Where Old Ghosts Meet - Kate Evans [16]
She picked up the book again and began to leaf through the preface, stopping to read a pencilled line: Still I believe that in the beginning God made a world for each separate man, and in that world, which is within us, one should seek to live.Written in the margin alongside were the words, and be connected. Should seek to live and be connected. Was this what he meant?
She turned the page.
Epistola : In Carcere et Vinculis
H.M. Prison,
Reading
Dear Bosie,
After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself …
There were pages and pages to this letter written by Wilde from prison to Bosie. She knew little of Oscar Wilde and his writings but was aware that he had gone to jail for his homosexual activities. She began to read, skipping ahead, not very interested in the piece until she came to a small section near the end that had a pencilled line in the margin. She read slowly now, feeling no need for haste: Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
Had he, she wondered, simply highlighted a beautiful passage with his pencil or did he too have his own private hurt? She closed the book and laid it on top of the boxes.
When she opened the slim copy of The Playboy of the Western World, the first thing she saw was the heavy black signature of J.M. Synge scrawled across the page. She could hardly believe it, a first edition with the signature of the man himself. This couldn’t be right. She turned to the first page and began reading the opening lines of the play as if somehow that would convince her that what she was seeing was true. She read on and on as if in denial, taking in nothing of the text, just riding from page to page on a great wave of excitement.
There was a soft tap on the door and Peg stepped into the room. “You’re enjoying yourself, by the look of it.”
“Yes. Peg, this is quite an incredible collection of books. This one …” She held it up. “It’s–
“Oh yes.” Peg came forward. “I know that one. I’ve read it a few times in my day.” She sat on the end of the bed. “We used read it together, from time to time: we both loved that play. He’d read the men’s parts and I’d do the women. It was something to do on the long winter nights. We’d just read it over and over. I knew it by heart in the end, every bit of it: And myself, a girl was tempted often to go sailing the seas ’till I’d marry a Jew-Man, with ten kegs of gold, and I not knowing at all there was the like of you drawing nearer, like the stars of God. ”
She laughed as she ran off the lines. “See, I haven’t forgotten it. I still know it all. I liked that girl Pegeen; she was some bit of stuff. Same name as me.” For a while she sounded as if she might go on but then stopped herself and said, “They are all yours, Nora, that’s what he wanted. ‘If anyone comes,’ he said, ‘they are to have them. It’s a fine collection so be sure they go into the right hands and that they appreciate them.’”
She pointed to the boxes. “There’s more there and more under the bed. I had nowhere else