“Tease me, you mean?”
“I suppose, if that’s what you call it.”
Laurel gave a throaty chuckle. “I’m fairly certain I did worse to them. In their eyes I was their bratty little sister, and I did a better than fair job of proving them right.” Her head tilted to one side as she studied him. “What about you? Brothers? Sisters?”
“Neither.”
“Oh, that is too bad. You missed out.”
“Well, I didn’t have anyone daring me to kill myself.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Uh-huh.” He looked up at the falls again and shook his head. “Maybe not, but that was the likely outcome if you had jumped.”
Laurel frowned. “I don’t suppose you can understand, you being without brothers or sisters of your own, but George and Martin weren’t deliberately mean. They were young, too. Thoughtless. They didn’t see as far as the consequences until I was almost at the top. George had already started up after me. See? They wanted to make it right. To protect me. It was always that way. That’s what brothers do. Sisters, too, I reckon.”
“Hmm. You’re right. I don’t know about that, but I had a lot of women around me growing up. Not sisters exactly.More like aunts. No blood relations except for my mother, but every one of them looked out for me.”
“Then you know about family.”
“Of a particular kind, yes.”
“Your aunts... were they...?” She hesitated, reluctant to finish what she’d started.
“Whores? Yes. Like my mother. I grew up in a house very much like Mrs. Fry’s establishment.”
“A brothel,” she said flatly.
He nodded. “A brothel. My mother’s parents tried to take me away when I was an infant and again when I was seven, but my mother wasn’t amenable to that arrangement. They hired lawyers. She hired better ones. Her parents didn’t want her in their home again. Everything hinged on that. When they learned she was pregnant, they turned their backs on her, called her a whore. She always maintained that’s why she became one. For a lot of years, I believed her, but later I began to understand that it helped her to blame them for her choices.”
“So they only wanted you.”
“That’s right. Bastard or not, I was my grandfather’s heir. The only child of his only child. I have no doubt he loved my mother, but it wasn’t reason enough to forgive her.”
“May I ask about your father?”
“There’s nothing to tell you. I don’t know who he is because my mother would never say. She never told her parents either, which is part of what infuriated them. I suspect he was married. I have no proof of it, but it makes sense that it would be motivation for her silence.”
“She was protecting him,” said Laurel.
“If I’m right, it’s more likely that she was protecting his wife. The town was already scandalized by my mother’s behavior. Knowing her, she would not have wanted to destroy another family.”
“I don’t know if I could be so magnanimous.”
“There’s that,” he said, “but Mother is also a bit of a martyr.”
“Are your grandparents still living?”
“No. They died within a few months of each other not long after my grandfather’s factory was burned to the ground. The last time Confederate soldiers came to Chambersburg, they left a lot of ash and rubble in their wake. My grandfather didn’t have the will to rebuild.”
Laurel nodded her understanding but said nothing.
Call said, “I didn’t know any of this when it happened. I was deep in the South by then. I learned all of it when I returned home. That was years later and the town was still recovering.”
“What about your mother?”
“A survivor. By the time Johnny Reb came calling, my mother was the owner of the house. She says she paid a ransom to keep the soldiers from setting fire to the house, but I think she may have offered more than that. I heard other families paid ransom and had their homes destroyed anyway. The fact that her place was left standing did not endear her to her neighbors, but she redeemed herself to a large extent by taking in whole families, feeding and clothing them, giving them medical care if they needed it and sometimes money if they needed it more. She kept her home open for that purpose until families rebuilt or found shelter with relatives.”
