And not without consequence. Seven weeks after returning from London, it was clear to Emmy that she was pregnant.
As Emmy vomited again and again into the toilet, and as Charlotte placed a cool cloth across the back of her neck, a terrible longing filled the emptiness that gripped her stomach. She missed her mother.
“I want my mum,” Emmy rasped to Charlotte, between heaves.
Charlotte leaned over her and kissed the back of Emmy’s head. “I know you do.”
Through all the years of the war, Emmy had awakened each day as Isabel Crofton. But she was still Annie Downtree’s daughter. Mum had stood where she was now: alone, pregnant, and reeling from choices made in weakness. Mum alone knew where to find the strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other despite the stares, the empty days, and the lonely nights.
Mum knew how to survive in a world without dreams.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Emmy finally whispered.
Charlotte sought Emmy’s gaze, maneuvering her face close to Emmy’s. “Tell Mac. He loves you. I’ve known it all along. And I think you love him, too. This child is as much his as it is yours.”
Emmy blinked back threatening tears. “But . . . Mac is American. When the war is over, he will go back to America.”
Charlotte looked down and nodded. “I know.”
“You . . . would want me to go? Leave here?” Emmy could hardly form the words. Thistle House had been her refuge, a sanctuary after the war had taken everything from her.
“We’re not talking about what I want.” Charlotte reached for Emmy’s hand. “This is about your life, not mine. You need to make your way back into the world, Isabel. You’ve a place in it. You need to find what it is. I know you’ve said you won’t ever sketch another bridal gown, and maybe you won’t, but you were meant to do something with your life. I can’t believe it’s to sit in Thistle House and watch time pass you by.”
“But I feel . . . safe here,” Emmy said, scarcely breathing.
“Safe is not the same thing as happy. Trust me on this, Isabel.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“I won’t know what to do with myself in America,” Emmy finally said.
Charlotte smiled. “You will build a life with the man you love and the child you created. You’ll figure out the rest. That’s what we all have to do.”
Another stretch of silence passed as Emmy contemplated a future with the only man she could ever see herself loving. It seemed too grand a thing to imagine; it had been too grand for Mum.
Mum.
If she did this, this was where Annie Downtree’s daughter and Eloise Crofton’s would part. For good.
This was where Emmeline Downtree would fade at last into nothing, just like Julia had. Like Mum had.
Charlotte got to her knees and told Emmy she was going to make some chamomile tea to settle Emmy’s stomach.
“You might consider telling Mac who you really are. I don’t think it will matter to him,” Charlotte said as she stood at the doorway.
Emmy murmured that if it didn’t matter to him, then there was no reason to tell him. Because it mattered to her. Life was about coming and going.
For Emmy, it was time to go.
*
ISABEL Crofton married Jonah MacFarland in a London courthouse on May 8, the day the Allies declared victory in Europe.
The end of hostilities.
The newlyweds left for America with Isabel’s brand-new passport on a foggy morning in July after a tearful, long weekend at Thistle House where she said her farewells. The morning of their departure, Isabel found herself as she had been the day she left London after Mac had saved her life, desperate to be far from it. She felt the stitching of any last ties to her old life break away as London fell behind her. In her suitcase in the belly of the ship, she carried a small stack of maternity clothes, her watercolor brushes, her birth certificate, a felt box of trinkets, a book of fairy tales.
And a hammer.
She would not see England again.
The hammer would remind her, lest she forget, that she had made a transaction when she became Isabel.
Leaving England forever meant she could leave Emmeline Downtree and her terrible sorrows there with it.
It seemed a reasonable exchange.