“There was someone else, wasn’t there? Someone came between them.”
She blinked at me. “That I canna say, love. She didn’t tell me the whole of it.” She shook her head. “It was a wretched time for us all. Her heart was broken into pieces, that’s all I know.”
Tears pricked at my eyes. I dabbed at them with my skirt, then fetched the pumice stone from her shelf and knelt beside the basin. I lifted the left foot first and went to work on the largest of the corns. It was a stubborn old thing. After several minutes, I switched to the other. Aunt Lucy scrunched up her face as I worked but didn’t say a word until I dropped the stone in the bucket and sat back with a sigh. “You shouldn’t let them get so bad. I don’t see how you were even able to walk.”
“And what am I to do about them?” She bent at the waist, as if to show me she couldn’t go more than a few inches toward her misshapen feet.
I hauled the bucket to the window, trying not to look at its grayish water, and dumped it out the back.
I found a cloth in her closet and knelt to pat her feet dry. “Where is he? How can I find him?” His was the final angle to this story that I didn’t have, the last piece to put into the puzzle. The only one alive who knew what had happened that night. “It isn’t as if she’s in any danger from him now, and he deserves to know what happened to her.” Part of me wished to know if he believed he’d killed her.
“Now, child, didn’t you promise your mother?”
“Yes, but—”
“You aren’t one to go and break your word, Ella Blythe.” She shook her head.
“You don’t think I should find him? Learn the truth?”
“There’s nothing you can do to fix the past, lass. It’s over and done. As you said, no one’s chasing after your poor mum now.”
“No, but I can speak with him, find out—”
“You did promise, lass.” Her rocking slowed, chair creaking over the floor. “It was your mother’s wish.”
I narrowed my eyes, scrutinizing right past her placid smile. “What aren’t you telling me? What aren’t you saying about my father?”
She sat back, rocking again. “Naught but reminding a good and loyal daughter of her promise. She was a good ’un, your mum. Plenty good to you, even all by herself, wasn’t she?”
“The finest.” I stared at the familiar contours of her face, the loose skin at her throat, the frizzy hair that had somehow managed to remain a fine faded red. “I know when you’re hiding something, Aunt Lucy. Please—tell me what it is.”
There was a loud fumble at the door, then someone stumbledin, arms laden with parcels. “Irefuseto shop in the square again. What a crowd of animals, the lot of them.” She closed the door with her foot and dropped the parcels on the bed, then caught sight of me and froze.
“Lily!” I sprang to my sister and wrapped her in a hug. “Oh, how wonderful to see you. You’re staying here?” I pushed back to look her over.
“We’re keeping each other company,” Aunt Lucy said.
This was the “fine place” she’d promised me she’d secured. At least, I countered with myself, she was safe.
“It’s only temporary. I’ve been taking in fine sewing work from Mrs. McCullum, and I have prospects.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What sort?”
She flashed that charming, dimpled smile that could thaw a glacier. So like her real mother she was. “Nothing too terrible. A girl must have her romances, you know.” With a flippant shrug, she turned to her parcels and began unwrapping them.
My gaze bored into the slender back of the sister of my heart who, despite my efforts, had still not grown up. “You know how that’s gone in the past.”
She waved it off with a pretty pout. “That was so many years ago, and it’s nothing to me anymore. No harm done.”
I clutched the edges of the little footstool I sat upon as I thought about a bleak night many years ago that I’d landed in a place called Seven Dials, a district of dubious reputation, facing the most impossible choice of my life because of hernothing. She didn’t know, of course. She had no idea how much harmhadbeen done. I’d hidden it from her all this time.
Temptation niggled at me to reveal that old secret now, to say it aloud and to utterly shock some sense into her as she seemed ready to dive headlong back into the same entanglements. Itwasn’t resentment that bore down on me, but a strong sense of my own foolishness for once again thinking I could fix everything. I was simply not sister enough for that.
But Aunt Lucy knew what I’d done that night, how I was torturing myself now even while my sister danced blissfully through life. She was staring at me, head tilted to the side as if to say,See? Some secrets truly are better left in the dark.
11
Are you Protestant or Anglican?”
