‘How did it get to this stage?’ Helena muttered, disbelieving.
‘Who knows.’
‘And why is it concentrated in a few places?’
‘It’s like the ruins…’ Eliza ventured.
Helena looked at her. ‘You’ve seen them?’
‘Oh, yes! Everyone knows about the ruins… Although you wouldn’t believe that if you were to ask about them.’
‘People like to pretend as if they are not there…’
‘Exactly.’
They advanced into the next area.
‘Let’s carry on.’ They entered the little sitting room. ‘There is a schoolroom over there, and that must have been the bedroom they shared.’
They walked into the schoolroom. There was a standard map of the Empire and another of Europe, and a blackboard. Nothing remained of twenty years ago, no hidden messages or puzzling scribblings. It was therefore strangely empty and useless and black, with specks of sticky dirt. The bookshelf wasn’t entirely empty, although it had the unavoidable feeling that someone had ransacked it in the course of the years, and that what remained in it was only the discarded bits and pieces of unwanted books and notebooks. An assortment of the expected lesson books, a faded French dictionary. The floor was littered with bits of paper, mixed with the sticky substance. Helena opened the school cupboard: nothing remarkable. Pencils and standard inkpots abandoned on the shelves, sheets of paper, cuttings of flowers and cherubim and ponies, postcards and decoupage littering the floor. She took up a postcard: someone, perhaps a maid, had wished them to be where she was, from Scarborough of all places.
‘Let’s see the bedroom,’ she indicated.
‘Wait!’ Eliza had spotted something. The map was hanging from a clay decoration, and she moved it to one side, revealing something stuck to the wall behind it.
‘How did you notice that?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I have the makings of a detective myself.’
Behind the map, stuck to the wall, was another map, this one crude, painted obviously by children. Helena couldn’t at first work out where it was, but then she understood the reason for her confusion: it was a map of the estate and a stretch of coast. However, it did not include the abbey, and therefore it was difficult to interpret it on first glance. At its centre was instead the Tudor manor house.
‘Look, what is this?’
The children were awfully clever. The map had little flaps of paper stuck to it, and so, lifting one of them up, it was possible to see the two versions of the tide.
‘That is very nifty,’ Eliza said. ‘What is under the other flap?’
That was a very interesting question, as the second flap replaced the Tudor manor with—what? Helena could not tell. It looked like an alternate landscape. One of the children had painted a beautiful bird, a hummingbird, blue and green, to signal, in the manner of old-fashioned maps, the beginning of a foreign land.
The sentence, ‘This is how it starts’ was written below.
Was the map indicating that there was another exotic land underneath the Tudor manor? Although exotic was perhaps not the right word for it. It was a kind of citadel, with standing stones and crooked buildings, very similar to the drawings that Eliza had found in Dot’s room when she’d first arrived, a sort of wrong landscape.
Eliza had mentioned the drawings, originally made by Maud, that she had found among Dot’s things. All this was odd and intriguing.
‘I need to hold on to this. Let’s see the bedroom now.’
The room had nothing remarkable on first inspection. The beds had been removed. Then Helena had an idea.
‘Eliza,’ she said. ‘That beggar woman. Lady Matthews told me that she sneaked up here the one time she managed to get into the house.’
‘Oh, yes! I’ve heard that from Mrs Burroughs. That was odd indeed.’
‘It is, isn’t it? I wonder where did they find her, exactly.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘She was apparently found lying in the nursery rooms, on the floor and in the foetal position.’ Helena had an idea: ‘As if she was sleeping. On a bed.’
In one corner there was a wardrobe, and she walked in its direction. The smell here was faintly decaying. Helena opened it. On the floor, next to the usual dirt, there was a pile of books and papers surrounded by paper roses and a collection of stones and minerals, and other little things she didn’t recognise. She took out the little magnifying glass that she carried around her neck, ostensibly to help her read newspapers, and picked some up between her fingers.
‘What is that?’
‘I’m not sure—I would need a microscope to be certain. But they look like dry petals.’
‘Oh! I didn’t know that was there!’ More children’s books. Eliza took them in her hand and the dust went everywhere. They both covered their mouths again.
They sat among a collection of scribblings and drawings. Helena took them and quickly considered them: strange four-legged creatures with long limbs, knights, maidens. The alternate landscape again.
‘These children…’
‘What about them?’
‘They really liked George MacDonald.’
‘Who?’ She looked at Helena.
‘These books: The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, they are both by George MacDonald. How odd that they put them here—even this collection of fairy tales, Dealings with the Fairies, they are all by him.’
Helena’s mind considered the pile of books and the papers.
‘Eliza, I’m thinking—’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t you think this is odd?’ Helena realised at once that she had said something stupid; what wasn’t odd about this place? ‘I mean—they look as if someone had—’
‘As if they had been studying them,’ Eliza said, reading Helena’s mind.
‘Exactly!’
‘As if they were a pile of books and papers one finds in the college library once it has shut, because someone has abandoned them in a hurry to go punting with her boyfriend.’
‘Which college? St Hilda’s, Girton, Newnham?’
‘St Hilda’s,’ Eliza answered.
‘Yes but—they had no boyfriend.’
‘And they took the precaution to hide them here—’
‘Unless—’
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘They had no boyfriend, but I wonder: who was their white rabbit? Who did they follow down the rabbit hole?’
‘Alice—’
‘Alice.’
‘Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do,’ Eliza quoted.
‘She walked sadly… wondering how she was ever to get out again,’ Helena quoted back.
‘My God—’
‘What?’
‘Look.’ Eliza had found some papers folded inside one of the books.
‘What is it?’
There were some loose pages, three in total, written in compressed handwriting.
‘Helena…’
Eliza passed on the pages, and Helena saw that they were signed ‘Maud Matthews, 1881’.
She started to read:
‘Something very wonderful happened when I was little…’
‘Is it a diary?’
‘I am not sure… but we need to take it with us. And the books as well.’
‘George MacDonald’s books? What do you need them for?’
‘I can’t explain it, Eliza, but I am sure that they are the clue to all this.’
They took it all and left the place, locking the door behind them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When Mina was little, there was a fairy story she liked very much to read, and she also had a favourite spot to read it in, like children sometimes do. The story was called The Blue Light-Shade; the favourite spot was a bench in her back garden. In the story a couple of twin sisters entered a haunted house, and only one of them came out again. The sisters were called Raven and Rose. The house stood at the other side of their garden,
quiet with secrets.
Sometimes a blue light could be seen glimmering over it. The twin sisters saw it floating around the house and its surroundings, moving from room to room, illuminating window after window, pouring into the starry sky through the chimney. Leaking from beneath the main door. Hovering over the ceiling like a lost cloud from another world.
The Blue Light-Shade was one of those stories where ‘something horrible happened’. Mina had liked those stories very much when she was a child, she had explained to Eliza, and they had laughed together about it.
The blue light vanished Raven away. It had to do with her name, Mina said. She didn’t really belong here but there. The sinister light had come to claim her back.
Raven was never seen again; she was lost forever. From then on, Rose always left a space between herself and other people, as if there were someone standing next to her.
It was so painful to think of Mina. For a long time Eliza had hoped that their quarrel would resolve itself; but she had also fallen prey to one of her least endearing qualities: a certain immobility, which resulted in her expectation that the issue would resolve all by itself somehow. She had been the one leaving their shared home, but simply because she had her family carstone cottage; she had a place to go. But she had always hoped that Mina would come to find her one day, or would write her a letter perhaps, explaining how wrong she had been, how much she missed her, how impossible it was for her to be apart from her. None of this had happened. And time had now passed, irrevocably.
At the time it had seemed to Eliza that they had quarrelled about something minor; it had taken her a long time to realise the importance of the issue for Mina, how much it mattered to her. Indeed, it had probably been the most important thing of all, as it directly assaulted the only thing that mattered in Mina’s life: her writing.
Mina wrote strange stories, and poems in the fairy fashion, and had, always under the cover of a pseudonym—sometimes the name of a man, but more often and more comfortably a simple set of rhyming initials, N.N., X.X., B.B.—published them in several places. St James’s Gazette. Home. One long poem, once, in The Yellow Book.
For years she had been trying to write a novel. Her writing desk had been covered with reams of dusty paper, all written over with her cramped but enthusiastic hand, which she had never let anybody see. Until she met Jane Howard. They had seemed to complement one another perfectly. Mina was a writer, and Jane was a reader. Jane had not, as so many other women had, mocked Mina for her choice of topic, her fairies and elves. She had seemed to have a genuine curiosity about them, although, as she always said, it was not a topic she knew anything about, or one that she would choose herself. She read Mina’s stories and poems in a disinterested way, mostly to tell her how much she liked them, and how they would never sell in any quantity.
What happened then was unacceptable. And predictable, like a plot twist in a book. Jane Howard herself sold a novel she had been working on in secret. And it turned out, after all her protestations, to be a novel in the ‘fairy’ fashion, and to incorporate many of the topics that Mina herself had been working on. Jane was invited to speak to various groups, to write long articles for the magazines where Mina had only, with trouble, placed a short story every now and then. In a public talk about her book, Jane mentioned the poem ‘Goblin Market’ as her inspiration for the novel. A poem that was apparently dear to her, but which she had not known at all before Mina had shown it to her. This was never mentioned. Mina, as friend and confidante, had suddenly disappeared from the literary sphere.
As luck would have it, the world at that time was gasping for a novel of elves and goblins, and Jane’s book was extremely successful; so successful that it pre-empted any complaint on Mina’s part: anything she said would be taken as pettiness. And what, exactly, could Mina protest about? Mina understood her hopeless situation: nothing criminal had happened. She did not have the exclusive use of ‘fairy’ or ‘Celtic’ topics. But something was wrong, nonetheless. She could hardly bring herself to read the novel, aware from the reviews she had read of the familiar ground it might cover, and also scared that, unfairly, Jane would turn out to be a better writer than her.
Jane had come from wealth, had married wealth, and had the confidence that went along with wealth, the easy confidence of those who knew the world was for their picking, the charm and the know-how of the rich. Jane’s novel became the talk of the season. It was made into a play by the impresario Wybert Reeve, translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish. She was said to have ‘remade the fairy tale’, this woman who knew nothing about them that she hadn’t learnt from Mina.
But that wasn’t all, far from it. For Mina realised that she had to start again rewriting her own work. If she were to finish and publish her novel, that dusty heap of papers that seemed somehow now to threaten her from the desk drawer, there would of course be too many similarities in themes, approaches, to Jane’s book. Mina feared that she might be accused of copying her. The irony. Jane Howard was a woman made for success, elegant and beautiful; she was now on her way to a fame comparable to that of Marie Corelli herself. Mina was not: she was mousy and insecure. Her looks were all wrong, her parentage disputed. It was quite possible that, even being the talented writer she knew herself to be, she would never publish anything.
The whole situation was a perfect exercise in manipulation: there is always someone weaker than you around, someone you can abuse. And Mina, poor Mina, had found herself too often on that receiving end.
It was embarrassing for Eliza to admit it, but she had not positioned herself readily on Mina’s side. She remembered that day all too well; they had gone to visit a church attached to a neighbouring estate. After admiring the building, inspecting the stained windows, they were taking a stroll in the brief, unkempt cemetery, Mina in particularly low spirits.
‘Whatever is the matter?’ Eliza knew what the matter was, but the truth was that she had avoided talking about the topic for as long as she had been able to.
Mina, as if waiting for the right occasion, burst it all out, expecting some compassion, no doubt. But Eliza was ruthless. Partly, she was ashamed to acknowledge, out of cowardice, for Mrs Howard was now so successful that it would be impossible to confront her. But also, as she pointed out, there was nothing ‘exact’ to confront her with. She had not copied any of Mina’s work; her only sin had been, perhaps, the lack of respect for a fellow writer’s imagination, a very vague thing indeed. Eliza explained that she ought to be pitied, presumably because she lacked any ideas of her own. There was nothing more terrible for an artist. It was her opinion that, quite possibly, Mrs Howard would not write another book. And even if there could be some kind of acknowledgement, an apology would be unlikely, for Mrs Howard would still win: she would have at her disposal all the greatest platforms to defend herself, her publisher being extremely well-connected in Fleet Street. She would destroy Mina’s reputation, Mina’s career, before this career had even begun.
* * *
This was not all she said: Eliza also called Mina childish, absurd, self-centred.
On the way back home, Mina hardly spoke, answering only with monosyllables.
They quarrelled that evening, and the next morning. Eventually, Mina threw some of the pages of her novel into the fire. It was obvious that she was hurt, but it was equally obvious to Eliza that there was nothing they could do. And she thought at the time honesty was the best she could offer.
Eventually Mina asked Eliza to leave the house. And Eliza went, not thinking that Mina was serious about a proper separation. She was. Eliza went off with a smile on her face, sure that her lover would ask her back soon. She didn’t.
* * *
Mina had never written again; the experience had broken her. And Eliza knew it to be her fault. She wondered sometimes if that was the reason why she had chosen Eunice Foote as her subject: another woman erased, whose ideas were put to better use by others. But Mina’s experience was shocking in that a woman, bent o
n success at whatever cost, had done that to another woman. Perhaps that was the reason why she now wanted to help Helena.
The truth was perhaps more complicated, for every time that Mina came into her mind, Eliza looked at the list of things that she had offered to help Helena with. She was good at research, but she also knew why she was putting all her efforts into solving this particular mystery: she felt she had something to atone for.
Her successfully completed first task had been to unearth the local account about the church at Wicken Far End. It was baffling to say the least. According to the records, the building had collapsed in the 1770s. However, the local people were sure that it happened a whole century later. For a legend it was an odd one; for something so solid as a building to carry two accounts of its demise, it truly was peculiar. Eliza dug a bit further, asked Mrs Hobbs, visited some local record offices, wrote to a couple of folklorist friends of Peter’s. The report of one of them was surprising to say the least. For he wrote back that the church, at least in people’s minds, was ‘here but not here’, and that for a long time it looked from the distance sort of ‘put together’, as if a green hue or light sustained its stones. There was no record of services or of any activity going on in the actual building, but the general sense was that the place was sort of ‘held together’, at least in people’s imaginations. What could all this mean? It was almost as if the ‘real’ church had in fact collapsed, but for a long while people could get a glimpse of its sister building, one that still stood, in a sort of mirror realm from their own, conjured up by the light itself.
‘This is not helping. I need solid facts,’ complained Helena. They were in Eliza’s sitting room, eating Mrs Hobbs’s fruitcake.
‘I agree. Why don’t we go to the factory?’
‘I thought you said that you and the good doctor could not make it there!’
‘We can try again…’
And so they set off that very afternoon in the pony and cart.
Ahead of them, the tired green and dark brown marshy soil stretched towards the grey, leaden waters, receding almost to a mudflat, but still separating them from the island.
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