‘Well, there you are. I didn’t want to be a perv and a weirdo, might have blown my chances with you altogether.’
‘Are you saying you fancied me right from the start?’
‘Fishing for compliments?’
She rolled over and pretended she was going to get up. I hauled her back until she was lying on top of me and I felt a desire for her aching through my body.
‘I think I knew from the minute I saw you.’
She kissed me softly and let her fingers run through my hair. It was like a dream I never wanted to wake from – after all of the times I’d had to leave this house knowing she would never be mine, it hardly seemed real.
‘Wait a second,’ she said, lifting herself up on her elbows and annoyingly removing her lips from mine. ‘Why do you think the shop chose you to see it?’
‘Um, I’m not sure it chose me …’ It was hard to think rationally while lying naked in bed with this woman. Besides, for the longest time, I’d thought it was a drunken mirage, if such a thing existed.
She sat up now and wrapped the sheet around her. It seemed we were taking a break.
‘The book, A Place Called Lost. I just assumed Madame Bowden had put it in here.’
‘Along with your tree.’
She made a face at me. My sarcastic tone was wearing thin.
‘I told you, none of it makes sense. This might sound crazy—’
‘Crazier than seeing a shop that doesn’t exist?’
She looked at me with her head tilted, as though sizing me up. ‘The manuscript. It’s really important to you, isn’t it?’
Was she still doubting my motivation here? I began to explain myself but she interrupted.
‘No, I know that’s not what this is, but I get that you wanted to prove something.’
Hearing those words, it all suddenly sounded so superficial. Trying to win the approval of other people, chasing achievements that weren’t really achievements at all. It’s not as if I wrote anything, I just stumbled across someone else’s work and tried to find my own worth in some kind of second-hand glory. Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe it was time I tried to earn my own respect instead of everybody else’s.
‘Finding the manuscript would have been’—I paused, searching for the right word—‘immense. But in a strange way, uncovering the truth about Opaline and her bookshop and, last but not least, meeting the perfect partner with the kind of laugh that makes my heart race, has sort of surpassed that.’
‘Are we partners?’
‘I’d like to be.’
‘Okay.’
With that, she turned her back to me.
‘Um, what are we doing? Is this some kind of mating ritual? Do I turn my back?’
She was laughing again. ‘The words, Henry!’
Her tattoo. Of course. I leaned closer but couldn’t make out the writing.
‘Shit.’
‘What is it?’
‘I think I might need glasses.’
She bent towards her nightstand and fished out a magnifying glass from the drawer. I tried not to feel like an ageing tortoise. The script began …
Wrenville Hall is a spectre that haunts us all from one generation to the next, crushing every dream, every aspiration in its path. This ground is cursed, as is the lineage of each and every child born here. I am born into darkness and no amount of atonement will grant me the saving light I have sought in her, my darling Rosaleen. Darkness will reign on this place until my last breath, and beyond.
I wasn’t sure what I had expected since seeing Martha’s tattoo the first time, but I know I had not expected this.
‘Can you see the date?’
I searched with my magnifying glass and saw the numbers 1846.
‘What is this?’
She turned around to look at me, her eyes wide and solemn.
‘I’ve never told anyone about this. I never really understood it – I mean, why it was happening – until I saw that photograph of Opaline.’ She reached back and grabbed her phone off the nightstand, pulling up an image of the old photograph we’d found of Opaline at St Agnes’s before handing it to me.
‘What am I looking for?’ I asked, taking the phone.
‘Look at her skirt.’
I zoomed in and saw something I had missed before. There were stitches on the material.
‘Words,’ she said, prompting my brain to kick into gear. ‘A story. The same one that’s on my skin, she sewed it into her clothes.’
‘What the—’
I looked at her back again and saw the initials at the end.
EJB.
My scalp tingled and it felt like my hair was standing on end.
‘Henry, I think this is Emily Bront?’s manuscript.’
Chapter Fifty-Two
OPALINE
London, 1946
Inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo, I spent months searching for information and came across a newspaper article about a soldier’s family who believed he had been wrongly executed for cowardice. They named the unit. It was my brother’s. I had my lead, all I had to do was follow it.
I uncovered damning court martial papers from two trials held in Ypres, where fifty men had been sentenced to death by firing squad (or murdered, depending on your viewpoint). Just days before the Armistice was signed and in full knowledge that the Germans were about to surrender, my brother had ordered two more men to be shot. I took the papers to a Mr Turner, a journalist working with The Times, and he agreed to investigate further.
From the trial record, it was clear that they were suffering from shell-shock. In Lyndon’s own hand, he wrote that shell-shock was a regrettable weakness, not found in good units. ‘There is insufficient evidence for a conviction,’ he’d written, yet he recommended a death sentence in order to send a message to the battalion, who had suffered great losses the day before. There was no mention that it was the general’s military strategy that had led to these wasted lives. One was an Irish soldier, Frank O’Dowd, who was shot for refusing to put his hat on because it was wet through from the endless rain. He was drugged by a doctor to get him through the final hours in the death cells. Mr Turner had been able to contact the medic, who confirmed that O’Dowd was a volunteer soldier. ‘They couldn’t see brave men when they were standing there in front of them,’ the medic had told him. He also confirmed that, once the firing squad had finished, my brother gave the Irishman the final coup de grace, a bullet to the head.
I spent the night at the Great Western Royal Hotel in Paddington. Unlike so much of London, it had made it through the war relatively unscathed, with some minor air-raid damage to the roof. It was strange being back home. I no longer felt a part of the fabric and the people seemed strange to me, different somehow. The war had robbed them of so much. In that, I should have felt a kind of solidarity, but my war had been a very different one. I met with Mr Turner for lunch and he handed me a copy of the article they would print in the paper the following day.