I sucked in a breath, then let it out fast. If I couldn’t handle a passing reference to myself in the paper, how would I cope with my story being told in the memoirs?
“Do you think she will follow in your footsteps?” I asked, over a mouthful of game pie.
“I think she will do anything she sets her mind to,” he said. “Just as I did.”
I didn’t bother trying to stop the tears, this time. I couldn’t ignore all the ways I’d let Nathaniel down, not lived up to what he wanted for me. Greg was only the start of it.
It had to be different from now on. I had to be different. That much, I was sure of.
The obituary finished with another line about the memoirs. If Nathaniel Drury really wanted to publish his memoirs, perhaps it is presumptive to assume that he would allow even his death to stop him. Perhaps, somewhere in Rosewood, there is a manuscript box, all ready to be delivered to his publishers…
I smiled. If only that were the case. It would be a lot easier…but it would rob me of the chance to work with Edward on them. To make the project my own.
And I had to admit, the idea of that had started to appeal to me.
“What are they saying?” Isabelle’s voice came sharp from the doorway. “I bet it’s all gossip.”
“It’s a nice piece, actually,” I said, holding the paper out to her. She ignored it. “You should read it.”
Isabelle’s lips were pursed tight, the lines around them suddenly obvious in a way I’d never noticed before. She looked old all of a sudden.
“I don’t want to read what they have to say about me. About my husband,” she corrected herself, and I frowned. What was it Isabelle thought they were going to say? “He’s barely cold and they’re already digging. Already looking for scandal and lies. It’ll only get worse, you mark my words.”
With that, she wandered back out again, towards the Orangery. I stared after her in confusion.
There was definitely something weird going on with Isabelle.
Eventually everyone else made it down to the kitchen, hunting for breakfast.
“I think we all need to get out of here for a few hours,” Dad said, as he warmed croissants in the oven. “Especially Caro. The atmosphere around here is no good for a young girl.”
He was right, I knew. So even though all I really wanted to do was curl up in Nathaniel’s study with Edward and keep going through all the documents and photos he’d left behind, I said, “That sounds lovely. Who else fancies it? Edward?”
Edward raised his eyebrows at me across the kitchen counter, but I ignored him. He’d been stuck up in that study for too long already. Some fresh air would probably do him good, too.
And actually, it was lovely. Isabelle, when I took her coffee in the Orangery and explained the plan, insisted on staying at home in case of condolence callers, of which she expected there to be many, and to call the funeral directors. Mum and Ellie decided they’d best stay with her so, in the end, it was only Caro, Dad, Edward and I who ventured out, Dad with the picnic rucksack on his back.
Edward and Caro set off at a faster pace than the rest of us, and I could hear Caroline explaining about all the different creatures that lived in the woods – mice and owls and squirrels and fairies and even the occasional unicorn, apparently. Edward, to his credit, was not only listening attentively, but asking insightful questions into the housing issues faced by fairies in today’s disappearing woodlands.
“Well, we certainly know where that one got her imagination from,” Dad said, stooping to pick up a long and sturdy stick, as if it would make him any more of a natural walker.
“Nathaniel,” I said, fondly.
“He used to love her stories.” Dad gazed ahead at where Caroline had dived into a pile of cut grass, and Edward was trying to pull her out. “She’d sit up in his study with him and Edward, pretending to help them work.” He linked his arm through mine and tugged me close. “He used to say she reminded him of you.”
I always knew that my grandfather loved me. I even had some inkling, even as a child, that I might be something of a favourite. But I’m not sure I realised exactly how much he trusted and respected me until he died.
On the one hand, leaving me his notes and plans for his memoirs, and entrusting me to get them published, was always guaranteed to get me into hot water with the rest of the family. But what I hadn’t really stopped to consider, until I got out of the house and away from the others, was that I was the only family member he chose to give this responsibility to. There was no one else, except his assistant, an outsider, and even then, I had the final decision on what happened.
We’d barely even started going through the boxes the night before, but I already knew it was going to be a hard slog. Nathaniel had, at least, managed to package things vaguely into decade-orientated boxes, but within those boxes nothing was really in order, and there was certainly no handy index to the life and times of Nathaniel Drury. Just figuring out what was in there, and what events each document corresponded to, was going to be a challenge. I hoped that the majority of the older documents were dated accurately, or we didn’t stand a chance.
“Couldn’t you have persuaded him to be a little more thorough in his archiving?” I’d asked Edward, as I pawed through what appeared to be a recent box. It included, amongst other things, my very first byline – something not even I had kept a copy of.
For the first time I wondered how much of my past was in these boxes, beyond what I’d done to Ellie. And would I like it when I found it?
We returned to Rosewood in the early afternoon, stuffed full of coronation chicken sandwiches and feeling virtuous anyway for walking at least a few miles. In our absence, it appeared that most of Cheshire had stopped by with flowers and, while I was subjected to a detailed tour of our new floral arrangements, along with pointed comments from Isabelle about who was simply being ostentatious and who would probably sob all through the funeral, even though they’d only met Nathaniel twice, Edward escaped upstairs without even taking off his boots, leaving grass-stained footprints all the way to Nathaniel’s study.
The funeral, Isabelle announced, was to be held in three days’ time. Apparently she’d had a secret meeting with the funeral director, Mrs Dawkins, yet another old friend of the family, while we were out, and Mrs Dawkins had agreed to hurry things along. We’d established that Nathaniel definitely hadn’t left any firm instructions for how his funeral should be handled in his will which, given Isabelle’s tendency towards extremes, seemed a bit of an oversight to me.
I followed Edward up to the study once I’d fully admired all the flowers, and found him already elbow deep in paperwork. I shut the door behind me, then snapped my fingers at Edward. It took him a moment, but he eventually figured out what I wanted and tossed me the key.
Safely locked in, I felt comfortable enough to get stuck into my family history once again.
I wasn’t sure if the family were just ignoring our absence, or honestly hadn’t realised what we were up to. Given their ongoing complaints about the memoirs, I suspected they were just hoping we’d come to our senses and drop the whole thing.
As I took my seat, ready to pick up where I’d left off the night before, Edward spoke.
“I saw Ellie on my way up here. She’s asked me to speak at the funeral.”
I froze, halfway through reaching for Nathaniel’s journal. Somehow, just picturing Edward standing up there, talking about my grandfather, made the whole thing seem real all over again. Like, while we were in his study, reading his words, Nathaniel wasn’t really gone.
But soon, I’d be sat in that church, mourning him, and I wouldn’t be able to pretend any more.
I looked up at Edward, and took in the grey tinge to his skin, and the ways his hands shook, just a little as he reached for the next box.
“Are you going to do it?” I asked.
“I guess.” He shook hi
s head, like he wasn’t sure. “I just don’t get why they want me to. Ellie said that Isabelle told her to ask me. Why would she do that? She hates me right now.”
“No, she doesn’t.” He gave me a look. “Well, maybe a bit. But it’s not you. It’s what you represent. And that’s exactly why she wants you to speak.”
The majority of the congregation would probably be readers, rather than close friends – Nathaniel always had more of the former than the latter – and Edward was the only one of us who could talk with any confidence about his writing, or his professional life.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
“What do you mean?”
“To most people, Nathaniel was his books. That’s what she wants you to talk about. His legacy.”
“As long as I don’t mention the memoirs, you mean,” Edward said.
“Pretty much. Think you can manage it?”
He sighed. “I can try.”
We worked in silence for a long while, enjoying the warm summer sun lighting the room, and the rustle of papers. Occasionally Edward would pass a tattered old photo, usually with black and white figures staring at the camera, and I’d try and decipher Isabelle’s scrawl on the back to puzzle out who they were. It was becoming more and more obvious to me that without the cooperation and assistance of my family, we’d never be able to uncover all the information we needed to write these memoirs.
Deciding to go ahead with the project wouldn’t be enough. I’d need to convince my relatives that it was a good idea, too. And that sounded even more impossible than making sense of Nathaniel’s boxes and boxes of notes.
“I’m learning a lot about you in these boxes.” Edward handed over another, more recent, photo: me, aged around ten, wearing a glorious black and fluorescent pink combination, with my hair cut much the same as it was currently – bobbed just above shoulder level.
“Maybe we should swap boxes,” I suggested. Mostly, I’d been wading through book reviews and communications with publishers – interesting, sure, but not really very enlightening. More than anything, I was just amazed that Nathaniel had kept so much stuff, all these years.