Oh, John.He could not be thinking rationally. Would his mind ever be right again? At peace?
She laid a hand on his rumpled sleeve. “You must forgive him, John, for your own sake. You are eaten up with bitterness.”
He scowled. “Forgive him? He stole from me. Ruined my chances and my name. Called me a liar. I should be threateninghimwith a defamation suit instead of the other way around. And would—if I had more evidence. Or the money for a more powerful lawyer.”
Rebecca sighed. She had heard it all so many times before. She said, “I don’t want to leave. I just got here. And I want to help—”
“You can help me far more at the abbey,” he insisted. “I already have Rose here. I don’t need two women scolding me. And take your things. Might be a few days until you have an opportunity to speak with him.”
“John, an unmarried woman cannot stay in a hotel alone.”
“Is not your Lady F staying there?”
“I am not certain. She said she might visit friends.”
He shrugged. “Either way, no need to be fastidious. It is not some gentlemen’s club in London. This is Swanford Abbey—perfectly respectable.”
She regarded her brother, another rebuke on her lips, but before she could reply he looked her in the eye and implored, “Please, please help me, Becky.”
In that moment, she saw John as a little boy, climbing onto her bed, his hair untidy and book in hand.“Read mea story, Becky. Please?”
Taking a deep breath, she said, “I will think about it.” She reached for the pages, but he held them away from her.
“Not these. You’ll smudge them. Read from my copy, if you care to. Not that you’ve ever cared about my work before....”
Her stomach churned with that old familiar guilt along with unease. What should she do?
She just wanted her brother back as he had once been, but she feared that John was gone forever.
———
Donning her spectacles, Rebecca read a few chapters of John’s draft—actually quite good, she thought—then set it aside to dress. She went into the kitchen and found Rose bent over a book of household accounts.
The cook-housekeeper looked up with a rueful shake of her head. “I am behind on my bookwork as well as the housework.”
Rebecca sat down across from her. “John asked me to take your copy of his manuscript to Mr. Oliver.”
Rose nodded. “I overheard.”
“It seems a fool’s errand to me, not to mention improper. I don’t know that I should even try.”
Rose lifted a veined, work-worn hand and framed Rebecca’s chin with it.
“If that’s all he wants, give it to him. Besides, better you than John himself. Best thing we can do is keep him away from the abbey until Ambrose Oliver leaves.”
Rose was right. But the last thing Rebecca wanted to do was to go inside Swanford Abbey, a place she had avoided since childhood.
With a sigh of resignation, Rebecca made quick work of repacking her valise, then looked around the sitting room to see if she had forgotten anything.
She noticed that the Lane family portrait was no longer hanging above the fireplace. Had Rose or John moved it for some reason?
She stepped closer to the mantelpiece and saw that someone had propped three sketches there—awful, amateur, adored. Her mother had drawn them in the vicarage garden. The first showed the vicarage’s paneled front door and listing porch,woodbine climbing its columns. The second showed two children at play with a ball, meant to be her and John, she knew, although the simple drawing resembled neither. And the third was of a man in black—her father—standing beside the old rosebush, which reminded Rebecca of the hothouse flowers she had laid upon their grave when last she was home.
Rebecca looked above them, at the empty place on the wall. The sketches were dear, because her mother had done them, but they were a poor substitute for the professionally painted portrait of her parents and herself, with John as a toddler.
Rose shuffled past with a broom.
“Rose, where is our family portrait?”
