Their Brilliant Careers by Ryan O'Neill

Author:Ryan O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

Deverall spent a further year in England and France, vainly searching for additional information about Wilhelmina Campbell, and at long last returned to Sydney at the end of January 2009. Ignoring the author’s attempts to meet her, she bought a rundown one-bedroom house in Petersham, a twenty-minute train ride from the library at the University of Sydney. In her new home she marshalled her work on Wilhelmina Campbell: The Looking Glass Annual she had stolen from the University of Western Australia, her precious copy of The Autumn Journey, six boxes from Vincent Degraël’s archive that his nephew had allowed her to take from Paris, and her own records, which now amounted to two thousand closely handwritten pages. Deverall spent months organising her voluminous research in preparation for writing her book on Wilhelmina Campbell. Then, disaster struck.

On the evening of 7 November 2009, Deverall returned from the university library to find her house in flames. The fire service was already there, and they prevented the hysterical Deverall from entering the burning building. Though she had transcribed most of her notes and made an electronic backup, Degraël’s work on Le Voyage d’hiver was lost, as were the only copies of The Autumn Journey and The Looking-Glass Annual containing The Summer Journey. Deverall was inconsolable. A few days later she was admitted to the Southside Clinic, a private psychiatric hospital, where she remained, undergoing treatment, for almost two years.

An investigation into the fire concluded that it had been started deliberately; kerosene had been splashed around the living room and a match used to set it alight. The police interviewed Deverall after she had been at the hospital for six months, endeavouring to find out whether she had any enemies. Regrettably, this set off an episode of persecutory delusion and paranoia in which Deverall refused to speak to any of her friends and family for over a year, convinced that someone she knew had deliberately sabotaged her research. For some months in 2010 Rachel regressed to her childhood; she became convinced that she was Trudy Tective, the sleuth she had made up when she was five years old, and that the Bearded Man, her nemesis, had concocted a diabolical master plan to steal her secret files.

The insurance company completed its own investigation in August 2010, reluctantly paying out Deverall’s policy that December. After months of therapy and many relapses, Deverall left the clinic in October 2011, still under medication for depression and anxiety. She rented a dingy apartment in Hornsby and spent her days trying to reconstruct from memory the contents of The Summer Journey and The Autumn Journey, or in the stacks at the university library, reading her way through every journal, novel and newspaper published in Australia from 1820 onwards, seeking references to Wilhelmina Campbell she might have overlooked. She subsisted on the little money she made from freelancing for a number of Australian publishers, mainly line-editing and creating indexes for scholarly texts. Though serious research was beyond her now, she was

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