“But this interests me greatly,” Albina grinned. “I did not expect the duke to take an interest in you like this.”
“And he hasn’t,” Temperance argued.
“You have always been blind to your admirers,” Albina shook her head, “very well, we don’t need to discuss it if it makes you uncomfortable. Come here,” she patted the footstool beside her chair.
Temperance crossed the room and sat on it, and Albina tucked a loose strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear with the absent, unthinking ease of someone who had done it a thousand times.
They sat in comfortable quiet for a while.
“Tell me something,” Albina said eventually. “About the nunnery.”
“Why are you curious all of a sudden?”
“It’s just… well, I suppose I see little Joseph around the house and it makes me wonder what you must have been like at that age,” Albina admitted.
Temperance was silent for a moment, not having expected her mother to talk about this. “I’ve told you things.”
“I want to know what it was actually like,” Albina replied, “I suspect the version which you have me had been changed to spare my feelings, but I want to know the truth.”
Temperance was quiet for a moment. There was a version of this conversation she could have had been put in the wrong place and left there. She had rehearsed it, privately, but sitting here in the warm room with her mother’s hand near her shoulder, she found the rehearsed version inadequate and the true version too heavy for an evening that had been, until now, light.
“I am not sure if you really wish to know.”
“I do,” Albina assured, “I believe it is about time that you tell me these things.”
Temperance was quiet for a long moment, and then lost a battle with herself. It was her mother, and perhaps she deserved to know the truth.
“It was lonely,” she said, finally. “Before the others arrived. Alethea came when I was nine. Before that it was mostly just me and Sister Marguerite, who was not cruel, exactly, but was very interested in correct behavior and not very interested in much else.” She looked at her hands. “I got in trouble constantly, for silly things like laughing too loudly, which apparently I did.”
There was a small pause.
“I still do, I’m told.”
“You do,” Albina said, listening intently. “It is one of my favorite things about you.”
Temperance looked at her mother, and composed herself.
“When the others came it was better,” Temperance said. “Alethea and then the others. Having people who understood what the place was like. Alethea used to save pages from books she thought I would like and pass them through the gap under the dormitory door after lights out. Charity once convinced Sister Agatha that a compulsory nature walk was a form of religious contemplation, and we spent an entire afternoon outside doing nothing at all.” She paused.
“I am glad that they were there with you,” Albina said softly, “when I couldn’t be.”
“I don’t tell you the harder parts because there is nothing useful in it. It is done and I came out the other side of it,” she said it gently, meaning it. She could not give her mother the true weight of those years because Albina would carry it in a way that would hurt her, and Temperance was not willing to do that for the sake of her own unburdening.
Albina was quiet for a long moment.
“I have thought about it every day,” she said. “Since the moment I found out you were alive. Every single day, I have thought about what those years were like for you and whether you were cold or hungry or frightened, and whether you thought of me.”
“I didn’t know about you,” Temperance said. “I knew I had a mother somewhere. I assumed she had…. I assumed she hadn’t wanted me.”
Albina closed her eyes briefly.
“Your father told me you died,” she said. “He came to me two hours after you were born and he told me you had not survived, and I believed him as I had no reason not to. He was my husband.” She said the word with the flat.
“I believed him for twenty-two years.”
“I know,” Temperance said, suddenly feeling a strange weight in her chest.
“You know that I would have come looking for you much sooner had I known.”
