“I am saying, when you make a choice, even if it’s a bad one, you’ve played your hand. You cannot live your life as though you still held all your cards.”
“Is that why you agreed to let me talk to you today? To tell me this?”
Isabel laughs. “Good Lord, no. My reason is far more selfish than that.” She smiles at thoughts I am not able to guess at. She shakes her head. “Far more selfish.”
I wait for her to continue.
She looks at me. “You might have guessed I have not been very adept at being transparent with people. I agreed to let you interview me because I plan to leave my history with you.”
“Me?”
Isabel crooks an eyebrow. “Yes, of course you. Why not you? You are a history major. This is history. My history. And only a handful of people know it.”
“You... never told anyone who you are?”
She lifts the corners of her mouth in a half grin. “I told a few. Gwen knows. And Beryl.”
“Gwen?”
“My daughter. Mine and Mac’s. We only had the one.”
I hear children outside the door on the staircase. Isabel hears them, too, and turns to the sound of innocence.
“Did you ever tell your husband?” I ask.
She faces me again. “Eventually. Took me twenty years but I finally told him.”
“When you came back to England?” I had done my research. I knew the artist Isabel MacFarland had returned to England for a visit in 1958 with her daughter and stayed. Her husband joined her several months later.
“Yes,” she says, drawing out the word and giving it an emphasis I don’t understand. “When I came back to England.”
Isabel reaches for the cloth-bound bundle that she came into the room with a couple hours earlier.
“Mac and I started out very happy,” she says as she unties the ribbon on the bundle. “At least as happy as two people who have survived the horrors of war can be. We bought a little house in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and lived near his parents for the first few years. They were very sweet to me and utterly devoted to Gwen. They were far better at being grandparents than I was at being a mother. I worried all the time about her safety. I was sure that I would lose her like I lost Julia.
“Mac wanted to make it in broadcasting but for whatever reason, he didn’t. He started writing children’s books instead. Mysteries with a teenaged, aspiring journalist and his artsy next-door neighbor as the hero and heroine. Joey and Izzy.”
“You and Mac?” I say, proud of myself for figuring this out.
“Naturally.” She unfolds the fabric. Inside the bundleare a yellowed envelope and a leather-bound notebook, tawny with age. “The books did well enough for us to live off that income alone,” she continues. “I had my little studio, and I started painting the Umbrella Girls. At first they were just for me. I found that remembering Julia in this secret way assuaged the guilt I still felt. I missed this house, and I missed Charlotte and Rose, but I could not bring myself to visit them, not even when Mac’s books did well enough that I could have. And then, one day in April 1958, I got a letter.”
Isabel hands me the envelope. There is no name on the outside. Opening it carefully, I withdraw three sheets of lavender-hued paper. I read it aloud:
October 12, 1957
My dear Emmy,
If you are reading this letter, then you will know that I have passed on from this life and that I’ve left you Thistle House in my will. I have always known I would leave it to you, from the moment you returned to me seventeen years ago, after having lost so much. I knew that very day that you and I were bound together as surely and as irrevocably as those who share the same name, the same blood. You are as much my daughter as any child that could have been born from my body.
It does not matter to me that after you left England to begin your new life you felt it necessary to keep me at a distance, not just physically but within our souls. I know how precarious it can be to live the reinvented life. Your birthday cards and Christmas gifts to me over the years, while they may have seemed small and insignificant to you, have meant the world to me, especially after the passing of Rose. I wrote to you only as often as you wrote tome because I wished nothing to upset the careful balance you had struck with what was, what is, and what might be.
It is my hope and prayer that you consider Thistle House as your rightful inheritance. I wish I were able to maintain it as beautifully as it was when you last knew it. Underneath the peeling paint and chipped plaster and wild vines, the cottage is still a grand old friend who longs to welcome you back.
I have left Thistle House to Isabel Crofton MacFarland because that is the name you go by and I wish to make it as seamless as possible for you to take possession of it. But should you encounter any difficulty, my attorney has a sealed letter from me verifying your true identity that need only be opened if anyone doubts your claim to my property.
Please come as soon as you can to claim Thistle House, Emmy. I do not know how many months or even years will have transpired between my writing this and your reading it. The doctor says my heart is giving out and I find that I agree. It is my earnest desire to give the heart of my home to you, dear Emmeline.
And there is another reason I am hoping you will come back to see Thistle House. I shall not trouble you with the details of this reason if your wish is to sell the cottage unseen and be divested of your last tie to the person you were when first I met you. If you come, as I truly hope you will, then you will be able to do what you wish with the letter that is waiting for you in the top drawer of my bedside table.
