Yule Island by Johana Gustawsson

Author:Johana Gustawsson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orenda Books
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Two hours later, I’ve found nothing that merits keeping, selling or exhibiting to anyone other than collectors of shopping lists. The papers are mostly an assortment of notes and rough drafts of letters to do with the construction of the manor house and purchases of drapery, paintings and materials, such as Italian marble and Nordic lumber, as well as changes to the plans and complaints about delays on this or that aspect of the work.

Next, I move on to the stack of cardboard folders. There are eight of them in all. After that, I’ll have two notebooks to go through, each with about a hundred pages. I expect I’ll be done by the end of the afternoon.

At lunchtime, I take a short break and head to the Centrum shopping centre across from the museum and buy a sandwich and a smoothie from Joe & The Juice. Back at the museum, sitting down again at my desk to eat, the storage room seems bright and airy, and I feel comfortable here. I finish my sandwich, then wipe my fingers and put my gloves on again to tackle the last two folders.

One of them contains two folded A3 sheets of paper. The first is a plan of the Gussmans’ land on Storholmen. It’s dated 1915, seven years before the manor was built. The plan has been divided into a grid resembling a chessboard. The squares are labelled horizontally from A to H and vertically from one to eight. The second sheet is a floor plan of all three levels of the building, dated 1920, with the architect’s name in the bottom right corner.

Two documents worth keeping, for sure.

I set them aside and move on to the next folder. This one’s thicker and contains thirty or so letters in their original envelopes. I start reading one and am surprised to find myself drawn in, keen to see the others. I smile at the sweet nothings, and at the steamy suggestions Gustav wrote to woo, and also to titillate, his wife, Harriet.

I pour the last of the coffee into my cup and remove one of my gloves to taste one of the shortbread biscuits from Brith, which I’d completely forgotten about. Then I get back to work.

The two notebooks I still have to appraise are leather-bound and embossed with the late great-grandfather’s initials: GG.

I leaf through the pages quickly to see if there’s a chronological order to them. The first one is from 1915. The second is not dated.

‘Back to the First World War it is, then,’ I say out loud.

This notebook is a real hotchpotch. Far from being about the war, there’s all sorts of domestic stuff in here, notes for speeches, scraps of poems, guest lists, names of enemies – what the heck? – and budgets. There’s no real substance to the content, but still, this might be of interest to a collector.

I’m about to close the notebook when something jumps out at me. One page contains nothing but three handwritten lines:

DECAPITATION

ALIVE?

1743

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