“Oh, nobody, darling,” Clara says.
I open my arms anyway, because I must. Because my daughter sits there before me, and we are all that’s left. She flings the book out of her lap and rises to embrace me, and I’m not one to waste such riches. I turn my face into her curling hair and breathe in the peculiar fragrance of childhood. The same honeysuckle with which I used to wash Sophie’s hair, when she was little.
“Sweetheart,” I whisper.
“Angel,” Clara says tenderly, laying her head on my other shoulder, and we sit there on the sofa, breathing in unison, while the sun climbs into noon. While the clock chimes.
But Evelyn’s not yet three, and her nap is hours away. She wriggles back down and strikes across the floor, following God knows what trail, and Clara’s lips move against the fabric of my shoulder.
“You can’t risk her. What should we do without her? We’ve got to wait for Samuel. Samuel knows what to do. He’s a soldier, you know. They are terribly competent.”
I watch Evelyn’s head bob next to the window. She has something in her hand, a small rubber horse, which she gallops along the sill. Neigh, neigh, she trills, and then she moves to the next window, a few yards away. Below her the Indian River flows past the docks. Past the Phantom Shipping Company warehouse, reconstructed into usefulness. The white light makes her cheek glow, like the side of the moon.
“Samuel will protect us,” Clara says dreamily. “After all, he’s in love with you.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. You’ll see. Everything will be just fine, darling. What a happy family we’ll be. I’ve always wanted a happy family, where everybody loves each other.”
“Oh, Clara.”
She slides down and settles her head in my lap. Evelyn gallops her horse across the room. The tea cools before us: Clara’s thick and milky, mine clear and amber, beneath a paper-thin wedge of Maitland lemon.
“Simon’s gone, darling,” she murmurs. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”
I stroke her soft brown hair and observe the movement of my daughter’s tanned, rhythmic legs. Back and forth. My face feels stiff and hot. Inside, my brain is teeming. Charged and spinning, like an electric dynamo, throwing off sparks to the wind.
“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”
When Clara is thoroughly asleep, I slide out from beneath her and lead Evelyn to her bedroom, where we play with her rubber animals for a few minutes, until she’s immersed in her barnyard and doesn’t notice my departure.
The telephone is down the hall, in a small nook built into the wall for the purpose of discreet conversation. I take the card from my pocket and read off the exchange and number to the operator. Collect, I tell her. From Mrs. Fitzwilliam.
To my surprise, the call connects in less than a minute. But then, maybe he’s waiting for me to find him.
“Mrs. Fitzwilliam,” he says, in his urgent American voice, like the passing of velvet over stone. “What can I do for you?”
Chapter 26
Cornwall, England, April 1919
My last clear memory of my mother came a week before she died. She was a little more herself that day, for whatever reason, and in the absence of either gloom or mania we baked a cake together in the large kitchen on Field Point Road. She wore a yellow dress the color of primroses and a white pinafore apron. Like me, she was tall and long-boned, but she had Sophie’s face, or rather Sophie has hers: large, soulful eyes and honey hair, which she had pinned in a loose and graceful knot on the top of her head. She was also several months gone with child, and her figure exuded that luscious, rounded quality of an expectant mother. I thought she looked beautiful. I remember I couldn’t wait for the baby to be born. Another sister. I could almost picture her, like an infant doll.
My mother wasn’t all that experienced in the kitchen, and the cake was a simple one: white layers alternating with lemon curd. She didn’t want to use the lemon curd that our kitchen maid had already cooked and put in jars for the winter, so we created our own out of fresh Florida lemons and sugar. When it was finished, I stuck my finger in the bowl and tasted it, and it was awful, not nearly as good as Charlotte’s, grainy and sour, and I puckered my lips in disgust. What’s wrong, darling? Mama asked, and I said, without thinking, It’s not as nice as Charlotte’s lemon curd.
In that instant, the rare, hopeful radiance of her expression turned dark, and I realized the awfulness of my mistake. I stammered something out, some kind of mitigation, but she was already reaching for the bowl, already lifting it high above her head and hurling it to the polished wooden floor.
I remember how the sticky yellow curd splattered everywhere, studded with tiny shards of porcelain. I remember how Charlotte came running into the room, her face a picture of shock, and how Mama picked up a rag from the sink and threw it into Charlotte’s chest. Clean up this mess! she shouted. I can hear those words now, and the exact tone in which she said them. I can still feel the misery that bore down on my ribs, because it was my fault. My fault for saying such a thing, when I knew better. Knew better than to suggest that Charlotte, of all people, held any sort of advantage over my mother.
Charlotte picked up the rag, of course, and silently cleaned the floor of the lemon curd my mother and I had made together. What else could she do? She was only a servant. A week later, my mother was dead, and it turned out that the baby she had been expecting was not my sister after all, but a brother.
And to this day, I’m really not sure which loss hurt me the most, in that terrible time after Sophie found her body on the kitchen floor, covered with blood: my mother or the sister I had imagined, who never really existed.