Writer's Life by Eric Brown

Author:Eric Brown [Brown, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: infinity plus
Published: 2001-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

~

I know there is more to this reality than we perceive with our strictly limited senses; we are like new-born babies who have yet to acquire polychromatic vision, and see the world only in black and white. Beyond our conditioned purview of the world are wonders of which we cannot even dream...

From the novel Seasons of Wonder by Vaughan Edwards.

~

The return journey seemed to pass in no time at all, my thoughts full of the Hall's strange history, the two reclusive writers separated by years and yet so obviously connected by a similarity of the soul.

It was almost eight by the time I arrived home. Mina was not due back until ten, so I fixed myself a quick meal and settled beside the fire with the books I had brought from the White Lion.

I scanned the first of the Cunningham-Prices, The White Lodge, a story of a country house and its inhabitants over the course of thirty years. It had the unmistakable feel of something that Vaughan Edwards might have written, a haunting, elegiac quality, a sympathy for the characters, that was familiar from the modern writer's work... I had another seven of Edwards' books yet to read—it was quite possible that among the books I had taken from Highdale there would be one that borrowed, as I thought of it, from The White Lodge.

I was still reading when Mina arrived home. She made herself a cup of tea and collapsed with a sigh on the sofa next to me. She frowned at the pile of novels on the coffee table. "So the day was a success?"

"And that's not all," I said. I told her about my visit to the Hall and the conversation with Giles.

"Strange, or what?" I said.

She cupped her mug in both hands and sipped, eyeing me over the horizon of the rim. I could almost hear her mind working, practical as ever. "What's so strange about it?"

I enumerated the strange points on my fingers. "Cunningham-Price, a reclusive writer. The mysterious explosion. Cunningham-Price's unconfirmed death in the Great

War. The ghost-"

Mina snorted at this. "You've only the word of some cowboy builder about that!"

I shrugged. "Nevertheless." I held up my fingers. "Vaughan Edwards, reclusive writer. He buys the place where his literary mentor lived and wrote. He uses the Victorian writer's novels as a starting point of his own-"

"So you admit he was a plagiarist?"

"Not in so many words."

"But you're still going to buy me that Thai meal?"

"Very well. Will you stop interrupting?" I pulled back my thumb. "Then Vaughan Edwards goes and disappears in mysterious circumstances."

Mina sighed. "Sometimes I wonder about you, Daniel. What's so strange? So Cunningham was a reclusive writer—so were you before you met me!"

"That's not fair."

"The explosion—your builder chap explained that. And then Cunningham died in the war, along with millions of others. Vaughan Edwards comes along, buys the house of his hero, copies his novels, goes out for a walk one day and falls down the hillside, his body buried in undergrowth or snagged at the bottom of the river.

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