Your letter reached me earlier today–I was in the gardens here, and although I wasn’t wearing a shady hat like my grandmother apparently used to, I was cutting sheaves of lilac for the rooms as she once did. It’s not to scent the rooms, you understand–it’s to drive away the smell of the paint. My grandmother probably had only the sounds of rooks cawing or doves cooing or something equally idyllic: I have the sound of hammering and sawing from within the house, although at least the bailiffs have gone, which my father says is God’s mercy. I should think they were very glad to go–they must have had a thin time of it here, what with the rain coming in through the roof in about forty different places, and death-watch beetle feasting off the timbers.
So it isn’t quite the Irish idyll you said you visualized, but to me it’s still the most beautiful place in the world, and–will you understand this, I wonder?–it’s my place in the world, just as it’s my father’s place. I won’t wax absurdly lyrical about soul places, but I think he and I both knew that one day we would come back here. My father says he thanks whatever saints are appropriate that there were entails thicker than leaves on the ground in autumn, and that he was still the owner–he smiles when he says this, and tries to pretend he doesn’t care one way or the other, but he does care, of course, and he’ll be eternally grateful to George Lincoln for that astonishing legacy. He’s sent quite a large sum of money to help the endowment of the new wing for Latchkill–he’s done that anonymously, so I’m trusting you not to tell anyone.
Thank you for telling me about Maud. She was so confused and unhappy, wasn’t she? But the piano is a wonderful idea–perhaps she will find some kind of peace in her music.
I’m glad the memorial clock to Thomasina Forrester is in its place at last, but I’m not surprised that your prediction about it was right, and that it’s the most appalling monstrosity imaginable but it’s very generous of you to pay for its installing, and to set up the little fund for someone to wind it every week. I think I do understand what you said about liking to know it will be there in the future. You always have felt deeply about things, and there’s no accounting for these feelings, is there?
I’m working in a hospital just outside Connemara for two days in each week, and I love that. When you get here next week, I’ll take you to see it.
And yes, of course, you can stay here just as long as you want to.
Bryony
Antonia finished reading the faded writing, and felt the past brush against her mind all over again. For several moments she was unable to speak. So, after all, Daniel, you were with me, and after all, you did save me. You had a part in arranging for that dreadful, blessed, old clock to be installed and looked after, and it sounds as if you also created the Clock-Winder position. Did you have a feeling it would be needed one day? It’s a pity you can’t know how very much it was needed, Daniel, or that in a future you couldn’t possibly have envisaged, it meant I escaped from Twygrist and from Donna Robards.
Daniel was becoming shadowy now–Antonia recognized this without sadness, but she rested her hand on the letter for a moment. Trying to keep hold of the past, Antonia? No, I’m letting it go. But I’m glad that I touched that past once or twice. Thank you, Daniel. I hope you went to Ireland and to Bryony who lived there. I think you probably did, somehow.
She withdrew her hand from the letter and smiled at the man seated across the table. ‘Oliver, you’re brilliant to have found this.’
‘I am, aren’t I?’ He did not exactly smile back, but somehow a smile seemed to be between them.
‘Kit Kendal thinks the first Clock-Winder was a several-times great-aunt–he thinks her name was Ellen, but he isn’t absolutely sure,’ said Oliver. ‘I told you the Clock-Winder appointment was virtually hereditary, didn’t I? I didn’t know the first incumbent was female, though. Nice that, isn’t it? Women’s equality as far back as the beginning of the nineteenth century.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought you were a particular supporter of feminism.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been able to find out anything about Ellen Kendal yet, but I think the Maud mentioned in Bryony’s letter could have been Maud Lincoln.’
‘The miller’s daughter,’ said Antonia. ‘Was she?’
‘The records do show that George Lincoln had a daughter named Maud.’
Maud. Had she been the withdrawn creature in Latchkill, about whom the day book had recorded that she pressed into the ground as if afraid of the light?