What Happened To A. T. Harris? | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: What Happened To A. T. Harris? | Previous Challenge Entry
By Linda Lawrence
06/04/20
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The words “Secondhand and Antiquarian Booksellers” above the window of a Cotswolds’ shop snagged my attention. Eagerly, I crossed the street to roam through the messy, cramped, book-stacked space. A clean hard-bound gold-embossed spine drew my attention. Pulling it from a shelf I discovered a beautifully designed book with an elaborate gilt-adorned cover. Even its title was appealing: Sunday Echoes in Weekday Hours. Seventy-five pence? Less than a dollar! I casually added it to the stack of books to take home as souvenirs from my once-in-a-lifetime trip to England—unaware it contained a mysterious puzzle and would become a treasured book.

Content to admire its antique beauty on my bookshelf, months passed before I opened the book and discovered an inscription on the flyleaf, in a spencerian hand:

Albert Theodore Harris
From his mother
December 28th 1880

Then, on the back of the dedication page, in similar handwriting:

December 31st 1883
The long long future it hath no gay dream
For naught can make it beautiful to me
Hope plants no roses by life’s stream
Or is there blossoms on life’s frost-hued tree
And fame she may bring wreaths
I heed them not
By all the world I pray to be forgot
Forgot by all and in the grave be laid

It seemed strange for a mother to write something so morbid, but I pushed that thought aside. The book was crying to be read, perhaps a puzzle to be solved.

I was immediately charmed by the quaint old-fashioned writing style and the story of a poor widow who was sending her young, beloved, only son away to boarding school.

A tender dialogue between the mother and Cecil brought a lump to my throat. She asked if he could understand why she was able to be parted from him. He wisely answered, “For my good, mother.” I gasped when I saw the word “good” heavily crossed out in pencil, and the word “death” substituted. Who was having such a strong reaction to this dialogue? It must be Mrs. Harris, the mother who gave her son this book. At the bottom of the next page was scrawled, “My boy was killed by neglect—His mother denied him and for what?” When did Mrs. Harris deface these pages? Surely not before she gave the book to her son, Albert.

Returning my attention to Cecil’s story, I discovered each chapter focused on an echo of his mother’s Sunday instruction—guiding him as he was bullied at the boarding school. He befriended another lonely boy, Jervis, a frail orphan. Cecil took Jervis home over Christmas to share in his mother’s warm and wise comfort.

Heavens! Jervis just died! Blessedly in the arms of Cecil’s mother—in a tender, sacred, comfort-filled scene. But I saw Mrs. Harris had roughly penciled something in the margin again—“November 16, 1882.” Why?

I rushed on, reading to the end of the book, wondering if there would be other pieces to this strange puzzle. On the last page, I found written in ink, in the earlier fine spencerian script:

A.T. Harris. Murdered November 16th 1882
Aged 15 years and 10 months

Murdered! Not fictional Jervis. Not fictional Cecil. But Albert Harris, the son who was given this book—murdered?

Looking back and forth at the dates, the inscriptions, and the pencil markings, I tried to fit together the pieces of this puzzle.

Here’s what I think happened. In December 1880, Albert Harris’s mother gave him this book as she sent him away to boarding school—an appropriate Christian novel, written with moral and spiritual guidance for a boy leaving home for the first time.

Two years later, while at boarding school Albert must have tragically died. His mother felt responsible for his death because she sent him there for his “good.” A year after Albert’s death, this grieving mother came across this book among his belongings—her parting gift to him. Heartbroken, she opened the book, maybe for the first time, and reading the parallels between Cecil and his mother, and Jervis and her son, she expelled her grief and sense of guilt with pencil-slashed groans.

It appears she went back to the book on the following New Year's Eve and sorrowfully wrote the heart-wrenching tear-filled poem.

But how did Albert die . . . and why? Was he truly murdered, or neglected, or did he get sick and die while at boarding school? Those are the missing pieces.

This gold-embossed treasure on my bookshelf still carries the echoes of its unresolved antiquarian cry.

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