I realised I had been clutching my blouse tightly at my chest. It was real. I had found it. I jumped up from my seat and then sat down again. I let out a shriek, then immediately wondered if it could possibly be true. Was this an excerpt from Emily’s novel? My heart felt as though it were a balloon about to burst! I clapped my hands over my mouth, breathing excitedly into them. It couldn’t be, could it? Was I still in my little shop, reading what would be the greatest literary discovery of modern times? I placed one hand on my heart and tried to steady its beat before reading it again.
It was a rough outline of a story about an Anglo-Irish landowner, Egerton Talbot, who had fallen in love with one of his tenants, Rose, set against the backdrop of the Irish Famine. She was described as a ‘malevolent, devious creature with all the malignancy of Satan’ by the land agent and that she had put his lordship under some kind of spell. ‘Even in the act of the appalling, she enchants!’
I was fascinated and beguiled and utterly stunned. I was still half-afraid to touch the paper in case I damaged it.
What had inspired Emily’s tale? I knew her brother Branwell was something of a tortured artist; perhaps he provided the raw materials for this Egerton character? It was also he who around that time had visited Liverpool, which was thronged with starving victims fleeing the Famine. Their images, depicted in the Illustrated London News, starving scarecrows with a few rags on them, would have been known to Emily. Some scholars even argued that Heathcliff himself, ‘a dirty, ragged, black-haired child’， who spoke a kind of ‘gibberish’ was Irish and labelled a savage and a demon.
My head swam with images of Millais’ Ophelia and how his muse, Elizabeth Siddall, almost perished while sitting for the portrait in a cold bath. Or Oscar Wilde’s painting, which seemed to be a doorway between two worlds, death and youth. It seemed to me that the slightly deranged Egerton could not see that his muse was dying, just as the English aristocrats refused to see that Ireland was starving from the Famine.
I checked my notes and the dates, which seemed to correspond with the letter Emily had sent her publisher, Cautley. This was it – I had, quite inadvertently, solved one of the twentieth century’s most important literary mysteries!
I couldn’t wait to tell the world of my discovery. I went back to my desk and picked up the receiver and then quietly replaced it. This was a rare moment – nay, a once in a thousand lifetimes moment. And it was all mine. I wanted to savour it. So I sat back down and began to write out a copy of the manuscript. It was something I used to do as a child; I would write out entire passages from books that I loved, just to know what it would feel like to write those words. Besides, I wanted to keep my own copy once the original found its proper home – I hoped within the public walls of a museum. It was hard to imagine what kind of price it might fetch at auction.
I brought my thoughts back to the present. Fifteen pages scrawled upon a miniature notebook, translated to almost double that amount in my own handwriting. I wondered if she had visited Ireland herself? This discovery was presenting more questions than answers! Perhaps that was why scholars analysed her work so intensely, in a futile effort to get to the woman who wrote so passionately and violently – a courageous writer whose novel carried us to the very depths of the human heart and the outer reaches of the supernatural environment. I felt her presence on the page, full of vitality, as though she were communicating still. Some things defy explanation. Emily Bront? was one of them.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
MARTHA
‘I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with it.’
It was a letter from the mortgage company. My mother had forwarded it. I was back in Dublin, cleaning out the kitchen cupboards while Madame Bowden watched me from a high stool, sipping an herbal tea that made her face wince every time she tasted it.
‘But it’s your home.’
‘This is my home!’ I hadn’t meant to shout. ‘I mean, as long as you’re happy to have me.’
She smiled knowingly. What did she know? I read her face. She believed I would be here for the rest of my life. Well, I wasn’t so sure about that.
‘I don’t care what happens to that apartment. The bank can keep it. Burn it down for all I care. I could never live there again.’
‘My dear, the bank has quite enough wealth as it is. Why don’t you sell it?’
I didn’t want to have this conversation. I didn’t want to think about Shane or what had happened.
‘I don’t know, maybe.’
‘You might not think it matters now, but trust me, in time you’ll wish you had taken what is rightfully yours. Think of it as compensation.’ She said the final part as though it were a matter of fact.
It made my skin crawl. Nothing could ever compensate for what he did and nothing could erase the blame I carried for his death. But, right or wrong, whenever I thought of my mother’s words – the first words I had ever heard her speak, I’m glad he’s dead – I didn’t feel so bad. I was finally free and Madame Bowden was right, I couldn’t waste this chance.
Evenings were the hardest. The need to speak to Henry was such a strong physical urge, I had to leave the house and just keep walking until it stopped. Despite everything else that was going on, my thoughts still went back to him and how he had just left. Maybe it was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, blocking his number, but it was self-preservation too. I didn’t want to hear his reasons or have to listen while he let me down gently. I could no longer read him and that frightened me to death. It felt like walking a high wire with no safety net. I had fallen in love with him and no one knew better than I what a risk that was. I couldn’t – wouldn’t – let that happen again.
It didn’t help that my feet took me past all of the places we had been together. I found myself standing outside Pen Corner and thought of his crooked smile, the sound of his voice when he spoke French, his warm breath on my neck. It was late and the shop was closed. I let my forehead touch the window as I looked at the display of pens and notebooks.
That was when it happened: in the golden glow of the window, all of the words came rushing to me. I could see them in my mind’s eye – the smallest handwriting, neat like stitching in dark thread. All of the words, lines and lines of a strangely dark story pouring into my mind. I could hardly catch my breath. I was so excited I ran as fast as I could in the direction of the tattoo parlour.
‘Look, best I can do is Tuesday,’ she said.
A young guy with half a tiger blazing on his arm was sitting in the chair.
‘I just, I feel like I need to do it now, as soon as possible.’
‘I get it,’ tiger man said. ‘Sometimes you just gotta strike while the iron’s hot.’
‘Exactly,’ I said, slightly out of breath. ‘He gets it.’
‘Okay, I could make a start when I’m finished here, but I won’t be able to do the whole thing.’
I told her that was fine and grabbed a pen and paper while I waited, in case I forgot the words. But it didn’t seem possible to forget this time. They were emblazoned on my brain. The sound of the needle carried on until it was my turn. I lifted my jumper to show her where the lines would go. She needed a magnifying glass – I wanted to keep the writing as small as it had appeared to me.