It turned out Leonard’s professor had tracked him down using the records of his old college. Professor Harris had entered one of Leonard’s papers in a competition at the University and he’d been awarded a small stipend, enough to buy a new pair of walking boots and a couple of maps at Stanfords. With the change, he’d bought a train ticket. Leonard had come to feel a kinship with Radcliffe during his walkabout and headed now to York to read Thurston Holmes’s papers. It seemed to him that something must have happened to cause a young man – only twenty years old at the time – to write with such enthusiasm about place and belonging, to make him fall so wholeheartedly in love with a house. Surely only a man who knew himself to be an outsider would think along such lines.
He hadn’t had much luck. The Holmes archive contained many letters from Radcliffe, but there were none from the period in which Leonard was interested. Exceedingly frustrating, but curious, too. Throughout 1859, 1860 and into 1861, Radcliffe and Holmes had corresponded regularly, their lengthy, conversational letters making it clear that the two men saw a lot of one another and that each found his thinking and his art stimulated by the other. But Radcliffe was reticent to write further about the house and then, after a brief, rather curt letter in which he requested the return of a borrowed paint set in January 1862, there appeared to have been only occasional, perfunctory exchanges between them.
It was possible of course that there was no mystery: that the two men had simply drifted apart, or else that they’d continued corresponding, but the more fulsome letters had been lost to a winter fire, a poor filing system, a feverish session of spring-cleaning. There was no way of knowing and Leonard didn’t spend too much time then wondering. Whatever the case, evidently in mid-1862 they had been close enough to go away together for the summer, with the other members of the Magenta Brotherhood – Felix and Adele Bernard – and Edward’s sister, Clare, who was modelling for Thurston Holmes, to Edward Radcliffe’s house at Birchwood.
And although Leonard hadn’t found precisely what he’d come looking for, he didn’t leave the archives empty-handed. He’d discovered a doorway, and on the other side was a group of young people from over half a century before who’d reached through time and taken him back with them.
It was Edward Radcliffe whose charisma leapt most vividly from the pages of the letters. His energy and openness, his willingness to engage with life and everything it offered, the inclusiveness of his art, its readiness to grow and transmute and capture experiences, was clear. Each line in each letter pulsed with youth, possibility and sensuality, and Leonard could picture the state of blissful domestic déshabillé in which Radcliffe lived, his perch on the edge of artistic poverty, just as surely as if he were there. He understood their intimacy and ease, the camaraderie that others found both cliquish and alluring; they were a true brotherhood. It was the same way Leonard had felt about Tom, almost proprietorial, as if they were made of the same stuff, and therefore they were the same person. It allowed them to fight and wrestle and then to laugh it off as they lay on the ground panting, for one to lean across and slap a mosquito on the other’s leg just as he would his own. Leonard perceived, too, the way the men, like brothers, had been stimulated by competition, each working feverishly to create works that would leave an indelible mark on the Establishment. Each seeking to attract the praise of John Ruskin, the glowing review of Charles Dickens, the patronage of a gentleman with deep pockets.
It was intoxicating stuff, and reading the young men’s letters, the joyful flowering of creativity and their attempts to put their thoughts and ideas into words, seemed to reanimate some deep, forgotten part of Leonard. After he left the library in York, he kept reading and walking and thinking, wondering about the purpose of art, the importance of place, the fluidity of time; and Edward Radcliffe slipped further and deeper under his skin, so that one day he found himself back at the University, knocking on Professor Harris’s door.
The long barn near the house came into sight and Dog raced ahead, straight through the cool flowing water of the Hafodsted Brook, anticipating the breakfast he assumed would be coming his way when they made it back. For an interloper, he had a lot of faith in the kindness of strangers. Not that they were strangers any more.
Leonard’s shirt was almost dry now, as he left the sunlit field and made his way over the fallen log. He crossed the grass to arrive at the dusty coach way that ran along the stone wall surrounding the front garden of the house. Hard to imagine that this must once have been a busy thoroughfare where carriages arrived and glossy horses hoofed impatiently, anxious for a drink and a rest after the long journey from London. Today it was just Leonard, Dog and the hum of early morning bee-song.
The iron gate was hanging off the latch, just as he’d left it, its powder-green paint faded to the colour of lavender leaves. Tangled jasmine tendrils grew along the nubbly stone wall and over the arch, tiny pink and white flowers still falling in sprays, their fragrance heady.
Leonard pinched himself as he did each time he approached the house. Birchwood Manor, Edward Radcliffe’s pride and joy. It really had been a piece of extraordinary good luck. Almost immediately after his doctoral candidacy had been accepted, Leonard had found himself, for once, the right man in the right place at precisely the right time: a woman named Lucy Radcliffe had approached the Art Historians’ Association and announced that she was considering leaving them a significant gift. The house had come to Miss Radcliffe after her brother’s death and she had lived in it ever since. Now, though, only a couple of years off eighty, she had decided to find herself a place with fewer staircases and corners, and wished to endow the house as part of a legacy in her brother’s name. She envisaged it as a place where students pursuing the same interests might go to work; a locus for artists exploring notions of truth and beauty, of light and place and home. Her solicitor had suggested that before she commit to the plan, she give it a test run.
Leonard had read about the new Residential Scholarship in Cherwell and begun working immediately on an application. Some months after submitting his letter and résumé, he’d received word that the award was his: a handwritten reply arrived, inviting him to take up residence at Birchwood Manor for a three-month period during the summer of 1928. He’d flinched, briefly, at the cited lack of electricity and necessary reliance on candles and lamplight, but had shaken away thoughts of the gloomy chalk tunnels in France, telling himself that it would be summer and he would have no need to face the dark. He would live by nature’s clock. Ad occasum tendimus omnes, he had read once on a grey, pitted gravestone in Dorset. We are travelling each towards his sunset.
Leonard had arrived with a predisposition to love the place, but the reality, in what he’d observed to be a very rare occurrence in life, was infinitely better than the imagining. He had approached that day from the village rather than the river, down the winding country lane that tapered as it neared the house, leaving the row of cottages on the village outskirts behind so that one was alone for a time amidst fields dotted with bored cows and curious calves.
The first sign of the house itself had been the wall, eight feet high, and the twin gables of the grey slate roof just visible beyond. Leonard noted with satisfaction the way the slates mimicked nature: tiny, neat rectangles at the peak, gaining size as they fell towards the guttering, just like feathers grading along the wing. Here, then, was Radcliffe’s dignified bird, roosting in its own river bend.