Ponden Heaton, after all. Every now and then Marcus still asks me to dinner, though I never accept. That’s the thing with a true collector: they never ever give up.

  I reject his call and, as I do, I sense the gentle quiet in the room solidify into something else. Becoming perfectly still, I simply wait. It’s been so long since there was a trace of anything but warmth and peace in this house, that this atmosphere takes me off guard, but it isn’t frightening. How can it be? It’s Ponden.

  There is the sound of a cracking to my right, and when I look I see its source – a thick waterfall of debris, trickling down from a narrow gap in the top of the casement window.

  Slowly, I sit up, watching as the plaster dust continues to fall in a steady stream.

  Reaching up, I touch the panel of wood that runs across the top of the window, pushing it slightly with my fingertips. It gives a little, moving in and springing outward. This is the only window in the house configured like this, with the panelling all around it. It’s the only place I never looked.

  Something shifts inside; a weight bowls down towards where I am standing and the panel gives way, delivering what was concealed into my arms in a shower of detritus that rains into my hair and face. Coughing and blinking, I sit down on the bed to see what it is I am holding.

  It’s a strongbox, exactly like the one I found under the pear tree stump, but this one isn’t locked. Drawing in a deep breath, I clean my hands on the bedspread and slowly open the box. And there it is.

  The House at Scar Gill by Emily Brontë.

  A ream of pages, bound together with a faded black velvet ribbon. It might be all three volumes, it might not, but however much is here it is substantial. A substantial amount of new words by Emily Brontë. Catching my breath, I see that, resting beneath the central knot, there lies a faded and delicate pressed sprig of once-white flowers, some kind of blossom. This will be the first, and perhaps last, time that anyone touches these pages with bare hands in nearly two hundred years, and it goes against protocol, but I don’t care. Leaning back against the wall, I hold the manuscript to my chest and feel its weight against my beating heart.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, but now the air is empty of anything but dust and sunlight.

  ‘Ma, Will!’ I call out to them as I walk round the back, holding the strongbox, the novel safely within. ‘I’ve found treasure! Where are you?’

  ‘Here!’ Will calls, and I see him begin to run up from his den at the bottom of the field; Ma, much slower, follows in his wake.

  As I wait for them, a little flutter of white catches my eye low on the ground. Turning my head towards it, I see that the pear tree stump, planted by Robert for his beloved Emily and believed dead for so many years, has suddenly produced a single bloom.

  A sprig of white blossom.

  Tru and Abe

  Vale do Javari Indigenous Territory – Brazil

  You never get used to the heat or the oppressive humidity in the air, that much l have learned. I do my best to tune it out, to think only of the vibrant green, the rising mountains and valley, the snaking, steady flow of the brown river. It’s so different to home, but also somehow connected at its deepest roots, sharing the sun, sharing the earth, knitting together the world that we live on.

  I’d begun in Peru, back at the medical centre where Abe had volunteered for so many years. I was greeted as a friend, as part of the family, and on my first night I wandered from room to room, looking at all the photos of him pinned around the building, even traces of his handwriting. Louis, the centre manager, gave me Abe’s favourite bunk to sleep in, and folded up on his pillow was one of the shirts he had left behind the morning he’d boarded that plane. It comforted me that night to realise he’d had a life here, he’d had friends. This wasn’t a strange, alien land that he had been lost in; it was another place where he’d felt at home.

  Louis set me up with a young man who had guided Abe when he went on treks into the forest to offer medical care to the tribes there. On the second day, Adao sat with me and showed me on his maps every inch of every square mile that had already been searched, that he had continued to search in his spare time. To know that Adao had never stopped looking touched me more than I could articulate. As he explained to me the areas he planned to cover next all I could do was to reach out and hug him with gratitude.

  Adao smiled and shook his head.

  ‘They were my friends on that plane,’ he told me. ‘I want to bring my friends home.’

  I had been in Rosachina, a nearby town, at an outreach clinic, when I heard two Matsés women, the local people, talking. It was the first time on any of my visits here that I’d seen these truly indigenous people. Something in the animation of their voices drew me to them, and even though I had no idea what they were saying, I knew I’d heard their language before somewhere, and it was as if I could almost understand them. Their backs were to me and I couldn’t see their faces, but I knew they were laughing and smiling, and for reasons I will never know I followed them a little way outside of the settlement until they came to the edge and were about to return into the depths of the jungle and to their families.

  Then one of the women turned back to look at me.

  And I recognised her.

  Not her features, not her bright eyes, but her tribal body art.

  When she turned to me, I could see that the lengths of her arms and the top half of her face were painted bright red. Just like the faces that Agnes had drawn, over and over again.

  ‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Do you speak English?’

  The women shook their heads.

  ‘Spanish? Portuguese?’

  They nodded, laughing as I beckoned them back to where Beatrice, the French volunteer who had brought me here, was working. I asked her to ask them to tell her what they had been talking about before as they’d walked into the forest.

  ‘Trudy,’ Beatrice warned me, ‘these women aren’t a sideshow, you know. You must treat them with respect.’

  ‘I am, I am, I just … Please,’ I begged her, and relenting, she asked them the question.

  They told their story to Beatrice, who translated it for
me.

  It was a story of the Korubo tribe who live across the border in Brazil, and were the mortal enemies of the Matsés. Beatrice explained that the Korubo tribe hadn’t made contact with the modern world until 1996, and since then have only been seen perhaps twice. The women didn’t like them. Beatrice didn’t tell me this, but she didn’t need to; I could see it in their expressions and gestures: the Korubo are their enemies. But that didn’t matter, because they retold a story to Beatrice that had been whispered through the forest, whispers that have found their way to me. Tales of an injured man, who fell out of the sky and almost died, who would have died if the Korubo hadn’t taken him in. A man who had been living with them while they healed him, and he healed them. A mad man who couldn’t walk, his broken legs yet to heal, but who was crawling to the border anyway, even though he would surely die, because he must return home.

  A European man of colour. A doctor.

  It was hardly more than a fairy tale, not even really a rumour, born out of half-told facts but how could I not follow this thread through the forest?

  Both Beatrice and Adao told me that I was mad to travel on my own into this world where outsiders are not welcome, or wanted, where the arrival of new people brings only destruction. But when I looked at the faces of the Matsés women, remembered the drawings that Agnes had made, remembered her description of a green inferno, I knew that I had been on a journey to meet these women all my life, perhaps since before I was even born. I knew now that Agnes had been trying to tell me where to look for Abe – four hundred years before he was born. I tried to explain all this to Beatrice, who shook her head and swore in French. She asked the women to show her where this man was supposed to be on a map.

  The women bent over the map, following the line of the river with their fingers, and finally those fingers stopped on a small tributary branching off from the larger river. I caught my breath when I looked at it. And reaching into my bag I brought out the drawing that Will had made, and I realised that it wasn’t a snake, it was a river. It matched the map exactly.

  Beatrice was not interested in what I tried to show her, she brushed it away as superstition and coincidence, but nevertheless she brought me here; she wouldn’t let me go alone.

  So here I am, approaching the building in the centre of a clearing, where the team have set up temporary medical care for any of the surrounding people who may want it. As I stand there, I hear the call of a bird, louder for a moment than any of the other thousands. I’ve heard this call twice before, once when I was a little girl at Ponden Hall, sitting around a Halloween fire with my father, and once when my son was lost in a derelict house.

  ‘What’s that bird?’ I ask Beatrice.

  ‘Toucan,’ she says. ‘They are like the pigeons of the rainforest.’

  And I know that I am in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time. Whatever I discover next, I know that it is meant to be.

  Beatrice has gone on ahead; she is talking to a group of men by the door. And after a short conversation she looks at me with such astonishment that I can’t discern what it can possibly mean. Reaching out for my hand, she leads me around the back of the building.

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ she says. ‘I expect it’s some kind of a mix-up. People get hurt in the rainforest all the time.’

  ‘You mean …?’ I look at her.

  ‘There’s a man on the reserve who may be your husband,’ she tells me.

  There’s a makeshift bed in an open-sided room, covered in a mosquito net, obscured by a half-drawn curtain hung from the ceiling.

  Beatrice holds my hand and nods in encouragement, ushering me forward.

  It takes every ounce of courage I have to draw back the sheet and see the sleeping face on the other side of the net.

  I never thought I would see the face of my husband again.

  ‘Abe.’ I fight with the netting to get to him, taking his hand in mine, and his eyes open at the sound of my voice.

  ‘Tru, is it you? Is it really you?’

  ‘It is really me,’ I tell him, touching his face with my fingertips. ‘Is it really you?’

  ‘Trudy, I never stopped trying to get back to you and Will! I’m sorry it took so long … my leg, I was injured and couldn’t walk for months; there was no way to reach the outside world. But I—’

  ‘You never gave up hope,’ I say.

  ‘No.’ Abe’s hand reaches up and I rest my cheek in the palm of his hand. ‘I never gave up hope.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ I tell him. ‘Neither did I.’

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In writing The Girl at the Window I have merged fact and fiction to create a haunting love story. Ponden Hall is an ancient home packed full of fascinating history in its own right, so here are the things that are true.

  Ponden was first built by the Heatons in 1541, and added to in 1634 and 1801 to become the grand house it is now. It was lived in by the Heaton family until 1898, when the last Ponden Heaton died and their closest relative Hannah Knowles Heaton sold the house soon afterwards, together with the contents of the historic library. It is true that the most valuable books from the collection, including a Shakespeare First Folio and the Audubon Birds of America went missing, but other than that the books were sold. We know what was in the library thanks to a sales catalogue drawn up by an auctioneer with help from a local teacher, and all the Ponden books mentioned in the novel were in the collection, so if you ever find a book with a Ponden book plate in please let me know!

  The Brontë Family were close to the Heatons for many years. As children Emily, Anne and Branwell took refuge from the Crow Hill Bog Burst – an explosive landslide that unleashed a deadly tsunami of mud – in the porch of the Ponden Peat Loft, which probably saved their lives. They all used to visit Ponden to use the library, and Emily probably sat in the oldest part of the house, the box-bed room, to read by the fire. In recent years, various house historians have pointed out where the original box bed would have been positioned in that room. We think that bed was still in situ as late as the 1940s, which is the last time it was recorded as being seen. (If you visit Ponden Hall now you can sleep in a reproduction box bed right next to the original Cathy window.) It does seem certain that Emily used that, and other aspects of Ponden’s history, as inspiration for Wuthering Heights, including the interior of the house. It very probably inspired part of Thrushcross Grange and Anne Brontë’s Wildfell Hall too.

  There is a sketch drawn by Emily, aged ten, of a window, possibly the one in the box bed room, with the fist of a bearded man smashing through the glass, and it’s fascinating to think that she might have been dreaming up Wuthering Heights even then. Emily was friends with Robert Heaton, who seemed to have had a deep affection for her, and did indeed plant a pear tree for her at Ponden Hall, the root of which can still be seen. As far as we know Emily never returned his affections, but we do know that Robert remained unmarried until his death.

  Henry Casson is a real historical figure, who did indeed marry Michael Heaton’s widow (and was rumoured to have murdered Michael), and is said to have badly mistreated Michael Heaton’s son and heir Robert Heaton until as an adult he was able to buy back his inheritance. Many believe that Henry Casson was an early model for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

  Agnes Heaton is a fictional character, and both her ghost, and the ghost of the Ponden Child are my creations.

  However, legend has it that Henry Casson did indeed return to Ponden Hall in the form of Greybeard, a gytrash, or evil spirit, said to haunt the Heatons by appearing every time a Heaton was about to die, although he hasn’t been sighted since Hannah Knowles Heaton last saw him in 1898.

  Today Ponden Hall is a thriving and lovingly cared for home and bed and breakfast, which you can go and visit and enjoy!

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The greatest debt of thanks that I owe in the writing of this book is to Julie Akhurst, Steve Brown and their children Kizzy and Noah, who not only allowed me to set a novel
in their home, but put up with my numerous (and continuing visits) and have become dear and lifelong friends. For nearly two years I lived in an imaginary version of their house, you could even say I haunted it. And thank you too to Ponden Hall itself, which is a bright and beautiful building, lovingly renovated and cared for by its owners and you can’t tell me it won’t know if I leave it out of the acknowledgements. When I first walked in the door I fell in love, and it is a love that is set to endure forever.

  Thank you also to my brilliant editor Gillian Green who knows exactly the right balance to strike in amongst my whirlwind of ideas. She is kind, patient, clever and I’m always grateful for her insight. I’m so lucky to have such talented professionals on my side at Ebury Press, including Tess Henderson, Stephenie Naulls, Katie Seaman and Aslan Byrne, and I can never thank them enough for the hard work they all do on my behalf.

  Thank you to my amazing agent Lizzy Kremer, who is literally super agent and a woman I admire and am inspired by in so many ways. And the whole team at David Higham, Georgina Ruffhead, Harriet Moore, Maddalena Cavaciuti, Alice Howe, Emily Randle, Margaux Vialleron, Emma Jamison, Johanna Clarke, Claire Morris and Emma Schouten.

  Thank you to Sarah Laycock at the Brontë Parsonage who sat with me for a morning and explained to me the intricacies of her fascinating job, and to Ann Dinsdale, Lauren Livesey and the whole team at the Parsonage.

  Thank you Flavio Marzo and Liz Rose who took me behind the scenes at the British Library and showed me how they preserve precious books and artefacts. That was a morning I will never forget!

  An author’s journey is a solitary one, but thank goodness for the community of writers who are out there cheering each other on, especially Julie Cohen, Tamsyn Murray, Kate Harrison, Miranda Dickinson, CL Taylor, Angela Clarke, Katie Fforde, Tammy Cohen, Callie Langridge, Katy Regan, Eve Chase, Carole Matthews, Milly Johnson, Rosie Walsh, Paul Burston, Janie Millman to name just a few. And also to the RNA for it’s continued community and support.