Page 149 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
‘Dead serious!’ she assured me.
We’d arrived at the attics by then, the three large ones now cleared and the things Honey wanted to keep neatly stacked against the walls.
We made our way through them to the small, packed room and surveyed it from the doorway without a lot of expectation.
‘The things in here look a lot more recent than in the other rooms. I suspect Hugo used it to shove odds and ends in, when he was trying to find more family papers,’ Honey said. ‘It was probably empty before that, because those steps down and the sharp bend in the corridor would make getting anything large or heavy in here difficult.’
‘I can see a couple of big cabin trunks stacked up on each other, right at the back,’ said Simon.
‘Yes, but those are cumbersome rather than really heavy,’ she said.
We moved three tea chests of old books into the first attic, where Pearl could look through them more comfortably, while we sorted the rest out … starting with a hideous hat stand constructed out of antlers.
‘One for Arthur’s Cave,’ said Honey, as we dragged it out and Thom and Simon manoeuvred it up the steps.
Except for a couple of nice oil lamps, we found nothing terribly interesting, and any slight lingering hope that we’d find any more of Rosa-May’s belongings faded and died.
Soon, only the two huge cabin trunks were left against the furthest wall.
Pearl rejoined us, a smudge of dust across one cheek, and said she had one small box of books to take back to the shop and check out further, but the rest were all things like collections of sermons, which no one would want.
‘Arthur will just have to take them away, then,’ Honey said. ‘I’ll let him have that old mirror with the good frame for free.’
‘Yeah, but it makes anyone reflected in it look as if they’ve got leprosy,’ Simon pointed out.
‘I think mirrors can be re-silvered,’ Thom suggested. ‘Right, shall we get on? Simon, help me lift down the trunk stacked on top.’
When opened, it contained only a pair of huge green velvet curtains, sun-faded along the folds. The trunk that had been beneath, however, was heavier when they pulled it into the middle of the room.
The weight was explained when they lifted the lid to reveal that a smaller and much older-looking chest of dark wood had been put inside.
On top lay a fat, brown manila envelope, on which had been written boldly in black ink: ‘Open this, before you look inside the chest.’
‘That’s Hugo’s handwriting!’ exclaimed Honey, pouncing on it. ‘How curious!’
She tore it open and took out a sheet of paper. With it came a small book with a brown calfskin cover.
‘But … that looks just like Rosa-May’s journal!’ I cried. ‘Honey, could Hugo have found the missing second volume?’
‘He must have,’ she said, opening it. ‘This is her writing – but how odd of Uncle Hugo to hide it away like this!’
She turned a few more pages. ‘She doesn’t seem to have written many more entries and the light in here is too bad to make out her tiny handwriting. Let’s see what Hugo has to say.’
She unfolded the paper, scanned it, then said, ‘Listen to this.’
To whoever finds this – quite possibly my great-niece Honey Fairford, since I’m sure the clutter of the attic will be anathema to her and she won’t rest until it is all cleared out.
I discovered the old wooden chest some years ago, while searching the attics for more family documents, and there seemed to me to be no point in stirring up old secrets that reflected badly on the family. So in the end, after removing the enclosed journal, and locking the chest, I had it placed inside in this cabin trunk and stored here with the other old luggage.
The thought of it has occasionally weighed on my conscience, but I leave it to whichever descendant discovers it to decide what course to take.
Hugo Fairford
Even before Thom and Simon had lifted the old wooden chest out and prised open the lid, I think we all had a foreboding of what we’d find inside.
Honey lifted out a small leather valise and there, curled underneath it, was the pathetically tiny body – withered and mummified to little more than a skeleton. The uppermost side of the small skull was dented in and broken …
‘Well, I think we can now have a fair guess at what happened to Rosa-May,’ said Honey, and even she sounded shaken.
