“When did you last see her?”
“Not too long after I sent that note,” he said. “We were in love—or at least in that way young people sometimes think they are. I offered to marry her, you know, after—” He blushed. “But she never wanted to. I don’t know if she knew at the time you were inside her.”
“Did you?”
“Not right away, no,” he replied. “Her parents took the family to the city, Emily and her sister. She met your father there.”
“But not my father.”
Hollis shook his head. “I suppose not. According to your grandparents, he swept her off her feet and offered to marry her on the spot. And she said yes.”
“That must have hurt.”
“It did,” he said. “For a while, at least. Your mother and I probably wouldn’t have suited well. And living here would have killed her—or killed what made her special.”
“She was very special,” Beau agreed. “If you ever get to meet my sister Jessica, you’ll see a lot of my mother in her. Fiery. Smart as hell.”
“I’d like that, I think.” He smiled, then looked Beau up and down. “But you turned out mighty fine. I hope Mr. da Silva raised you well?”
The question caught Beau off guard, and he wasn’t sure how to answer it. Beau had wanted for nothing—food, clothes, shelter, schooling—he had the finest of all of it. But looking back now, he wondered if Frank knew—if not about Hollis, then at least about the his mother’s pregnancy. After all, if they married not long after meeting, Beau would have been born two months early weighing a strapping eight pounds.
“He did,” Beau said at last. Frank had never been loving. He’d been demanding as hell. But he’d never laid a hand on him. “Frank da Silva wasn’t the easiest man to be around. But he let me try to prove myself to him, and he must have trusted me enough to leave the business to me.”
“Well, I am sorry to hear about what happened to him,” Hollis said. “But I am happy to see you and know you’re well. I had always wondered about you. I read in the papers about you from time to time. But I was never sure you were mine until I saw your picture in the paper not that long ago.”
“That must have been a shock,” Beau said.
“It was on both accounts,” he said. “But I knew you couldn’t have done it.”
“Thank you,” Beau answered, struck by that conviction, that faith which could have easily been misguided. “I don’t know why, but that means a lot to me.”
“You’re my son,” he said, his voice wavering a little. “I’ve always had faith in you.”
Hollis’s statement rippled through Beau, nearly forcing him backward. In all the years he’d been with Frank, all the effort, the endless search for his approval, had he ever felt as if he’d truly earned it. And yet here was Hollis—a man Beau never knew—who believed in him simply because he wanted to.
Beau smiled, swallowing the lump of emotion in his throat.
“Did my grandparents know?”
Hollis shook his head. “I never betrayed your mother’s confidence. It’s hard for a woman, of course. I would have married her, and at the time I would have believed me the right person to be her husband, but I would have been mistaken. In the end, we found the people we needed. A few years later I met a nice girl—Shirley Oickle, Daniel’s mother. She’s passed, God rest her soul, but we had a good life together.”
Beau considered that. He never recalled his parents being unhappy. Frank had doted on his mother. She was the only person whose will he bent to, and he did it willingly. Beau didn’t remember any unhappiness. Any fights. The darkness came for Frank, and possibly for Beau, after she was gone.
“What about Daniel?” he asked, after he had time to compose himself. Beau recalled the jokes at the mill, and the curious look on his face when he went to the post office. Daniel may not have noticed the likeness, but it had not escaped others. After seeing them all together, he might have put it all together.
“I think he suspects something,” Hollis confirmed. “I’ll talk with him tonight, but I wanted to speak with you first.”
With the horses stabled, the men walked back toward the house, the conversation turning to much more mundane matters, such as how long ago the grapevines had been planted, and the excellent homemade wine Hollis’s wife had made. As they approached the house, the others were already busy, preparing for the work ahead. All the while, he sensed Madeline watching him. Watching out for him.
While the men cut the timbers, Madeline and Annie collected the grapes that couldn’t be left to ripen.
None of this should have mattered. He’d intended to sell the property, and what George’s College did with the grapes, the vines, or even the old pergola wouldn’t have mattered. But every day he was here, Beau saw something: possibility. It was something that seemed to come naturally to Madeline, who spent every minute she could bringing the kitchen garden back to life.
One might argue she was having the same effect on him.
After the work on the pergola had begun in earnest, Maddy and Annie took their reclaimed grapes into the kitchen. Maddy had never worked with grapes before, and she was eager to explore what was possible with them. She showed Annie the Reddens’ book, and they laughed in mutual fascination at the suggestion that rooting mustard seeds in hot horse manure could produce leaves in hours. As they flipped through the pages, exchanging stories of past gardening successes and failures, Maddy noted the differences in technique from the lessons she’d gathered from her own experience with those of Annie’s, informed by generations and generations of local knowledge from her Mi’kma’ki elders. Overall, the morning passed quickly with contentment—something Maddy never dreamed she’d feel outside the walls of Everwell.
The school had been Maddy’s home for seven years. More than a home—a haven. After years on the run from a murder charge, Maddy had found her way to Boston. She’d worked in a factory there for a time, always looking over her shoulder, waiting for the day the Ferguson family would find her and take her back to Cape Enrage to pay for the crime of killing their beloved son. She’d met Phillipa Hartley there, saving her from a man who’d cornered Phillipa in an alley. On the spot, Phillipa had offered Maddy a lifeline—a place at Everwell. It took some time, but at last, it felt like home. So much so, she could hardly imagine another.
