Daphne by Justine Picardie Page A

and at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. OK, I'm sorry, there are a lot of librarians in this story, and libraries as well (which maybe doesn't bode so well for originality). People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries - as if the words are synonymous with boredom or timidity. But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Menabilly, July 1957
    Daphne always cherished her isolation at Menabilly, indeed, fell in love with the house for its remoteness from the first time she saw it, as a trespasser, nearly thirty years ago, when it had been derelict and uninhabited, the trees coming close to colonising its abandoned rooms, the rampant ivy strangling everything, creeping into the roof, slithering through the cracked windowpanes. Now, Menabilly was restored, brought to life again by Daphne's love and a great deal of her money; which was as it should be, she thought, given that her fortune was made by Rebecca, a story inspired by Menabilly; no, more than that, she felt, a story that belonged to Menabilly as much as it did to her. All of it was made safe, except for a crumbling, uninhabited wing where none but Daphne dared venture, for its rooms were the most shadowy of places, with no electricity to bring light to dark corners, though this part of the house seemed to possess an occasional crackling humming of its own, on a frequency that only she could hear.
    She also took care to preserve Menabilly's secrecy, along with its walls, this house that could not be seen from the road or the sea, its grey stones hidden by the contours of the land and a shroud of impenetrable forest. It was the closest place she could find to a desert island, she told her cousin, Peter Llewelyn Davies, when she moved into Menabilly at the end of 1943. 'But you will adore this house, as I do,' she wrote to Peter. 'You must come to stay, though I'm hoping the bats and rats and ghosts will keep all other visitors away.'
    She was true to her word, and kept Menabilly as an island; peaceful in her solitude; the very opposite of her father, who could not bear to be without a great gang of friends and family around him, and who could only tolerate silence when his audience held their breath during a brief, dramatic pause in the theatre, waiting for him, and the action, to move on, until its foregone conclusion, the cheers and thunderous applause . . .
    Yet for the last few days, she had been chafing at the seclusion, longing for a message from the outside world; specifically, for the arrival of a reply to her letter to Mr Symington.
    This morning, at last, the postman made his slow way up the long, curved drive from the West Lodge, and Daphne was waiting at the front door, having seen the red van from her bedroom window. Much to her relief, the delivery was of a brown paper parcel with a Yorkshire postmark, addressed to her in spidery black capital letters, and as she opened the package, pulling at the knotted string and examining the musty-smelling contents, Daphne experienced a moment of pure pleasure, such that she had not felt for a very long time. For not only did the parcel contain a rare copy of one of Branwell's stories, as well as a privately printed volume of his letters to a friend, Joseph Leyland, Mr Symington had also enclosed a very intriguing handwritten letter, partially obscured by inkblots and heavily crossed out sentences, yet hinting that there might be a mystery associated with Branwell's manuscripts. Daphne scanned the letter rapidly, still standing in the hallway, then went to her chair in the library, where she reread it, several times over, until she could make sense of Mr Symington's elaborate circumlocutions.
    And yes, he was guarded, his language as fenced and hedged as the Menabilly estate, forcing Daphne to read between the lines, and those crossings-out and