Katherine, When She Smiled

by Harmon, Joyce

  And, The Peculiar Staircase? Katherine would have sworn that Aunt Alice had read to them all the Mrs. Wilson novels, but this title was unfamiliar. Katherine’s mind often wandered of an evening when the reading was not her own selection, but she could at least have told the title of the evening’s work.

  Carefully, Katherine set aside the portion of the manuscript that was Papa’s work on Homer, and considered this strange intruder. It was written in the same neat hand as the Homer. And looking through it, she realized there were corrections and emendations, all in the same hand. Here ‘inky darkness’ was lined through and ‘stygian gloom’ penned neatly above it.

  Papa wasn’t just copying a book. It appeared that he was editing it as well. Katherine flipped to the end again, and saw that the manuscript was incomplete. Where had this come from? Why did Papa have it?

  Slowly, a bizarre suspicion crossed Katherine’s mind. She reopened the bottom shelf of the desk and began pulling out the manuscripts. Here was Papa’s Aristotle monograph, and here was Aristophanes. Euripides. Euclid. When she’d opened the drawer earlier, she had seen without really noticing that the ribbon-tied manuscripts toward the back of the drawer were thicker. And here was the first of the thicker ones. Count Olpho. By Mrs. Wilson.

  Again in Papa’s neat and precise handwriting, including his neat and precise edits. More rapidly now, Katherine pulled out manuscript after manuscript. Heir to a Fallen Throne. The Perilous Journey. Castle Sinister, which they had just been reading.

  Katherine sank back into the chair, stunned by the evidence. Could it truly be? Was Papa Mrs. Wilson?!

  THREE

  The chiming of the hall clock drew Katherine’s attention to the passage of time. Quickly, she stowed the Mrs. Wilson manuscripts back into the bottom drawer. Then she placed the Homer papers on top of the incomplete Mrs. Wilson novel, and returned the stack to its accustomed place. She stood and looked over the desk, ensuring that everything was in its place, and then left the study, closing the door carefully behind her.

  As she went up the stairs, a chatter of voices told her that Aunt Alice was in the morning room having a comfortable coze with her cronies Mrs. Worth and Mrs. Shelby. They would be awaiting the tea tray and well occupied. Katherine moved silently down the hall and into the ladies’ sewing room.

  There, beside Aunt Alice’s favorite chair, was a small bookcase. This case contained recent novels, Aunt Alice’s amiable vice, books considered too undistinguished to be given shelving in the library that adjoined Papa’s study. Katherine sat down in Aunt Alice’s chair and bent down to examine the titles. There they were, the complete works of Mrs. Wilson.

  Here was the first of Mrs. Wilson’s popular novels, Count Olpho. Katherine pulled it out and turned to the title page. She was interested in the publication date. There it was. The first novel by Mrs. Wilson was published seven years ago.

  Katherine leaned back, staring off into the distance. Seven years ago. The times matched. Was it possible that Count Olpho was ‘Papa’s Clever Investment’? She thought back to that baffling celebratory dinner, and the new information seemed to fit. If Papa had indeed earned the money to save the family home through penning this absurd melodrama, Mama would certainly have found that fact exquisitely humorous.

  Mama knew! She must have known. But no one else did. Papa had kept the secret all to himself after Mama’s death, for all these years. Scarcely surprising, when she came to consider the matter. The Mrs. Wilson novels, though wildly popular, were critically much disparaged. Such an eminent scholar as Papa had been, he would not have wanted it known that such silly tales were the product of his pen.

  Katherine thought that she must keep this to herself. First, she wasn’t absolutely certain; more investigation in the desk was called for. And second, if she told Helen or Aunt Alice, the secret would be secret no longer. Helen, dear girl, was the soul of guilelessness. As for Aunt Alice, she adored Mrs. Wilson. If she learned that her own late brother was the brain behind the Mrs. Wilson novels, she could not keep such information to herself for as much as an hour.

  Katherine looked at the dainty ormolu clock on the mantle, reshelved Count Odolpho, and went to her own room to discard her apron and kerchief and neaten her hair before going sedately to the morning room for tea.

  When Katherine entered the room just ahead of Mary with the tea tray, the three ladies were decorously discussing gardening. But Katherine knew from their bright eyes and slyly exchanged glances that before hearing her footsteps they had been having a more interesting conversation about village personalities. She felt like a governess interrupting her charges in the midst of mischief.

  Pouring the tea cups and greeting Aunt Alice’s guests, she asked them politely what news they had. Mrs. Worth shared news of a newly opened bloom in her garden, causing Mrs. Shelby to titter into her cup. As Helen entered with a murmured apology for being late, Aunt Alice turned the conversation by asking Katherine about her afternoon’s progress, adding brightly to her guests, “Katherine is sorting out poor dear Sidney’s desk. Balliol College has asked us for some manuscripts so that they might make up a display in his memory. It’s quite an honor, of course.”

  Seeing the opportunity to explain spending more time in the study, Katherine said mendaciously, “It’s going to take longer than I first thought. Papa’s papers are more disorganized than I expected and getting them into any sort of order will be challenging.”

  That evening, as the Rose ladies sat over their needlework and reading, Katherine paid closer attention to Aunt Alice’s reading of Mrs. Wilson’s The Perilous Journey, which had succeeded Sense and Sensibility. This time, she was beginning to notice a sly wit in the writing, a subtle irony in the dialog and the character descriptions that struck her as familiar. It reminded her, in fact, of Papa’s conversation over the tea cups. Amazing that she had never noticed before.

  So absorbed was she in listening to the story that she was surprised when Helen looked over at her and exclaimed, “Dearest Kitty, is that sock intended for Jack?!”

  Katherine looked down at her hands, moving automatically through the motions of knitting, and realized that she had continued on with the plain knitting long past the point where she should have turned the heel, and the result bore resemblance to a garment more suitable to a giraffe than to a human boy. “Oh, how provoking!” she said ruefully. “All this work and for nothing.” She held up the sock on its needles and couldn’t help laughing. “Jack will never in his life grow tall enough to need this. Well, I must undo a good portion of it, but not tonight.” She thrust the project back into her work basket, and took up some plain mending.

  The next afternoon, Katherine once again went to Papa’s study, to tackle what Aunt Alice had begun to characterize as her duties as ‘Papa’s literary executrix’. Katherine rather liked that phrasing. For one thing, it sounded complicated, complicated enough that Katherine felt confident she would receive no offers of assistance. It also sounded time consuming, so she could hope to be given time to get to the bottom of this matter.

  She was now all but convinced that Papa was indeed Mrs. Wilson. But that realization raised more questions than it answered. How did this come about? How did the system work? Who knew about Papa’s secret identity? Where did Papa send the completed manuscripts and who sent the payments back?

  The answers, she hoped, would be in the correspondence. She seated herself once again at the desk, feeling more comfortable there now, and opened the second drawer and pulled out the top letters she found there. She no longer believed she would find scholarly letters about Greek, and in this she was correct.

  The first letter she examined was signed ‘Grimey’. Katherine smiled. She knew who this was; she had never met him but had heard of him often. Basil ‘Grimey’ Grimthorpe, Papa’s old school chum, described by him as ‘not precisely needle-witted, but the best of good fellows.’ Grimthorpe, a man of independent means, lived in London, from which he frequently sent Papa long chatty letters full
of Town news and gossip. Katherine skimmed this one. Near the end, she found this suggestive paragraph: “And what do you hear from our mutual friend, Mrs. W? The fellows over at M&H impatiently await whatever she wishes to send to them. As her representative, they direct their anxious bleating to yours truly.”

  After a moment’s thought, Katherine deciphered ‘M&H’ as Mulberry and Hawes, the well-regarded London publishing house that published the Mrs. Wilson novels. She felt elated. She had already answered some of her questions. It appeared that Papa’s old friend ‘Grimey’ served as Mrs. Wilson’s conduit to the larger world. But how had this started? Why was it even necessary? The Roses had lived at Rosebourne for five generations now; when had the income become insufficient?

  Katherine decided to go back to the beginning. She pulled everything out of the drawer and turned the stack around, so that the papers from the bottom were now on the top. And she hoped, the papers she examined now were older ones. Papa’s filing system was simple; newer material on top of older.

  The first documents she examined, the ones from the very bottom of the drawer, were trivial. They were merely notes offering conventional greetings and best wishes for holidays and birthdays, signed with a scrawled “Harry”. This would be Henry Rose, Papa’s brother, who had died years ago in India.

  But then came a note in the same handwriting, and this wasn’t trivial at all. Written in a hurry, it read, “Sid – Come to Town at once, I’m in the devil of a jam. They say they won’t prosecute if I return the money, but the money is gone and I don’t know what to do. Help me out, old man!” Signed, again, “Harry.”

  Katherine thought back to what she knew about Uncle Harry. She’d only met him several times, when he’d visited Rosebourne, and quite liked him as a child. He was a jolly man, full of jokes and with a light-hearted attitude that contrasted strongly with her serious father. He worked in a barrister’s office in London before he went out to India. Perhaps this trouble he wrote of was why he went away.

  Paging onward, Katherine found documentation of Papa selling some of his holdings in the Funds. This must have been for Uncle Harry’s trouble, and replacing the money that he… stole? Gambled away? Who now knew, but the fact remained that Papa had to sell Funds to the total of – Katherine gasped involuntarily. Thirty thousand pounds! How was that even possible?

  But here at least was the answer. Here was the loss that had drained the estate of a significant part of its income. No wonder Papa feared they would have to sell Rosebourne!

  Turning the page and another note from Harry. “Onboard the Eastern Queen. Sid – We sail with the tide. I’m sure you will be delighted to see the last of me, but I just had to tell you once more that I’m desperately sorry to have cost you so much, I know I owe you my life and I’m more thankful than I can say. Sid, I swear to you that I’m going to make good, and someday I’ll pay you back, every shilling of it. Thanks again, old man, and try not to think too hardly of me. Your genuinely penitent brother, Henry Rose.”

  Poor Uncle Harry! He sounded so sincere, but he never had the opportunity to deliver on that promise. Katherine remembered when the letter came, an impersonal notice from the East India Company, notifying of the death of Henry Rose, and later the arrival of the small box containing the poor remnants that were Uncle Harry’s possessions. Papa had snorted and said, “Always knew he’d come to a bad end,” but Katherine could tell he was genuinely saddened by the news.

  So. Katherine had found one of the answers she sought – where had the money gone? It had gone to save Uncle Harry from prison, and it was gone for good. Very well. Now for the next question. Where on earth had Mrs. Wilson come from? Katherine paged on through the stack of papers.

  And here was a letter from Grimey. Dated several months after Uncle Harry had sailed for India, the letter read:

  “Rosie, old thing. First, I must tell you that the sun is shining, it’s mid-morning, and I’m sober as a parson. But I’ve been thinking more about what we discussed when you were up in Town, and I don’t think we can discount it entirely as pure exhilaration of spirits. Yes, the punch was strong, but the idea was sound. Listen, Pinky Hawes has taken over for his pater with those publishing chaps, and he was just telling me the other day that they simply can’t get enough of this Gothick business. They print it, he says, it sells out, and they print more. The ladies, God bless ‘em, are all mad for Gothick. They want castles, they want perils, they want innocent heroines and dastardly villains. And they’re willing to pay for it.

  And don’t tell me you can’t do it, either. I remember those tales you spun for us in Hall. I certainly couldn’t do it, but you have a facility for that sort of thing. And honestly, old man, what other options do you have? You’ll never make the amount of money you need with Homer.

  Do give it a try, and I can pass your manuscript on to Pinky. We’ll create a new name and alter ego for you. What a lark!”

  Katherine spent a pleasantly nostalgic afternoon reading through the correspondence, becoming acquainted with a side of her father that she’d never known existed. Papa made copies of his own letters to Grimey, so she was able to follow both sides of the conversation. She hugely enjoyed the light-hearted construction of Mrs. Wilson, whom Grimthorpe presented to Mulberry and Hawes as a tragic young widow in reduced circumstances.

  “I rather think old Pink is half in love with Mrs. W,” he wrote to ‘Rosie’. “He seems to have decided that she is not only young, but also beautiful, though I never said any such thing. Pinkie was wondering if he might ever be allowed to meet his most successful authoress, but I described her as desperately shy. I’ve also given her five children to support, and that flight of fancy seems to have done the trick and Pink will be content to worship from afar.”

  She left the study that afternoon feeling a gentle melancholy, missing her father, and wishing she had know this about him while he was still alive. Then with a slight wince, she recalled some of the things she’d said about gothics in the past, superior condemnations of what she called a very silly type of literature. No wonder Papa hadn’t been willing to admit his secret identity!

  Katherine went to bed that night with a sense of true relief and an easy mind. Her questions had been answered, the mysteries were solved. She knew now the cause of the reverses of the family fortunes, and she knew how Papa had solved them. She knew the source of the mysterious income. She fell asleep readily and slept deeply.

  Sometime after midnight, she woke up, instantly alert. While she slept, her mind had been busy arranging the facts she had learned at different times, including the mystery payments arriving twice a year and the publications of the Mrs. Wilson novels. The year Mama died, money had been tight, she remembered. And recently, when she went over the family financial records, she saw that memory was accurate. The payments from Papa’s Clever Investment were significantly lower that year. Mama’s illness had been long and emotionally draining for the entire family and Papa had spent most of his time with her in those final days. Not surprisingly, there had been no new Mrs. Wilson novel that year.

  The smaller payment indicated that the previous works still sold, though in significantly smaller numbers when there wasn’t a new book to generate renewed interest. Katherine remembered that recent letter from Grimey, and Mulberry and Hawes’ impatience to gain a new Mrs. Wilson manuscript.

  She thought of the stack of papers under the Homer on Papa’s desk. The Peculiar Staircase. Surely it was almost completed, it was such a great stack of papers. She told herself she would have to read it, perhaps pen a conclusion if Papa hadn’t reached the end, and somehow get it off to Grimthorpe and thence to the publishers. With that thought, she fell back to sleep.

  The next morning, Katherine and Helen walked into the village to do some shopping. As they ambled along the country lane, Helen exclaimed at new stands of wildflowers, gathering samples and placing them in her basket. Katherine was abstracted, mentally composing a letter to Basil Grimthorpe, explaining the situation w
ith Papa’s death and the incomplete Mrs. Wilson novel.

  Now that she thought of it, it was strange the family hadn’t heard from Mr. Grimthorpe already. Papa’s death was mentioned in all the major London newspapers; he had been quite a well-known figure among scholars. Perhaps ‘Grimey’ had been traveling and had missed the news? She was anxious to return home and examine the latest novel. She hoped it was complete or near enough completion that she could easily manage it.

  They had reached the village outskirts now and passed a group of cottagers standing huddled together talking urgently. Further on was another clump of local people. Now the village proper, and the street was crowded with groups, forming to talk and breaking apart to join other groups. The talk was hushed and urgent. Occasionally a voice would rise to a shrill exclamation before dropping back to the hushed tones more suitable to a church than a village square.

  “Gracious,” Helen exclaimed. “What is happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Katherine admitted. “But I haven’t seen such a bustle and to-do since Maisie Ellis ran off with that Irish horse coper.” (Maisie, the daughter of the local publican, returned a year and a half later, babe in arms, calling herself Mrs. Connor and claiming a wedding and a husband’s tragic death. Most of the villagers were kind enough to pretend to believe her.)

  Mrs. Shelby hurried up to the Rose girls. “Have you heard?” she asked breathlessly. “It’s the battle! It’s begun!”

  “Begun?” snorted Mrs. Worth, joining her. “Over by now, from what I’m hearing.”

  Indeed, such was the matter engaging the interest of Piddledean. Word had come that the forces of Napoleon and those of Wellington were engaged at last. Beyond that one fact was confusion. A dozen stories circulated the square, all of them contradictory. Napoleon had been hit in the first exchange of fire, was now dead and the battle won. No, it was Wellington who was dead and the Allied forces were retreating in wild confusion toward the channel. The French army were in Brussels, slaughtering civilians, or were retreating rapidly down the road toward Paris, throwing away their arms as they ran.