Page 40

October 9, 1925

The next few days go by in a rush. With Harriet taking a much-deserved break, Marguerite’s care has fallen squarely on my shoulders. While I’ve recovered well enough from Weston’s attack to see to my many responsibilities, I’m always on edge. Jumpy. Even though I’ve never been afraid of the dark, I’ve begun leaving the lights on overnight, just like my grandmother did. The ringing in my ears and occasional headaches still plague me. Most concerningly, my memory remains full of holes. It’s mostly harmless, small things—forgetting where I placed the dustpan, or put my watch. But then, one afternoon, as Marguerite feverishly works on her self-portrait while we chat about our family history, I find myself unable to recall the year my little brother, Henry, was born.

“I ... I think it was 1905. Yes. That was the year. Mama went into labor during a snowstorm. The doctor came to the house to deliver him.” We didn’t have a telephone at the time, so she’d sent Felix to the doctor’s house, rousing him from sleep.

Marguerite smiles placidly, feathering painted shadows between the pleats on her younger self’s skirt. “It’s curious how time can make our minds slip, isn’t it? Some things that happened many, many years ago seem to have only happened yesterday. But others ...” Her brush pauses on the canvas. “Others I’d give anything to remember. I have entire years missing, Sadie. Years.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well. Dr. Gallagher says that I must do my best to hold on to the things I can remember.”

“Do you remember going to California? Or perhaps Oregon? With Claire and Florence?” I ask. “Did you see the redwoods?”

Marguerite’s brush stills again. “I’ve been to lots of places, my dear, but never out West. Hugh and I—we wanted to go to Colorado. Together. But Florence put an end to all of that.” She sighs. “I went looking for him there, after Claire died.” She shakes her head. “But that’s as far west as I’ve been.”

I don’t believe her. Not for a minute.

The next morning, I hear Marguerite talking to someone inside her room. I cross to her closed door, listening. She laughs softly, her voice low. “You always were. I adored that one. You should have shown it in Chicago.”

There’s a pause in the conversation. “She doesn’t.” A dramatic sigh. “I can’t tell her. You know that.”

A moment later, Marguerite begins to sob. “Oh, leave me be!”

I rap on the door, realizing she’s in the midst of a hallucination. I know how quickly these delusions can turn from pleasant to terrifying. “Aunt Marg, it’s Sadie. Can I come in?”

“Yes,” she says wearily.

I open the door to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, her head hanging low. She glances up as I come in, a haunted, distant look in her eyes.

“Who were you talking to just now?” I ask, sitting next to her.

“Iris.” Marguerite’s lips thin as she scowls. “She won’t leave things alone.”

“Won’t leave what alone?”

“The past.”

I take her hand. It’s icy cold. I rub it between my own to warm her skin. “You can tell me what’s bothering you if you want. I promise I won’t tell another soul.”

“I can’t, dear. I made a promise to Florence. To my family. I’ve forgotten a lot, but I haven’t forgotten that.”

“Grandmother is dead now. Whatever secret she made you keep—you can’t hurt her by telling me.”

“I could care less about hurting Florence. She never cared about hurting me.” Marguerite’s lip trembles. “Oh, Sadie. I’d give anything to go back. I would. How different things might have been.”

“What would you change, if you could?”

“So many things,” she says enigmatically. “Help me get dressed. I need to get back to my work.”

She paints for the rest of the day, pausing only long enough for tea in the afternoon, saying very little to me. I leave her in the library, with an admonishment to ring the bell if she needs me and go up to the attic to search for Marguerite’s will, a deed to the house—and any other clues I might uncover about her past.

It’s been weeks since I’ve been up here. The bed is made, a fresh quilt smoothed neatly over the mattress. The faintest odor of smoke still lingers from the fire. The curtains are closed, so I open them, allowing the light to reach into the darkened eaves, where layers of steamer trunks are stacked. I’m daunted by the prospect of sorting through Marguerite’s things. I’ve no idea where to start. The chatelaine and its bronze keys still sit on the top shelf of the wardrobe, where I left them. I try the trunks near the west-facing window first. The smaller keys fit the locks, just as I suspected, and soon I’m burrowing through the detritus of my aunt’s past. She’s saved everything over the years, it seems. Mail. Old receipts. Notes scribbled in her fine, delicate penmanship. It’s an interesting, yet arduous task. I make two stacks—one to burn in the rubbish heap, one to look through more carefully.

I roll my head back on my shoulders, stretching my aching neck before I open the next trunk. My heart jolts at the sight of my parents’ wedding portrait sitting on top of a pile of family pictures. In the photograph, my young mother is full-cheeked and happy, wearing the high-necked, wasp-waisted gown Marguerite evidently paid for, her lace veil pooling on the church floor, my father next to her, handsome in his white tie. They were little more than children when they married—sixteen and eighteen—with Felix well on the way. Though tightly corseted, my mother’s pregnancy shows in the fullness of her bust and her plump face.

The trunk is filled with family memorabilia. Photographs. Knickknacks, trophies, ribbons from Marguerite’s equestrienne days. I sort through things slowly, taking the time to read old postcards and letters from my aunt Grace, my mother, my grandmother. Most of them simply recount their daily lives—births, illnesses, our growing-up years, what they did on holiday. In a letter from 1920, I learn that my grandmother disliked Felix’s wife as much as I do, laughing to myself as she decries her insipid smile and weak-chinned blathering . Grandmother always treated Rosalie with abject kindness and respect, at least in front of us. I find it both humorous and intriguing knowing what lay beneath her refined politeness. Her histrionics in my journeys to the past were shocking as well. When I was young, she seemed less like a grandmother than a queen trapped inside a snow globe. Beautiful, regal, and untouchable. How many secrets had she kept? How many faces had she worn? Did she ever really know who she was?

I continue searching through the trunk until the light fades to a wash of rusty orange through the windows. Near the bottom, beneath a neat stack of letters tied with grosgrain ribbon, I find an envelope with a notary seal. I open the folded papers within, my heart beating wildly. It’s Marguerite’s will.

I peruse the handwritten document carefully, tracing each line with my finger. The will was drawn up decades ago, in 1887, and it bears the markings of its age, the faded ink nearly illegible in some places, although it’s quite clear to whom Marguerite wanted to leave her fortune once she departed this life. My mother. Her maiden name, Laura Bethany Knight, is notated throughout the will. She would have inherited everything—the house, Marguerite’s entire artistic estate, and even the silverware and china.

Marguerite’s bell rings from the library, the sound piercingly loud. “Coming!” I call, placing the parcel of letters back inside the trunk. I’ll return to them later. My hands tremble as I hastily refold the three-page will and secrete it in my apron pocket. If Felix ever lays eyes on it as it’s written now, he’ll fight me tooth and nail over the estate. We must get the will redrafted. Soon. Whether Marguerite decides to leave everything to me or to Beckett matters not. Felix took our childhood home and my mother’s cottage. I won’t let him take Blackberry Grange.

That night, Marguerite is restless. Petulant. She refuses to change into her nightclothes, her lucidity fading with the light. I finally manage to calm her with recordings of Enrico Caruso and a cup of chamomile tea. The music takes her back to another time, in Venice, with Pia, who she’s never painted but loved all the same. I listen as she recounts their adventures, going with her into the past. I’ve learned it’s best to meet her there, in the life she’s constructed from happy, comforting memories. When drowsiness begins to take hold of her, she trails me to her room, where she shows me the collection of Venetian masks she collected on her travels, unwrapping them from their tissue one by one, their colorful feathers and beads still vibrant.

“We should start looking through some of these things—start planning for who will get them after I’m gone,” she says. “Set aside whatever you’d like now, Sadie. Before the others come. Florence will take everything.”

She’s forgotten that Grandmother died nearly three years ago. “Aunt Marg, let’s not think about all that tonight.” I immediately chastise myself for my words—the folded papers in my apron pocket remind me that we do indeed need to talk about who will get her belongings after she’s gone. “If you’d like, we can summon an attorney. Have him come to the house, catalog your belongings, and draft a will.”

“Oh, I had a will done ages ago, my dear. I made my wishes very clear concerning the estate. Laura’s to get everything.”

I’ve avoided talking about my mother’s death with Marguerite for months, slipping away from the subject like a skater avoids razor-thin ice. But who am I trying to protect by doing so? Marguerite? Or myself? Keeping Mama alive in Marguerite’s imagination serves no one. And now, it’s a matter of my own survival and security to tell her the truth.

I sit on the edge of Marguerite’s bed and pat the mattress. “Come sit with me. We need to talk about Laura.”

Marguerite shuffles over and sinks down next to me. I take her hand in mine, capturing her eyes with my own. “Laura died, Aunt Marg. This summer.”

At first, she doesn’t react, only blinks, the impact of the words delayed. Then a soft sigh escapes her lips. She begins to tremble all over, her eyes frantic. “But she was just here, last month. For a visit. She brought the children.”

“That was Louise.” I squeeze her hand. “We used to visit you in the summers when me and my brothers were little, though. That’s probably what you’re remembering.”

“Laura’s . . . dead? You’re sure?”

“I’m afraid so.” My mouth suddenly feels dry, the back of my throat burning like an ember. “Her heart. It was very sudden.”

Marguerite’s hands fly up, hover in front of her face for a moment, then tangle in her hair. She rocks back and forth, wailing. The sound ricochets from the ceiling and reverberates through me. It’s the most pitiful, most painful sound I’ve ever heard. The rawness of her grief breaks me, cracks open my fragile shell, my own long-denied tears flowing as I wrap her in my arms, both of us weeping together over a beloved niece. A treasured mother.

“No, no, no,” Marguerite says, over and over. “No, no, no.”

“I know,” I say, smoothing her hair out of her clawed hands. “I don’t want to believe she’s gone, either. But we’re going to get through this. We must.”

Beckett knocks, and asks to come in. “Everything all right?”

“No,” I say, smiling sheepishly as I wipe the tears from my eyes. “I’m going to stay with Marguerite tonight. Sleep in her room.”

His eyes bounce from me to Marguerite, his consternation at our mutual distress apparent. “Let me know if you need me.”

“I will.”

The door snicks shut. I turn down the bed, and ease Marguerite under the covers. I switch off the lights, then lie next to her, cradling her back as she sobs into her pillow. Sometime later, she drifts off to sleep, and I soon join her, the two of us bonded by our grief, by the terrible weight of love.