Mum.
If she did this, this was where Annie Downtree’s daughter and Eloise Crofton’s would part. For good.
This was where Emmeline Downtree would fade at last into nothing, just like Julia had. Like Mum had.
Charlotte got to her knees and told Emmy she was going to make some chamomile tea to settle Emmy’s stomach.
“You might consider telling Mac who you really are. I don’t think it will matter to him,” Charlotte said as she stood at the doorway.
Emmy murmured that if it didn’t matter to him, thenthere was no reason to tell him. Because it mattered to her. Life was about coming and going.
For Emmy, it was time to go.
***
ISABELCrofton married Jonah MacFarland in a London courthouse on May 8, the day the Allies declared victory in Europe.
The end of hostilities.
The newlyweds left for America with Isabel’s brand-new passport on a foggy morning in July after a tearful, long weekend at Thistle House where she said her farewells. The morning of their departure, Isabel found herself as she had been the day she left London after Mac had saved her life, desperate to be far from it. She felt the stitching of any last ties to her old life break away as London fell behind her. In her suitcase in the belly of the ship, she carried a small stack of maternity clothes, her watercolor brushes, her birth certificate, a felt box of trinkets, a book of fairy tales.
And a hammer.
She would not see England again.
The hammer would remind her, lest she forget, that she had made a transaction when she became Isabel.
Leaving England forever meant she could leave Emmeline Downtree and her terrible sorrows there with it.
It seemed a reasonable exchange.
Thirty-three
KENDRA
Ilook at the woman across from me on the sofa, framed by her iconic Umbrella Girls paintings behind her. Her hands are crossed in her lap and she is staring at them.
She is Emmeline Downtree. She is Isabel MacFarland.
“But youdidcome back to England,” I say. “This is Thistle House, isn’t it?”
She nods once. “It is.”
“What—what made you return?”
Isabel raises her head but turns to gaze out the window. “Oh, I suppose the mighty hand of God. That’s what it usually takes to move someone who is holding on to what doesn’t belong to her.” She laughs lightly, as though the details of her return still surprise her.
“I—I’m not sure I follow you.”
Isabel tips her head to glance at me, but only barely.
“You haven’t made the mistakes I have nor have you been flung into a tempest that forces you to make choices you are not prepared to make—I know that. But I hope someday you will remember I told you that you do not own your sins.”
I am still at a loss. “You’re not saying people aren’t responsible for the wrong they do,” I say, though I can’t believe this is what she means. Not after all that she has told me.
She sighs gently, wondering perhaps how to make it clear to me.
She is revealing something to me, I think. Her purpose for having allowed me to interview her perhaps?
