“That’s my brother, Colin Thorne. Half of the children on the lawn are his great-grandchildren, and their parents are my nieces and nephews.”
“Was it hard to forgive Colin for what happened that day you were at your father’s house?” I ask, and then I wish I hadn’t. It was far too personal a question.
“Colin had done nothing that required my forgiveness. I’m the one who chose to believe he wanted me to be paid off so that I would leave the Thornes alone.”
“And that’s not what he wanted?”
“What he wanted was a relationship with his halfsister. He thought the inheritance that our father had left me would be the overture to begin having it. I never gave him a chance.”
“But then you did.”
“Again, I think Providence was prodding me to mend the brokenness where I could. When I arrived at Thistle House in 1958, the place was a tumbledown mess, slipping into ruin and in need of extensive repairs that I couldn’t afford to make. Before I even contacted Colin, I was thinking I would have to sell the place. When I agreed to meet him in Oxford for tea—on the very day Julia came to the house, no less—he handed me the bankbook for what he had done with my original inheritance. It had more than quadrupled in value. And he insisted I take it. Not as payment for anything I had done or hadn’t done, but because our father had given it to me.
“That money allowed me to make the needed repairs to Thistle House and, strangely enough, gave Mac and me a haven in which to reconnect with each other. Mac came to realize that part of the reason I wanted to remain Isabel to the outside world was because of him—because she was the woman he loved. He was also a forgiving man and always had been. So while he was ready to love me as Emmy, he saw how much a stranger Emmy was to me. And as I said a few moments ago, I saw no compelling reason to resurrect her. Graham Dabney had died some years earlier and his widow had remarried. They were the only family Eloise Crofton had and who could’ve possibly appeared out of the blue to challenge my maiden name, which I didn’t even use anymore. Mac was able to write a whole new series of books here, and we ended up selling our house in Saint Paul and making Thistle House our permanent home. Mac and Colin became very goodfriends. I think each having the other to talk to was good for them. They both knew who I had been before and I think they found a kinship because of that.”
Isabel smiles easily as a memory slips across her mind. “Reconnecting with my brother allowed me to learn who my father was. I knew his faults—who of us doesn’t have those?—but I knew nothing of his merits, if I may call them that. I don’t think he planned to seduce Mum when she was a young maid in his house. They were both starving for love and affirmation. When you are hungry for something, you often do not use your best judgment. I know that better than anyone. After Agnes died, Colin found personal papers that belonged to our father, which led him to believe Henry really did love Mum and perhaps, me, too. But Henry Thorne had been a slave to his position in society. He saw no other way to provide for me and Mum than by paying her rent, giving her money for food and clothes, and adding me to his will. Even when Mum was with Neville, my father still supported her. He wasn’t a terrible person, nor was Mum. They made choices, some good, some bad. Just like I did. And then they had to live with those choices, just as I had to live with mine. And as you will have to live with yours.”
At that moment my recorder clicks off. I’ve run the battery down to nothing. We both look at it.
“I suppose that means I’ve given you enough material for your essay,” Isabel says.
It is a comment made to make us both laugh. We do. But it also calls to attention that just as I came to this house with a goal in mind, Isabel MacFarland surely agreed to this interview for a reason of her own.
“You want me to do something for you, don’t you?”I ask. “That’s why you said yes to an interview about the war when you’ve never said yes before.”
Her gaze is tight on mine. “I do.”
A thin ribbon of silence stretches before us and then I ask her what she wants from me.
“I want you to secure one of those five spots in the London paper.”
I laugh lightly. “But that’s not up to me. I—”
“It most certainly is up to you. Write the essay as if your life depends on it. Stay up late writing and rewriting it. Make it the most compelling paper you have ever written. I very much want it in the newspaper.”
“Isabel, I can’tmakemy professor choose my paper. I can’t—”
Again she cuts me off.
“I wouldn’t have agreed to this chat if I didn’t think you have the ability to secure one of those spots. You’re not the only one who has been interviewing today. I have been listening to everything you say as intently as you’ve been listening to me. I have chosen you to write down my history. You are the one who will give me what I’ve wanted all my life now that I am at the end of it.”
For a moment or two I can only stare at her in confusion. I can’t resurrect her long-dead bridal gown career or her deceased sister. And I can’t give her anything in a newspaper article except perhaps the return of her real name.
But that is not what she’s wanted all her life.
She inclines her head toward me, coaxing me to remember all that she has told me from the history of her life in the short time I have spent with her. What did she always want? What did she want before she found Julia?
Before she lost Julia?
Before she sketched the first wedding gown?
Before she stood on a sunny beach with her toes in the sand and her mum at her side?
“You wanted your mother to be proud of you,” I whisper.
Isabel nods once as tears rim her eyes.
“You can give Mum the honor of having flesh and blood and a name again. I want people to know the sacrifices she made for me and Julia. Anne Louise Downtree is a forgotten soul, Kendra. She is nothing but a three-word entry in the record of the war’s dead, remembered by no one except me, her daughter, Emmeline. I don’t know that she can see me from where she is, but if she can, I want her to view me as I stand at the end of my existence. I want her to see that I understand there are no secrets to a charmed life. There is just the simple truth that you must forgive yourself for only being able to make your own choices, and no one else’s.”
