“How could she leave us in such a horrible manner? I don’t understand. I just don’t understand.”
“She suffered from melancholy. You couldn’t have foreseen her doing what she did. None of us did.” Father patted her shoulders, his face drawn. He’d gained weight since Sally passed, eating excessively, which concerned all of us. Motherbarely ate a morsel and was thin as a rail. Everyone grieved in different ways, and my parents were suffering.
What had Sally done? I strained to hear more.
“She doomed herself to internal damnation by committing the ultimate sin. Oh, why ever did I leave the bottle of laudanum near her?”
The ultimate sin. I pondered the implications for a long moment until a vice-like grip settled around my chest, stealing my breath. Had Sally taken her own life? My beloved Sally? I shook my head. No, it couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t. Mother must be assuming the worst. Sally was too levelheaded to harm herself.
“Ellen, lower your voice,” Father snapped, alarmed eyes scanning the room until his stare settled on the cracked open door. A glint of something shiny on his cheeks caught in the gaslight. Tears. I hadn’t realized my own face was wet until a tear fell onto my hand. I’d never seen my father cry until Sally died.
I sank deeper into the shadows, my entire body gripped in bone-chilling shock. The need to run warred with my desire to hear everything I could about Sally.
“What if someone overhears you and Noah finds out the truth? He will never forgive us for keeping that information from him.” Father rocked back and forth on his heels, thumbing the watch fob, a nervous habit he had developed. Although he was a sensitive soul, he rarely showed his softer side to the world. The florid shade of his skin concerned me. He wasn't a young man. I worried about his health.
Mother’s anguished face lifted, and she said in a whisper, “It is our shame to bear. What Sally did is a sin, and she will spend all of eternity in hell because of it.”
I stood rooted to the spot. Mother claimed Sally’s death was self-inflected; surely she was mistaken? Granted, Sally had taken to her bed more often than not after the twins’ birth. She’dspent hours on end writing in her journal or sleeping off the effects of the medication the doctor prescribed for her hysteria.
“All the more reason to convince Noah to marry Amelia.” The shrill quality of her voice and the abject misery etched across my mother’s brow were startling. She reeked of desperation. “If he finds out we lied to him, he might take the children and leave our house. I couldn’t stomach that. I simply couldn’t bear to lose my precious grandsons. It was bad enough Albert’s wife stole him from us, and now I fear I will never see any children that harridan bears.”
Albert’s wife and my mother disliked each other with a passion. The second my brother was out of mourning, my sister-in-law demanded they return to India to be close to her family. It still rankled my mother to no end.
“Albert went of his own free will.” Father gripped Mother’s wrists in his and pulled her to her feet. He wrapped her in his embrace, his cheeks a bright pink. “He made his choice, the same as Amelia has. She loves Oliver. He’s a duke, and she’ll be a duchess. It is a very advantageous match for her.”
Sobs racked her slender frame, and my own eyes overflowed with wetness. “Amelia needs to marry Noah,” Mother said. “I can’t lose my grandchildren and she can cement their future in my house. Please, Brimley, you must turn down Oliver’s offer. He is a dear boy, but she doesn’t need to marry a duke. Amelia will learn to love Noah. You must trust me in this.”
My stomach dropped to the floor, my hands began to shake. My sympathy for her deflated. The air left my lungs, and I rested my forearm against the wall, trying to catch my breath. She was willing to sacrifice my happiness for her own. What had I ever done to make her hate me so much?
“Amelia has made her choice.” Father released Mother and stepped back, his jaw clenched. My father and I were close. He’d often acted as a buffer between Mother and me. Tonight wasn’tany different. “You must let this go, Ellen. Noah will never find out about the suicide. If we don’t tell him, he will never know.”
“But Brimley—”
He held up a staying hand. Mother ran the household, but on occasion, Father took a stand against her. “Not another word, Ellen, and not just tonight. It pains me to say this, but we must bury Sally’s secret with her.”
“It is our shame,” she said, forever obstinate.
“Like the rest of society, we will suffer in silence for our remaining days. We can’t, however, dismiss Amelia’s happiness for the sake of our shameful secrets. Amelia will marry Oliver since he is her choice. Noah will never take the children from us. We are their grandparents, and our grandchildren will forever be bound to the house of Brimley.”
Mother sniffled and withdrew a handkerchief from the sleeve of her tea gown. “I pray you are right, Brimley.”
“I am right, Ellen.” He heaved out a sigh, the material of his coat pulling at his protruding belly.
I backed up until I was in the library, my head spinning. If Sally had, indeed, taken her own life, perhaps her diaries would hold a clue to her thoughts. My pulse continued to race with horror over what I’d overheard, and I rushed from the room to the staircase.
The third step squeaked, and I hopped over it, my feet moving of their own accord. I felt empty and drained, unable to fathom the depths of Sally’s despair. Yet I had been home during her last bout of melancholy and done nothing to help her like I had after Ethan was born. I halted at the landing. To the left were my room and my parents’ suite. To the right, Sally’s childhood bedroom, which would soon become Ethan’s once he was out of the nursery.
Tears flooded my vision, and I stared up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry Sally, I failed you,” I whispered.
I rubbed at my eyes, wishing with all my heart I could turn back time and un-hear what I had heard.
Dare I speak to Oliver about the matter? He was my best friend, and I hadn’t kept any secrets from him. Well, I had kept my attraction to Noah from him and my annoyance that he hadn’t asked for my hand yet. Those were minor issues when compared with my sister’s apparent suicide.
And then there was Noah. He had escaped the house soon after breakfast on the pretext of visiting his estate and he wasn’t due back until the morning. He and I often spoke until the wee hours of the morning on a variety of subjects. But even if he were home, I couldn’t do to him what my parents inadvertently did to me, disclose the alleged truth of Sally’s demise.
I shook my head and went into my room. If I remembered correctly, Sally had hidden her journals under a floorboard in her room. I would look for them and see what, if anything useful, they contained. The smart thing to do would be to let the entire matter drop as Father recommended. Nothing would come of opening up old wounds. Except I had to know the truth. I simply had to.
