Jones was smoking restlessly, not quite looking at her. “Winter’s wound—the stitches will—”
Laura took a step nearer him, and his voice died away. She said, “I am capable of managing Winter’s stitches.”
“I know,” he said. He tossed his cigarette overboard, watching her.
Very carefully, she touched his face, palm to cheekbone. She was angry at him for being high-handed, but perhaps it was merely her reflexive distrust of someone trying to help her. It was a novel experience, after all. He didn’t move.Come with us,she hadn’t said. Jones was like her. He knew his duty, and while he still had strength, he would not turn aside. Laura’s duty lay below, with the last of her family, resurrected.
“Write me,” he said. “Let me know how you get on.”
“If you do the same,” said Laura.
They paused again. Finally Laura huffed, and pulled his head down and kissed him. Four years ago, her behavior would have shocked the deck; now no one even looked their way. When Jones drew away, his eyes were brilliant. The whistle blew for departure.
“Hell,” said Jones, and kissed her once more. Then he turned, and walked down the gangplank and away.
· · ·
The voyage was slow, and quiet, and private. They kept to their staterooms. Laura would wake up, weeping, remembering the voyage out, and Pim. But Freddie comforted her, and Winter too. Winter was observant, in his quiet way, and they’d come and sit together in the library when no one else was there. Winter proved to have a bone-dry sense of humor that carried them all through the harder moments. Such as when Freddie, gravely, asked Laura, the first night, if she’d tell him about himself. Told her why.
So, evening after evening, she told over their childhood for Freddie and Winter too. Inconsequential memories. Funny memories. She told him about the boy he’d been, and had the painful pleasure of seeing her brother—if not become the person he’d been—at least begin to resemble him.
She saw how it was between Freddie and Winter. She didn’t begrudge it, not really. But it made her lonely.
· · ·
They arrived in Halifax in late spring.
Laura, lacking anywhere better to go, took them all straight to Blackthorn House, hoping to throw herself on the sisters’ mercy, at least until she could plan their next step. It still stood square and stern on its plot, rambling and old, in sight of the sea. Laura and Winter and Freddie were all wearing the civilian clothes that they’d got in Belgium, although now they were sweating in the clear sun.
All through the taxi ride, Laura was thinking,I’ll have to get work. Lord knows what I’ll do about Freddie and Winter…Freddie’s officially dead, and Winter….Her thoughts had run along much the same lines all through their trip across the ocean, without a solution. Worry nagged her still, so much so that she hardly saw the house even as the taxi dropped them off. Or at least she didn’t see it until Winter frowned and said, with the censorious tone of a punctilious German farmer, “Look at the garden.”
Laura looked, really looked, at the garden that had been the Parkeys’ pride and joy. At this time of year, the irises ought to have just been coming in, and the poor climbing roses, with the peonies nearly done, but still rippling in colorful profusion, in the wind off the water. But the garden was overgrown, unweeded. The red beetles had got at the planting of lilies that stood by the door, and their stems stood sadly naked. And the house—there was something strange in the house’s stillness.
The door was locked. Had the door ever been locked?
No one came to Laura’s knocking.
Finally Laura groped, not really expecting to find it, for the hidden latchkey, behind a loose piece of siding. To her surprise, it was still there. Hesitating, she put it into the lock. The door swung open.
The house was empty, and still. Dust, and dust sheets, covered the furniture. “Miss Parkey?” called Laura. “Miss Lucretia? Miss Clotilde?”
Silence. The deep hush of a house that contained only its ghosts. Had they died?
“What’s this?” said Freddie from the front hall, a few steps behind her. “It has your name on it.”
Laura turned. Saw a letter on the hall table, addressed, in an elegant, slightly shaky hand, to Miss Laura Iven. A much thicker envelope lay beneath the first. Laura snatched the letter up and slit it with her pocket lancet.
She saw the same handwriting on the letter, which read:
My Dear Laura,
So you’ve got back, have you? Well done. We’ve gone, you know. But we’ve left you a few things. You’ve earned them. Take your rest, my dear.
Yours sincerely,
Agatha Parkey
Laura stared at the odd missive. Stared and stared, and finally handed it to Freddie while she opened the second envelope, only to stare in astonishment at a will leaving the house, effects, and funds of Agatha, Clotilde, and Lucretia Parkey to one Laura Elizabeth Iven.
