The Secret Book of Flora Lea: a Novel, page 17
Mum wasn’t the same and Hazel didn’t know how to define it, but the before-war Mum was gone. The pearls and high heels; the singsong voice of happy adventure; the cakes she made that tipped over with thick icing; the picnics in the backyard pretending they were on holiday. That mum seemed asleep, as if an evil witch had put a spell on her. Now she spoke softly, startled easily, and her body seemed tense. She rarely laughed and when she did it sounded forced and false. When the war was over, maybe the before-mum would return.
By the time Mum left, although the rain hadn’t stopped for even a minute and they hadn’t been able to show her about the land, Hazel believed that she’d been wrong to worry and believe that the war would ruin everything. And as she fell asleep, and although it made her feel the littlest bit guilty, Hazel didn’t want to return to Bloomsbury. Not yet.
When Mum hugged them goodbye, there weren’t tears this time. Only later did Hazel discover that Mum cried the whole way home, but for Hazel and Flora all was well.
CHAPTER 25
March 1960
“All the best love stories are doomed love stories. Romeo and Juliet. Tristan and Isolde. They all end in heartbreak,” Hazel said, pointing to Kelty’s book on the kitchen table: Wuthering Heights.
Kelty made a face of amusement. “We are going to St. Ives to see Harry, and you’re talking of doomed love.”
“I’m talking about that book you’re reading.”
Early morning light softened the kitchen as Kelty rinsed egg cups and Hazel packed a lunch for their trip to Cornwall. “It’s not my book that’s bothering you. It’s Harry. You’re afraid of seeing him, aren’t you?”
“I am not afraid of Harry. It’s Barnaby.” Hazel folded parchment around the ham and cheese sandwiches and faced Kelty. “We leave for Paris in a week. If I do anything to muck that up, he will never forgive me.”
“So seeing Harry isn’t on the top of his desires for you?”
“I don’t think he’s quite keen on us finding him. No.”
“I think you’re afraid of Harry not living up to the man you imagined he’d become. Perhaps he’s unworthy of comparison to every other man you’ve dated.”
“Kelty, stop. I am not seeing Harry to undo some doomed love story. I’ve never compared other men to him. All of this is only for Flora. For Whisperwood. To find out if Flora survived to tell the story.”
Kelty nodded but Hazel knew she didn’t buy it, not one bit. But before they could say another word, the phone rang. Hazel picked up.
“Miss Linden?”
“Speaking,” she said, and cradled the receiver between her shoulder and ear as she slipped the sandwiches into a basket.
“This is Lord Arthur Dickson from Sotheby’s.”
“Oh, hello, Lord Dickson.” She cheered her voice and stood straighter, placed the receiver in her hand. A man who needed to remind her that he was in the House of Lords was a man who needed an ego boost. “I’m so looking forward to my first day.”
“Well, yes. That’s why I’m ringing you. We here at Sotheby’s receive any and all police reports and blotters about art or book heists. Your name has appeared in our last report from London. I am just making sure there is another Hazel Linden in London who might have done such a thing as take valuable prints and a signed first edition.” He paused, and Hazel tasted the bile rise in her throat, the metallic taste of fear.
His voice, rising in question. “Is there another Hazel Linden?”
“No, sir. That was me. It was a dreadful mistake and all has been set right.”
“Well, well, that was some kind of mistake, Miss Linden.”
“Yes, it was on my last day of fifteen years of impeccable work at Hogan’s.”
“Indeed. Yet, before the board decides what to do with this information, I wanted to confirm the facts with you. Thank you for your honesty.”
“My record until that moment has been unblemished. If you let me, I am sure I can explain.”
“This places your employment at risk, Miss Linden. We will get back with you.”
And he, like Peggy Andrews and the man at the publishing house, hung up without a goodbye. She was rightly tired of people hanging up on her. She slammed the receiver back in the cradle and faced Kelty.
Kelty grimaced. “Oh… no.”
“This bloody well better be worth it,” Hazel said. “If I lose my job, and lose Barnaby…”
Kelty held up her hand, as if talking to her little daughter. “Stop. Do not go down that trail of mad thinking. Let’s just concentrate on what’s ahead today. Just for now… today.”
So, the time had come for Hazel to see Harry Aberdeen. He’d receive no warning. No call. All these years of wondering if and when she would see him; today was the day. And what Hazel had meant to tell Kelty, what she had not found the words to say, stayed stuck inside her.
Although this would be the first time she’d seen him since Binsey, it would not be the first time they’d communicated.
CHAPTER 26
November 1946
At twenty-one, Hazel had been in her third year at university and living in rooms at Newnham Hall of Cambridge. As she entered the building one autumn day, the porter handed her the mail, damp from that November’s incessant rain. She entered her room and tossed her mail onto a round coffee table in the center of the seating area. Preoccupied with the coming Michaelmas exams and distracted by too-loud music coming from two doors down where a freshman girl from Lancashire cared little for anything but pubs and the boys from Hughes Hall, Hazel didn’t notice the letter for a bit.
The war was over now, Germany was defeated, but rationing of items like sugar and chocolate continued, and in the cobblestone streets of Cambridge were the ghosts of boys who hadn’t returned, and the hollowed-eye looks of those who did. Her papa was gone and not even enough of his body to bury, and Flora remained a mystery that even the best of Oxford’s detectives couldn’t solve. They’d given up, even as every few months Hazel took the two-and-a-half-hour train ride to Oxford and stopped by Aiden Davies’s office and asked for updates.
There never were any.
Meanwhile, Hazel had disappeared into the books and stories she studied. She walked the green paths of Cambridge, past glorious and ancient buildings, yet she barely noticed the scenery. There were boys to be sure, but her heart was unavailable to them—also to herself. She would never tell or write stories again, that was clear. Making stories brought misery but reading and studying them provided comfort. In the stories of others, there were endings without loose ends, those who were missing were found, and the world made sense.
Tonight there was a visiting lecture by the professor J. R. R. Tolkien from Oxford—she planned to be early and find a seat near the front. Tossing her knapsack on the floor, she sat on an overstuffed chair with tea stains from generations of students, sifting through the envelopes to see if Mum had written from London.
No.
But there was a letter from Scotland, the red stamp damp where she’d touched it. No return address. She ripped it open, knowing before she read the signature that this was the letter she’d been waiting for. All this time, she’d been waiting to hear from Harry Aberdeen. The rest of the world faded away, time and Tolkien forgotten as rain struck iron-paned windows and the autumn night descended.
Dear Hazel,
I hope this letter finds you. I have wanted to write to you for many years now but haven’t known what to say or where to find you. Ethan told me he saw you in Cambridge and that you are now a student at Newnham. So if this reaches you—bravo to Ethan!
Hazel let the name Ethan run past her. Ethan Baldwin was the boy she’d pinned to the ground at school with her boot. The boy who’d called her a “vaccie” but then had helped them search for Flora. The boy who’d wept when he realized they could not find her.
She read as quickly as possible, then read again slower this time, then another time, shifting her mind from how she’d imagined Harry’s last six years to the man he might be today.
She read that Bridie had sent Harry to boarding school at the same time Hazel had returned to Bloomsbury with her mum. Bridie had wanted to protect him from gossip and innuendo. He’d graduated, and now attended University of Edinburgh, studying mathematics. He had never stopped thinking about Hazel. Not ever. And he wondered if she might tell him how she herself was doing in the world.
She closed her eyes, fell backward in time, remembering the vow in the stone church when, crying in her delirium, blood on the altar, she’d promised to never see Harry Aberdeen again.
But a letter was not the same as seeing him. The promise would not be broken if she wrote back to him, would it?
It was a week before she penned a letter, as the remembrances of his kindness returned with the ache of missing him, joining the yearning that had never gone away. What to write to him consumed her thoughts, her schoolwork neglected.
Their correspondence continued for three years. They told each other of their lives, Hazel found herself jotting down things she noticed each day to share with Harry: a speckled thrush rising from the river’s edge, a blooming rosemary bush that made her think of Bridie and how she’d tucked bundles of it in their pockets, a new Agatha Christie just out, the burst of blue cornflowers, ones that Bridie once told them healed Achilles.
And Harry told Hazel of his life: his studies and his journey to America to visit Princeton, where he studied a semester under James Waddell Alexander, the world-famous mathematician. He wrote of adventures with Ethan Baldwin, hiking in Scotland and learning to hunt the Monarch of the Glen, even attempting to sneak onto Balmoral’s hunting fields to catch a sight of King George! But not once did either Harry or Hazel write about Flora or that awful day that ripped their idyllic world to pieces.
Hazel graduated in 1948, moving into a flat above a dry cleaner in London City Centre. She took a job at a pub called The Crown, drawing Guinness and pouring whiskey.
Over the course of that year above the dry cleaner, she told Harry about all of it—the odor of chemicals rising through the floorboards, the books she read. She asked him questions, which he always answered. Do you still sketch? (Yes, he did.) Do you still look for walking sticks when you hike? (Yes, he did.) What she didn’t ask: Do your lips still move while you read? Do you hike at the edge of the river and think of Flora?
Do you miss me?
He asked her questions about her life, and she began answering with stories, taking the dullest detail of her day and turning it into a sensational tale, exaggerating for the fun of it and describing every color, aroma, and sound.
She felt a bit more like herself when she wrote to Harry.
One of his letters to her read, “You make life magical, Hazel Linden. Did you know that?”
The thrill of reading this compliment brought back the afternoon in the riven tree, his lips on hers, his body…
Finally, he wrote, “May I visit you in London?”
She almost wrote back. She tried to answer. If she said yes, she’d break her own blood vow. If she said no, she would always regret it. In the end, she never answered him, and he stopped writing to her. Just like that, he quit. When she wanted to mourn him, she just tapped into the anger like she’d tap into a draft of beer, reminding herself that he just up and quit when she didn’t answer him. He didn’t fight for her.
And her vow in a church on St. Frideswide’s Day of 1940 remained unbroken.
So, she made a new promise: to be the Hazel who Harry knew in letters, a person who could make life magical. She was determined that—without Harry and without his letters—she would change. It was then she took her mum’s offer of the flat and applied for a job at Hogan’s. Possibly, in the end, that’s all the communication was meant to do: push Hazel toward the right direction in her life.
Or so she told herself.
CHAPTER 27
March 1960
Three hours into the drive, Hazel pulled into a station for more petrol. Kelty stretched and opened the passenger door to unfold her long legs. She sighed. “How much longer?”
“Two hours. We can picnic in the gardens at Rougemont Castle.”
“How far is that?”
“Around the corner. We’re in Exeter already.”
“How grand to sleep through all of the dullest scenery! Without Midge around to call my name every two and half seconds.” She smiled at the name of her child, even within her bit of joy at their brief separation.
“But you missed so much,” Hazel said. “It’s such gorgeous countryside in the spring. The baby lambs, all wobbly on their feet, trying to keep up with the others. The thatch roofs with the whitewashed houses. Chapels with steeples reaching for something they’ll never reach. The—”
“You are a natural born storyteller, my friend.”
“That’s not a story. It’s just what I saw on the way.”
“It’s both.”
Within a few minutes, Hazel found a parking spot at the edge of the road near Rougemont Castle, at the visitor’s parking lot at Northernhay Gardens. They climbed out with the basket they’d packed in Hazel’s kitchen that morning and ambled down a dusty lane where an alley of Dutch elms rolled out their sleepy leaves. Into the gardens they went with the grass soft under their boots, past the iron Deer Stalker statue turning green with age to find a picnic table and wooden bench nearby.
“Does that castle resemble yours in Whisperwood?” Kelty asked as they spread the picnic across the table beneath a sycamore.
“No, those are red stones. Ours was…” Hazel closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun, let it warm her. She allowed her thoughts to meander down a woodland path she’d avoided for years. “It was made of white and gray stone. Even before we saw Bridie’s house, it was made of the same. Flora thought I’d imagined Bridie’s house into being.” She opened her eyes. “Maybe I shouldn’t have allowed her to think that way, to think that I had that kind of power. But it seemed harmless.”
“It was harmless but not without effect. In those awful times, Flora needed an escape, fairy tales and magical lands.” Kelty picked a piece of cubed cheese and popped it into her mouth.
“I’d try to find different words for white and gray each time we approached the castle. It looked like a pearl in a shell. The wing of a dove. The edges of the sky before rain. The pure white of a summer cloud.” Hazel shook off the old dreams and glanced at the red stones of Rougemont. “The Devon witches were tried here, the last to be executed for being witches in England.”
“How do you know such things?”
“1680,” Hazel said. “I read, and these little facts get stuck in my head.”
Kelty opened her mouth as if to speak and then stopped.
“What? What were you going to say?” Hazel asked, nudging Kelty’s boot with hers.
“I wonder what Harry looks like now—that’s all.”
Hazel didn’t want to admit to wondering the same. “Who cares?” Hazel said. “We get there; we ask him if he knew the name of Whisperwood, and we get out.”
“I remember him so well, and I knew him for what? A week? He was so full of—”
“Adventure, I know.”
“And so—”
“Cute, I know.”
They smiled their best-mates smiles, finished their picnic, and got back on the winding road to St. Ives. They passed sun-bleached wheat fields that echoed the tawny sand beaches in color, drove through a patchwork of green fields and between unforgiving hedgerows that scraped the side of the car, all in friendly silence wondering what might happen when they arrived.
* * *
They arrived as the afternoon sun rolled toward the thrashing sea, which bashed against the gray stone walls of the Cornish town bookended by concrete piers. St. Ives curled like a lazy cat around the bay. The peaks of gray-roofed houses rose and fell on green hills. Hazel heard the high squeal of seagulls, spied the jetty with the white lighthouse and a tower with four peaks. The tide was low and a long stretch of sand glowed the color of buttered toast. Boats rested, waiting for the water to rise.
Hazel parked the car in front of the Sloop Inn on the corner of Fore Street. FOUNDED IN 1312, the sign read in red letters. In front, caned chairs and marble café tables sat on the pavement facing the sea. Hazel and Kelty were silent in all this beauty until Kelty asked, “How are we to find him?”
“We can ask around.” Hazel turned off the ignition and they climbed out. Their bags in tow from the boot of the car, they walked toward the Sloop Inn. Couples and singles gathered at the tables, sipping wine and staring out to sea. A spring seaside holiday for those in their bright sweaters and colorful hats, in their love gazes and soft afternoon buzz.
When they reached the wooden front door, Hazel said, “Let’s check in, unpack, have a pint, then find Harry.”
Kelty shifted her bag to her other hand. “Always, with the lists! It must be exhausting.”
“If I didn’t love you…” Hazel shook her head. “Or if I didn’t know you loved me, I’d take that as an insult rather than the intended compliment.”
“Of course. Everything about you is lovable.”
* * *
An hour later, dressed in her favorite shift dress with swirling patterns of green leaves, her hair tamed back in a matching headband, Hazel waited for Kelty at one of the café tables on the sidewalk. The padded light of midafternoon filled the air with a haze, a softening of the world that brought with it a kind of luminescent focus, an easing of the hard edges.
“You look marvelous!” Kelty plopped into a chair and took a long swig of the amber pint awaiting her.
“As do you.” And it was true. Hugging her body was a simple cerulean shift dress with pockets and a Peter Pan collar.
“I know you, my friend,” Kelty said. “You are sitting here, fast forwarding through the day, wondering who what where—”
