“Technically, you said it, but I’ll be careful.”
“Quenby—” His words faltered. They were so close to finding Brigitte. Nothing, he seemed to realize, was going to stop her from climbing over to the other side.
Lucas reached for the branch. “I’ll go first.”
But Elias scowled at him. “No man allowed.”
Maya apologized. “Some men . . . they hurt him before he left home.”
Quenby couldn’t imagine what both of these children had been through. Nor could she understand what evil drove a person to hurt an innocent child . . . or abandon one. Thankfully, it seemed these children had found safety here.
“Lucas is a good man,” she told Elias. “A kind one.”
She didn’t know if he understood, but she felt Lucas’s hand on her shoulder.
“Be careful, Quenby,” he whispered. “You might start liking me.”
She glanced back at him. “I’m afraid it’s already too late for that.”
She thought he might kiss her right there, but he eyed the tree instead. “I don’t want you to go over that wall alone.”
“I won’t be alone,” she said softly. “Elias and Maya will be with me.”
“But—” he started to protest again.
“If I don’t go now, the children will surely tell Brigitte. And she might run again.”
Lucas glanced at Elias. “Take care of her.”
Elias didn’t stop scowling, but he nodded.
“Do you have your phone?” Lucas asked.
Quenby checked her handbag. “I do.”
“If I don’t hear from you in thirty minutes, I’m phoning the police and an ambulance.”
“Give me forty-five.”
Maya and Elias pressed down on the lowest branch with the strength of their feet. Quenby secured the strap of her handbag over her shoulder and then, with Lucas’s help, pulled herself up onto the branch. She climbed the tree and then over the hedge to the other side.
When her feet touched the ground, she shouted to Lucas that she was fine. Then, turning, she glimpsed the expanse of the park in front of her. It was blooming pink, white, and magenta from a host of magnolia trees.
Maya was on one side of her, Elias on the other, and together they paraded through the color, toward a roof in the distance.
Moments later, when they emerged through the trees, Quenby felt dizzy. Standing before her was a house of buttercream.
“Just a second,” she said, bracing herself against one of the magnolias.
Surely there was more than one house in Yorkshire that used the honey-colored stone, but . . .
Was it possible her mother had visited here when she was a girl? Or even been raised here, as one of the fostered children?
Ivy covered part of the stone front, and the lawn around it was overgrown. The house had been expanded with a wing of a darker-colored stone that bustled toward a garden and greenhouse. It wasn’t derelict by any means, like the abandoned Mill House, but it could use some care.
Maya motioned her toward a side door as Elias raced away. Quenby and Maya both brushed their shoes off on a rug inside the house.
The floor of the narrow hall was wooden, rugged and unpolished, but neatly swept. Another child glanced out a door, a toy knight clutched in his hand.
“I’ll find Ms. Hannah,” Maya said, dashing down the corridor.
Quenby turned right into a formal library, paneled with knotty pine and filled floor to ceiling with the colorful spines of books. She picked one of the books from a low shelf, titled The Amber Light. It was a fairy tale, illustrated with watercolors, but she didn’t know the author. Sir Vincent was all it said.
Outside the window, divided by a dozen panes, she saw a woman sitting on a wooden bench, surrounded by five or six children, a dark-pink scooter parked at the edge of her bench.
Quenby replaced The Amber Light and moved out of the library, into the sitting room next door. There she lingered beside a set of open French doors, listening to the woman read a story.
One of the older children, standing behind the bench, turned toward Quenby. When the girl saw her, she tapped the woman’s shoulder. And the woman turned as well.
Her pale skin was wrinkled, her blue eyes clear and kind. And strong.
Quenby stepped down the flat ramp leading out of the house. “Brigitte?” she asked.
The woman looked terrified.
CHAPTER 57
_____
Children were scattered across the garden and park, playing on a swing set and climbing trees. As Quenby slid onto the bench, she removed the metal box from her handbag. The woman glanced down at the rusted box, but she didn’t say anything.
“Brigitte—” she started again.
“Please call me Bridget. There’s no joy in that old name.”
“I think it’s a beautiful name.”
“Only a handful of people know it, and most of them want to bring me harm.”
“Not me,” Quenby said. She opened the box and took out the photograph first, of Brigitte and her parents.
Bridget clutched the old picture in one hand, the other hand over her mouth. “I’d forgotten what they looked like.”
“They must have loved you very much.”