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“Maybe there’s one final secret I haven’t told you.”

Her mind reeling in disbelief, Iris gazed back at the letter. The salutation scrawled at the top in Charlotte’s hand read:

Dear Mr. Saltonstall.

28

Iris’ heart was somewhere in her throat as she scanned the letter. “You knew Charlotte Brontë?”

“We were pen pals,” Blair clarified. “We never met in person.”

The letter was bittersweet. In it, Charlotte expressed her sorrow at her siblings’ deaths, conveying her despair that she was the only child her father had left, and how inadequate of a daughter she believed she was. She wrote about how difficult her writing journey had been of late, how she often felt too unwell—sometimes in spirit and other times in body—to meet the deadlines outlined by her publisher.

Iris’ gaze fell on a passage in the lower half of the letter, where Charlotte thanked her correspondent for sharing his true name with her and admitted that she used a pseudonym as well. Realization dawning, Iris peered more closely at the previous envelopes addressed to Mr. Hailstone and realized with a jolt that they had been sent to the Saltonstalls’ home address.

Blair was kneeling by the bookshelf when Iris next spoke. “Blair. Are you Theodore Hailstone?”

In lieu of an answer, he slid four more books from his shelves and placed them on the wood floor next to her, before returning to retrieve a second pile. He stacked them neatly beside the first, twisting his ring around his finger as he met her incredulous stare.

“I was at first.” He motioned to the original stack of novels as he sat by her side. “In the 1900’s, I was Oliver Brunty. Most recently, I’ve written under the name of Andrew Rhys.”

Iris set the letters aside and knelt on the floor. Slowly, she began to examine each book. Some of the Oliver Brunty novels were upwards of five hundred pages long, and many of the later ones had New York Times Bestselling Author printed across the top. The most recent Andrew Rhys book was from 2017.

She shook her head in amazement as she read some of the author blurbs near the front of his most recent book, Silent Words, praised for its “lyrical prose” and the author’s “wisdom beyond his years.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

Blair shrugged. “When you asked what I did with my time here, I told you I wrote.”

She rolled her eyes. “I thought you meant, like, in your journal or something.”

“I had a lot of time, Iris.”

“I know. It’s just, you were friends with Charlotte Brontë! Did you know any other authors?”

He shook his head.

“Still, that’s insane.” Iris sat on the bed again, thumbing through one of his Oliver Brunty books from the 1920’s.

“The name Brunty was in honor of Charlotte,” said Blair. “It was her father’s original surname in Ireland. We were friends in our way, Charlotte and I. She was one of the few friends I’ve had in my life.”

“But you’d never read Jane Eyre until this year?” Iris asked, setting his book back on the pile and picking up the stack of letters again. She unfolded one that had been nestled near the bottom, a small tulip drawn in ink on the back of the envelope.

“My mother wouldn’t allow me to read her books. She didn’t want to encourage our friendship. She never even wanted me to write, but I wore her down eventually.”

“Why not?”

He flinched. “She thought it would be too upsetting for me. Like, if I delved too deep into my emotions, maybe it would trigger…”

“And did it?”

“No. So she let me write and seek publication for my books. But she didn’t approve of my friendship with Charlotte. I think she was afraid I would tell her what I was, but I would never have done that. You and Gabriel are the only people outside of my family who I’ve ever told.”

Moisture gathered behind Iris’ lashes as she read Charlotte’s final letter to him, dated 1854. She could sense the pain in the author’s words as she recounted feeling as though her life no longer belonged to her now that she was married. Charlotte’s husband always kept her busy with things he thought she should be doing; apparently writing wasn’t one of them. Conversely, she wrote that her husband was a good, patient man. Somehow, Iris didn’t believe her. What kind of a partner would keep their spouse from engaging in what brought them the most joy?

Before signing off, Charlotte expressed that she hoped Blair would find similar happiness one day. As with the letter in which she’d confessed to using a pseudonym, the note was signed simply CB. Iris trailed a light finger over Charlotte’s words, wishing she could have read some of Blair’s replies.

“Has anyone else seen these?” Iris asked, carefully organizing the envelopes back into a neat pile. “Do historians know they exist?”