Free Liv, Forever by Amy Talkington

time’s right. Then I can draw on you.”
    He held up the green marker, which he hadn’t had time to use. He’d pocketed it. But I was still reluctant.
    “It’s the only way to have any time together. Alone.”
    “Okay,” I said and then turned to run into my dorm, not looking back.

 
    I wanted to know more about the Wickhams, specifically how and why they’d ended up with a William Blake. So I did some research. The Wickham archives were preserved at Old Homestead and all the school records were maintained at the Headmaster’s Quarters, but there was a tiny section in the library dedicated to the early history of the school.
    Minerva Savage met Wallace Wickham in 1849. Wallace was thirty-four and Minerva twenty-four, which was already considered an old maid back then. Wallace was a lot higher on the social spectrum than Minerva, and so his family was not pleased. They’d chosen another woman for him, but Wallace loved Minerva and insisted on marrying her. Apparently it was so scandalous it even made the cover of the Sunday edition of
News of the World.
(Yes,
News of the World
was already peddling gossip way back when.) Wallace’s parents practically disowned him, but because hewas their only son, he received his inheritance when they passed anyway.
    Wallace married for true love. And truly love he did.
    Among their papers—mostly handwritten notes on curriculum and school traditions—was a series of love letters. I’d read some pretty good love letters in my sixteen years. None addressed to me of course. I’d never received anything more elaborate than a drugstore valentine from Doug Caswell in the fifth grade. But I’d read letters by Van Gogh and Beethoven and dozens of poets—yes, I know, I spent far too much time on the Internet—and these Wickham letters ranked right up there. They were written when Wallace set off to the United States in search of land for a school. They desperately missed each other and constantly referenced lines from their beloved poets. In one letter, Wallace listed numerous names of poems for Minerva to read—Lord Byron’s “She Walks In Beauty,” “Love” by Wordsworth, and Keats’s “A Thing of Beauty”—almost like an old-fashioned playlist for her.
    In the letters, Wallace and Minerva detailed their dream of creating a school steeped in nature and wilderness. A place to study the humanities—poetry, literature, the fine arts—and embrace Romanticism. A place where they could seek peace from his overbearing family. A place where society wouldn’t disdain them for their choices.
    Wallace found this land in 1859 and purchased it immediately. He wrote to Minerva, calling it “a wildlife sanctuary where ideas could be explored and minds opened.” I imagined them hiking through the nature preserve and being the first to discover the mountain and its gloriousview over the lake. I wondered if they’d kissed there or jumped off the cliff.
    And, finally—when I’d practically forgotten what I was looking for—I came across a reference to the Blake. Minerva’s father, a blacksmith, had been Blake’s neighbor when Blake moved to Felpham in Sussex. They’d become friendly. Minerva’s father had done some work for Blake, and Blake paid him with the drawing, a sketch for
Milton
, which he wrote while in Felpham. Minerva had always loved the drawing and, in one of her letters to Wallace, instructed him to “please build a small chamber for its viewing” in Old Homestead.
    Minerva died in an accident ten years after founding the school, so she never saw Wickham Hall rise to its place as one of the top preparatory schools in the country. And poor Wallace didn’t last long after her death. One article mentioned that he “continued to talk to her and to write her love letters until the day he died.” He believed that her spirit lingered and that he communed with her. Apparently he’d even attempted to take pictures of it. It was sad but somehow beautiful. The poor