Only when they were aboard the ship and the continent was sliding from sight had Anne’s breath caught, her heart stuttered, and she understood: She would never see India again. Her father would be continents away. Her best friend, Mary, would be on the other side of the world, and they would never again walk arm in arm through the gardens, never again share notes and secrets, whispers and laughter. Anne was leaving, and she would never return.
Whatever she had imagined of Vermont during the long journey, it was nothing like the lumpy, tree-choked land around her. Mother had spoken of mountains, but these small, forested humps were disappointing compared to the towering pinnacles they had left behind. The town was dull, captured in the bottom of a valley rather than spread gloriously upon a ridge like her beloved Himalayan hill station, and its people were grim and suspicious. They all knew Mother—but her name was spat derisively from scorn-twisted lips, and the sight most presented to Anne was that of turned backs or scowling faces. Anne could have sworn she heard one woman mutter, “Witch-spawn”—so unexpected, so barbaric and provincial, she had nearly laughed. She would have laughed if she could have told Mary, if there hadn’t been thousands of miles between them and nothing but ink and paper to span it, if she hadn’t seen the pinched look on Mother’s face and felt a seasick uncertainty about what to do.
The orchard itself was the worst of all, worse than the mountains that weren’t mountains, worse than the townspeople who muttered and glared. The house was wrecked and filthy, having been claimed and abandoned by a succession of failed farmers since Mother’s childhood, full of broken furniture and cobwebs and animal nests. The whole property was an ugly, overgrown place, its trees stuck in every season of the year from barren winter to leafy high summer—sometimes all on the same tree, pink blossoms hanging from the same branches as orange autumn leaves. Everywhere, the air stank of rotting apples. Mother had mentioned building a cider house for pressing cider, and the very thought made Anne gag.
Mother was right. Anne was not happy here.
Finally Mother said, “Your father and I thought you would like—”
Anne snorted, a rough unladylike sound. “You didn’t even ask me. Father would never have sent me away if you had asked.”
Mother sighed, and when Anne glanced up she was pinching the bridge of her nose. Her eyes had been bothering her more and more lately. Even with the eyeglasses she had bought in London, she still squinted over every page by candlelight, peering close to the letters and deeds that had dragged her on this long journey, back to a home she had not seen since she was a child. She looked tired now, aged ten years rather than mere months since they had left home.
Father was supposed to join them someday, when the British Army was done with him. Anne had walked the perimeter of the Lovegood land—Mother’s land, she refused to think of it as hers—every day already, holding in her hand the magnetic compass given to her as a parting gift from Surveyor-General Waugh himself, who had tugged at her braid and chucked her chin and told her to practice her sums like a good girl. She promised herself she would fill dozens of notebooks with carefully collected angles and azimuths and calculations before Father arrived, even if she was the only one who understood what they meant. There was a school in town, but it was run by the pastor’s wife and full of dim-witted farmers’ children, all smaller than Anne by a head and not a one of them knowing the difference between a sine and a cosine if their lives depended on it.
But if Anne was expecting an apology, an admission of error from Mother, she was to be disappointed.
“I know this is not what you are accustomed to,” Mother said. She still wasn’t looking at Anne as she spoke. Her gaze was fixed instead on the ground at her feet, where white stones lay half-concealed beneath fallen leaves. “To be quite honest, I had not thought I would ever come back. When the solicitor’s letter arrived, I very nearly burned it.”
Anne had read the letter Mother was talking about. She wasn’t supposed to, but she had sneaked it from Mother’s valise while they were aboard the ship. A lawyer in America had written to Mother to tell her that her property in Vermont was the subject of extensive legal challenges, and did she wish to appoint a representative or perhaps settle the matter by offering the land for sale?
Mother had not wanted to do either. She was going to deal with the matter herself.
“You should have burned it,” Anne said miserably. “I want to go home. I hate it here.”
Fresh tears rose in her eyes; she swiped them away. There was no sense hiding them now. She wanted Mother to see how afraid she was of forgetting the sound of Father’s voice and the tickle of his whiskers against her cheek, the glimmer of sunlight on Mary’s hair and how warm her hand felt clutched in Anne’s, the way the mist crawled through the foothills to make an island of the hill station, as though the rest of the world had dropped away. There was a hole in Anne’s heart, a raw wound, and she did not want to hide it anymore.
Mother lifted her eyes from the ground to the sky. Beyond the oak’s broad branches, patchy clouds were gathering together to blot out the blue.
“My sister taught me to climb this tree,” she said.
That was the very last thing Anne had expected her to say.
“You have a sister?” she asked.
“I did, once,” Mother said. She pressed her palm against the trunk of the oak. “I had four sisters and two brothers.”
“I never knew,” Anne said quietly. Mother spoke so rarely of her family and her childhood that Anne imagined it as a forbidden puzzle box full of long-kept secrets, always locked away, hidden.
“I scarcely remember them,” Mother admitted. “For many years I had thought I’d forgotten them, but I’m remembering more, being back here. I was the youngest. The last to learn to climb. Prudence was the eldest. She was the one who taught me.”
A thousand questions trembled in Anne’s chest, but she spoke only one: “Where is she?”
Instead of answering, Mother gathered her skirts and sat beside Anne on a large woody root. She took a breath as though steeling herself to speak—but that was nonsense; Mother was sharp and clever and stern, never unsteady, never uncertain—then another, and a third, and with every inhale Anne felt her expectation grow.
“They’re gone,” said Mother. “All of them. They died when I was young. For a long time I thought—I thought it better that I never speak of them. I thought it better to never say their names. To forget them.”
Anne said nothing, too afraid of shattering the fragile stillness around them. She was holding her wooden tiger so tight her fingers trembled.
“I was wrong,” Mother said. “I was wrong to let myself forget them. I know that now. It is better, I think, to tell their story—to remember who they were. To remember who they came from. Who they could have been, if they hadn’t died that summer. It was the coldest summer anybody could remember—so cold there was frost in July, and none of the crops grew.”
Anne drew her legs to her chest again and rested her chin on her knees to listen.
8