“Oh, my!” she gasped.
Simon’s hand gripped mine. “Yes. Where are Mummy and Father? I should like to present their new daughter-in-law.”
“But you can’t!”
“Why not? Have we been forbidden?”
Clara wrung her tiny hands, like a nurse in a play, and perhaps it was that—the image of Clara as nurse—that made everything fit together: the empty, yearning house and the cold and the damp and the familiar expectancy of disaster. Made understanding creep over me like twilight, even before she opened her pink mouth and told us the truth.
“No. Because they’re ill. They’re both terribly ill. I think it’s the ’flu.”
February 12, 1922
Dear Mrs. Fitzwilliam,
For so you remain, at least for the moment, and I don’t want to waste what might prove my last opportunity to address you with the name you were so good as to accept from me, three years ago.
This morning I received a letter from your father. Something of a shock, I’ll admit, as he has never troubled himself to address me before. Even more shocking that he wrote this singular epistle from inside the Fairfield County Jail in Stamford, Connecticut, and now, my dear wife, now I understand how I have been a fool. A fool to leave you alone like this, all these long months and years, and not to find you and speak with you and understand why you have shunned me like this. The terrible secret you have been harboring under your skin. The terrible courage with which you must have placed your hand in mine, in that long-ago churchyard in Kensington. And I did not understand. I thought—forgive me—I thought your trust and love in me must have been very weak indeed to fall away so easily under my brother’s persuasion. Now I know.
And we have a daughter. Her name is Evelyn, and she has my eyes and my smile. How I stare at those words. Daughter. Evelyn. It cannot be true, and yet your father assures me it is. I want to weep. I want to rage. I don’t know whether I adore you or hate you for granting me such a gift and then never telling me it existed. How could you? But then you could. You had to. You had this fear of me. You were afraid I was a monster, and that the terror of your own childhood would be revisited upon her. Excuse the poorness of this handwriting. I cannot seem to steady my distress.
I will return to your father’s letter.
It was long and full of fear: for you, Virginia, and your sister. He turns to me now, for all my faults, in the event he can no longer watch over your interests himself. Without my knowledge, he has investigated my affairs—I suppose that is no more than any father would do—and has changed, or at least softened, the implacability of his resolve against me. In consequence, he has bequeathed me a sum of money with which he hopes to purchase my loyalty. He promises more if certain conditions are met.
It is a strange letter, and stranger still that it should arrive at such a moment, as I contemplate the balance sheet before me and realize that I have no choice but to take some kind of action, or lose everything for which I have labored these past few years.
I shall have my wife at last. And now I shall have a daughter, too.
My fingers are shaking so fiercely, I can hardly hold this pen. I am filled with a strange exhilaration, as if I have caught at last that tide in the affairs of man, to which Shakespeare urged us.
I am not making any sense, am I? Fear not, my beloved. I shall explain everything when the time comes.
And in the interim, my dear, you are not to worry if you haven’t heard from me for some time. You are not to think that I have succumbed to any ill. I am only doing what must be done, as I have always done when faced with obstacles. I am determined to win back what I have lost, even if this gamble requires the most desperate stakes I have yet had the courage to summon.
But then, only the brave deserve the fair.
Still (and ever) your own
S.F.
Chapter 25
Cocoa, Florida, July 1922
The small body cowering on the floor of the foyer might belong to my sister-in-law, but she’s not the Clara I remember. Not the Clara who drove confidently down the drive of Maitland Plantation a month ago.
I sink next to her and take her cheeks in my hands. “Clara! My God! Are you all right?”
“You’re hurt!”
“It’s nothing, nothing. But you!”
I stroke her dirty hair, her bruised little face. Her wan skin.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispers. “As long as you’re safe. Are you? You look like hell.”
“So do you!”
“I’ve been living in a hole in the ground for the past four weeks, that’s why. A damned hole!”
“Where?”
“Somewhere between here and Maitland.”
“But what happened?”
“I escaped, of course. What do you think?”
I stare at her, amazed, and she returns my stare and laughs. “Oh, that hurts!” she says, and goes on laughing, holding her stomach, and I start to laugh, too. Laughing and crying together. “A hole in the ground?” I gasp.
“A basement. These terrible men—”
“Who? What men?”
“Oh, darling . . .”
Evelyn walks in, hair all tousled, and we turn to her in the same movement. “Dolly gone,” she says, starting to cry. “Where my dolly?”
Clara holds out her arms.
“Evvie, darling!”
And Evelyn runs straight into her auntie’s embrace.
I find the kitchen and boil water for tea, while Clara runs a bath. The room is the absolute latest, all hygienic sanitary tiles and fitted metal cabinets, like a laboratory. A new Western Electric range squats in the corner on its four curved legs. Evelyn tugs on my dressing gown and tell me she’s hungry. I pour her a glass of milk from the icebox. Slice bread and butter it thickly. Everything’s fresh, and yet I haven’t seen a maid. A bowl of green apples rests on the marble-topped table in the center of the room. I cut one apple into pieces and Evelyn eats them all, one by one. The lost doll seems to have been forgotten.
“Now, that’s better,” Clara says, wandering through the doorway, sitting at the table. She’s wearing an ice-white robe and her head is wrapped in a towel. “Your turn. I’ll watch Evelyn.”
I lift my right hand. “But my bandage!”
“Just hold it out of the tub.” She puts the tea in the strainer and the strainer in the cup, and she pours the hot water over all, just as if she’s not sitting there wearing a bruise along her jaw, wearing pale, fresh-scrubbed skin and wide, exhausted eyes. When I continue to stand there, smoothing my hands on the sides of my dressing gown, she looks up. “Go on! You’ll feel much better. We can’t think clearly until you’re fresh and clean.”
“Think clearly about what?”
“What’s to be done, of course. We can’t let them win. They’ll kill us if we do.”
I want to ask her who, but I suppose I already know the answer. There is only one who here, isn’t there?
Only one man who wants my money badly enough to kill for it.
She’s right, you know, even if I don’t quite understand what she means by thinking clearly until I emerge from the bedroom half an hour later, wearing a skirt and blouse and cardigan and black stockings, skin scrubbed and hair brushed, teeth cleaned and stomach actually hungry. Dizzy, weak, restless. Hand hurting, head hurting. But more recognizably Virginia than at any moment in the past month.
Clara’s moved to the parlor with the tea. She sits on the sofa next to Evelyn and turns the pages of a book, while Evelyn points out everything in the pictures. When she sees me, she smiles and reaches for the teapot.
“So, my love. What’s happened to you?”
“You first.”
“Oh, darling. It’s so much to explain.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
She sets down the cup and takes my hand. “Virginia. There’s so much I haven’t told you. I didn’t want to burden you, you know, with everything you’ve been through.”
“
I’m not a child.”
“No, you’re not. But you’ve endured so much. That was why I took you to Maitland, you see. I thought you’d be safe there, away from everything, and look at you!” She brushes my cheek with her thumb. “Where’s Samuel?”
“He went to look for you. To Miami Beach.”
“The Flamingo?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We’ll ring them and leave a message and stay right here, safe and sound, until he gets back. And we’ll plot, you and I, what’s next to be done. What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? My God! Look at us! You act as if nothing’s happened! And he’s trying to hurt us. He wants control of my money. Of my daughter, don’t you see? And you were in the way, you were protecting me, so he tried to get rid of you. And it’s my fault. I should have known better. I shouldn’t have softened like that. I shouldn’t have come. I shouldn’t have brought Evelyn into this, and now we’re trapped. He won’t let us go until I give him what he wants. What he’s always wanted from me.”
Clara glances at Evelyn, who’s taken over the book. The subject is horses, I think. Evelyn’s studying each plate carefully with her grave hazel eyes.
“Who won’t let you go?” Clara asks quietly.
I lean forward and whisper: Simon.
Of course, she thinks I’m crazy. I don’t blame her. In the first place, the idea’s absurd. What kind of man goes to such lengths as to burn down his beautiful villa by the sea, in order to enact the fiction of his own death? For what possible purpose? Simon’s own brother identified his body. Agent Marshall of the Bureau of Internal Revenue confirmed it personally, summoning a great deal of sympathy as he did so. Not one person has disputed the fact of Simon’s demise, not even those who cared if he was alive.
And where is my proof? A postmark on an envelope. A letter from a bank. A distrust of revenue men. A pair of hazel eyes, staring at me in fury in the instant before I was struck down on a criminal beach at midnight.
“You must have imagined that,” Clara says. “It’s simply not possible. You said yourself, you didn’t remember a thing from that night.”
“Nothing except that.”
“Well, isn’t that suspect in itself? That you don’t remember anything else. You only think you remember it. You’ve seen Simon’s eyes a thousand times. It’s just a memory of him, shoved awkwardly into the wrong spot. Round peg, square hole. Because you want it to be true.”
“Want Simon to be alive?”
She takes my hand. “Darling, don’t think for an instant I don’t know. The human heart is such an unreasonable little organ. You loved him so. You still love him, even though you know how thoroughly bad he is.”
“I don’t love him anymore.”
“Yes, you do. You’re absolutely obsessed by him. Why else would you come all the way down to Florida in search of him? It’s the truth, dearest, and I don’t blame you for it. But you’ve got to be sensible. I know who kidnapped me. I saw his face, and it wasn’t my brother Simon, I can tell you.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. He might have been acting on Simon’s orders.”
She waves her hand. “Surely you know what kind of trouble Simon was in, before he died. How he got on the wrong side of some rather unpleasant chaps—”
“Yes, I know.”
“Well. There you are. However cold and calculating my dear brother was, he wasn’t going to get the better of the Ashley gang.”
“The Ashley gang. That’s their name?”
Her tea is cold. She leans forward and takes the pot delicately by the handle, and as she performs this little ritual, milk and sugar and tea leaves and water, I’m struck again by the ease of her manner. Why, she’s just escaped from a terrible ordeal! And she’s beaten up, she’s pale and bruised, but she’s thoroughly, terrifyingly intact. Drinking tea on a sofa. As if she’s got some kind of unending reservoir of British glue inside that small, playful body, holding all her parts together. How did she come by it? What awful things has Clara endured, over the course of the past few years? Her entire life, when you think about it. Hadn’t Simon said that she was a terrible inconvenience to her parents? Like Eve—or like the apple, really—she had caused the love-drunk Fitzwilliams to be exiled from their Eden in Borneo. Pearl fishing with their old friend Mr. Gibbons. This tiny little outcast, nothing like her brothers.
I think how inadequate I am. How weak, how easily overturned by the slightest obstacle.
“Samuel told me all about them,” she says. “They’re a primitive sort of family from the swamps. They don’t follow any laws, just one another. I suppose when you grow up in the wild like that, you don’t care much for the lives of outsiders. Anyway, they saw what Samuel had done—you do know about that, don’t you? You’re too clever not to have noticed.”
“Bringing in liquor.”
“Nothing very big, you understand. Just a bit of honest smuggling. It’s in our blood, you know. Cornwall. My great-grandfather made a bloody fortune shipping in brandy when the French were cutting up, did you know? Then that beast Wellington spoiled all our fun!” She makes a soft little laugh and sits back with her tea. “Maybe it was bad of Samuel—you Americans are so terribly strict about your little laws—but they needed the money, and he wasn’t hurting anybody. Until the Ashley chaps decided they wanted a share of the business. So do you know what they did? It’s rather fiendishly clever, actually. They would wait until the ships came onto shore, all filled with rum and whisky and that sort of thing, on those dark nights without any moon, and they’d intercept them! Take all the cargo for themselves!”
“My God!”
“Isn’t it frightful? And naturally Simon was furious. He never did like to share what he considered rightfully his, even if it was illegal to begin with.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Anyway, they had a great big row, Samuel and Simon. Samuel wanted to pay the buggers off—that was what they really wanted, after all—but Simon’s not the accommodating type. He thought he could do better. Take them on and take them over. He had some sort of scheme, Samuel said, but they were too clever for him. That gang, I mean. And that’s when they got him.” She lifts her hand and makes a slicing movement along her neck.
“Got who?” asks Evelyn. She looks up benignly from the floor, where she’s moved with her horse book, sitting small and cross-legged, the pages open on her lap. A thin layer of dried milk crusts the skin above her upper lip, and her sandy hair floats about her shoulders. Her father’s eyes are so wide and innocent on her face, I want to rage. I want to swoop her up and cradle her against my ribs, but my arms are so weak.
“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.