Solsbury Hill Page 6

  Eleanor looked to Gwen, then back to Mead. “Will it be for the public, the library?”

  “God, no.” He spoke harshly.

  “Ouch,” she said in a playful way.

  “I mean that’s not the plan,” he said, his tone chastened. “I suppose anything could happen.”

  Eleanor stood and crossed the room to look at the bindings of some of the books that remained on the shelf.

  “I’m going up to Alice.” Gwen kissed Mead tenderly on the top of his head. “Did you get a chance to see her today?”

  “I’ve just come down. We had some chicken and delicious potatoes.”

  “Perfect.” Gwen left them alone.

  After a long silence, with Mead drinking whisky and Eleanor looking through the books that were still on the lower shelves, she said, “You’ve a lot of Brontë material.”

  “Alice was a Brontë scholar in her early academic life.”

  “Huh.” Eleanor pulled out an edition of Brontë poems. “My mother had a copy of Wuthering Heights in this trunk I have, and I found it just before I left.” She turned to him and held out her palm. “It’s as big as my hand. Fits right there in the palm. I started reading it again. I know I read it before, when I was younger, but I don’t remember much of it.”

  “Did you like it then?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Are you liking it now?”

  She shook her head. “I just started it the other night and it was, I don’t know, kind of irritating.”

  “Irritating how?”

  “Irritating like too many questions.”

  She dropped onto the couch. Relenting a little, she said, “The guy who tells the story sounds so pressed and urgent.”

  “It’s gothic. He’s creating suspense,” he said in a tone that suggested anyone would know that.

  “You’ve read it.”

  “I have, many times. What did you like about it before?”

  She considered for a moment. “I was a kid. I guess I liked the romance. I don’t remember it that well, but I remember some vivid scenes. Not what the book was about, so much. I remember that my mother was worried when I borrowed it from her. She told me to put it down if it made me uneasy. It made her uneasy. I remember that.” She rocked back and forth. “Do you want to tell me what it’s about?”

  “You’re not going to read it?”

  “I will. I’m sure I will, but tell me anyway.”

  Mead studied Eleanor’s face. “You’re not going to read it. I’ll tell you what I can. Get yourself comfortable.” He started in. “Wuthering Heights is a story of love, but also of siblings and rivalry and revenge. The house itself was a wild, dark, and motherless place, the home of the Earnshaw family.”

  He paused and she nodded for him to continue.

  “Mr. Earnshaw brought home from his travels a dark gypsy boy he named Heathcliff. The older brother, Hindley, resented Heathcliff, but little Catherine adored him from the start. They grew up together, rode horses and ran wild on the moors. Mr. Earnshaw treated Heathcliff as his son, and some think he might have been.

  “Hindley’s jealousy—first of their father’s affection, then of Catherine’s, then, too, of Heathcliff’s affinity with the moors—grew vicious once Mr. Earnshaw died. Hindley exiled Heathcliff to the stables and treated him like a servant from that moment on. He was brutal and cruel to Heathcliff, and this drove Catherine and Heathcliff even closer together, till they developed a sense that they were alone together against the world.

  “They were wild as the moors are wild, Catherine and Heathcliff. As they grew, their love grew romantic and they shared an unspoken promise to be together forever. One evening, mischievous as ever, they climbed into the garden of the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange. Watching through the window, they made some noise and dogs came running. Catherine was bit and Heathcliff was chased away—”

  Eleanor broke in. “Didn’t they die together in the book? I’m embarrassed how little I remember.”

  “No, no, not exactly. No, they didn’t.” More thoughtful now. “But you see”—he cleared his throat—“there’s the book that was written, and then there’s the book that’s remembered, and all the movies in between. It’s hard to get at what people really know about the love story. Which love story they mean.” This last bit he spoke into his drink, his eyes fixed on the bottom of the glass, and then he drank it down. “From all the things that happened to him, Heathcliff was a pretty nasty character in the end.”

  “I remember Catherine saying, ‘Nelly, I am Heathcliff!’ and Heathcliff cursing her, somehow, never to rest. Is that right?”

  “It is. I gather from the look on your face, you’re not a fan of that sort of love.”

  She looked into the flames. “I hardly remember any of it.”

  Gwen strode back in. “She’s soundly sleeping. Did I hear something about Heathcliff?”

  “You did.” Mead stood. The crystal decanters were each filled with a different whisky and he poured Gwen a glass from one and Eleanor a glass from another.

  “I suppose I started that.” Gwen settled into an easy chair and Eleanor got up to sit down at the end of the couch closest to the fire.

  It was turning into a sweet lazy evening.

  “Tell us more,” Eleanor said to Mead.

  Mead perched on the edge of a chair and started, “We know they loved each other since they were small, but as they got older it got more complex till they were all tangled up in each other, as you noted, and couldn’t tell themselves apart.”

  He walked across the room. “Cathy spent five weeks with the Lintons, healing from the bite, and came home elegant with airs and manners and Heathcliff was crazed to see Cathy so changed. She teased and provoked him, taunted him with Edgar Linton’s courtship.” Mead opened his throat and swallowed the glassful in one gulp. He noticed Eleanor’s sleepy eyes.

  “The story’s longer than this night allows for,” Mead said.

  “No, go on.”

  “The rest is all mistakes and betrayals and running away. Heathcliff disappears and Catherine marries Edgar Linton. Heathcliff returns a rich gentleman. He’s won Wuthering Heights, from Hindley, in a debauched game of cards, but he wants more. He fights and connives and won’t give up, even after Catherine dies. Heathcliff becomes a monster, from all the bad done to him . . .”

  “A monster?”

  “He’s not a bloke I’d want for a mate.” He poured one more whisky and knocked it back. “There’s more to it—all the slamming stuff is at the end. You should read it again.”

  Eleanor laughed. “Okay, I will.”

  “I believe I’m done in.” He smiled a broad smile, the first smile Eleanor had seen on him. “Good night, ladies.”

  “You have him in a fine mood,” Gwen said after he was gone.

  Eleanor put her sweater on and said she thought she’d return to her room. “Will it be okay if I pop my head in just to kiss her good night? I won’t wake her.”

  “Of course. It will ensure her dreams. Good night, Eleanor. Have your own sweet dreams.”

  In the hall, Tilda was drawing the curtains closed on every window. “There’s to be a wicked wind tonight, so bundle up.”

  “I will. See you in the morning.”

  There were only a few lights lit on the stairway and in the upstairs hall. She crept into Aunt Alice’s room and saw her sleeping, propped up against a few pillows, her face calm. She wanted to take Alice’s small hand in hers, but feared she’d wake her. Still, she bent down and kissed her cool forehead.

  Alice had a hard night, Gwen said in the morning. She said the wind kept her up, but Eleanor could see it was more than that. Despite the veil of morphine, there was pain in Alice Eleanor hadn’t seen the day before. Eleanor asked if it would be all right to spend the day with her, and so she held Alice’s thin hand and watched h
er sleep till the early afternoon when Alice wakened and stirred and pulled herself upright. Alice rested against the large square pillows and, still groggy, asked Eleanor if she’d go into the closet and find the tall jewelry box set somewhere inside.

  Beyond a pair of doors, the dressing room had a chaise longue made up as a bed with pillows and a comforter. There was a table beside the chaise and a book splayed flat on the table with Gwen’s reading glasses. There was an easy chair, two sinks, a freestanding claw-foot tub, a vanity, and a long wall of closets. On a chest of drawers inside one of the closets Eleanor found the cream leather jewelry case.

  The box was heavy, so Eleanor placed it on the floor as she cleared the bedside table, then brought the box up and, with a nod from Alice, opened the top of it. It was deep with jewels: strands of pearls, carved carnelian, garnets, sapphires, as well as more precious things for which Eleanor had no name.

  Alice tried to turn onto her side. “They’re fine, are they not?”

  “They are.” Eleanor beamed. “Do you want to see one? A particular one?”

  “No, goodness no,” said Alice. “They’re yours now, but I can tell you stories about almost every one.”

  Eleanor handed her a necklace.

  “Carved sapphire,” Alice said. “Mead brought this home from Italy when he was studying architecture there for a time. The tiny black beads are jet, like your ring. Jet, you know,” Alice explained, clearly excited to share what she knew, “was originally for mourning, but not that ring. By the time whoever he was had that face carved into this fine mineral, it was a most fashionable thing: jet in all kinds of jewelry. You know it’s from millions of years ago, the stuff of which that ring is made. It’s wood, originally, compressed for hundreds of millions of years. Imagine . . .” Alice’s eyes sparkled, then she returned to the necklace Mead had brought home less than a decade before. “And these are Moravian crystals.” She pointed to each small part of it. “I think it’s an eighteenth-century piece. He never finished his studies, but he brought home some beautiful things, for Gwen and for me.”

  Eleanor handed her another necklace.

  “This one has family history.” Her eyes seemed to wobble in their sockets as she tried to remember. “Just a moment, it’s to do with great-grandparents, many times great. These are chips of fine rubies, nonetheless fine for being chips, and these white beads are Russian crystal, but I can’t recall whose this was.” She seemed frustrated, worn and hazy as she was from the morphine she’d been given. “These are old-fashioned, aren’t they?” She dropped the necklace and turned her upper body toward the jewelry box.

  “Eleanor dear, would you open the bottom drawer of it? There’s something more interesting than jewels I want to show you.”

  Eleanor’s fingers were moving gently about in among the necklaces—they felt like her buttons, made the same sort of sound—but she withdrew her fingers now and opened the long drawer at the bottom of eight other drawers. Inside there was a folded piece of paper. Eleanor was careful as she maneuvered the paper out of the drawer, where it was squeezed in tightly. Alice’s fine white hands trembled as she reached toward it.

  “Could you open it for me?” Alice spoke in a whisper from lack of strength. “Years ago, I was moving that old armoire there”—she cocked her head toward a piece of yellow pine on the wall opposite the windows—“from downstairs where it sat in the kitchen up here to this bedroom, where Gwen and I started to stay whenever we came up from Cambridge. It’s from the seventeenth century. If you look at its details you can see it’s held together without one nail, and inside it there are secret drawers. And in one of them, I found this strange dry parchment paper.”

  Alice held the paper. “Granley’s father took the piece apart to move it upstairs. I was still a young woman. He took the top off, then the drawers out, and I don’t know what made me look to the back of it.” The inside of her lips stuck together as she spoke. Eleanor brought a glass close to Alice’s mouth and placed the straw between her lips. Her eyes closed in quiet pleasure as she took a slow, long sip. “I suppose I was bending down to slide the bottom drawer in when I saw the little knobs hidden inside. And I got a thrill.” The strength of Alice’s voice came and went. “When I opened it. Well, pumpkin, you should open it.”

  Eleanor did so, slowly. The paper was dry and fragile, so she was careful not to break it at the folds. It was a finely drawn family tree with some small portraits, mostly at the top, but Eleanor’s eyes were drawn to her mother’s name and Alice’s name and above that her grandmother’s and grandfather’s names. She saw that her grandfather had had a younger brother and a sister who died in childhood. Eleanor’s eyes climbed the tree trunk up the branches, taking in the names of her ancestors all the way to the top, where was written Emily and no name for her partner, a couple who bore a child named Victoria, who married Bertram Enswell and began this family tree’s long line.

  Alice’s eyes were almost lifeless today, but the corners of her lips lifted in a small smile. A smile on the other side of a dark morphine haze. She said, “I was in my twenties when I found it. Gwen had her own thoughts about it.”

  The end of Alice’s forefinger was crooked with arthritis, but she pointed to her parents’ names, her own, and her sister Anne’s name. “That’s my hand. I wrote those in. Once I realized I wasn’t going to do anything with the tree.”

  Exhausted, her head now fell back on the pillow, so light it hardly left an imprint.

  “It’s a gorgeous thing,” Eleanor said. The tree was drawn in pencil and colored with watercolor wash.

  Alice’s eyes had fallen closed and her breathing rattled and was shallow.

  Eleanor sat on the side of the bed. “Aunt Alice?” she whispered.

  “It’s a good family to be part of, all in all,” Alice said as she was drifting off. “It’s a good family you belong to.”

  Alice’s beautiful face lifted and there was a mischievous twinkle in her eyes. “Gwen says it’s nonsense, but I know it’s not. Nothing I care to make a fuss about anymore, but you, dear . . .” She suddenly faded. “Dear Eleanor, I’m afraid I need to sleep again.” Her eyes were already closed and her tongue was fairly thick in her mouth when she spoke. “For just a while. Would you mind if I drifted off for a bit and we’ll talk in the morning?”

  Eleanor traced along the branch that ran from her mother to her grandparents and then to their parents, then set the family tree aside and watched Alice sleep. In the quiet she heard the whinny of horses and went to the bay window. On a hill in the distance she saw Mead on a chestnut horse with a white colt on a lead. The white colt was shaking his head and pulling against Mead, who sat tall in the saddle, yanked the rope sharply downward, and seemed to encourage the colt to cooperate, because soon the two horses and rider were cantering down the side of the hill.

  Gwen had come in quietly. “Oh, my, she’s been telling you stories,” she said. She’d brought a simple ham sandwich and some lemonade for Eleanor. As she laid them on the table, she noticed the drawing on one side of the bed. “Did she say much about it?” Gwen lifted the edge and gazed at the delicate drawing.

  “She said you had your own ideas.”

  Gwen dismissed this with a shake of her head. “Well, we were young when we found it. Alice was studying English literature at Cambridge, teaching a bit already, working on her doctorate and very curious about history, so when we chanced upon this odd document, well, you can imagine how excited she would have been.”

  “She’s a little excited about it still,” Eleanor said. She thanked Gwen, and took a big bite of the sandwich.

  “I haven’t seen it in decades.” Gwen looked at Alice’s face, the face of her one great love. “I haven’t seen it since then.” She shrugged. “Anyone could draw a family history saying anything, I suppose.” Gwen pulled the covers up on Alice’s chest. “It might be a story worth considering, but there are some things people
just don’t want to know.”

  “Alice wanted me to know.”

  “Apparently so.” Gwen smiled warmly, looking at the drawing. “Certainly a good deal of it’s accurate. It is your family tree.”

  She folded it and slid it back into its tight place in the drawer. Alice stirred.

  Eleanor sensed the sadness in Gwen. The lemonade was fresh and sweet and delicious. She finished her sandwich as Gwen carried the jewelry box back into the closet and Eleanor called to her, “I’m going to go for another walk, if that’s okay.”

  “More than okay.” Gwen came back in the room. “It’s healthy.”

  Eleanor kissed Gwen’s cheek and then her aunt Alice’s thin hand before leaving the room. Downstairs, she borrowed some Wellington boots from the mudroom and headed straight for the hill with the orange-barked leaning lady.

  The swing felt solid and the seat was warm. It hung from heavy twined ropes wrapped in velvet that had once been some color that had faded to brown. Eleanor had only been on swings at the city parks, swings that were lined up three or four seats side by side and suspended by short chains with a meager motion compared to this one. These ropes were long and the arc was wild. It made her queasy to swing so high.

  For a moment Eleanor thought she saw the same children, but they disappeared in a dell, and when she saw them again they both had their heads down and were climbing a faraway hill.

  She bent her legs tight beneath her to miss hitting the ground when she swung back across it. What an odd world, she thought to herself as she swung. A family tree that reached back for what looked like seven or eight generations. She hadn’t been on a swing since she was small. She remembered her mother telling her to reach her toes for the sky. Her mother would have told her to reach for the leaves on the top branches of this tree, if she’d been here. Had her mother swung from this tree when she was small, she would have leaned back so far that her hair would have brushed the ground.