Which wasn’t entirely unreasonable.
“Not even a little bit,” I said with a sigh. “But I know that I can’t make a decision on whether to publish or not until I know what we’re talking about. There’s obviously something Isabelle doesn’t want included, and I don’t know whether that’s the same thing everyone else doesn’t want written about or something else, and until I do…I just don’t know. So I need to look at what Nathaniel left behind.”
Edward nodded. “Makes sense.” He crossed the room and settled back into his chair, shuffling the papers that were piled on the desk in front of him before selecting a clip-bound paper stack and passing it over to me. “This is what we’d got agreed so far.”
What they had so far, from my brief look through, was Nathaniel’s childhood and existence up until the point where he met Isabelle.
“‘I saw her, and my world changed,’” I read. “That was the last thing he wrote?” It was almost a direct quote from Biding Time.
“Yep. Think it will make Isabelle feel any better disposed towards the project?” Edward tipped his chair back a little, his face lit by the faint remaining evening light forcing its way in through the window.
“Probably not.” I clipped the pages back together. “I’ll read through this properly tonight, but then I promised Therese she could take a look at it too.”
Edward’s face was unreadable. “What if she remembers their childhood differently?” he asked, making me wonder exactly what Nathaniel had said about growing up poor in Shropshire.
“Then I’ll take that into account when I make my decision.”
“Okay, then.” Edward let the front two chair legs crash to the ground. “So the question then is, what happened next?”
“Yep.” I put the partial manuscript to one side, and gave Edward my full attention. “So, what do we have?”
“Mostly?” Edward stood up and crossed the study, pausing by a pile of file boxes, stacked haphazardly upon each other and looking frighteningly precarious. “What we have is this,” he said, gesturing at the boxes.
“Fantastic.” I sighed. “We’d better get started, then.”
We made it through the first two boxes that night, sorting through Nathaniel’s notes, journals, photos, clippings and miscellany. I wasn’t sure I’d figured out the logic to the storage of the notes yet, but I hoped that Edward, who’d been working with them longer, would have a far better idea than I did.
Eventually, after I yawned for the eighteenth time in half an hour, Edward closed the lid of the box I was looking through and took the journal I was reading from my hands.
“We should get to bed,” he said, placing the journal on top of the box.
At his words, a strange warmth flowed through me. “You seem to be saying that to me a lot lately.” I meant when he put me for a nap, like a small child, that morning. But as soon as the words were out I was transported back to that night in the attic in my mind.
From the heat in Edward’s eyes, he was thinking the same, forbidden thoughts.
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, his gaze sliding away from mine. “You’re tired.”
Was that an excuse? A reason not to address whatever the hell this was between us? Or an easy let down. A way to let me know that the spark didn’t matter, not any more.
That seemed more likely.
I pulled back, hurrying to my feet, wanting to get out of there, fast. “You’re right. And I need to call Duncan, before I go to bed.”
Edward stilled at the name. “You haven’t spoken to him yet?”
“I left a voicemail, explaining what had happened. About Nathaniel, I mean. I needed to let him know I wouldn’t be at work for a few days.”
“A few days,” he echoed. “So you’re still planning on going back?”
Was I? I wasn’t sure. “I’ll have to, at some point. I have a job. A flat. All my stuff is there.” And besides, was there really a place for me at Rosewood? Especially without Nathaniel there to stand in my corner.
Edward’s head bobbed in a jerky nod. “Of course. We’ll carry on here tomorrow though?”
I gazed around the room at the endless unopened boxes. “I think we have to.” What other way was there for me to figure out what happened next?
Duncan didn’t take the news of my impending absence particularly well.
“So when will you be back?” he asked, impatiently. I wondered if I’d interrupted some sports event or another, or if he’d always been this grumpy outside of a bed and I just hadn’t noticed.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We don’t have a date for the funeral yet, and even then, there’s a project he’s left to me to finish…”
“A project more important than your job here?”
Wasn’t that the million-dollar question? I thought of Edward, head bent over a fifty-year-old journal, soaking in every moment of my family’s history. “I think it might be.”
“I see.” He sighed. “Well, take all the time you need. You can’t rush grief. But, Sas…I can’t hold your job indefinitely. Not even for you.”
Not even for me. Speaking of which, there was something else I needed to talk to Duncan about. And if not now when?
“Actually…” I started, then trailed off.
Duncan laughed. “Don’t tell me. Your grandmother has set you up with a date for the funeral, you’ve fallen madly in love and it’s all over between us.”
“No. Not exactly.”
“But close? Sas, who has a date for a funeral?”
I sighed. “It’s not a date. Just like whatever was between us wasn’t, I don’t know, a relationship.”
“It was the closest thing either of us had had in a while,” Duncan pointed out, which was truer than I’d like. “And it’s over now, right?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “It is. I just… I think I’m looking for something more than that.”
“You think a relationship will make you happy?” He made the idea sound ludicrous.
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ve never really had one, not as an adult. I think it might be time to give it a try.”
It didn’t change anything, not really. But somehow I felt lighter after I hung up the phone.
The next day dawned bright and warm even from the early hours.
The house seemed empty when I made it downstairs, so I assumed everyone else was having a lie in. Deciding to enjoy the peace, I picked up the paper from the doormat and took it into the kitchen to read with my coffee. But as I flicked open the pages, I forgot all about my caffeine fix.
Literary community in mourning.
I skipped the headline, my gaze locking directly onto the photo of Nathaniel next to it. He looked just as he had the last day I’d seen him, dressed in his white dinner jacket. It must have been taken at the Golden Wedding, I realised, running a finger across his face as my eyes filled. I blinked the tears away.
I needed to know what they were saying – about the family, about the memoirs. About everything.
For all that he was almost seventy-six, there was no warning of his demise. There was no long struggle with illness, no public decline, no reports of ill health even. Quite the contrary, in fact – just the day before his death Drury had announced, at his own Golden Wedding Anniversary party at his home in Rosewood, his intention to write his memoirs – something the gossips and scandal mongers of the aforementioned literary world have been waiting for impatiently for many years.
Whether the work will now be completed remains to be seen, but if they are published, we can all be assured of one hell of a story.
Well that, I supposed, was a given. I read on, through a brief recap of Nathaniel’s early life and rise to fame – with the obligatory reference to Biding Time being a love story to Isabelle. She’d like that bit, anyway.
I met Drury only once, in London in 2013, at the Blackfriars pub – a personal favourite of his. I was supposed to be interviewing him about his latest book, The Tithing. Instead, I found myself d
rawn into a conversation about one of his granddaughters, and her burgeoning career as a journalist.