The Case of the Missing Bronte (23 page)

We laid out the last two pages, and stood up and surveyed our work.

‘Oh, Perry, it's awful! It makes me weep. OK — it's probably all there — but look at it!'

‘I don't know. Scientists can work wonders these days.'

‘Well, they can't work miracles. Some of it's obviously gone forever. It was difficult enough to decipher before, and no whatsitoscope is going to get it back now. That's what's so terrible. There's going to be this great book, with big gaps where they have to say that the manuscript is indecipherable. It'll be like the Elgin Marbles — all chipped about, and bits fallen off.'

‘I don't think so,' I said.

‘You're just being stupidly optimistic.'

‘Come through here,' I said, leading her into the back room. I pointed to the desk.

‘See those piles. Macklehose grabbed the biggest pile when he started the whole fracas. That's what's out there. That's the bit that's already been transcribed. Here's Miss
Boothroyd's typescript. This small pile is the rest of it. She must have been working on the top page of this when I came calling. See — there's still a page half-finished in the machine. If Emily Brontë finished the novel, then we'll have all of it.'

Jan looked at it, and swallowed. Her spirits, always a bit mercurial, rose, and she looked at me and smiled. Then she went towards the piles on the desk.

‘Oh, Perry — it's incredible. Then this is
it.'
She took up the typescript. ‘This is the novel no one living has read.'

‘Except Miss Boothroyd.'

‘I don't begrudge it her. She doesn't sound as if she's had much fun. Look at it. She's done a marvellous job.'

We peered together at the typescript. Jan sat down in the desk chair, and I swung one over from the table. We put on the desk light and gazed at the neatly typed first page.

That summer, the summer of my twenty-second year, was the last summer of my content. July and August had been hot, with blazing sun and heavy air, presaging storms that never came. The only breeze vouchsafed us fluttered listlessly over the moors, and I ranged them, gun in hand, at peace with myself and all else, except the creatures of nature that I coveted for my supper. It was in that frame of mind, one day in the first week of September, that I climbed to the top of Mendith Crag, to gaze down on the drear, blank-windowed spectacle of Lingdale Manor.

I stopped short, and clung to the solitary stripling ash that braved the winds of the crag. The windows were curtained, the chimneys were smoking. Three carts, loaded with furniture, stood in the yard, and the farm cats that had used to dispute the tenancy with each other were now scrutinizing angrily the human intruders.

The Thornleys had returned, as my father had always predicted.

Indeed, as I watched, there came round the corner from the ruined kitchen garden, a young woman, drably dressed in grey cotton, but so striking of face and bearing that I clung more tightly to the stripling ash. This was my first glimpse of Marian Thornley.

We settled down to a long night's reading.

by the same author

A LITTLE LOCAL MURDER
DEATH AND THE PRINCESS
DEATH BY SHEER TORTURE
DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE
DEATH OF A PERFECT MOTHER
DEATH OF A LITERARY WIDOW
DEATH OF A MYSTERY WRITER

Robert Barnard (1936-2013) was awarded the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Nero Wolfe Award, as well as the Agatha and Macavity awards. An eight-time Edgar nominee, he was a member of Britain's distinguished Detection Club, and, in May 2003, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. His most recent novel,
Charitable Body
, was published by Scribner in 2012.

Copyright © 1983 Robert Barnard
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Barnard, Robert.

The case of the missing Brontë.

(A Perry Trethowan novel)

I. Title. II. Series: Barnard, Robert. Perry

Trethowan novel.

PR6052.A665C3    1983    823'.914    83-3328

ISBN 0-684-17910-5

ISBN: 978-1-4767-1622-0 (eBook)

Copyright under the Berne Convention.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.