“Of course you are. None of this would’ve mattered if underneath that name you stole, you weren’t who you’ve always been.”
Isabel breaks into a wide smile. She looks like a proud parent whose child has figured something out.
“Right you are, Kendra. Right you are. But you can already guess I have been slow to realize what should have been clear to me the second I saw Julia again.” She cocks her head to one side and I can see that she is remembering the moment she saw her sister after nearly two decades. I wait for her to tell me what it was like. A few moments later, she does.
“Mac led her into this room. I was sitting right here where I am now. She was so tall and beautiful. Taller than me, and looking so much like Mum, so very much like Mum. She wore a dress of pink with a ruby pendant at her neck. Had I passed her in the street and not seen her face, I might not have known her. But her eyes were locked on mine, and they were Julia’s eyes. She ran into my arms as though no time had passed, as though she were simply rising from the sofa where I had left her, and there had been no war, no slow waltz of time, no silent years of longing. She was a little girl inside a grown woman’s body, putting her arms around my neck, and saying the name Mum had given me—Emmy—over and over.”
Isabel is looking past me, into that long-ago moment. A tear is slipping down my cheek and I finger it away.
“That was the happiest day of my life, Kendra. I did not think I would ever live to see the heaviness of losing Julia lifted from me.”
I wait for her to tell me more. Several seconds later she continues.
“I was Emmy to her, not Isabel, but I really didn’t know how to be Emmy to anyone else. Julia seemed to understand that I became Isabel so that I might find her and I stayed Isabel so that I would be able to live with myself when finding her proved impossible. She told me she had her own ways of coping with her mistakes and then she handed me the journal she had written to me.”
Isabel raises her gaze to meet mine. “The journal answered many questions for me, and yet it raised new ones. If only I had gone to Mrs. Billingsley for help or answered the door when her butler came to the flat, either one would have told me that Thea had taken Julia to Neville’s parents, and wouldn’t I have been able to find her from the start? Or, if I had remembered Mum had gotten that letter from Neville’s parents, wouldn’t I have thought to look for it in the flat after Julia disappeared? Would I have figured out that since the letter was missing, someone had taken it? Or if I had been honest with Gwen from the start about who I really was, wouldn’t she have known that the woman who came to Thistle House inquiring about an old box of bridal sketches was the sister that I had lost? Or if I had never tried to sneak away with those sketches in the first place, wouldn’t Mum have lived?”
I see her terrible logic, but I also see that a larger force had been at work. “There was a war,” I venture.
She nods slowly. “Yes. Strangely enough, war has a way of absolving us of the mistakes we make while in its dreadful shadow, but it keeps this absolution a secret. I didn’t realize I was playing my cards against a cruel opponent that had its own cards to play.”
We are quiet for a moment “So you remained Isabel, then,” I say. “Even after you and Julia were reunited.”
Isabel nods. “To all but family, yes. What is a name, really, but letters on a page, or a sound on the tongue? To the rest of the world, I was Isabel MacFarland, wife of the American writer, painter of the Umbrella Girls, half sister to a woman named Julia Waverly Massey.”
“Is Julia here today?” I finally ask, even though somehow I can already sense she is not.
“No.”
The word has never sounded more final to me.
Isabel continues as she strokes the cover of the journal. “Her son and daughter-in-law are here from York, and their three adult children and a great-granddaughter. Simon passed away five years ago. He married a lovely woman from Leeds many years after Julia was taken from us, but we stayed close, he and I. Losing her was very hard on Simon. He knew that I understood more than anyone what that loss felt like.”
A sliver of silence rests between us. At last I ask, “What happened to her?”
“Breast cancer.”
“I am so sorry.”
She nods once, accepting my meager condolences, and then turns her gaze to the Umbrella Girl just to her right. “You know, I tossed away twenty years of Julia’s life, but I was given them back—all of them. She died twenty years after we found each other again. They were very happy years, Kendra. Happier than I could have imagined. Much was restored to me.”
I am suddenly reminded of the letter in the bedside table that Charlotte had mentioned. I ask her if she wants me to know what it said.
“It was from my half brother, Colin. He had traced me to Charlotte’s in 1956 and written to her to see if I might possibly be willing to communicate with him. Start fresh. His mother had died and I was the only family he had. Imagine that.”
“And did you?”
She smiles, sniffs the air, and points to the open window. “Tell me, do you see a stooped old man sitting by the hydrangeas, smoking a pipe?”
I rise from the sofa, cross to the window, and peer out. In addition to party streamers, children on the lawn, and rows of fruit trees, I see on the terrace an elderly man puffing on a pipe. I catch a whiff of fruity tobacco. “I see him.”
“That’s my brother, Colin Thorne. Half of the children on the lawn are his great-grandchildren, and their parents are my nieces and nephews.”
“Was it hard to forgive Colin for what happened that day you were at your father’s house?” I ask, and then I wish I hadn’t. It was far too personal a question.
“Colin had done nothing that required my forgiveness. I’m the one who chose to believe he wanted me to be paid off so that I would leave the Thornes alone.”
“And that’s not what he wanted?”
“What he wanted was a relationship with his half sister. He thought the inheritance that our father had left me would be the overture to begin having it. I never gave him a chance.”
“But then you did.”
“Again, I think Providence was prodding me to mend the brokenness where I could. When I arrived at Thistle House in 1958, the place was a tumbledown mess, slipping into ruin and in need of extensive repairs that I couldn’t afford to make. Before I even contacted Colin, I was thinking I would have to sell the place. When I agreed to meet him in Oxford for tea—on the very day Julia came to the house, no less—he handed me the bankbook for what he had done with my original inheritance. It had more than quadrupled in value. And he insisted I take it. Not as payment for anything I had done or hadn’t done, but because our father had given it to me.
“That money allowed me to make the needed repairs to Thistle House and, strangely enough, gave Mac and me a haven in which to reconnect with each other. Mac came to realize that part of the reason I wanted to remain Isabel to the outside world was because of him—because she was the woman he loved. He was also a forgiving man and always had been. So while he was ready to love me as Emmy, he saw how much a stranger Emmy was to me. And as I said a few moments ago, I saw no compelling reason to resurrect her. Graham Dabney had died some years earlier and his widow had remarried. They were the only family Eloise Crofton had and who could’ve possibly appeared out of the blue to challenge my maiden name, which I didn’t even use anymore. Mac was able to write a whole new series of books here, and we ended up selling our house in Saint Paul and making Thistle House our permanent home. Mac and Colin became very good friends. I think each having the other to talk to was good for them. They both knew who I had been before and I think they found a kinship because of that.”
Isabel smiles easily as a memory slips across her mind. “Reconnecting with my brother allowed me to learn who my father was. I knew his faults—who of us doesn’t have those?—but I knew nothing of his merits, if I may call them that. I don’t think he planned to seduce Mum when she was a young maid in his house. They were both starving for love and affirmation. When you are hungry for something, you often do not use your best judgment. I know that better than anyone. After Agnes died, Colin found personal papers that belonged to our father, which led him to believe Henry really did love Mum and perhaps, me, too. But Henry Thorne had been a slave to his position in society. He saw no other way to provide for me and Mum than by paying her rent, giving her money for food and clothes, and adding me to his will. Even when Mum was with Neville, my father still supported her. He wasn’t a terrible person, nor was Mum. They made choices, some good, some bad. Just like I did. And then they had to live with those choices, just as I had to live with mine. And as you will have to live with yours.”
At that moment my recorder clicks off. I’ve run the battery down to nothing. We both look at it.
“I suppose that means I’ve given you enough material for your essay,” Isabel says.
It is a comment made to make us both laugh. We do. But it also calls to attention that just as I came to this house with a goal in mind, Isabel MacFarland surely agreed to this interview for a reason of her own.
“You want me to do something for you, don’t you?” I ask. “That’s why you said yes to an interview about the war when you’ve never said yes before.”
Her gaze is tight on mine. “I do.”
A thin ribbon of silence stretches before us and then I ask her what she wants from me.
“I want you to secure one of those five spots in the London paper.”
I laugh lightly. “But that’s not up to me. I—”
“It most certainly is up to you. Write the essay as if your life depends on it. Stay up late writing and rewriting it. Make it the most compelling paper you have ever written. I very much want it in the newspaper.”
“Isabel, I can’t make my professor choose my paper. I can’t—”
Again she cuts me off.
“I wouldn’t have agreed to this chat if I didn’t think you have the ability to secure one of those spots. You’re not the only one who has been interviewing today. I have been listening to everything you say as intently as you’ve been listening to me. I have chosen you to write down my history. You are the one who will give me what I’ve wanted all my life now that I am at the end of it.”
For a moment or two I can only stare at her in confusion. I can’t resurrect her long-dead bridal gown career or her deceased sister. And I can’t give her anything in a newspaper article except perhaps the return of her real name.
But that is not what she’s wanted all her life.
She inclines her head toward me, coaxing me to remember all that she has told me from the history of her life in the short time I have spent with her. What did she always want? What did she want before she found Julia?
Before she lost Julia?
Before she sketched the first wedding gown?
Before she stood on a sunny beach with her toes in the sand and her mum at her side?
“You wanted your mother to be proud of you,” I whisper.
Isabel nods once as tears rim her eyes.
“You can give Mum the honor of having flesh and blood and a name again. I want people to know the sacrifices she made for me and Julia. Anne Louise Downtree is a forgotten soul, Kendra. She is nothing but a three-word entry in the record of the war’s dead, remembered by no one except me, her daughter, Emmeline. I don’t know that she can see me from where she is, but if she can, I want her to view me as I stand at the end of my existence. I want her to see that I understand there are no secrets to a charmed life. There is just the simple truth that you must forgive yourself for only being able to make your own choices, and no one else’s.”