Wild Fell (25 page)

The last photograph was a formal portrait of the entire Blackmore family in the nave of the church. Alexander and his wife were seated in high chairs like the lord and lady of the manor. Behind them, Rosa and Malcolm posed stiffly, Rosa standing behind her mother and Malcolm behind his father. I was struck that in this picture, while Rosa was still not smiling, in this case, very likely due to the formality of the pose, something about her proximity to her brother seemed to relax her. The set of her shoulders was less rigid and, in spite of the degraded quality of the reproduction, the expression on her face seemed markedly less severe.

“Excuse me.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to see an old man in a flannel shirt and a tweed jacket that had obviously seen better days. He wore baggy cotton trousers and ancient running shoes. But when he smiled, it began in his bright blue eyes and lit up his whole face—the kind of smile in the presence of which it was impossible not to smile as well.

“Hello,” I said. “May I help you?”

“Actually, I was hoping to be able to help
you
, sir. My daughter”—he indicated the librarian’s desk where Mrs. Beams stood watching with an expression I could only read as disapproval, though it was unclear which of us she was disapproving of—“told me that you’re researching the Blackmore family. She told me not to bother you, but I couldn’t resist stopping by an introducing myself. I wondered if I could be of any assistance. My name is Clarence Brocklehurst. I’m retired now, but I ran the Alvina Historical Society for many years. I was born and raised here. I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. The Blackmores are an odd subject, but as a former teacher, I can’t help but be pleased when young people take an interest in local history.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Brocklehurst, but I don’t want to put you out. Also,” I said,
sotto voce
, “I don’t want to get you into any trouble with your daughter for talking in a library. I don’t think she’d appreciate that at all.”

“Oh, I’m in here every day, Mr. Browning. I drive my daughter crazy. I’ve read all the books in my own house, and now I’m working my way through these here.”

When he laughed, it was the open, full-throated laugh of a much younger man. Like his smile, his laugh again lit up his face and I suddenly wondered how old he was. He could be anywhere from sixty to eighty, though with the morose Mrs. Beams as his daughter, I leaned more toward the latter figure.

“Quite so, quite so,” he said. He laughed again, more softly this time. “They can be a bit martinet-like in here, can’t they? I have a proposal to make, young man. Do you have a car?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I walked here from my house,” he said. “And I’m feeling a bit worn out. If you would be so kind as to drive me home, I would be pleased to offer you a cup of home-brewed tea and share any information and stories I have about the Blackmore family.”

I was surprised by the invitation from a stranger, albeit an apparently harmless stranger. “Mr. Brocklehurst, I’d be happy to give you a lift home, but you don’t need to give me tea. I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“Oh believe me, Mr. Browning, it’s no imposition at all. I would appreciate the company. It gets lonely around here sometimes, especially with my wife gone. Please rest assured I don’t run around inviting strangers over to my house, but when my daughter told me you were researching the Blackmores, I just knew we had to talk.” He beamed. “My father, you see, used to play chess with the Blackmore family butler, and he was a bit of a raconteur. The butler, I mean. Well, also my father, to tell the truth. And I seem to have inherited his garrulousness.” He chuckled again.

“At Wild Fell? Your father played chess with the butler at Wild Fell?”

“Yes, at Wild Fell.” Mr. Brocklehurst looked at me with evident surprise. “You know of it?”

“Actually, Mr. Brocklehurst, I bought it.”

He shook his head slightly in confusion. “You bought what, exactly?”

“I bought Blackmore Island,” I said. “I bought Wild Fell.”

He gaped at me with unambiguous shock. “You bought
Blackmore Island
? From whom?”

“It was offered for sale. Apparently, the property reverted to a family in England who are related to the Blackmores somehow. I bought it a short time ago. I bought the island
and
the house.”

“Good Lord,” he said. “Good Lord. You must have very deep pockets, Mr. . . . I’m sorry, but I don’t think I got your name. How rude of me.”

“My name is Jameson Browning, Mr. Brocklehurst. It’s nice to meet you.”

“And you, too, Mr. Browning. Well,” he said. “This puts an entirely new complexion on the matter. Perhaps you can enlighten me, as well, rather than just listening to an old history teacher give a lecture.” Mr. Brocklehurst favoured me with a conspiratorial wink. “Were you interested in taking me up on my offer of a cup of tea? If so, we should probably go. And don’t mention it to my daughter. She gets a little bit tense when the topic of Blackmore Island comes up. I believe she mentioned poor Brenda Egan to you, and what happened in ’60?”

“She did, yes. Very sad. I’d heard about it before, but I’d never spoken with anyone directly connected to the drowning. I’m afraid I may have upset her a bit. I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Brocklehurst said, patting my arm. “It’s her way. It’s all our way, really. Small towns, you know. These things get written into our DNA, almost. Collective consciousness or something like that. The farther you get from the city the stronger that experience is. Something can happen in a small town fifty, a hundred years ago and, in some cases, folks who weren’t even born yet will share in some part of it. Does that make sense to you, or is it terribly quaint?”

“It makes sense to me,” I said, thinking of the Blackmore family portraits in the cellar. “I could see how the past would live on in a small town. It’s likely inevitable.”

He rubbed his hands in excitement. “Oh, you
are
a wonderfully intelligent young man,” Mr. Brocklehurst said with delight. “I’m looking forward to our talk very much. Intelligent conversation in Alvina is so rare. Shall we go?”

“My car is outside,” I said. “After you, Mr. Brocklehurst.”

Clarence Brocklehurst’s house on the outskirts of Alvina was an educated man’s house, a teacher’s house. Every available wall was occupied with either floor to ceiling bookshelves overflowing with books of British and Scottish history—as well as a significant number of volumes on Canadian history and works of classic English literature—or antique maps of Canada and the British Isles.

Next to the living room fireplace there was an easy chair with a neatly folded dark green crocheted afghan draped over the back. It was obviously his favourite, regular chair. Behind it was a long-necked lamp with a dusty rose shade that still likely provided more than enough light for reading. It was here that Mr. Brocklehurst repaired after making a pot of tea and carrying it into the living room, placing it on a low coffee table between us.

He explained that he’d been a widower for twenty years now, and that he still couldn’t make proper tea like his wife had. It didn’t taste the same when he made it, he said by way of apology. “That’s my Bella,” he said, pointing to a silver-framed photograph of a slender older woman with fine, kind features. “Isn’t she beautiful? Cancer. We’d been together thirty years. When it happened, I didn’t want to go on living. But then one day I remembered how she’d pushed me out of my shell when we were dating. I was a regular wallflower and Bella was the prettiest girl in Alvina. One day about three months after she passed, I realized I’d spent almost a week wearing pyjamas all day. I kept telling my daughter and son-in-law not to bother me and that I had the flu, or some such lie. Well, that day I was sitting here in this chair and I looked at her photograph. The light fell on it just so, and it was almost like she was in the room. I practically heard her say, ‘Clarence, get off your G.D. fat
duff
and get out of those ugly pyjamas and brush your G.D.
teeth
. Your breath
stinks.
” He laughed again, and at that moment, right on cue, the sun shone into his living room. “That’s just the sort of thing she would have said, too,” he added softly. “Well, that was the day I got my life back on track, got involved with things like the curling league. And of course, the historical society. Which,” he said, “brings us to the subject of your visit.”

“Yes, Mr. Brocklehurst.”

“Please, call me Clarence,” he said kindly. “Shall I call you Jameson? Or do you go by something else? James? Jamie?” In that moment, Clarence Brocklehurst reminded me so much of my father before the illness took him away that I felt my heart clench.

“Please call me Jamie, all my friends do.”

“I will. Now,” he said. “You say you bought Blackmore Island. First, if I may—and please forgive me in advance for my vulgarity—are you very rich? Or are you crazy?” His blue eyes danced. “The land alone must have cost a fortune. And the house is a ruin. It would take a fortune to renovate. What were you thinking?”

“Actually, the house is in remarkable shape. As for how I was able to afford it, I came into a rather large sum after an accident. My father is in an Alzheimer’s clinic in Toronto. The money provided for his care and left me enough for an investment property. When the real estate agent sent me the photographs, I realized that Wild Fell had some potential as a vacation property, or guest house.”

“Well, you must be a very enterprising young man. It’s been a lot of years since I’ve been near Blackmore, but it was pretty run down. Frankly, it would take a lot of money to fix up, in my opinion. And I’m very sorry about your father,” he added. “Alzheimer’s is a filthy bugger of a disease.”

“Thank you.” I paused, waiting for him to continue. When he didn’t, I said, “What can you tell me about the Blackmore family, Mr. Brocklehurst?”

“Clarence, please.”

“Clarence.”

He paused. “What do you know about them, Jamie?”

“Not much,” I admitted. “I know that Alexander Blackmore was a local politician who apparently had deep pockets. The house must have been particularly striking back in its day. It’s still impressive, but I can only imagine how it must have looked to the townspeople. Blackmore must have set himself up as a minor king out here.”

“Wild Fell was like no house ever seen in this region,” Clarence began. “The source of Blackmore’s wealth was never actually established. It may have been inherited. You know, second sons were often sent out to the colonies to establish themselves in those days, but wherever it came from, he spared nothing when it came to that place. The stone was all local, of course, but I’m given to understand that entire rooms were deconstructed in Europe and reassembled inside Wild Fell. Tremendous art and furniture. Exquisite panelling for the walls.”

“It’s very impressive,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

He paused, glancing at me strangely. Then he went on.

“As I was saying, why he ever picked Alvina as a place to settle, no one really knows. But even then, millionaires from as far away as America were building these palaces along Georgian Bay. It was almost as though Alexander Blackmore wanted to top them all. He married a woman from Montreal—old money. Well, whatever ‘old money’ meant in Canada in the early 1800s, anyway. All of the money was pretty new, but they loved to give themselves aristocratic airs. Her name was Catherine Agnes Russell. According to what I’ve heard, he didn’t build Wild Fell for
her
. He built Wild Fell for
himself
, then married her because he felt it needed a chatelaine. Also, he obviously had political ambitions, and he needed a wife and family.”

“There’s a portrait of her in the house,” I said. “I found it this morning.”

Mr. Brocklehurst raised his eyebrows. “Really? A portrait of Catherine Russell? Good
Lord
, what sort of condition is it in?”

I shrugged. “Excellent, I’d say. I found portraits of all of them. They’d been hidden away in the basement. I don’t know why. They’re beautifully done and they must be worth a great deal of money.”

Again, that strange look. “Well, if you’ve found portraits of them, you must at least know that he had two children, twins. Rosa and Malcolm. Of the two, apparently Rosa was the intellectual. She was a voracious reader, according to my father’s friend, the butler. She wrote poetry, she painted. And she was supposed to be something of a dedicated lepidopterist—she collected moths, of all things. From what I’ve heard, her parents indulged her by ordering specimens for her from all over the world.”

“I found a framed display of them in one of the bedrooms at the house,” I interrupted. “I suspected it was probably Rosa’s bedroom. And there was a box on the mantel with an odd inscription—‘Moths for Forgetfulness’ or something.”

“The Victorians loved that sort of thing,” Clarence said. “The phrase likely refers to the Cornish superstition that moths were harbingers of forgetfulness. That they actually carried away memories, or dreams. I can’t remember exactly. And she was quite a beauty, apparently.”

“Yes, she was quite beautiful. And he was a very handsome man—Malcolm, I mean, judging by the portrait.”

The old man hesitated. “Do you know anything about . . . well, about the family dynamics? You see, I don’t mean to be presumptuous. I don’t want to tell you things you already know. What I know is a mixture of history and second-hand stories passed along by my father, who in turn heard them from Beckett, the butler at Wild Fell. As you can see, it’s a bit of a broken telephone, historically speaking. On the other hand, frankly, the facts of record are fairly dry. Catherine died in 1847 of what we would now call cancer; she was only forty or so.”

I nodded, remembering the pain in the woman’s eyes in the portrait, her preternatural thinness, and what I now realized was premature aging from illness.

“Alexander Blackmore never remarried. He retreated to the house and raised Rosa and Malcolm as a single father, which was pretty unusual in those days, let me tell you. He died under fairly gruesome circumstances in an accident in 1883. The children—well, they were grown by then, of course—were extremely close. They lived on at Wild Fell till they were very old.”

“I’m sorry, you said ‘gruesome circumstances’?”

“Yes,” Clarence said. “He was stung to death. By wasps.”

I felt lightheaded. “What did you say?”

“Wasps.”

“
How . . . ?
”

“He was out riding. In those days the Blackmores maintained a secondary stable manned by a groom at the edge of the point of land where their boathouse used to be. The ferrying place. If you’ve been there, you know the place I’m speaking about, am I correct?”

I nodded mutely. “I think so.”

“He was on his way into town on some errand or other,” Mr. Brocklehurst said. “The children were on the island. Well, hardly
children
, really. At that point, they must have been sixteen or seventeen, but no older than that. Blackmore had left them in the care of the servants that morning. He mustn’t have gotten very far because apparently they could hear his screams—and the horse’s—from across the lake. The groom had to put the horse down on the spot. By the time they managed to ferry Alexander Blackmore back to the island, he was dead. Ghastly way to die.”

“Oh my God. What a horrible story.”

“Well,” he said. “That part of it isn’t a story, it’s a matter of historical record. He’s buried in Carlton Cemetery up on the hill. The gravestone is very impressive. After you leave this afternoon, you should stop by and take a look, if you really want to get a sense of the kind of monuments people like Alexander Blackmore built for themselves to be remembered after they were dead. Gravestones, you know, they last forever. Not like houses.”

“You said, ‘that part of it.’ Is there some other part?”

“Ah,” Clarence said. “Well now, that depends.”

“Depends on
what?
”

“Well, it depends on where you draw the line between history—the kind that’s documented and written down by journalists and historians—and oral history that may or may not be entirely factual, or at least is unproveable.”

“You said your father played chess with the butler at Wild Fell. Did he tell your father these . . . well, these
other
stories? The unproveable ones?”

“Quite so,” he said. “Would you like some more tea?”

“No, thank you, Mr. Brock . . . 
Clarence
. I’m fine. But please, go on. What did the butler tell your father?”

“You understand, Jamie, that some of this is going to sound ridiculous, don’t you?”

I repeated, “Please, go on.”

“The ‘other part’ is that she killed him. Rosa killed her father with the wasps. She sent them to him. To stop him . . . well to stop him—” Here Clarence actually blushed and lowered his voice. “To stop him from . . . interfering with her. Molesting her.”

“What are you saying? That you believe Rosa Blackmore was some sort of
witch?
”

“No, I’m not saying that, Jamie,” he said. “I’m just telling you what the butler told my father. Me, I don’t believe in witches. Or magic. But the butler swore to my father that her relationship with her father was never ‘natural,’ as he put it. Not on Rosa’s part, you understand. He was quite clear that if there was abuse—and I’m not saying there was, because this is all hearsay—she was an unwilling participant. But in those days, cut off from everyone on that island, in that house . . . 
well, anything was possible, especially something that unspeakable.”

“Of course she was,” I said. “No child is ever a willing participant in abuse. No wonder she was obsessed with moths, if that was the superstition—that they took away memory. Her memories must have been nightmarish. But why did anyone think she was a witch? I can’t imagine anything crueller than spreading that sort of rumour about a victim of incest.”

“Oh, believe me, if there were rumours spread, I never heard them,” Clarence said quickly. “And I certainly wouldn’t be spreading them about any child, living or dead. As far as I know, the only person who ever spoke of it was the butler and he only told my father, then swore my father to secrecy. But I don’t think any of the servants would have begrudged her if she
had
killed her father with witchcraft.”

“But why? Why did they think that?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, stories,” he said. “We’re not talking about an educated class of people, Jamie—servants in those days. It wouldn’t take much for an old book to be considered a ‘strange book.’ Rosa’s apparent obsession with mirrors might also have inspired superstition. Another story was that she had some sort of ‘secret chamber’ in one of the basements of the house, and that she used it for casting spells. According to my father, after Alexander Blackmore died, Rosa grew obsessed with the idea of escaping him in the afterlife by ‘bending time’ as she apparently called it, whatever that means, and ensuring that he could never come back to hurt her again.”

“It sounds like she had a nervous breakdown.” I thought of the bestial nature I had seen in the portrait of Alexander Blackmore in the cellar of Wild Fell. “It would hardly be surprising, considering what she went through.”

“But at the end of the day, her father was dead and she was free. She was already close to her twin, but according to what I’ve heard, they grew even closer. In any case, they lived together till the end of their lives.”

“Didn’t either of them marry? Leave the island, ever?”

“As far as I my research went, Malcolm got engaged when he was thirty or so. Her name was Ailsa Crane. He’d met her in Toronto when he was there attending to some sort of family business. She was the daughter of a prominent lawyer, E.W. Crane.”

“Malcolm was engaged? Did he marry?”

“No,” Clarence said. “They didn’t marry. His fiancée apparently drowned in Devil’s Lake in 1888. Malcolm had made a visit back home to introduce Ailsa to his twin sister. Presumably he was also going to tell Rosa that he and Ailsa would be setting up housekeeping elsewhere, either in Alvina, or back in Toronto. According to the story my father heard, Rosa and Malcolm quarrelled about his leaving Wild Fell. Rosa didn’t fancy being left alone.” He paused thoughtfully. “Ailsa drowned the following night. It seemed as though she had just sleepwalked into the lake. She was in her nightclothes; she wasn’t dressed for any sort of swimming. God only knows why she didn’t wake up, but apparently she didn’t.”