“No,” I say. “I was the lucky one.”
Across the room, I spot my husband chatting animatedly with a new arrival—a glamorous young woman I don’t recognize. I go up to them and greet her, smiling. “Hello,” I say, “I’m Sadie Hill. I see you know Beckett.”
“Sadie, this is Sybil Vaughn. My cousin,” Beckett says. “She was Marguerite’s companion a few years ago, before you came.”
Sybil.“Of course. Beckett’s told me so much about you,” I say, schooling my face.
“I was so sorry when Beckett phoned me with the news,” Sybil says in her crisp English accent. She takes my offered hand, and goose bumps prickle up and down my arms. “I did quite enjoy my time with your aunt. I’ve just wrapped a movie, so I thought I’d come pay my respects and meet Beck’s new wife.”
“I’m so, so glad you’re here,” I say, though she’ll never gather the true meaning behind my words. Marguerite did it—she saved Sybil, just as Iris hoped. “I knew your grandmother.”
“You did?” She gives me a puzzled look. “How?”
“T-through Beckett and Marguerite’s stories,” I say, stumbling over my words. “And the portrait she painted. Of Iris.”
“Well. Isn’t that wonderful? Say, I’m famished, Beck,” Sybil says, eyeing me curiously. “Could you show me to the food?”
I take a break in the powder room, splashing my face with cool water to shock myself out of disbelief at meeting my formerly dead aunt Claire and Sybil. It’s going to take some time to unravel all the twisted threads of this new reality Marguerite created and I now find myself a part of. There are things that happened inmypast but never happened to those around me. I’ll need to sort my own memories from everyone else’s, lest they think me mad. I have no idea how much my own husband remembers about the last few months.
Beckett finds me later, after all our company has gone for the night. It’s just the two of us alone now, in this big house. He builds a fire in the library, and we cuddle together on the sofa, my head tucked beneath his chin. “It’s not going to be the same house, without her here.”
“No,” he says. “It never will be. But we’ll make it our own, Sadie.” His hand rests gently on my belly, and the new life growing there. “Because she wanted us to.”
Three days later, Aunt Claire and I linger at Marguerite’s graveside after the other mourners have left, the wind frigid despite the warmth of the low December sun. She sits on a stone bench, and I sit next to her, both of us quietly contemplating the small churchyard, speckled with fallen leaves.
“Aunt Claire, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Yes, dear?”
“Did you ever know a man named Weston Chase?”
Her eyebrows draw together. “Weston. Weston. That namedoessound familiar, but I can’t think how.”
“He was a writer. Tall, dark headed. Quite striking. She painted a portrait of him. He stayed at your house one summer, in the ’70s.”
“Oh, yes. I remember him. Papa had all sorts pass through in those days. Mr. Chase was writing a novel, I believe. He stayed with us for a few months.”
“Did Grandmother ... have a fling with him?”
“Florence? A fling?” Claire snorts. “Heavens no. She was too conventional for that sort of thing.”
“I don’t think she was as conventional as everyone thought,” I say quietly. “But Weston was a real person?”
“Of course he was. I believe Marguerite has one of his books in her library, come to think of it. The one about the sisters. He wrote several novels.”
“He sounds very charming, from Aunt Marg’s recollections. Sort of a ladies’ man.”
“Oh, he was good-looking, as I remember, but I wasn’t interested in men yet. I was much too shy and always had my head in a book. I was a late bloomer. I didn’t have a beau until I was in my twenties. You probably don’t remember my Harold. He died in 1898. You were very young. Very young.” She shakes her head. “We met in California, in 1881, when I was on holiday with Florence and Marguerite. Harold was a stagecoach driver. I scandalized the whole family, marrying him. It was great fun.” She titters like a satisfied pigeon.
“Do you ever have strange feelings about the past, Aunt Claire? Like you’ve been somewhere before. Experienced something before?”
“Only once. The same summer I met Harold. I had recurring dreams the entire month before we left for California. Terrifying ones. I dreamed I fell from a great height, but at the last moment, Marguerite caught my hand and pulled me up over the precipice. On our holiday, we stayed near a bluff on the coast that looked just like the one in my dream. Anytime I went close to that bluff, I had the strangest sensation I’d been there before.” She shrugs. “Déjà vu. That’s what they call it.”
“Yes. I think so.” I pause for a moment, thinking. “So, Weston—Mr. Chase—wasn’t with you in California?”
“Oh, no. We hadn’t seen him for years at that point, and it would have been wildly improper for a man to travel alone with a group of young women in those days, dear. It was only my sisters and I, and Marguerite’s friend. Iris.” She slaps her knees, standing. “Well, shall we go back to the house? They’ll be waiting on us.” As we walk away, I cast one final look at Marguerite’s grave, wondering how many times she went back to that cliff in California. How many times she tried to save Claire and failed. Until the one time when she succeeded, and brought her sister back from death. As for Weston? I have a feeling I already know the answer—that the peace I feel inside Blackberry Grange is a sign he’s moved on and that Marguerite was successful in saving him, just as she saved Sybil and Claire. Marguerite’s actions in the past musthave shifted things in such a way that Weston never became romantically involved with Grandmother, at least not by the time they were all together in California. If so, he might even still be living, although he’d be an old man by now. I probably wouldn’t even recognize him if we passed on the street.
That night, after everyone has gone to bed, I light a lantern and go to the library. I skim my finger over the spines, searching. On a shelf across from the fireplace, I find it—a volume bound in green leather and embossed with gold leaf:Three Gracesby Weston A. Chase. The frontispiece displays the publication date: 1884. Three years after that cataclysmic day in California—confirmation that he survived.
