Bitterhall by Helen McClory (story books to read .txt) 📕

the new workplace. There are always bits that get lost in translation, jokes that won’t work, etcetera. But I had the form down. A couple of my early friends and girlfriends were the biggest role models, but none of the later ones had more than a bit to add to my repertoire. Usually, after I was into my twenties – whether partner or person of interest – their influence faded when I left their company. And I became different again, with only a little of the residue in the ways I dressed or a motion of my hands retained. Different again: another circle of being, but with these little bits of continuity, new wheel but still a wheel. So I keep – kept – myself together.

After I moved into the Minto house I read and understood the story of James Lennoxlove and sucked it wholesale into me sort of accidentally. Nobody else knew it really, not even Daniel, who had the diary – who had stolen it, and like most any thief had missed its real value. Mark MacAshfall, whose diary it was, also never knew the whole story. He knew the facts but not the story. I was the only one who got that. It gave me a wilder wonkier shape because of that. You should never get an original insight, they are the road to madness, because they might be wrong, and that reflects on you, or they might be right, and then people might be disturbed. That’s what I’d thought all my life, based on empirical evidence. Yet here I fucking am. At the end of everything.

James Lennoxlove’s diary came to Daniel from Mark who I knew previously by chance – his stepfather was a client of Cloudberry and once I had to go to Mr MacAshfall senior’s house to explain a device his company was using to collect and monitor the notes of the most profitable songs in real time. He hadn’t invented it; he played the piano to me in a room upstairs and made me taste a wine he had laid down from the year of my birth – sweet charred cork and purple musk with an entrancing death lily edge, he said. Mark came up and extracted me. We sat in the kitchen and the sun cast long golden rays between the stairs. I told him about my grandmother’s villa on the edge of a town in the Cotswolds. The electrical substation where I’d hang out with friends and drink cider and smoke roll ups had barrels of pink and white flowers planted around it to make it look prettier. It was the kind of place, I said, that looks like either everyone is about to be scenically murdered and or endlessly and in booming self-satisfaction votes Tory which amounts to the same thing – I was pretty drunk at that point. Mark laughed; a pug sneezing. Less scenic to be murdered by Tories, he said.

He told me about his family – convoluted to the point of interlooping – after a while working his way to telling me about a relative who was potentially of interest, whose diary he had just rediscovered and who he thought he might write a biography on, if anyone still read at all, he said.

‘He called himself James Lennoxlove,’ he said, ‘but nobody knows what his real surname was.’

‘Did he call himself Lennoxlove?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’

‘Then that was his real name,’ I said. Pretty smugly, if I’m honest.

‘Well, maybe. If you think of it like that. It’s just – there were no Lennoxloves recorded before him, and I mean anywhere, though he claimed he had an older illegitimate brother. He claimed also to live in Bitterhall, which is a place that does not exist. It’s possible he meant “Bitterhaugh” or “Bitterhill”, both of which might. The only thing I’ve found that’s real with Lennoxlove attached to it is Lennoxlove Hall, but the Maitland family lived there. Lennoxlove Hall is in East Lothian – not far from here. The mysterious James Lennoxlove wrote in his diary with no firm locations or even dates.’

‘Pretty weird for a diary.’

‘Mmm. It covers a small section of his life in, best guess, the early part of the nineteenth century when he was, apparently, a young man. I’ve had the book analysed by a codicologist and handwriting expert who told me that the writing marks it out as from that time, and done by someone educated, though most Scots were literate, so that narrows nothing down. The only thing she could find odd about it was the ligature of the binding, which is made of an unusual material – black silk threads of Turkish origin.’

‘Pretty interesting stuff,’ I said.

‘Ah, you don’t have to be polite – I know it’s probably not, but,’ he said, ‘that’s not the fascinating part, really. Lots of things have details lost to time. In the book, you see, he describes witnessing a murder that I have reason to believe, though no evidence as yet, that he might have in fact been involved in.’

‘A murder,’ I said.

‘I know, right?’ Mark said. He stopped briefly to bring me over a coffee. The wine with its grating heft and wordy descriptions had left me tired. I had nowhere to be while I was able to pretend to be in a meeting/liaison with a client. The house had this unbearable gentle luxuriousness to it and Mark though hideous to look at was a clever, funny bloke, and he pushed a plateful of small cakes covered in thin icing in my direction.

‘Thanks very much,’ I said, stuffing one in my mouth. The icing was lemony. From the study on the floor above I could hear Mr MacAshfall singing and bashing down operatically on the keys. ‘How do you know he was involved?’

‘Family secret,’ he said.

‘Are there skeletons in the cupboard?’

‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Either way the diary is fairly well written, full of strange tensions. But anyway I’m stuck right now with either proving