I want you to know before I leave that I do care for you.
Mary Fisher, one of the middle school boarders, was on her way up the stairs. She turned back when she saw who had come through the door.
“Oh, Miss Osbourne,” she cried, all excitement, “we and Mr. Upton have made the changes you wanted to the sketches for the scenery and finished them. They are ever so gorgeous. Do come and see.”
“Of course. I can hardly wait. Lead the way, then, Mary,” Susanna said, smiling brightly as she pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet. “Have you been working all afternoon? How splendid of you.”
I want you to know before I leave that I do care for you.
…before I leave…
And now he was gone.
20
Peter went straight from Bath to Sidley Park—to stay.
Will you do one thing for me?And this was it. She might never know he had done as she asked, and how his coming here could benefit her anyway he did not know. But here he was. He loved her, and so he had honored her final request.
He hoped that love would go away again as suddenly as it had come. He did not like the feeling at all. It was a dashed miserable thing, if the truth were known.
His mother was ecstatic to see him. She scarcely stopped talking about Christmas, which would be absolutely perfect now that he was home to enjoy all that she had planned for him. Four of his sisters—Barbara, Doris, Amy, and Belinda—were to come to Sidley Park for Christmas, all except Josephine, in fact, the middle one in age, who lived in Scotland with her husband and his family. And of course the presence of four sisters was going to mean too the presence of their spouses and children—nine of the latter among the four of them. And because it was Christmas, numbers of their in-laws of all ages had been invited too. None of his uncles—hehadmade himself clear to them five years ago, though in the intervening years since he had seen them occasionally in London and learned to be cordial with them.
And of course the Flynn-Posys were coming for Christmas.
Well, he would endure it. He would even enjoy it. He would establish himself as host.
His mother took him into the dining room the day after his arrival and explained to him all that she planned to have done in there for his comfort and delight.
“I’ll think about it, Mama,” he said. “I may have some ideas of my own.”
“But of course, my love,” she said, beaming happily at him. “Whatever you want provided it will not ruin the overall effect of what I have planned. Howlovelyit is to have you home again.”
He left it at that. It had never been easy to talk to his mother—it had always seemed something akin to dashing one’s brains against a rock.
Will you talk to your mother, Peter? Really talk?…Tell her who you are. Perhaps she has been so intent upon loving you all your life that really she does not know you at all. Perhaps—probably—she does not know your dreams.
He had never really talked to his mother, or she to him. He had confronted her once, of course—ghastly memory—but they had both been horribly upset at the time, and they had not used the opportunity to open their hearts to each other, to establish a new and equal relationship of adult mother and adult son.
That would change. He would talk to her. Hewouldhold firm against her iron will. It just seemed somewhat absurd that the provocation was probably going to be a lavender dining room.
He spent a good deal of the time before Christmas away from the house. He liked to go and sit in the dower house, sometimes for hours on end, lighting a fire in the sitting room and enjoying the peace he found there. He had always loved the house, and it had always been well kept even though it had been inhabited during his lifetime only by the girls’ governesses and the tutors he had had before going away to school and sometimes during school holidays. It was a small manor in its own right and was set in the middle of a pretty garden in a secluded corner of the park.
It would, in fact, be the ideal home for his mother…
He visited his neighbors again. And he called on Theo.
“I must thank you, by the way,” Theo said as they sat in his library sipping brandy, “for taking Susanna Osbourne to call on my mother and Edith in Bath. They both wrote to tell me all about it the very next day. I suppose because I was away at school at the time of Osbourne’s death and Susanna’s disappearance, I did not realize quite how upsetting it all was for them. My mother has been thinking all these years that she must be dead.”
“Are the letters still in existence?” Peter asked.
“Yes, indeed,” Theo said, stretching out his booted feet to the blaze in the hearth. “They were at the back of the safe in Osbourne’s old office where I never look—it is stuffed with old papers that I must go through one of these days. I had never even read the letter Osbourne wrote my father until I found both letters after my mother wrote. Susanna’s is still sealed. I suppose I ought to send it on to her even though my mother seems to think she is not interested in seeing it. Queer, that.”
“I think it is more that she is afraid to read it,” Peter said.
“Eh?” Theo said, giving a log a shove farther onto the fire with the toe of one boot. “What would she be afraid of? Ghosts? I suppose it might put the wind up someone, though, to see a letter written more than a decade ago in the hand of a dead man.”
“I think she is afraid of what she will find there,” Peter said. “Sometimes it seems better not to know what one thought forever lost in the past. But I do wonder if the not knowing will fester in her now that she knows about the letter. Does she know it still exists?”
