“A lot,” murmurs Hal. His voice shakes as much as his hand did. “The only thing they could do was elope – there’s the ruin and deception Jane was talking about in her letter, right there. If anyone caught them, she’d be finished. No job, no reference – and no Albie.”
Does he know how soft his voice has become? How it slides through the attic, carried on the warm dusty air? Maybe, like me, he can feel the change in the atmosphere, in the letters. Hope and fear now sit hand in hand behind Iris and Albie. They have so much at stake. So much to lose.
And we know how the story ends.
Time slips by in silence, only the shifting shadows on the floor and the moving piles of pages to mark it. The attic air has warmed around us, and filled with something close to static. It makes my skin hum and my hands shake…and I think it’s coming from Hal.
Possibility.
Every time he comes near me, sparks flicker up my arms and into my chest. Watching him pore over these letters, half-frowning or moving his lips in an echo of the words on the pages…it makes my heart hurt. But not because I’m sad. The opposite. Something is changing. Something in me is waking up. Something that wants…I don’t know. But it’s been a long time since I wanted anything, except maybe to be left alone – and now I don’t think I want that so much. Or at least I think maybe I do want to be left alone, but alone with him.
What would Iris and Albie make of this, of us? Would they mind? Would I mind someone reading my letters – my thoughts and hopes and dreams and fears – in a hundred years’ time? I don’t know. All I know is that it’s almost starting to feel like we’re meant to find them. Sole heir to a family fortune and a housemaid? If it wasn’t such a perfect coincidence it would almost be silly. I picture them passing in the hallway of Hopwood, her eyes lowered in case anyone could see them…and then her gaze coming up to meet his. His hand reaching for hers, the slightest, lightest touch and then gone.
“So, she must have agreed to marry him, right? That’s what the letter from Jane was about – Iris told her sister, who wrote back and warned her it was a bad idea. What then?” I tip my head back and rub my neck. I’ve been leaning forward over all these letters, bills and receipts, these pieces of other lives, for so long that it aches when I straighten up.
“They couldn’t have just gone. They would have needed a plan. Money, somewhere to go. Somewhere they’d be safe, where they could start over without anyone knowing who they were.”
Somewhere safe. Somewhere to start over.
Ironic, really – they were running away from the exact place I ran to.
“They must have really loved each other. To risk everything – to give everything up – just to be together.”
“I guess so.” Hal’s hand rests on the nearest pile of papers, his fingertips almost within touching distance. If I stretched mine out, I could reach them. But I don’t, and however much I want him to move his hand towards mine one more time, he doesn’t either.
I look at all the papers in front of us. “Do you think it’s weird, doing this? Reading their letters? They were here – right here – and now we’re looking through the things they wrote, the things they said to each other…? It’s like…bringing them back, you know?”
“I guess so. I hadn’t really thought about it like that.” He brushes a fleck of paper off his knee.
“I mean, it’s kind of nice. It’s almost like someone finally gets to know their secret. They don’t have to hide it any more.”
“I’m not sure they did hide it from absolutely everybody in the house, though. That’s something else I found.” He sifts through one of the piles, spreading out the pages like tarot cards, looking for someone else’s future.
Meet tonight usual place GH will come to kitchen door.
“‘GH’?”
“I think they had someone helping them. Someone they trusted. They must have done. Think about it – we know they were going to run away, and they must have been meeting up in secret while they were planning it. That can’t have been easy, not back then. There’s no way they’d have got away with it for long on their own.”
“So you think they had someone taking messages for them?”
“Isn’t that what you’d do?” Hal’s eyes move from the sheet of paper to mine, holding them.
“I don’t know. I’ve never had a secret relationship.”
Hal opens his mouth and closes it a couple of times, like a goldfish. “Nah. Me neither. Or, you know, any relationship.” His cheeks slowly work through several different shades of pink. “Umm.” He clears his throat, scratches his left ear and then apparently becomes very, very, very interested in a splinter of wood sticking up from the floor.
“No. No, right. No.”
Me neither.
But maybe…
The words I want just won’t come out. They stick to my tongue, they wind around the insides of my ribs like barbed wire.
The attic is suddenly very hot. Very, very hot and filled with the sound of drums, which I think might actually be my heart.
I try to talk over it, just in case he can hear it. “So, is this what you want to do?”
A look of pure panic crosses his face. “Sorry, what?”
Oh.
OH.
“What you want to do. In the future. For a job?” This time, the words all come out in a rush. For once, I’m quite glad.
His face relaxes. “This? You mean research, right?”
“You seem to like it. To be…kind of at home in it.” And he does. Not like he belongs in the past, exactly, more like he belongs with it. They’re comfortable with each other.
I wonder how that feels, being comfortable with the past.
“I guess. Like I said, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather when I was younger, and he didn’t exactly know what to do with a kid. So he took me to museums. Something about the past stuck. I just…like it. I like spending time with it.” He pats the nearest stack of papers.
“How come you’re not doing it at university?”
It’s a mistake – I know it as soon as I’ve said it, but I don’t know why. Everything about Hal darkens and closes up again – as though the shell that had almost dropped away has snapped shut around him again. His eyes close, and when they open again there’s someone else behind them.
“I wasn’t given the choice.” Even his voice is darker, heavier.
“To do history?”
“To go to university.”
“Oh.”
Who would get excited about being smuggled into a university history library? Someone who knew they would never get the chance to be there for real. It can’t be the money – someone like Hal Waverley doesn’t worry about money. So…why?
He reads the question in my face, and I wish, I wish, he hadn’t. But he answers anyway.
“Family business, remember?”
Only me to carry on the family name.
“Hang on, you weren’t allowed to go to university because of the hotel business?”
“Yep.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“It didn’t seem to matter either way. And the only person in my family who would have backed me up…”