And I fell in love with a boy. The years took away my love for all but the last. Never an accomplice but my fellow victim, the only one on earth who could comprehend the barest thread of what I’d lost. And I knew if I saw him even one more time, my resolve would waver. Finbarr had never seen Genevieve, or held her. He’d never learned she existed until after she was already gone. And so he might persist in his attempts to lure me away, and if I saw him even one more time, I might very well succumb.
I thought of Cornelia Armstrong’s Yue Lao. The invisible thread. But not the one between Finbarr and me. The one that connected me, still and always, to Genevieve. I could feel it like a living, tactile object, stretching out from my heart to hers. Taking me not to the Timeless Manor, but to the train station. Chilton had agreed not to prosecute me for murder. I felt safe in assuming he’d overlook auto theft as well. After all, anything I could do to win Archie back was to his benefit.
If Agatha and Archie reunited, I’d never again have access to Teddy. I needed to see her at least one more time. I needed to tell her if she ever found herself in trouble, she could find me, and I would take care of her. Whatever it took. I don’t know why I believed that would help. My mother had made me the same offer.
I love you. I sent the message telepathically, which was not something I believed was possible. But still I hoped and prayed Finbarr – however abandoned – would hear it and understand. Perhaps there was a part of me that hoped I’d return to London to find myself shut out of the Christies’ world. The failure of the plan I’d worked on single-mindedly for three years was the only chance for Finbarr and me to be together. If I had to accept its failure, then so be it. But I would never be the one to let it go.
Meanwhile, Chilton had to go on foot to the manor house – no longer timeless – to collect what Agatha had asked of him. Her typewriter, and everything she’d written in the midst of this adventure. She would never think much, in later years, of the work she did while she was away. A short story or two, and the beginnings of her novel The Mystery of the Blue Train. She always said it was the least favourite of all her books. But she published it just the same. She published everything she wrote – even the short story ‘The Edge’, which ended with my doppelganger dead at the bottom of a mountain. It appeared the following year in Pearson’s Magazine, with the ending changed so that my character was not pushed, but leaped.
Chilton had no plans to transport Agatha’s typewriter and work to Sunningdale. He would take it with him back to Brixham, so that she’d have to find him there.
‘But where’s Nan?’ Finbarr asked, when Chilton told him Agatha had been discovered.
Chilton placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. He had already given me the gift of freedom. He did not have the remaining generosity to wish for Finbarr’s romance resolved in favour of his own.
‘I’m sorry,’ Chilton said. ‘If Nan’s not back by nightfall, I don’t expect she ever will be.’
‘She’ll be back,’ Finbarr said, but he didn’t sound sure. As if to confirm this, he said, ‘If you see her, tell her I’ll be waiting in Ballycotton, ready to go anywhere in the world she likes. She can find me there when she comes to her senses.’
But alas. I never did.
A New Year
1928
YOU DON’T NEED to guess. You already know. Agatha and Archie’s reunion did not last. The urgency to continue her marriage had left Agatha. Instead, she mooned about Styles mourning the loss of the Timeless Manor. All I had to do was reappear before Archie – smiling and smiling. Agatha left, this time for good, taking Teddy with her.
But eventually she sent Teddy back to Styles. By then Archie and I were married – a diamond ring and wedding band replacing Finbarr’s Claddagh. Teddy would stay with us a full year while Agatha went off on her own, adventuring, the first of many journeys she’d take aboard the Orient Express.
Honoria brought the child to us from London. I had planned to be downstairs with Archie to greet Teddy on her arrival. But when the car pulled into the drive, I found myself overcome with emotion I didn’t want my husband to witness. I’d seen Teddy several times since returning to Archie but this would be our first extended stretch, together in a home we shared, with myself her official stepmother.
‘Are you quite all right?’ Archie asked, placing a hand at my waist. He had learned a bit about being solicitous since his first marriage.
‘Yes, I’m fine. Just the tiniest bit light-headed. I believe I’ll go upstairs and rest.’
As I crested the stairs I heard them – Honoria and Teddy, one dark and stern voice, one small and light. I walked through the hall of what was now my own home and went into the nursery, nobody here anymore to scold me for intruding. Honoria would be heading back to London. ‘I’m happy to take care of her myself,’ I’d said to Archie, when he asked me how we’d manage. ‘In fact, I’d like to.’
And I would take care of her myself, many times, in the years that followed. I would rush to her when she woke up crying from a terrible dream. I would hold her hand, my arm round her shoulders, when the doctor put stitches in her wounded knee. When she married during the Second World War, a small and hasty ceremony without even Archie in attendance, Agatha made sure to send a telegram so that I could be there, too.
There on the windowsill stood the dog Finbarr had carved for her. Sonny. I picked it up. I could hear Teddy walking quickly and purposefully down the hall. Whoever coined the phrase ‘the patter of little feet’ might be the most brilliant person in history. How the sound filled the house, the music of a child living inside it. I drew in a breath, determined that my eyes would not be full of tears when I turned towards her.
‘Nan,’ Teddy said, coming through the door of the nursery to find me with the whittled dog still in my hands. ‘I was looking for you.’
I returned Sonny to the windowsill and kneeled, putting one hand on either side of Teddy’s face, bright blue eyes staring back at me. Then I gathered her up in my arms, almost believing her hair – grown darker since I’d seen her last – smelled of the Irish Sea.
‘I was looking for you, too.’
Finbarr returned to Ballycotton, where he received word of my marriage to Archie. I sent him a letter with the news, along with a lock of Teddy’s hair. In a few years he would marry an Irish girl. It pained me to think of it and at the same time, how I did wish him happiness. How I loved him enough to wish him all the dogs, all the books, all the everything, we had planned for ourselves. He fathered three sons, and I can imagine how much he loved and enjoyed them before he died young, from a slow-burning cancer in his lungs, one last gift from the mustard gas.
The rage that lingers, when one thinks of war.
But forget all that. As readers, our minds do reach towards the longed-for conclusions, despite what we know to be true. Pretend there is no Second World War come to bombard England again, what no one should have to endure once in a lifetime, let alone twice. This story belongs to me. I hold no allegiance to history, which has never done me a single favour. Still, I can’t end my own story with Finbarr, even in my imagination, because any ending with him is an ending away from our child.
But Agatha’s story – I can end that however I like.