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—

Dear Molly,

It is the prerogative of the young to rail against injustice, and it is the fate of the old to endure it. When you were a child, you railed against anything you perceived as unfair, wanting so much for the wrongs of this world to be righted. You had no notion that justice comes at a cost, one that is too often paid by those who can least afford it.

It will hurt you to know that Algernon never paid the price for anything he did. There was no further investigation into Mrs.Mead’s death. It was deemed an accident, and he escaped justice. As for everything else he did, it was swept under the carpet by his parents, who greased many a palm so their golden boy could slip through the loopholes they’d opened wide for him. I suspect Algernon Braun plundered and pillaged for the rest of his days.

When I asked Papa about everything I’d told him and what the consequences would be, he said three words—“Let it go.” And so I did, but I refused to let go of everything.

A few days after Mrs.Mead’s funeral, the Brauns were invited to the manor yet again—life going on as usual, as if Mrs.Mead hadn’t died, as if a girl in our retinue had not been egregiously wronged, as if I was going to marry Algernon and enact my parents’ wishes.

I waited until after dinner, and when Penelope disappeared into the kitchen, I stood. “I have an announcement,” I said in front of both families. “Algernon, I’m not marrying you. Our engagement is off.”

“Is this a joke?” Algernon said, laughing. But he saw from my face that this was no laughing matter.

“I’m refusing a life with you. This marriage was my parents’ will, not my own, and I’m not going through with it.”

There were few words after that. My mother stuttered and stammered. She even begged for the Brauns’ forgiveness, claiming that I was out of my wits and would soon apologize. My father remained statue still, saying nothing. Priscilla and Magnus rose from the table and silently marched their son out of the banquet room, past the parlor, through the portrait corridor of our long-lost relatives, and out the front door of Gray Manor, which Uncle Willy held wide open.

My parents watched as Magnus and his family turned their backs on us. Once outside, Magnus stopped between two imposing Roman columns. He turned around, to address not me but my father. “You won’t get away with this,” he said. And with that, all three of them left for good.

The moment Uncle Willy closed the manor door behind them, I ran to my bedroom, for I knew if I didn’t move fast, I’d suffer the full wrath of Papa’s rage.

Uncle Willy and John had known ahead of time what I was planning to announce, and they were primed for the aftermath. Papa rushed up the grand staircase after me, and Uncle Willy followed, stopping my father before he entered the heavy double doors to my bedroom. Buried under my quilts, I heard words exchanged, but Uncle Willy, who’d always been a gatekeeper, now forbade his employer from entering his own daughter’s room.

My father’s heavy footsteps retreated down the hallway. Next, I heard the slamming of his office door. Then came the bellowing roar as whatever rage he’d reserved for me no doubt befell my mother.

My bedroom door opened, and Uncle Willy’s face appeared. He nodded, and I got out of bed. He accompanied me down the servants’ back staircase, and I ran out of the conservatory, over the lawns, and through the garden gate to where John was waiting to take me to the safety of Mrs.Mead’s cottage. That night, I slept in her bed while my beloved John and dear Uncle Willy kept vigil by the cottage door.

—

The next day the sun rose, though in truth I had doubted it would. Uncle Willy went to work at the manor, and around noon, he returned to tell me it was safe for me to go home. Whatever he said to my parents I was not privy to it, but Papa ceased to be a physical threat. Still, when I walked into the manor, Mama and Papa were as cold as ice. They could barely look at me, said not a word to me, no matter how I tried to make amends. I’d lost my golden sheen; I was no longer their darling girl, and while my presence was tolerated, it was clear I was an impediment to their aspirations, living proof that a girl is but a burden.

As the days passed, when I wasn’t sneaking to the cottage to visit my beloved John, taking refuge in his arms and his love, I holed myself up in the library and read book after book. I knew Papa kept the Fabergé hidden in the filing cabinet in his office, and one day when he wasn’t around, before the Brauns could ask for it back, I took what was mine. I hid the egg behind a stack of my favorite novels in the library, and my parents, so distraught about losing the Brauns’ favor, failed to notice the egg was gone. Sometimes, I would shift the stack just to look at the beautiful, shiny object. At the height of my despair, I even talked to it. “Beware,” I warned it. “You may be a coveted treasure one day and pitched to the curb the next. I would know.”

It wasn’t long after that the men in black—Magnus’s henchmen, his corporate fixers—came knocking on the manor door. They brought back the original divestment papers to be signed by Papa with a deadline of under a week. The merger between the Brauns and the Grays was officially dead, and my father’s firm would soon be dissolved, his assets stripped away.

Papa paced the hallways, rarely coming to the banquet room for meals. Mama perpetually smelled of vodka and lime. She stumbled about the manor, ordering staff around, except they were figments of her imagination—ghosts from a bygone era. Not even Penelope worked for us anymore. She simply failed to show up one day, and as for the other servants, Papa couldn’t afford them without the merger, so all but Uncle Willy left, with no thanks or pay.

I soon learned to cook my own meals, simple fare—egg on toast, or crumpets with tea. For the first time in my life, there was no one to serve me, and so I re-created from memory dishes that Mrs.Mead had made as I’d watched, my little legs swinging back and forth under her cottage kitchen table. Sometimes, I would sneak out to eat with John and Uncle Willy at the cottage, and on those occasions, there was something so sustaining about Mrs.Mead’s hearth, a pot of stew simmering on it, though it would never taste as good as hers.

I wasn’t very hungry in those weeks when everything fell apart. In fact, I had trouble keeping food down. At first, I chalked it up to stress—to being undone by grief and uncertainty about what my future would hold. It was as if a pox had descended on our household, a curse on the entire Gray family.

But it wasn’t this curse that soon concerned me most, for there was another causing great apprehension. In those days, that’s what we called a woman’s monthlies, Molly—the curse. It had been weeks since I’d bled, and at first, I’d ignored this lapse, until I could ignore it no longer.

One afternoon, when Uncle Willy was helping movers cart off antiques from the manor, I went to the cottage to break the news to John.

“I’m late,” I said.

“You’re early. Dinner’s at six.”

“You’re not following,” I replied.

He looked at me, reading the meaning in my eyes.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know what to do. I’m so ashamed.”

I expected him to rage and fume, to call me loose and blame me for our indiscretions, but of course, I was confusing him with other men I’d known.

“There is no reason for shame,” he said. “I’m overjoyed, Flora! I can’t believe my luck.” He picked me up and spun me around in his arms. He held me tight, spilling tears of joy on my shoulders. I felt fortunate and doomed at the same time.

We visited a doctor, who confirmed what I already knew. And next, we told Uncle Willy. He took it stoically, his feelings clearly mixed, but he, too, spilled tears of joy for us all.

He held my hand and John’s on Mrs.Mead’s kitchen table. “If only she’d lived to see the day. It was her biggest dream, you know, that the two of you would find each other one day, a hope lodged in her heart, one that I dashed regularly, thinking it too preposterous to imagine. And now, here it is, as though she willed it into being.” He went quiet for a moment. “But what about university, John?”

“I’ll defer. I’ll go some other year. I’ll find us all a place to live. I’ll get a job. We’ll get away from this cursed manor, all of us. Life will finally begin.”

Life will end, I thought to myself, and I wonder if Uncle Willy had the same thought but was too good to voice it.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he said. “That’s what my sister used to say. We’ll figure everything out in good time.”

The next day, Uncle Willy found me in Papa’s library and told me to go to the cottage right away. “John’s waiting for you,” he said.

When I sneaked out the back and made my way to the cottage, John wasn’t there, but a trail of wild rose petals plucked from their blooms marked a path to the old oak tree. Standing beside it was the love of my life. He got down on one knee and proposed to me right there. I said yes, and he took the Claddagh ring from his pinkie and put it on my ring finger—a perfect fit.

There was only one thing to do after that—tell my parents. I begged them for a moment of their time, and we assembled in Papa’s office. His desk and Capital Throne were gone, sold to the highest bidder and replaced with an old folding card table and chair from the basement.

“I am with child,” I said simply, expecting to be disowned on the spot.

Mama looked at Papa, her face filled with an emotion I could hardly comprehend given what I’d just said. Her eyes were bright with hope. “But this is a miracle,” she said. “This is fate ordained!”

“My dear girl,” said Papa as he rose to his full height and gently placed his hands on my cheeks. “This is wonderful news.”

“He’ll have to marry you now,” said Mama.

Only then did I realize what they’d both assumed. “It’s John,” I said. “John is the father.”

A storm cloud came over Papa, a great darkness enveloping him. He grabbed both of my arms. “That’s a lie. Tell me it’s a lie!” he growled.

“It’s the truth,” I said, as I tried in vain to pull away.

“The butler’s boy had his way with you? Under my roof?” Papa boomed.

“He won’t get away with this!” said Mama.

“John is not to blame,” I explained. “I love him, and we’re engaged.”

Papa looked down at the ring on my finger, and for a minute I thought he would spit on it, but he unhanded me then and stormed out of his office.

“Where are you going?” I asked as I rushed down the stairs after him.

He marched all the way to the front of the manor, where Uncle Willy stood vigil by the door.

“You’re fired,” he said. “Leave the manor immediately—you and your wretched son. He raped my daughter. If you don’t leave now, I’ll skin him alive.”

Uncle Willy merely bowed his head, as though he’d been expecting this and only this. He strode past my father and took my hand in his, about to march out the stately front door with me in tow.

“Leave her,” my father snarled as he broke our connected hands. “Be gone!” he roared; then he pushed Uncle Willy out, slamming and locking the door behind him.

Papa turned to me, gripping my jaw in his viselike hands. “You’re a disgraced woman. You’re good for nothing now. Go!” he yelled. Then he landed a strong and sudden blow to my face.

Cradling my stinging cheek, I ran to my room, and I hid in my bed, quaking.

Mama came in a few minutes later. She sat on the edge of my mattress, and I wished it was Mrs.Mead perched there, not her. “You had it coming,” Mama pronounced. “Let me see?”

She drew the covers away, examining my swollen cheek.

“I’ve seen worse,” she said.

So had I, on her face.

“You’re not the first girl to disgrace herself, Flora, and you won’t be the last. Once he calms down, I’ll talk to him. No one has to know. There are ways out of this, you know.”

What she then proposed was a nightmare vision, a visit to a secret kind of doctor I vaguely knew existed.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I won’t.”

“Then we’ll send you to a birth house. This is what’s done, Flora. If you weren’t so na?ve, you’d know that. You’ll have the baby, and no one will be the wiser. You’ll go for ‘a stint in the countryside, a finishing school for girls,’ then you’ll return in ten months or so as though nothing ever happened.”

“But what about my baby?” I asked.

“What does it matter so long as it disappears? After the birth, you and the bastard child will both get a fresh start. Your father will keep quiet if he thinks he can use you to leverage getting close to a family of stature. We need that now more than ever.”

So many thoughts swirled in my head. Two roads diverged. John and Uncle Willy were banned from the manor, and I was certain John would want me to leave with them, but where would we go? John was willing to give up everything, to surrender his only chance at education and bettering himself, all for me and his unborn child. I could go with him, or I could do what my mother had proposed—disappear into a birth house, where I would have the baby, then return to Mama and Papa, and to this life, as though none of it had ever happened.

I considered the two possibilities, my mind racing. I decided on the spot. I came up with the plan.

“Take me to a birth house,” I told Mama. “Make it all disappear.”

“I’ll make arrangements. You’ll leave in a few days. You’ll come back a new woman, Flora, refreshed and reborn. Your father and I won’t say a word. We’ll find the right family for you to marry into.”

She brought me ice for my face, and when she left to find my father, I tiptoed down the corridor to the servants’ staircase. I scurried out the conservatory door, making my way to the cottage. Uncle Willy was packing in the bedroom. John was emptying the kitchen cupboards.

“Oh, Flora,” John said the second he saw my face.

“It’s just a bruise,” I said. “It’s not so bad.”

“Did he…Please tell me he didn’t…”

I knew what he was asking. “He hit only my face,” I said.

“Thank heavens,” he said as he drew me close. “He fired my father,” John said. “We have to leave right away. You’re coming with us. He’s a maniac and a tyrant. You’ll be safe with us, Flora.”

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“In town for the night. After that, we don’t know.”

“You’re coming, Flora, right?” John begged.

“Have you deferred your university enrollment?” I asked.

“Not yet, but I will. That doesn’t matter right now.”

“There’s no rush deferring,” I said. “And, John, I don’t think I should go with you just yet, not in my condition. I’ll slow you and Uncle Willy down. I can hardly keep anything down these days. I can’t just sleep anywhere the way you and he can. In my state, I need to be careful.”

“But I can’t leave you behind,” he said. “Look what he did to you.”

“Papa’s had his rage. The worst is over. I’ll find you soon.”

“When?” he asked, confused.

“Come back for me in a week’s time, once you’re more settled. I’ll have my suitcase ready. We’ll meet at noon at the old oak tree, and you can take me with you to wherever you are. I’ll be waiting for you,” I said.

“We’ll start our lives over. We’ll be a perfect little family, just the four of us.”

I nodded, my tears obscuring my sight. “What will Uncle Willy do for work now?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” said John. “Nobody even knows what a butler is these days. At his age, he may not find another job. He’s worried, but he won’t say it.” He put his hands on my shoulders. “So we have a plan? You’ll meet me at the oak tree in a week’s time? I’ll have a room ready for you, Flora. I can’t promise it’ll be posh, but I’ll take care of you, no matter what.”

“I know,” I said. “I have to go. They can’t catch me here.”

“I love you, Flora,” he said.

I held him tight, and I told him I loved him more than anyone in the world. Then I turned my back on him and ran toward the only life I’d ever known.

—

True to her word, my mother took care of all the details, and a few days later, I was shipped to a birth house far from the manor. There was no way I was going to let John ruin his future the way I had, his only chance at freedom from a life of servitude.

A week later, John would show up at noon at the old oak tree, expecting to find me there, suitcase in hand. But I would be long gone. He would look in the knothole, and there, to his great disappointment, he would discover what the fairies had left for him—a gold treasure, the Claddagh ring, a heart held in two tiny hands.

This is what you do, Molly, for those you love. You make sacrifices, and when you have no other choice, you set them free.