Well, Keir had to hand it to the cat. That was actually useful advice. Alison had mentioned that Willow made a fine editor, but Keir had thought she was just being kind.
It took the rest of the afternoon, but he finally came up with something decent. It wouldn’t win any awards, but it was heartfelt and heavy on the specifics Willow had mentioned.
“You’ll keep it a secret, won’t you? I’d like it to be a surprise to her on the day.”
Willow purred in response.
“And you too, Dinah?” asked Keir. The caramel cat was curled up on the couch. She’d been sleeping for most of the day, but Keir couldn’t be sure what she had heard.
“Food,” said Dinah.
“Too right,” said Keir, heading into the kitchen.
Back at New Year’s, Keir had spent some time looking through boxed up things in the cellar of Weldan House while Alison had gotten dressed for the ball.
It hadn’t taken him long to find what he was looking for.
There were only a few pictures of Keir’s mother that had been taken with a picture-taker. A traveling dwarf had visited Fossholm one Winter Solstice before Charlotte was born. He had come up to Weldan House with his picture-taker and a number of other strange contraptions, and Keir’s father had turned him away.
But hearing of the picture-taker, Keir’s mother had chased after the man, running down the gravel drive still in her slippers and dressing gown. She’d insisted he stay for Solstice supper that evening after taking their portraits in the afternoon. The dwarf had obliged, and Lady Ainsley had been most generous in her praise and compensation. Lord Ainsley, despite his earlier misgivings, had gone along with the affair willingly.
She had been the one person he couldn’t say no to.
The portraits themselves were boxed away with Lady Ainsley’s other things after her passing. Keir didn’t remember the day himself, but he’d heard the story from the servants, and he’d gone looking for the portraits. He went back every time he forgot his mother’s face, which happened unfortunately often. How cruel memory could be, to give access to some terriblethings so easily while denying him the beautiful moments he most longed for.
At least this one moment had been preserved. Keir hadn’t seen the portraits since the beginning of the latest feud with his father, having been unwelcome from Weldan House for all those years. Seeing her face again after relying for so long on his imperfect recollection was deeply gratifying. It soothed some aching part of him he had forgotten existed but that was always there, gnawing at his peace.
Keir wondered as he carried the portrait of his mother alone—the smallest of the prints, one made to fit exactly into the kind of locket he’d given Alison—whether Alison felt the same way thinking of her father. She had known him much longer than Keir had known his mother, and her feelings regarding him must have been more complex than the simple longing he’d felt for a woman whose absence had shaped his entire life. Did she forget his face in the same way?
Could she remember his voice?
Keir would have given anything to remember his mother’s voice. But he also wondered that if he did, if he remembered more of her in his own memories apart from the ones the servants had shared with him, if it would have been harder on him when he thought of her. If knowing her more would have given him more to miss.
He knocked on the cottage door; an unnecessary formality, he knew, but it didn’t feel right to intrude on Alison’s private space unannounced. She had shed her flannel nightgown in favor of the pretty slip with yellowing lace she often wore beneath it, and Keir could see why: it was quite warm in the cottage with the fire going now that they’d repaired all of the cracks and gaps in the floors and walls.
“Charlotte stopped by and told me you were back late, but the baby came alright,” said Alison as she took his cloak. It was thesame cloak he’d given her the first time they’d met, a night not much warmer than this one nearly a year earlier.
It had been such a shock seeing her there in his stream. Her stream, really, she had been right about that. She’d been so small and pale in the moonlight when she’d taken the cloak, shivering. So fragile.
Of course, he’d later learned she wasn’t very fragile at all, but the moment had awoken something else in him he’d kept buried: the need to care for someone.
She had needed him so rarely since then. Would she ever need him like that again?
“Is that the portrait?” asked Alison, spotting the envelope in his hand. “May I see it?”
Keir nodded, handing it to her wordlessly.
“Oh,” said Alison. “She was blonde! I had always pictured her with darker hair like yours or mine. You know, I always thought you and Charlotte resembled your father, but now that I’m looking at her, I can really see her in—”
“Charlotte, I know,” said Keir. “I had forgotten too.”
Of course, his memories of Charlotte ended so abruptly and with such a different version of her. He felt a pang of regret to have not known a younger Charlotte.
“She was so beautiful. And such a lovely smile. It was rare back then to take a smiling portrait like this. You’re lucky to have it.”
“Do you remember your father’s smile?”
Alison took the portrait of his mother and put it with the locket. Then she led him to the couch to sit together in front of the fire. “I do,” she said, smiling herself. Keir wondered how much of her smile was shared with her father. “He had a little gap between his front teeth. It was barely noticeable, but he liked to whistle through it to make me laugh.”
