The letter had been opened. The flap, once diligently stuck down with layers of thick tape, now floundered adrift from the main body of the thing, the tape dried up and useless. The return address was familiar to me: more symbolic than anything, a beacon from the past rather than an actual place. Barnsley House. It was like receiving a letter from the North Pole or heaven.
Of course, I had looked for that return address in my youth. On the backs of birthday cards and envelopes. Every time a letter arrived with the regal stamp in the corner, every time I saw the Queen’s head on the blue, purple, and teal backgrounds, I had hoped that this time, the letter would be from Barnsley.
In the end, my father bought me a stamp album. He had misinterpreted my interest in the post for a keen interest in philately. For years I diligently tore out the stamps and soaked them off the paper in a saucer filled with water, even though I had no interest in them at all. My only interest was in finding a letter from the address written on the envelope in front of me now.
It was enough for a moment just to stare at the mystical formation of those letters.
I took a deep breath, trying to dull my anticipation slightly. After twenty years, I had come up with more than enough scenarios for this moment. A small but meaningful outreach. A Christmas message. An offer of full-scale adoption.
This was different, though. The letter was addressed to my mother. Did they not know she was dead?
Listening carefully for the movements of my half sisters, I moved across into my father’s study, the door barely making a sound as it closed over the plush carpet. Dusk had moved quickly through the room, making it harder to read the words, so I took the letter to the window seat, forcing myself to sit down and breathe despite the rush of blood in my ears.
I slowly unfolded the paper, paying close attention to the thick cream stock of it and then bringing it close to my nose. Musty, yes. But a slight smell of damp. Smoke, even. I had expected a Proustian moment—a waft of my mother’s tea rose perfume or a healthy masculine cologne—but I was disappointed; it didn’t remind me of anything apart from the fireplace in the damp beach shack we used to rent at Wilsons Prom over Easter.
I read the letter, the first time quickly and the second time slowly, trying to find details that weren’t there.
Dear Tessa,
I found your photo by accident. I shouldn’t have been looking. Dad always said I’m too curious for my own good, but that’s what comes from no one ever telling me anything.
The trouble in this place is, you go looking for answers to one question and you end up finding an entirely separate batch of secrets.
Anyway. I found a photo of you, and you looked friendly, normal. Not like people in old photos normally look, with weird hairdos and funny jumpers.
When I turned over the photo, it said, “Tessa, 19,” in spidery old writing, like whoever wrote it was afraid to press too hard with their Biro.
For some reason, I had never thought of you as a real person. I mean, I knew you wrote The Book. I knew you had been gone for a long time. But I had never thought you might have been able to help us. We hadn’t really needed help before.
Something bad has happened. There’s something wrong with my mum. Dad says someone needs to look after us, but he says we need to keep it in the family. He is going to send us to boarding school after Christmas. Even Agatha. Despite what’s happened.
Will you come and help us? Please.
Love, Sophia Summer (your niece)
It was a shock to hear a young, contemporary voice from Barnsley. A voice that could belong to any of the young girls I knew—a voice that sounded like Ophelia, or Juliet. I had read The House of Brides hundreds of times. My mother’s book was a best seller when it was published and went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies before it went out of print in the late 1990s. But I hadn’t before thought what the book might mean to the people who lived at Barnsley today. That they might refer to it as The Book in the same reverential and singular way I did.
The House of Brides was my only connection to my mother and her past, and even then, it wasn’t the most personal connection. What I knew about Barnsley House was what all the readers knew about it. And what I remembered about my mother was pretty much what they knew as well. It was more than that: my mother was the book, and the book was the reason I studied creative writing at university.
The House of Brides went deeply into the history of Barnsley House; the women who had married into the family and brought more fame and prestige with them. They were writers and architects and socialites, women who, unusually for their time, had pushed the boundaries and found success, notoriety. Sarah Summer. Beatrice Summer. Their names were more familiar to me than those of some of my father’s living relatives. Between those women and my mother, I had a lot of pressure on me to do something special with my life.
Most of the time I had been scouring the book for clues about my mother, fruitlessly. Counter to the modern trend of writers inserting themselves into the nonfiction narrative, she was curiously absent. I could feel her attention to detail, her swift turn of phrase, but there was nothing else of her in it, nothing apart from the familiar head shot: her hair fair and fluffy, her smile wide and nonthreatening.
Her book was a straightforward history of Barnsley House and the women who had lived there over several generations. There were scandals, yes: suicides and secret liaisons and the obligatory gothic tropes—secret rooms, ghosts, and unexplained fires—but it was a book of history. A past typical of a country house of that era but I had always imagined Barnsley as a benign place now. Perhaps I was wrong.
All this time I had been wanting someone from Barnsley to come looking for me. But now that someone had, I wasn’t so sure it was what I wanted after all.