The strange thing was, when the door of the classroom opened and the headmistress motioned to my teacher, I knew what was wrong. I knew it was something to do with my mother, something terrible. I knew in my heart long before I accepted the fact of her murder in my head. It fit, that was all. All the wrongnesses in the house, one on top of the other. They were all leading to this.
My father was waiting in the headmistress’s little office. He had forgotten to take off his hat. I remember how his hands shook, how he smelled strangely metallic: a scent I now recognize as that of blood. Blood, and the strong lye soap that had washed it away. He took me by the hand and led me outside. We had an electric Columbia runabout in those days, the kind that used a tiller instead of a steering wheel. He helped me inside, into the seat next to his, and on the way home he told me what had happened. That Charlotte had found Sophie in the kitchen with my mother, and my mother was dead. He didn’t give me any details; I discovered those later. How she had been stabbed violently, and Sophie was soaked with her blood. Father just told me to be careful with Sophie, to hold her close and to protect her, because of what she had seen.
She probably won’t remember anything, Father said, because she’s so young. At least, I hope she won’t.
I think he wiped away a tear, though at the time I thought he was only adjusting his spectacles to see the road.
When we arrived home, there were policemen everywhere, wandering about my house as if it were a shop or a hotel, as if it belonged to them. Father took me upstairs—through the front of the house, so I wouldn’t see the kitchen—and told me to pack my things. We were going away. We couldn’t stay here, not after what had happened.
I did as he asked. I packed my things, one by one, all by myself. I packed everything, because I knew, even then, that I wouldn’t be returning to this bedroom, to this house, for the rest of my life. I knew, without being told, without thinking through any of the details, or resorting to any kind of human logic, that our happy days were past. That the night had come.
That I had only myself to rely on, in this unknown world that now lay before me.
Back in the cottage, I packed my few things with military precision. I poured all my concentration into the knife-edge sharpness of my folds, the squareness of the piles in my small valise. Hairbrush, cold cream, soap. Enamel writing case, containing pens and notepaper. I put on my coat and hat and gloves and opened the cottage door.
Samuel sat on the bench outside. He stood and removed his woolen cap. “I’ll drive you to the railway station in Truro, if you like. It’s a damned long walk to Port Isaac, and the ’bus doesn’t run but once a day.”
“All right.”
“You’re welcome.” He took the valise from my fingers and set off ahead of me, down the crooked little path to the road, where a battered Daimler saloon stood on the verge. He swung the valise into the rear seat and opened the passenger door in the front.
The drive to Truro took more than an hour, and I don’t think we exchanged a single word throughout. I stared straight ahead, clutching my pocketbook on my lap between my cold fingers, while Samuel drove with one hand and smoked with the other. The same way Simon had, I thought, driving from London. How strange, the small ways in which they were alike. The large ways in which they were different.
When we arrived at the railway station, Samuel switched off the ignition and looked at my lap. “You’re still wearing your ring.”
I glanced down and saw that he was right. I wriggled off the slim gold band and handed it to him. “For driving me here,” I said.
He pushed my hand away. “Keep it. You may need the money sometime.”
“You’ll need it before I do. Anyway, I don’t want it.”
He considered this for a second or two and took the ring back.
“I can go with you to Liverpool or Southampton. Help you book passage.”
“That’s all right. I can manage myself.” I reached for the handle of the door, and when I rose and shook out my skirt and closed the door again, Samuel stood next to me, holding out the valise.
“What should I tell him?” he asked.
“Are you going to tell him anything?”
“Only if you want me to.”
You must understand that I wasn’t really thinking at this point. If you had asked me to sit down and write, in logical order, the list of reasons why I should have believed the accusations of Samuel Fitzwilliam over my faith in Simon, I couldn’t have done it. I didn’t want to try. I was afraid that I could convince myself that he was innocent, that by wishing to make him innocent I would make him so, in my head, and I would then be a prisoner to unconscious doubt, looming outside my window, for the rest of my life. I would be a prisoner to this terror that boiled at the back of my mouth, along the edges of my skull.
And I had already been a prisoner for so long.
“Can I ask, at least, where you’re going?” Samuel said when I didn’t speak. “Home to your family, I assume?”
I nearly laughed. The hysteria rose in my throat, the true madness of my situation. Out of the frying pan, I thought. Now the fire?
“I’m going to find my sister,” I said, “and then I guess we’ll see what happens next.”
By the time I landed in New York Harbor, three weeks later, I knew I was carrying Simon’s child. My menstrual courses were late, and they were never late, not even when I was sick or lying near death in a hospital bed. Only Simon’s child could interrupt the precise biological rhythms that governed me.
I hadn’t wired ahead, so I was surprised to see two familiar figures standing among the milling people on the quayside as I disembarked. Father and Sophie.
My sister darted forward and threw her arms around me. “You’re back!” she screeched, kissing each cheek over and over. The smell of honeysuckle made my eyes sting with tears.
My father’s hand closed over my own. My left hand, which now bore a slim gold ring I had purchased on the ship.
“Welcome home,” he said.
Chapter 27
Cocoa, Florida, July 24, 1922
In all the months that followed my return to New York, as the summer wore on and my waist disappeared, my father never once asked me what had happened when I was overseas. I spoke to Sophie, of course. (Sisters will confide, you know.) I spun her the loveliest tale—based in truth, as all good stories are—about how I had fallen in love inside the cab of a Model T ambulance, about how we had written to each other as war raged around us, about how my beloved had cared for me tenderly after the accident that nearly killed me. How—my goodness—he had brought me back to life! Like a saint performing a miracle.