The Forgotten Garden (14 page)

He tilted his head and Nell’s first thought was that he was bowing—some vestige of manners from an earlier time. When pale glassy eyes appeared over the rim of his glasses she realised he was merely improving his view of her.

‘Mr Snelgrove?’

‘Yes.’ Tone of a tetchy headmaster. ‘Yes indeed. Well come in, do, you’re letting the wretched air through.’

Nell stepped forward, aware of the door closing behind her. A little current sucking out, leaving the warm, stale air to resettle.

‘Name,’ said the man.

‘Nell. Nell Andrews.’

He blinked at her. ‘Name,’ he said again, enunciating carefully, ‘of the book for which you are searching.’

‘Of course.’ Nell glanced again at her notebook. ‘Though it’s not so much a case of searching for a book.’

Mr Snelgrove blinked again slowly, a parody of patience.

He was weary of her already, Nell realised. This caught her off guard, she was used to playing the wearied herself. Surprise brought with it a pesky stammer. ‘Th—that is,’ she paused, trying to compose herself, ‘I already have the book in question.’

Mr Snelgrove sniffed sharply and large nostrils clamped shut.

‘Might I suggest, madam,’ he said, ‘that if you already have the book in question, you have little need for my humble services.’ A nod.

‘Good day.’

And with that he shuffled away, returned his attention to the towering bookshelf by the stairs.

She had been dismissed. Nell opened her mouth. Closed it again.

Turned to leave. Stopped.

No. She had come a long way to unravel a mystery, her mystery, and this man was her best chance of shedding some light on Eliza Makepeace, why she might have been escorting Nell to Australia in 1913.

Pulling herself to her full height, Nell crossed the floorboards to stand by Mr Snelgrove. She cleared her throat, rather pointedly, and waited.

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He didn’t turn his head, merely continued shelving his books. ‘You are still here.’ A statement.

‘Yes,’ said Nell firmly. ‘I have come a long way to show you something and I don’t intend to leave until I’ve done so.’

‘I fear, madam,’ he said through a sigh, ‘that you have wasted your time just as you are now wasting mine. I don’t sell items on commission.’

Anger prickled Nell’s throat. ‘And I don’t wish to sell my book.

I ask only that you take a look at it so that I might gain an expert opinion.’ Her cheeks were warm, an unfamiliar sensation. She was not a blusher.

Mr Snelgrove turned to appraise her, that pale, cool, weary gaze.

A thread of emotion (which one, she could not tell) plucked neatly at his lip. Wordlessly, and with the slightest of movements, he indicated a little office behind his shop counter.

Nell hurried through the doorway. His agreement was the sort of tiny kindness that had a habit of poking holes in one’s resolve. A tear of relief threatened to break through her defences and she dug inside her bag hoping to find an old tissue so she might stop the traitor in its tracks. What on earth was happening to her? She wasn’t an emotional person, she knew how to keep control. At least, she always had. Until recently, until Doug had delivered that suitcase and she’d found the storybook inside, the picture as its frontispiece. Started remembering things and people, like the Authoress; fragments of her past, glimpsed through tiny holes in the fabric of her memory.

Mr Snelgrove closed the glass door behind him and shuffled across a Persian carpet dulled by its coat of long-settled dust. He navigated his way between motley mounds of books that were arranged, maze-like, on the floor, then dropped into the leather chair on the far side of the desk. Fumbled a cigarette from a battered packet and lit it.

‘Well—’ the word floated out on a stream of smoke—‘come on then. Let me cast my gaze across this book of yours.’

Nell had wrapped the book in a tea towel when she left Brisbane.

A sensible idea—the book was old and precious, it needed protection—yet here, in the dim light of Mr Snelgrove’s trove, the domesticity implied by its shroud embarrassed her.

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She untied the string and slipped off the red and white checked cloth, restrained herself from pushing it deep within her bag. Then she handed the book across the table into Mr Snelgrove’s waiting fingers.

Silence descended, punctured only by the ticking of a concealed clock. Nell waited anxiously while he turned the pages, one by one.

Still he said nothing.

Perhaps he required further explanation. ‘What I was hoping—’

‘Silence.’ A pale hand was lifted; the cigarette wedged between two fingers threatened to relinquish its ash tip.

Nell’s words stuck in her throat. He was without doubt the rudest man she had ever had the misfortune to deal with, and given the character of some of her second-hand dealing associates that was saying something. Nonetheless, he was her best chance of finding the information she needed. She had little choice but to sit, chastised, watching and waiting as the cigarette’s white body morphed into an improbably long cylinder of ash.

Finally, the ash detached itself and dropped, lightly, to the ground.

Joined the other dusty corpses that had died similar silent deaths. Nell, by no means a keen housekeeper, shuddered.

Mr Snelgrove took one last, hungry drag and squashed the spent cigarette filter into a heaving ashtray. After what seemed an eternity, he spoke through a cough. ‘Where did you come by this?’

Was she imagining the tremor of interest in his voice? ‘I was given it.’

‘By whom?’

How to answer that one. ‘By the author herself, I think. I don’t really remember, I was given it as a child.’

He was watching her keenly now. His lips tightened, trembled a little. ‘I’ve heard of it, of course, but in all my days I confess I’ve never seen a copy.’

The book lay upon the table now and Mr Snelgrove ran his hand lightly over its cover. He let his eyelids flutter closed and uttered a sigh of deep wellbeing, that of the desert walker finally delivered to water.

Surprised by this shift in demeanour, Nell cleared her throat and clutched at words. ‘It’s rare then?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said softly, opening his eyes once more, ‘yes. Exceptionally rare. Only one edition, you see. And the illustrations, Nathaniel Walker.

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This would be one of the only books he ever did.’ He opened the cover and gazed at the frontispiece. ‘It’s a rare specimen indeed.’

‘And what about the author? Do you know anything about Eliza Makepeace?’ Nell caught her breath as he wrinkled his gnarled old nose. Dared to hope. ‘She’s proved rather elusive. I’ve only managed to turn up the most spare of details.’

Mr Snelgrove pushed himself to standing and glanced longingly at the book before turning to a wooden box on the shelf behind. Its drawers were small and, when he pulled one open, Nell saw it was filled to the brim with little rectangular cards. He riffled through, muttering to himself, until finally he withdrew one.

‘Here we are then.’ His lips moved as he scanned the card and in time the volume raised. ‘Eliza Makepeace . . . stories appeared in various periodicals . . . Only one published collection,’ he tapped a finger on Nell’s book, ‘which we have right here . . . very little scholarly work on her . . . except . . . ah, yes.’

Nell sat straighter. ‘What is it? What have you found?’

‘An article, a book that mentions your Eliza. It contains a little biography if I remember.’ He shuffled to a bookcase that ran floor to ceiling. ‘Relatively recent, only nine years old. According to my note it should be filed somewhere . . .’ He ran a finger along the fourth shelf, hesitated, continued, stopped. ‘Here.’ He grunted as he pulled down a book and blew dust from its top. Then he turned it over and squinted at the spine. ‘Fairytales and Fiction Weavers of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Dr Roger McNab.’ He licked his finger and turned to the index, traced down the list. ‘Here we are, Eliza Makepeace, page forty-seven.’

He pushed the open book across the table to Nell.

Her heart was racing, pulse flecking beneath her skin. She was warm, very warm. She fumbled the pages to forty-seven, read Eliza’s name at the top.

Finally, finally, she was making progress, a biography that promised to flesh out the one person to whom she knew she was somehow linked.

‘Thank you,’ she said, the words catching in her throat. ‘Thank you.’

Mr Snelgrove nodded, embarrassed by her gratitude. He tilted his head in the direction of Eliza’s book. ‘I don’t suppose you’re seeking a good home for this one?’

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Nell smiled slightly and shook her head. ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t part with it. It’s a family heirloom.’

The bell tinkled. A young man stood on the other side of the glass office door, staring uncertainly at the towers of sagging shelves.

Mr Snelgrove nodded curtly. ‘Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me.’ Peering over his glasses at the new customer, he huffed shortly. ‘Why do they always hold the door open?’ He began his shuffle back towards the shop. ‘Fairytales and Fiction Weavers is three pounds,’ he said as he passed Nell’s chair. ‘You may sit here and avail yourself of the facilities for a brief time, just be sure and leave the money on my counter when you leave.’

Nell nodded her agreement and, as the door closed behind him, heart pounding, she began to read.

A writer of the first decade of the twentieth century, Eliza Makepeace is best remembered for her fairytales, which appeared regularly in various periodicals over the years spanning 1907 to 1913. She is generally credited with having authored thirty-five stories, however this listing is incomplete and the true extent of her output may never be known. An illustrated collection of Eliza Makepeace’s fairytales was published by the London press Hobbins and Co in August 1913. The volume sold well and received favourable reviews. The Times described the stories as ‘a strange delight that enlivened in this reviewer the enchanting and sometimes frightening sensations of childhood’. The illustrations by Nathaniel Walker were praised especially and are thought by some to rank amongst his best work1. They were a departure from the oil portraits for which he is now better remembered.

Eliza’s own story began on 1 September 1888 when she was born in London. The birth records for that year indicate that she was born a twin, and the first twelve years of her life were spent in a tenement house at number thirty-five Battersea Church Road. Eliza’s pedigree is rather more complex than her humble origins might suggest. Her mother, Georgiana, was the daughter of an aristocratic family, inhabitants of 1 See Thomas R. Collins, Sketching the Past (Hamilton Hudson, 1959), and Reginald Coyte, Famous Illustrators (Wycliffe Press, 1964).

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Blackhurst Manor in Cornwall. Georgiana Mountrachet caused a society scandal when, at the age of seventeen, she ran away from the family estate with a young man far beneath her own social class.

Eliza’s father, Jonathan Makepeace, was born in London in 1866 to a penniless Thames bargeman and his wife. He was the fifth of nine children and grew up in the slums behind the London docks. Although his death in 1888 occurred before Eliza was born, Eliza’s published tales seem to reinterpret events that were likely experienced by a young Jonathan Makepeace during his childhood on the river. For instance, in

‘The River’s Curse’, the dead men hanging from the fairy gallows are almost certainly based on scenes Jonathan Makepeace would have witnessed as a boy at Execution Dock. We must presume that these stories were passed to Eliza through her mother, Georgiana, embellished perhaps, and stored in Eliza’s memory until she began to write herself.

How the son of a poor London bargeman came to meet and fall in love with the highborn Georgiana Mountrachet remains a mystery. In line with the secretive nature of her elopement, Georgiana left no information about events leading to her departure. Attempts to learn the truth are further thwarted by her family’s diligent efforts to smother the story. There was very little coverage in the newspapers and one must search further afield, in contemporary letters and diaries, to find mention of what must surely have been a great scandal at the time. The occupation listed on Jonathan’s death certificate is ‘Sailor’, however the precise nature of his employment is unclear. It is speculation only that leads this writer to suggest that perhaps Jonathan’s life on the seas brought him briefly to the rocky shores of Cornwall. That perhaps, on the cove of her family’s estate, Lord Mountrachet’s daughter, famed throughout the county for her flame-haired beauty, chanced to meet the young Jonathan Makepeace.

Whatever the circumstances of their meeting, that they were in love cannot be doubted. Alas, the young couple were not to be granted years of happiness. Jonathan’s sudden and somewhat inexplicable death less than ten months after their elopement must have dealt a devastating blow to Georgiana Mountrachet, who was left alone in London, unwed, pregnant, and with neither family nor financial security. Georgiana was not one to flounder, however: she had abandoned the strictures of her social class and, after the birth of her babies, abandoned too the name 99

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Mountrachet. She performed copy work for the legal firm of HJ Blackwater and Associates of Lincoln’s Inn, Holborn.

There is some evidence that Georgiana’s fine penmanship was a gift for which she found ample expression in her youth. The Mountrachet family journals, donated in 1950 to the British Library, contain a number of playbills composed with careful lettering and accomplished illustrations.