Chapter Six
And so she did—in the busy, whirlwind days that followed, Elspeth returned again and again to the unfinished story in the trunk, reading a scene here and a chapter there in the quiet moments between visits to dressmakers and bookstores and milliners.
In the hubbub of the chattering, enchanting city, it was a private pleasure to lose herself in the quiet flow of words, to indulge her imagination in her father’s half-finished story. Though she avoided some of the particularly carnal scenes, Elspeth amused herself by returning to other, less earthy portions, paging through the fragile sheets, letting the words lead her into different, newly imagined worlds, making up different, happier endings.
It was heaven—a heaven of her own making. And Aunt Augusta’s making, too—her new aunt never nagged, never once told Elspeth to stop daydreaming and pay heed. It was almost as if Aunt Augusta were daydreaming, too, and reveled in the glorious peace and evocative quiet.
“Elspeth, my dear.” Aunt Augusta’s voice was everything unstudied and casual as they drank their breakfast chocolate—lovely, rich and decadent—one morning before heading out to be fitted at a shoemaker’s. “You’ve had a chance now to read those bits of your father’s writing—tell me, what did you think?”
“I thought a hundred things—all different. I think I’ve imagined a different ending every time.”
“Have you? How wonderfully creative.” Aunt Augusta smiled and laughed. “You are more like him—like your father—than I ever hoped. I confess I feared the sisters Murray had nagged the imagination right out of you. But I am glad to find they did not.”
“You don’t mind my flights of fancy, as they called them?”
“Heavens, no! So you didn’t find the writing too…shall we say too piquant, too racy for your taste?”
Now that Elspeth was becoming a sophisticated woman of the world—for Edinburgh was an entirely enlightened, international city—she would pay no mind to the riddy heat that rose in her cheeks. Though it had been rather shocking to read the frankly carnal scenes in the story, it was doubly disconcerting to discuss such things out loud. But even though Elspeth knew she was well out of her depth, but she would not give in to embarrassment—she would discuss the topic as urbanely as Aunt Augusta.
And Elspeth reckoned she had read the pages without any lingering damage to her virtue. And she had liked it. “The part I have read, I found picaresque, I think is the word.”
Aunt Augusta laughed merrily. “Oh, yes, that is exactly the word. Another word might be naughty. He had a delightfully irreverent view of the world, your father.”
“Clearly.” But Elspeth found herself hungry for any knowledge of the man she had only heard spoken of disparagingly. “But it’s not all naughty, surely. Some passages are quite…elevating. And beautiful—lyrical and… I don’t know what, but they send me off making up stories of my own.”
“Yes, exactly so!” Aunt Augusta nodded with a sigh. “Quite brilliant. So very like him.”
Elspeth caught a bit of her aunt’s happy melancholy. “I had no idea he was brilliant as well as…naughty.”
“Made a villain of him, did they, the sisters Murray? No, don’t defend them.” Aunt Augusta looked out the window and smiled at her memories. “Your father was brilliant but…different. A bit difficult. Life wasn’t always easy for him—for us. We weren’t born into wealth. You father won his way through his own merit—he was a scholar, chosen for his cleverness, at the Cathedral school of St. Giles.” She closed her eyes. “I can see him now, bounding away up those worn steps. We had to stay behind, your mother Fie and I, for we were lasses of course, and couldn’t go to school. But we got our education in other ways, she and I. What a youth we had. Though her death so young was a tragedy, not every memory is sad.”
Such stories were manna to Elspeth, starved as she was for any affectionate word of her parents. “I wish I could remember her. I will own I envy you her memories—even the sad ones.”
“Oh, you are the loveliest of girls.” Her aunt took her hand. “Just like her. And very much like him, too—made for happiness. He was always the most interesting man in any room—people were just attracted to him, like a polestar, because he delighted in the world as he found it. He rather gloried in the messiness of the human condition, in the sublime and the ridiculous. He liked it all, bless his heart. He liked to laugh, and he liked play, and he like to drink, but oh, how he loved. He loved freely. Generously.”
“He loved my mother?”
“With all his heart. There was never anyone else for him ever—except you. And he loved you. Very, very much. Enough that he braved those two pecking old sparrows, the sisters Murray, to make sure that you would be safe and cared for in the end.”
Elspeth mouth ran dry, but she asked the question that had been burning in the back of her tongue ever since the moment she had known of her new aunt’s existence. “Why did he not leave me with you?”
It had haunted her of late, in the dark of the night—the possibility that this life of imagination and ease and light and laughter might have been hers sooner.
“Ah, my darling child.” She took Elspeth’s hand, but for the first time, the mirth dimmed from her Aunt Augusta’s eyes. “I have often wished he had, but the truth is, it mightn’t have turned out so well had he done so. I was not married to my dear Admiral Ivers then, and I did not have this lovely house as a safe haven to give you.”
There was a certain relief, mixed with a certain disappointment, that her lot in life was not the product of some awful mischance or unkind machination on the part of the Aunts. “I see.”
“I hope you do. Your father did the right thing in taking you to the Murrays. I still think so, though I will admit that I never thought that they would keep you from me for all of these many long years. But”—her aunt took a deep, cleansing breath, as if to throw off such sorrowful thoughts—“I wonder what might have been, if he’d had more time on this earth, your father. If grief and the drink hadn’t killed him. I wonder if that story in the trunk mightn’t have been the making of him.” Aunt Augusta shook her head and turned away, out the window, as if some fresh idea were worrying at her head. “And I wonder if it would be possible now…”
“If what would be possible, Aunt?”
“The book,” she clarified vaguely. “I had been toying with an idea… I thought to revive his legacy—and if I’m to be honest, earn some money so you, his heir, might have some sort of independent fortune that the sisters Murray could not refuse, for they would never take any money from me.”
“How thoughtful.”
Aunt Augusta waved away any praise. “I thought a new version of the old book, cleaned up for present tastes, might be attempted. But what you said—about his writing making you want to make up stories of your own—I wonder if the same could be done with the pages in the trunk. It could be done, I suppose.” She closed her eyes, as if she could picture it clearly, this new book. And the she opened them to look at Elspeth, as if seeing her anew. “By you, Elspeth.”
“Me? Finish the story?”
“Yes, but make it a different sort of book—a less picaresque book.”
Elspeth’s heart began clattering like the old spinning wheel—everything within her was afraid and aghast and exhilarated all at the same time. “I don’t know if I ought—”
“Oh, life is too short for doing only what one ought, my dear girl. Those pages are your father’s legacy to you—they are your fortune in foolscap just waiting to be redeemed.” Aunt Augusta sat back and took a long sip of tea. “Or not. However you choose, my dear girl.”
Elspeth thought about the fragile pages that had sifted and rustled through her fingers, as if they were whispering for her attention. As if they had an answer to a question she had not yet asked. As if they might be the antidote to the years and years of cap-wearing spinsterhood that stretched in front of her like an endlessly muddy lane.
The idea began as the flicker of a flame in the back of her mind, warming slowly, coming gradually toward the light. Gathering heat. And purpose.
“I would just write down the stories I’ve already imagined?”
“Just so.”
“And perhaps think of some more? To make them flow together?” There were some scenes amongst the pages of foolscap that just didn’t fit with the others—as if her father had perhaps let his imagination run wild without a thought for the rest of the book. But she might let her imagination run a bit less wild and fill in the seeming gaps in the story.
“And why not?” Aunt Augusta laughed. “You may do just as you please.”
Why not, indeed.
For the second time in her life, Elspeth decided to do just as she pleased.