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By way of introduction, he told this woman, whom he addressed formally as Mrs. Flanders, all about his reasons for taking this train into Cambridge, about his new position at Greenwood Manor—“Do you know it?”—and his barely contained anticipation for exploring the city. He pointed to the suitcases he’d stowed above their heads.
“Do you always travel alone?”
“No. This is possibly my greatest venture,” he said, and felt his mouth break into a smile. “I feel as though I’m stepping into a great novel.” He waved his copy of his beloved Brontë book. The text that brought him the most comfort, that had the greatest effect on him—always prompting his thoughts like a ghost, telling him that he could be who he was, dress the way he wanted. The world as he knew it was wrecked—the sneers in the street whenever he walked past, the state of his country, the foul air he breathed—but the poor, obscure, plain, and little heroine got there in the end, and this was the start of his own story.
Mrs. Flanders congratulated him on his move and his starting up at the university: “It’s so difficult to get into!” He chose not to correct her mistake and instead allowed her to think of him as some high achiever. This warmed his insides like a hot water bottle. Mrs. Flanders spoke for the remainder of their journeyabout her son “Emmanuel—El—Ellie,” who she said had been a student at Oxford and who was “just like him.” He noticed the way she looked at him, and then outside the window beyond, whenever she said her child’s name. “But that was all such a long time ago.”
When they’d reached their destination and exited the carriage, he appreciated the cold air biting his face. The rain beat down on the overhead structure, and after walking through the barriers, Mrs. Flanders linked herself onto his arm like a limpet, steering him to the bay from which she would catch her bus home. She insisted on his having her telephone number, and before he could ask her to input it into his mobile, she ripped a page from her notebook, held it close to her bag to save it from getting wet, and penciled down an address to which she insisted he pay a visit once he was settled. After helping her aboard the bus and waving goodbye as it pulled onto the road, he tapped her address and number into his phone.
Swallowing great gulps of air, he took in this new life. He’d thought perhaps someone related to his employer might have met him at the station and held up a card with his name, by the taxi rank. Looking anxiously around but finding nobody, he walked across the road to the pickup point and thought how gratuitous it was, his decision to splash out on the luxury of a taxi ride, for he was already soaked through; and by the time a car had come to collect him, the probability of making a good first impression had become all the more unlikely.
2
THE DRIVER DIDN’T HELPBron with his bags. He’d allowed himself to bring only two: a wheeled travel case and a large vintage bag. It wasn’t a fine suitcase of hard leather where initials would ascribe the possession to himself, but something more like a carpet bag.
The car turned the corner of Station Road. Siri was on loudspeaker, directing their switch onto Hills Road, where he saw the Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs before the car twisted into Fen Causeway. The drive through Cambridge was only half the scenic, sprawling landscape he’d imagined it would be: no bustling students and only a few recognizably medieval landmarks so far this side of town. Over there were the long stretches of countryside, but where were the cows grazing the field, or the university spires said to dominate the sky? If he was honest, it didn’t look that much different from the surroundings at St. Mary’s. Less dingy, perhaps. Still, he took in the streets and welcomed this lingering yet unfamiliar environment, knowing it to be the perfect rite of passage for any classic literary figure, and he the protagonist.
While he’d been not so much left on a relative’s doorstep at birth—no wicker basket and no cotton blanket to which he could cling in remembrance of a time unremembered—his lifehad led him onto a similar path to those who had such beginnings. After the sudden death of his parents when he was three (the details of which he’d never been explicitly told but which he’d pieced together over the years, to involve “speeding” and a “midnight jaunt”), his aunt, who’d been in no position to take on another child, did so with resentment. She shunned him, his cousins tolerated him, and it was in the pages of literary classics that he found comfort, sneaking the books off his aunt’s shelves. Ashamed of the effeminacy that appeared more prominently as he grew, he was sent off to St. Mary’s at the earliest convenience—aged seven—his small inheritance expended to cover the annual fees. Little did his aunt know that she was merely depositing him into an environment that would only accelerate his education in the desires and practices she thought so unmanly.
For rumors abounded at St. Marys’ school, of boys sneaking out, the things they would get up to at night: in the woods; in the broom cupboard at the end of the fourth floor; in the left-wing bathroom stall behind the science lab, where the lightbulb flickered after its being turned on; in beds pushed together when the others feigned sleep. This lack of discretion was tolerated in most circles, should they conform to the way of the world. But come Monday morning, these same lads would enact their tried-and-true method of averting attention away from themselves by reverting to everybody’s favorite topic: anything from the flower that Bron adorned in his hair to the fact that he hid a wand under his pillow to make his lashes longer. So while dirty gossip emerged from the woods beyond the school ground’s north lawn, it was he who was marked for being entirely of a different kind. Whom one was attracted to was no longer vilified; it was his femininity they reviled—that is, when they weren’t trying to court or coerce him into playing the girl’s part in their nighttime rendezvous, because they always called him pretty in the dark.
Now he looked at the rearview mirror, where he could see the driver’s puzzled reflection. Bron glanced away, focusing instead on the large Edwardian houses hidden behind great gates and fullhedges, reading each of their names on the affixed plaques as the car pressed past. Soon, they turned into a side street—feeling the bumps of the cobblestones under the tires—and the tree-lined street darkened their path.
Then the engine stopped.This couldn’t be it.No houses loomed behind the wall that stretched ahead of them, and the pathway didn’t lead into any driveway. Had they broken down? Confused, Bron said to the driver, “Everything alright?”
The man turned his head to the back seat, nodded, and pointed for him to open the door. Bron stepped onto the empty street. The signal on his phone showed one bar. “But where are we?”
The man replied, “We are here.”
When the engine revved, he feared the driver would thieve away with his things still inside. He tapped on the car’s bonnet until it halted. Muttering something about paintwork, the driver jumped out of the car to finally assist him, lifting his cases out in a single swoop before setting them aside on the street.
Bron asked him which way he ought to go. The driver muttered, “That way,” then slammed the door shut, made a U-turn in the narrow street, and sped away.
Bron started walking northward, in the general way of the driver’s waving hand. The little arrow on his phone vaguely mapped a similar path, and when the mobile app told him to, he turned into an alley, where a row of plastic wheelie bins had been left disarrayed. He walked through a slightly rusted gate knocked off its hinge and into a grove-like expanse dense with trees, hyssop, and sage. He bent his head to avoid the low-hanging branches, and continued onward, hoping the path would wind into some adjacent street. Instead, the ground filtered into a graveled surface, and his route was barred by a wrought-iron gateway. A stone plaque was affixed beside the door; though choked by moss and worn by time, it read “Greenwood.”
Before accepting the job, he’d searched Greenwood Manor’s Wikipedia page to find it had quite a history, as country housesoften do. Once described as a fortified medieval hall, it was sold to the duke and duchess of somewhere or other—he couldn’t quite remember—in the early 1710s, when its new owner decided to pull and re-erect parts, in favor of a more glamorous style, before running out of money. After lying dormant for almost two centuries, the manor had been purchased by the Edwards family in 1948, after the war, originally as a plot of some thirty acres, before sections were inevitably divided and sold off. It had also been the shooting location for several BBC productions, including an Agatha Christie drama and an episode ofBritain’s Historic Homes.
Behind the gated wall stood a magnificent structure that to Bron seemed almost a natural part of the environment, to have grown there. The tresses of vine grew stories high, and the gray brick—from which castles were surely made—held twelve-paneled bay windows sweeping the length of its facades, reflecting the sea of green lawn that encircled it. Fields rolled along in the background, and a cobbled pathway, lined with cedar trees, led from the gate to the house and spread in tendrils around all sides of the building. A small fountain burbled in the middle of the manicured expanse, water spouting upward into the sky.
Bron rang the buzzer—unsure which button to press, he decided on the porter’s lodge—and a crackling voice spitting from the wedge of the speaker asked for his name and whom he was here to see. He was let through easily enough, and approaching the first pillared porch, he lifted the horse-shaped knocker and waited two minutes before deciding to ring the doorbell.
It was a man who came to the door, in a silken blue dressing gown, who removed a pipe from his mouth and gave him the most quizzical look, eyebrows arched and white and wispy. “Yes?”
“I’m Brontë Ellis, sir. I’m looking for a Mr. Edwards, who should be expecting me?”
“House one,” he said flatly, eyes trailing him up and down. “This is apartment five.” He shut the door.
Bron made his way around the building, past coppery dahlias and a patch of bright blue delphinium and orange chrysanthemums, and climbed the stone steps that led onto yet another cobbled lane, another stretch of wall. A door signaled number four, and then apartment two—the Hansons, from where he heard another fountain playing, much louder than the first; and down the long, straight path like a brushstroke, a small black gate lay ahead.
Along the balustrades, a door was tucked beneath a stony alcove. He only needed to knock once before it started to edge open of its own accord. Bron didn’t exactly leap backward, but was hesitant to step forward as the gap continued to widen, almost in stop-motion. A small pair of hands appeared at the edge of the frame, and soon emerged the form of a little girl, who pressed her body against the door to help it open.
“Sorry about that. This old thing always jams,” she said, and offered a half-curtsy. “Bonjour!”
“Hello,” he said back.
“Are you alright there? You look a little … scared.”
“I’m fine,” he said, darting his gaze away from the girl’s incredulous stare.
