Twenty-four

Greenacres, 2011

The Nicolson sisters (minus Daphne, who’d stayed in LA to shoot a new network promo but promised to catch the red-eye back to London ‘just as soon as they can spare me’) brought Dorothy home to Greenacres on Saturday morning. Rose was concerned because she hadn’t been able to contact Gerry, but Iris—who always liked to be an authority—declared that she’d already telephoned his college and been told he was away on ‘very important’ business; the office had promised to get a message to him. Laurel had reached unconsciously for her phone while Iris was making her proclamation, turning it over in her palm, wondering why she still hadn’t heard a word about Dr Rufus, but she resisted calling. Gerry worked in his own way, at his own pace, and she knew from experience there was no joy to be had by ringing his office number.

By lunchtime Dorothy was settled in her bedroom, fast asleep with her white hair resting like a halo on the burgundy pillowcase. The sisters looked at one another and reached a silent agreement to leave her to it. The weather had cleared up and turned unseasonably warm, and they headed outside to sit on the swing seat beneath the tree and eat the bread rolls Iris had insisted on making solo, swatting away flies and enjoying what must surely be the last hot burst of the year.

The weekend passed smoothly. They installed themselves around Dorothy’s bed, reading silently or chatting together in low voices, even attempting Scrabble at one stage (though not for long—Iris never could play a full round without blowing up in the face of Rose’s remarkable knowledge of tricky two-letter words), but most of the time, they took turns just sitting in quiet company with their sleeping mother. It was right, Laurel thought, that they’d brought Ma home. Greenacres was where Dorothy belonged, this funny old big-hearted house she’d discovered by chance and recognised immediately as one she must inhabit and possess. ‘I always dreamed of a house like this one,’ she used to tell them, a broad smile spreading across her face as they walked in from the garden. ‘For a time I thought I’d lost my chance, but it all came right in the end. As soon as I saw her, I knew she was the one …’

Laurel wondered if her mother had been thinking of that long-ago day as they drove her up the driveway on Friday; whether she’d seen in her mind’s eye the old farmer who’d made tea for her and Daddy when they knocked on his door in 1947, the birds that had watched them from behind the boarded-up fireplace, and the young woman she’d been back then, holding firm to her second chance as she looked to the future and tried to escape whatever it was she’d done before. Or had Dorothy been thinking rather, as they wound up the drive, of events that had unfolded that summer’s day in 1961 and about the impossibility of ever truly escaping one’s past? Or was Laurel being sentimental, and had the tears her mother shed in the passenger seat of Rose’s car, the soft silent tears, been simply the effect of great age and faulty plumbing?

Whatever the case, the move from the hospital had evidently tired her and she slept most of the weekend, eating little and saying even less. Laurel, when it was her turn at the bedside, willed her mother to stir, to open her tired eyes and recognise her eldest daughter, to resume their conversation of the other day. She needed to know what her mother had taken from Vivien Jenkins—it was the crux of the mystery. Henry had been right all along, insisting there was more to his wife’s death than met the eye, that she’d been the target of shady con-artists. (Con-artists plural, Laurel noted—was it merely a turn of phrase, or had her mother acted with someone else? Could it have been Jimmy, the man she’d loved and lost? Was that perhaps why they’d been driven apart?) She would have to wait until Monday, though, because Dorothy wasn’t talking. In fact, it seemed to Laurel, watching as the old woman slept so peacefully, and the curtains fluttered in the light breeze, that her mother had passed through some invisible doorway into that place where ghosts from the past could no longer touch her.

Only once, in the wee hours of Monday morning, was she visited by the terrors that had nipped at her heels in recent weeks. Rose and Iris had both gone back to their own homes for the night, so it was Laurel who woke in the dark with a start and stumbled along the corridor, feeling about the wall for light switches as she went. The thought came to her of the many nights her mother had done the same thing for her: been woken from her sleep by a cry in the dark, and rushed down the hall to chase her daughter’s monsters away, to stroke her hair and whisper in her ear, ‘Hush, little wing … there now, hush’. No matter Laurel’s conflicted feelings towards her mother these days, it seemed there was a privilege in being able to do the same in return, particularly for Laurel, who’d left the family home in such a fraught way, who hadn’t been there when her father died, who’d spent her whole life beholden to no one but herself and her art.

Laurel climbed into bed with her mother, holding the old woman firmly but gently. The cotton of Dorothy’s long, white nightdress was damp with the labours of her nightmare, and her thin frame trembled. ‘It was my fault, Laurel,’ she was saying. ‘It was my fault.’

‘Hush, hush,’ Laurel whispered. ‘There now, everything’s all right.’ ‘It was my fault she died.’

‘I know, I know it was.’ Henry Jenkins came again to Laurel’s mind; his insistence that Vivien had died because she’d been led to a place she’d otherwise never have gone, led there by someone she trusted. ‘There, there, Ma. It’s over now.’

Dorothy’s breathing settled to a slow steady rhythm, and Laurel thought about the nature of love. That she could continue to feel it so intensely, despite the things she was learning about her mother, was remarkable. It seemed that ugly deeds did not make love disappear; but oh, the disappointment if Laurel let it could have crushed her. It was an anodyne word, disappointment, but the shame and helplessness intrinsic to it were breathtaking. It wasn’t that Laurel expected perfection. She wasn’t a child. And she didn’t share Gerry’s blind faith that just because Dorothy Nicolson was their mother she would somehow be found miraculously innocent of all wrongdoing. Not at all. Laurel was a realist, she understood her mother was a human being and had naturally done things in her life that weren’t saintly; she’d hated and wanted and made mistakes that never went away—just as Laurel had herself. But the picture Laurel was beginning to form of precisely what had happened in Dorothy’s past, what she’d seen her mother do—

‘He came to find me.’

Laurel had been drifting off with her thoughts and her mother’s faded voice startled her. ‘What’s that Ma?’

‘I tried to hide, but he found me.’

She was speaking of Henry Jenkins, Laurel realised. It seemed they were drawing ever closer to what had happened that day in 1961. ‘He’s gone now, Ma, he’s not coming back.’

A whisper: ‘I killed him, Laurel.’

Laurel’s breath caught. She whispered back, ‘I know you did.’

‘Can you forgive me, Laurel?’

It was a question Laurel hadn’t asked herself, let alone answered. Faced with it in that instant, in the dark quiet of her mother’s room, all she could say was, ‘Hush now. Everything’s going to be all right, Ma. I love you.’

 

Some hours later, when the sun was just beginning to rise above the treetops, Laurel handed the baton to Rose and headed for the green Mini.

‘London again?’ said Rose, walking with her along the gar-den path.

‘Oxford today.’

‘Oh, Oxford.’ Rose twisted her beads. ‘More research, is it?’

‘It is.’

‘Getting close to what you’re looking for?’

‘You know, Rosie,’ said Laurel, sitting in the driver’s seat, reaching to pull the door shut behind her, ‘I think I am.’ She smiled and waved and put the car into reverse, glad to escape before Rose could ask anything that required heavy-duty obfuscation.

 

The fellow at the desk in the British Library Reading Room had seemed pleased on Friday by her request to locate ‘a rather obscure memoir’, even more so when she mused as to how one might go about finding what happened to Miss Katy Ellis’s correspondence after she died. He’d frowned determination at his computer screen, pausing every so often to jot things down on his notepad, and Laurel’s hopes had risen and fallen with his brows, until evidently her rapt attention became a hindrance and he suggested it might take some time and he’d be very happy to continue the search while she got on with something else. Laurel had taken the hint, ducking outside for a quick cigarette (all right, three) and a bit of neurotic pacing, before rushing back to the Reading Room to see how he’d got on.

He’d got on rather well, as it turned out. He slid the piece of paper across the desk with the marathon runner’s smile of satisfied exhaustion on his face and said, ‘Found her.’ The cache of her private papers, at any rate. It turned out they were located in the archives of New College Library, Oxford; Katy Ellis had studied there as a doctoral candidate and her papers had been donated after her death in September 1983. There was a copy of the memoir available, too, but Laurel figured she’d be far more likely to find what she was looking for within the primary documents.

Laurel left her green Mini at the Park and Ride site in Thorn-hill, and caught the bus into Oxford. The driver directed her to hop off on the High Street, which she did, right opposite Queen’s College; she followed directions a short walk past the Bodleian Library, and along Holywell Street, to arrive at the main entrance of New College. She never tired of the university’s extraordinary beauty; every stone, every turret and spindle pointing towards the heavens, grated and heaved with the weight of the past; but Laurel didn’t have time today for sightseeing; she put her hands in her trouser pockets, head down against the chill, and hurried across the grass quadrangle to-wards the library.

She was greeted inside by a young man with shaggy blue-black hair. Laurel explained who she was and why she’d come, mentioning that the librarian from the British Library had called ahead on Friday to make an appointment.

‘Yes, yes,’ said the young man (whose name, it transpired was Ben, and who was—enthusiastically, it had to be said—serving a one-year traineeship in the library before undertaking his MA in archives and records management), ‘I spoke to him myself. You’re here to look at one of our alumni collections.’

‘The papers belonging to Katy Ellis.’

‘That’s right. I’ve brought it all over from the muniments tower.’ ‘Tremendous. Thank you very much.’

‘Don’t mention it—any excuse to climb the tower.’ He smiled and leaned a little closer, exhibiting an air of conspiracy. ‘It’s up a spiral staircase, you know, accessed through a door hidden in the panelling of the Hall. Like something out of Hogwarts.’

Laurel had read Harry Potter, of course, and was no less immune to the charms of old buildings than anyone else; but opening hours were limited, and Katy Ellis’s letters were within shouting distance, and the combination of those two facts left her rather panicked at the thought of spending another minute discussing either architecture or fiction with Ben. She smiled with a dazed lack of comprehension (Hogwarts?), he met it with one of sympathetic realisation (Muggle), and they both moved on.

‘The collection’s waiting for you in the archive reading room,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you over there myself, shall I? It’s a bit of a maze if you haven’t been here before.’

Laurel followed him along a stone corridor, Ben talking happily all the while about the history of New College until finally they arrived, a great many twists and turns later, in a room with tables laid out and windows overlooking a magnificent medieval wall overgrown with ivy.

‘Here you are,’ he said, stopping at a table with twenty or so matching boxes stacked on top. ‘Are you happy to work here?’

‘I’m sure this will be fine.’

‘Excellent. There are gloves near the boxes. Please wear them while you’re touching the materials. I’ll be right over there if you need me—’ he indicated a pile of papers on a desk in the far corner—‘transcribing,’ he added, by way of explanation. Laurel didn’t ask what for fear he’d tell her and so, with a nod, Ben left.

Laurel waited for a moment and then exhaled into the stony library silence. Finally she was alone with Katy Ellis’s letters. She fronted up to the desk and cracked her knuckles—not metaphorically, but literally; it seemed the right thing to do—and then she donned her reading glasses and the pair of white gloves and started the hunt for answers.

The boxes were identical—brown cardboard, acid-free, each about the size of an encyclopedia. They were named and numbered with a code Laurel didn’t entirely comprehend but which seemed to indicate a complex catalogue of items. She considered asking Ben for an explanation, but feared a fervid lecture on the history of records management might result if she did. It appeared the boxes had been arranged in chronological order … Laurel decided to take a chance that it would all make sense once she got going.

She opened the lid of box number one and found several acid-free envelopes inside. The first contained twenty or so letters bound with white tape and supported with a stiff piece of board, cut slightly larger than the largest letter. Laurel eyed the large pile of boxes. It seemed Katy Ellis was a prolific correspondent, but with whom had she corresponded … ? By the looks, the letters were arranged in order of receipt, but there had to be a better method of finding what she needed than by simple trial and error.

Laurel drummed her fingers, thinking, and then looked over the top of her glasses at the table. She smiled as she spied what she’d been missing—the index card—taking it up quickly and glancing over the whole to check that it contained, as she’d hoped, a list of senders and recipients. It did. Holding her breath, Laurel ran her finger down the ‘sender’ column, hesitating first at ‘J’ for Jenkins, next at ‘1! for Long- meyer, and finally ‘V’ for Vivien.

None of the options was listed.

Laurel looked again, more carefully this time. Still she came up blank. There was no reference in the index list to any letters from Vivien Longmeyer or Vivien Jenkins. And yet Katy Ellis had referred to such letters in the snippet of Born to Teach quoted in Henry Jenkins’s biography. Laurel pulled out the photocopy she’d taken in the British Library. There—it said so in black and white: Over the course of our long sea voyage, I was able to gain Vivien’s trust sufficiently to establish a relationship that continued over many years. We corresponded by letter with warm regularity until her untimely death during the Second World War … Laurel gritted her teeth and checked the list one final time.

Nothing.

It made no sense, Katy Ellis said there were letters—a life-time of them, warmly regular. Where were they? Laurel glanced over at Ben’s hunched back and decided there was nothing for it.

‘That’s all the letters we received,’ he said when she’d explained. Laurel pointed out the lines from the memoir and Ben frowned and agreed that it was odd, but then he brightened: ‘Perhaps she destroyed the letters before she died?’ He wasn’t to know that he was crushing Laurel’s dreams like a dried leaf between his fingers. ‘That happens sometimes,’ he continued, ‘particularly in the case of people who intend to donate their correspondence. They make sure anything they don’t want seen is no longer part of the collection. Is there any reason she might have done that, do you know?’

Laurel thought about it. It was possible, she supposed. Vivien’s letters might have contained something Katy Ellis considered sensitive or incriminating—God, anything was possible at this point. Laurel’s brain hurt. She said, ‘Could they be stored somewhere else?’

Ben shook his head. ‘New College Library was the sole beneficiary of Katy Ellis’s records. Everything she left is here.’

Laurel could have thrown the neat file boxes around the room; given poor Ben a real show. To have come so close only to be thwarted at this point—the disappointment was gutting. Ben smiled sympathetically and Laurel was about to slump back to her desk when she thought of something. ‘Journals,’ she said quickly ‘What’s that?’

‘Journals. Katy Ellis kept journals—she mentions them in the memoir. Do you know if they’re part of the collection?’

‘I do, and they are,’ he said. ‘I brought them down for you.’

He indicated a stack of books on the floor by the table and Laurel could have kissed him. She refrained, taking her seat instead and seizing up the first leather-bound volume. It was dated 1929, the year, Laurel remembered, that Katy Ellis had accompanied Vivien Longmeyer on the long sea voyage from Australia to England. The first page held a black-and-white photograph, inserted neatly using gold document corners, spotted now with age. It was the portrait of a young woman in long skirts and a prim blouse, her hair—hard to tell, but Laurel had a feeling it was red—parted on one side and then pressed into neat crimped curls. Everything about her appearance was modest and bluestocking-conservative, but her eyes were lit with determination. She’d lifted her chin at the camera and she wasn’t smiling so much as looking pleased with herself. Laurel decided that she liked Miss Katy Ellis, even more so when she read the small annotation at the bottom of the page: ‘A small and impudent vanity, but the author encloses here this photograph, taken at Hunter & Lyon Studios, Brisbane, as a record of a young woman on the verge of her great adventure in the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and twenty-nine.’

Laurel turned to the first page of neat penmanship, an entry dated May 18th, 1929 and headed ‘Week One—New Beginnings’. She smiled at the slightly pompous tone of Katy Ellis’s record, and then drew breath as the name ‘Vivien’ leapt out at her. In amongst a perfunctory description of the ship—the accommodations, the other passengers and (in most detail of all) the meals, Laurel read the following:

My travelling companion is a girl, aged eight, by the name of Vivien Longmeyer. She is a most unusual child, quite perplexing. Pleasant enough to look at—dark hair, parted in the middle and kept (by me) in plaits down her back, very large brown eyes, and full lips of a deep cherry colour that she holds together with a firmness giving the impression either of petulance or strength of mind—I have yet to decide which. She is of a proud and wilful nature, I can tell that by the way those dark eyes bore directly into mine (and certainly the aunt fashioned me with all manner of reports as to the sharpness of the girl’s tongue and the readiness of her fists); thus far, however, I have seen no evidence of her rumoured physicality, nor has she uttered more than five words, sharp or otherwise, in my hearing. Disobedient, she is certainly; ill mannered, there is no doubt; and yet somehow, in one of the inexplicable kinks of human personality, the child is oddly likable. She draws me to her; even when she is doing nothing more than sitting on the deck and watching the passing sea; it is not mere physical beauty, although there is undoubtedly much that is pleasing in her dark fea- tures—it is an aspect of herself that comes from deep within and communicates itself quite unwittingly so that one cannot help but watch.

I should add that there is an uncanny quiet about her. She chooses, when other children might be running and larking about the decks, to hide herself away and sit almost entirely still. It is an unnatural stillness, and one for which I had not been prepared.

Apparently Vivien Longmeyer continued to intrigue Katy Ellis, for along with further comments about the journey and notes for lesson plans she intended to use when she arrived in England, the journal entries over the next few weeks contained similar reports. Katy Ellis watched Vivien from a distance, interacting only insofar as it was necessary for the two of them in their shared travels, until finally, in an entry dated July 5th, 1929 and titled ‘Week Seven’, there appeared to come a breakthrough.

It was hot this morning, and a mild breeze blew from the north. We were sitting together on the front deck after break-fast when a most peculiar thing happened. I told Vivien to go back to the cabin and fetch her exercise book so that we might run through some lessons— I’d promised her aunt before we left, that Vivien’s lessons would not be neglected while we were on the seas (she fears, I think, that if the girl’s intellect is deemed unsatisfactory by the English uncle, she will be sent straight back to Australia). Our lessons are an interesting charade and always the same: I draw and point to the book, explaining various principles until my brain aches with the eternal quest for clarity of explanation; and Vivien stares with blank boredom at the fruits of my labours.

Still, I made a promise and so I persist. This morning, not for the first time, Vivien failed to do as I’d asked. She didn’t so much as deign to meet my eyes, and I was forced to repeat myself, not twice but thrice, and in increasingly stern tones. Still the child ignored me, until finally (the urge to tears pressing in my throat), I begged to know why she so often behaves as if she cannot hear me.

Perhaps my loss of control moved the child, for she sighed then, and told me the reason. She looked me in the eye and explained that seeing as I was merely a part of her dream, a figment of her own imagination, she didn’t see any point in listening unless the subject of my ‘chatter’ (her word) was of interest.

Another child might have been suspected of cheek and clipped about the ears for giving such response; but Vivien is not another child. For one thing, she does not lie—her aunt, for all her eager criticism of the child, conceded I would never hear an untruth from the girl’s mouth (‘Frank to the point of rudeness, that one’)—and so I was intrigued. I tried to keep my voice steady, asking as nonchalantly as if I were enquiring the time of day, what she meant by saying I was part of a dream. She blinked those wide brown eyes and said: ‘I fell asleep beside the creek back home and I haven’t woken up yet.’ Everything that had happened since, she told me—the news of her family’s motorcar accident, her removal like an unwanted package to England, this long sea voyage with only a teacher for company—was nothing more than a great big bad dream.

I asked her why she didn’t wake up, how it was possible that someone could sleep for such a very long time, and she responded it was bush magic. That she’d fallen asleep beneath some ferns on the edge of the enchanted creek (the one with the little lights, she said, and the tunnel that leads through a great engine room, right to the other side of the world)—that’s why she didn’t wake up as she otherwise might. I asked her then, how she would know when she had finally woken up, and she tilted her head as if I might be simple: ‘When I open my eyes and see that I’m home again.’ Of course, her firm little face added.

Laurel flicked through the journals until, two weeks later, Katy Ellis revisited the subject:

I have been probing—delicately, of course—about this dream world of Vivien’s, for it interests me greatly that a child might choose to comprehend a traumatic event in such a way. I gather, from the titbits she feeds me, that she has conjured a shadow land around her, a place of darkness through which she must quest in order to get back to her sleeping self in the ‘real world’ of the creek bank in Australia. She told me she believes that sometimes she comes close to waking; if she sits very, very still, she says she can glimpse the other side of the veil; she can see and hear her family going about their usual business, oblivious to her standing on the side, watching them. At least now I understand why the child exhibits such a profound quiet and stillness.

The girl’s theory of her waking dream is one thing. I can well understand the instinct a person might have to retreat in-to a safe imaginary world. What disturbs me more is Vivien’s seeming gladness in the face of punishment. Or—if not glad-ness, because that is not it precisely— her resignation, almost relief, when met with reprimand. I witnessed a brief incident the other day, in which she was wrongly accused of having taken an elderly woman’s hat from the top deck. She was innocent of the crime, a fact of which I was certain, having witnessed the ghastly cloche take up with the breeze and dance right overboard. As I watched, though—stunned for a moment into silence—Vivien presented herself for punishment, receiving a tremendous tongue-lashing; when threatened with a strapping, the girl seemed quite prepared to accept it. The expression in her eyes as she was scolded was one almost of relief. I found my brio then, and stepped in to stop the miscarriage of justice, informing them in the chilliest of tones as to the hat’s true fate, before directing Vivien to safety. But the look I’d seen in the girl’s eyes troubled me long after. Why, I wondered, would a child willingly accept punishment, particularly for a crime they hadn’t really committed?

A few pages further, Laurel found the following:

I believe I have answered one of my own most pressing questions. I have sometimes heard Vivien shouting out in her sleep—the episodes are usually short-lived, ending just as soon as the girl rolls over, but the other night the situation reached a peak and I rushed from my bed to soothe her. She was speaking very quickly as she clung to my arms— the most effusive conversation I have yet had from the child—and I was able to gather from what she said that she has come to believe the death of her family was her fault in some way. A ridiculous notion, when held up to the yardstick of adult perception, for as I understand it they were killed in a motorcar accident while she was many miles away; but childhood is not a place of logic and measuring sticks, and somehow (I cannot help but think the girl’s aunt might have helped it on its way) the idea has stuck.

Laurel looked up from Katy Ellis’s journal. Ben was making pack- ing-up noises and she glanced, alarmed, at her watch. It was ten minutes to one—damn—she’d been warned the library shut for an hour over lunch. Laurel was clinging to any reference to Vivien, feeling she was getting somewhere, but there wasn’t time to read everything. She skimmed through the rest of the sea voyage, until finally she reached an entry written in shakier handwriting than those previous—written, Laurel gathered, as Katy Ellis took the train to York, where she was to be employed as a governess.

The conductor is coming now, so I will record quickly, before I forget, the strange behaviour of my young charge as we disembarked in London yesterday. No sooner had we cleared the gangplank, and I was looking this way and that in attempts to discern where we ought to go next, than she hopped down on all-fours—never mind the dress I’d specially hand-sponged and prepared for her to wear when meeting her uncle—and pressed her ear to the ground. I am not one to embarrass easily so it was no such paltry emotion that made me shriek when I saw her, rather concern that the child would find herself trampled by the crowds of foot traffic, or the hoofs of a rearing horse.

I couldn’t help myself, I shouted with alarm: ‘What are you doing? Get up!’

To which—one should hardly be surprised—there came no answer.

‘What are you doing, child?’ I demanded.

She shook her head and said quickly: ‘I can’t hear it.’

‘Hear what?’ I replied.

‘The sound of the wheels turning.’

I remembered then what she had told me about the engine room in the centre of the earth, the tunnel that would lead her home.

‘I can’t hear them any more.’

She was beginning to realise, of course, the finality of her situation, for like me she will not see her homeland again for many years, if at all, and certainly not the version of it to which she longs to return. Though my heart broke for the stubborn sapling, I did not offer her words of meaningless encouragement, for it is best, surely, that she comes in time to escape the grip of her fantasies. Indeed, it seemed there was nothing for me to say or do but to take her hand kindly and shepherd her along to where I’d spotted the meeting place her aunt had agreed upon with the English uncle. Vivien’s pronouncement troubled me though because I knew the turmoil it would be causing within the child, and I knew too that the moment fast approached when I must bid her farewell and send her on her way.

Perhaps I would be feeling less disquieted now if I’d sensed more warmth from the uncle. Alas, I did not. Her new guardian is headmaster of the Nordstrom School in Oxford-shire, and perhaps it was some aspect of professional (male?) pride that erected a barrier between us, for he seemed determined not to notice my presence, stopping only to inspect the child, before telling her to come along, they hadn’t a second to spare.

No, he did not strike me as the sort of fellow to open his home with the warmth and understanding a sensitive little girl whose recent history is filled with so much suffering will need.

I have written to the Australian aunt with my misgivings, but I do not hold out high hopes she will leap to the girl’s aid and demand her immediate return. In the meantime, I have promised to write regularly to Vivien in Oxfordshire, and I in-tend to do so. Would that my new position didn’t take me to the other side of the country—I would gladly tuck the girl un-der my wing and keep her safe from harm. Despite myself, and against the best theories of my chosen career, to observe but not absorb, I have developed strong personal feelings for her. I dearly hope that time and circumstance—perhaps the cultivation of a good friend nearby?—will conspire to mend the deep wound rent inside the child by her recent suffering. It may be that strong emotion causes me to overstate and overthink the future, to fall victim to my worst imaginings, but I fear otherwise. Vivien is at risk of disappearing deep inside the safety of the dream world she’s created, remaining a stranger to the real world of human beings, and thus, becoming easy prey, as she grows to adulthood, to those who would look to gain by her ill-treatment. One wonders (suspicious-mindedly perhaps?) as to the uncle’s motivation in accepting the child as his ward. Duty? It is possible. A fondness for children? Afearedly not. With the beauty she is sure to attain, and the vast wealth I have learned she will inherit at maturity, I worry there is much she will possess that others may seek to take.

 

Laurel leaned back and stared unseeing at the medieval wall on the other side of the window. She bit her thumbnail as the words went round and round inside her head: I worry there is much she will possess that others may seek to take. Vivien Jenkins had an inheritance. It changed everything. She was a wealthy woman with the sort of character, or so her confidante had worried, that made her the perfect victim for those who might wish to profit by her.

Laurel took off her glasses, closing her eyes as she rubbed the tender patches on the sides of her nose. Money. It was one of the oldest motivators, wasn’t it? She sighed. It was so base, so predictable, but that had to be it. Her mother didn’t seem at all the type to desire more than she had, let alone to make plans to take it from someone else; but that was now. The Doro-thy Nicolson Laurel knew was removed by decades from the hungry young girl she’d used to be; an eighteen-year-old girl who’d lost her family in the Coventry Blitz and had to fend for herself in wartime London.

Certainly, the regrets her mother was expressing now, her talk of mistakes and second chances and forgiveness, fitted the theory. And what was it she’d used to say to Iris—no one likes a girl who wants more than the others every time? Might that have been a lesson she learned from her own experience? The more Laurel thought about it, the more right it seemed. It was money her mother had needed; money she’d tried to take from Vivien Jenkins; but it had all gone terribly wrong. She wondered again whether Jimmy had been involved; whether it was the plan’s failure that had seen their relationship flounder. And she wondered what part exactly the plan had played in Vivien’s death. Henry had held Dorothy responsible for his wife’s death: she might have fled to a life of atonement, but Vivien’s grieving husband had refused to give up his search, and he’d found her eventually. Laurel had seen what happened next with her own eyes.

Ben was behind her now, making small throat-clearing noises as the wall clock’s minute hand slipped past the hour. Laurel pretended not to hear him, wondering what had gone wrong with her mother’s plan. Had Vivien realised what was happening and put a stop to it, or was it something else, something worse that made it all blow up? She eyed the stack of journals, scanning the spines for that dated 1941.

‘I’d leave you here, really I would,’ Ben said, ‘only the head archivist is the sort to string me up by my toes.’ He gulped. ‘Or worse’.

Oh, bugger. Bloody hell. Laurel’s heart was heavy, there was a sick swirling in the pit of her stomach, and now she was going to have to cool her heels for fifty-seven minutes while the very book that might contain the answers she needed languished here in a shut-up room.

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