She waved it off. “More of the same.”
“Sakes, Aunt Luce. Haven’t you gotten those corns off by now?” I jumped up and helped her back to her chair.
“You’ll see when you age, lass, a body cannot always bend as it once did. I cannot fix what I cannot reach, now can I?”
I blew out a breath and walked to her tiny kitchen, rummaging for a large pot. “Where’s your soap? We’ll see to it now.”
“In the larder, love.”
I warmed the water over her fire, then brought it and the soap over, settling on the floor in front of her. “Give them here.”
She hesitated. “You want my feet?”
“How else will those corns come off?”
She readjusted in her chair, pushing up on the arms.
“Come on, then.” Steeling myself, I plunged one hand toward her stockingless right foot and pulled it out, settling it into the warm water. Her reluctance softened and her foot sank in. I stared at it, white and misshapen by age, knobbier than her hands and thick with calluses around the edges. Raised red bumps adorned several odd crevices of her toes.
Yet it was simply so veryAunt Luce, all aged and interesting and well-used. She lifted the other one in beside it, and I ran my hand over the bumps and calluses, trying not to flinch. This was the woman who had raised Mum, shaping her into the beauty she’d always been, as if Aunt Luce’s very nature had overflowed out onto her. I couldn’t think her anything less than lovely.
I looked up at her as I worked the cloth over her calluses, letting the corns soak. “He isn’t all bad, is he? My father, I mean.”
She tipped her head to the side. “Your father, Ella Blythe, is an unknowable, untamable man, and he always will be. Your mother had a rough go of it when she married ’im, and she cried many a tear into this here apron.” She shook out the tattered thing that probably was as old as Mum.
I rose and dried my hands, allowing her feet to soak. “I want to hear their story, Aunt Luce. The real one.”
“I’ve told it to you, lass, in little pieces when you were a wee ’un.” Her soft Irish voice wrapped around me as I sat on the footstool again, along with the familiar smells of the sugar and yeast below, carrying me back to childhood visits here.
“Tell me all of it—from one grown woman to another. Please.”
A long sigh, a pause in the creaking rocker as she moved her feet about in the pan, then she tipped back in her chair and started. She told me of the secret love that had become too much for either of them to set aside. “He were drawn to my lass, the nectar of her spirit, as hungry as a wandering panhandler in the dry season. I was scared for her at first, wee lamb, but she did something to that man. Melted him, she did, turning that walled-up stranger of a man into a fine gentlemanwho ran to do her every bidding. Ahhh, but they loved each other, those two.”
Yes. Yes, this is the way I’d remembered hearing it. Yet it bothered me how the pieces still didn’t fit, even with this version. “Why keep the marriage a secret then? Was it simply because they were partners in the theater?”
Her eyes remained closed. “You should have seen the way they danced together on that stage, love. Pure poetry, it were, and then they twirled off the stage and kept right on dancing. A gentle waltz, both so lost on th’ other I thought me poor lass would never come up for air.” She heaved a sigh that deflated her chest. “They couldn’t bear for London society to know, though. Couldn’t abide the gossips and the press in their private lives, so they kept it quiet, from the public and the theater folk alike. She was a humble one, my lass, a private woman. Stuck to the background rather than the spotlights, even though they say she was the star.”
“That does sound like Mama.” At last. Precious little I’d heard of her lately had.
“There was the trouble with her parents too, of course. They were against the match, so they kept it a secret from them, until they eloped and ran off. Never told a soul that weren’t family about the marriage, even after it were done.”
“How did they ever spend true quality time together to fall in love in the first place?”
She opened starry eyes and pinched her lips into a smile of equal parts delight and mischief. “Aunt Luce made herself quite useful in those days, she did. Still lived with the family of course, up until the elopement when your mother left with him and I moved here to the shop with my Helen’s family.”
“That’s why it was you she came to after the fire.”
“Who else? I loved her like me own, didn’t I?”
I sat closer and wrapped her wrinkled old hands in mine. “Did they truly love each other? Really and truly? Or was it just an illusion?”
Those gentle eyes folded into crescents of delight. “Aye, lass, ’twas real. You could feel it in the air between them, the way they melted into one another without a single word. He was utterly enchanted with his little ballerina, and she adored her fine man as if he was king, right up to the end.”
I clutched the cloth in my hand. “What happened, then? Why did she not go to him after the fire?” I wondered if Aunt Luce knew the other woman’s name.
She shook her head. “Couldn’t say, couldn’t say.”
More like,wouldn’t.
