Page 35 of A Stolen Heart

Aunt Hortense stared. “What are you talking about?”

She explained about the Countess and how she had fainted when she met Alexandra the evening before, and how Thorpe had taken her to see the Countess. “She showed me a portrait of her daughter-in-law painted years and years ago, and she looked almost exactly like me!”

Aunt Hortense’s eye widened. “But who—how…”

“Everyone says it’s just coincidence. At least, that is what Thorpe and the Countess’s daughter and I said. Only the Countess stubbornly held out the hope that I—”

“That you what? I don’t understand.”

“She thought I might be her granddaughter, whom she has thought dead for twenty-two years.”

Her aunt blinked. “But that’s absurd! How could you be related to some Countess in England?”

“I don’t know! Neither does anyone else. The Countess theorized that her granddaughter could have escaped the mob, being so little at the time, or that some kind soul took pity on her and helped her escape.”

“Escaped what mob?”

“In Paris, during the revolution. The same mob that Mother was so frightened of.”

“Paris!” Aunt Hortense looked astounded.

“Yes. The Countess’s son and his family were killed by the revolutionaries in Paris. Their baby was named Alexandra.”

“Alexandra! What are you suggesting?” Aunt Hortense’s words were indignant, but there was an odd quality to her voice.

“I’m not sure. I only know that I look like a Frenchwoman who died twenty-two years ago.” Alexandra began to pace the room, too agitated to sit down. “Did Mother ever tell you any of the details of my birth? How much I weighed or how long I was or the name of the midwife who attended her? I asked her tonight, and she claimed she couldn’t remember.”

“It has been a long time.”

“But it hadn’t been a long time when she returned home from Paris. Did she tell you about any of it then?”

“Some things. She talked about how frightened she was and about how much you had helped her get through the ordeal. She talked about Hiram’s passing, and how sad and lonely she had been.”

“But nothing about the birth itself.”

“You must remember, Alexandra.” Her aunt blushed, amazing Alexandra. “I never married. Your mother probably thought she needed to spare my sensibilities. There are some things married women simply do not discuss with spinsters.”

Alexandra knew that that was true. She had had enough experiences where, just when someone was about to get to the most interesting part of their story, one woman or the other would glance at her and say, “No, you mustn’t say that in front of Alexandra. She’s not married, you know.”

Her aunt hesitated. “There was one thing, though….”

“What?” Alexandra turned on her eagerly.

Aunt Hortense sighed, holding back for a moment, then went on. “Well, it always seemed odd that Rhea never sent home word about you. One day we got a letter from her, from England, saying she was sailing home, that Hiram had died of a fever, and she was returning with their baby. That was the first she ever wrote us about you.”

Alexandra looked at her, dumbstruck. Finally she recovered her voice enough to ask, “Ever? She did not write you the news when I was born?”

Aunt Hortense shrugged. “I never received it. She said she sent me a letter at the time and that the mails must have lost it. Obviously, that can happen. But the odd thing is that even if that one letter had been lost, why wouldn’t she have mentioned you in other letters? Baby’s got two new teeth this week. That sort of thing. It seemed decidedly peculiar, considering the fact that she and Hiram had wanted a baby for so long and had never been able to have one. I would have thought that when she finally did conceive—ten years after they were married—she would have been so proud she was about to burst. She would have written us all your virtues.” The words seemed to rush out of her aunt’s mouth, as if she held them back all these years, and now, once the dam was broken, she could not stem the flood.

“Perhaps I had too few to mention,” Alexandra teased.

“Not likely. Rhea had wanted that baby for so long, so hard. When she came home, that was all she talked about, Alexandra this and Alexandra that, until, if you hadn’t been such a beautiful angel, I would have wanted to scream at her to shut up.” She smiled, belying her words, then looked away. She bit her lip, then added, “Sometimes I wondered—I thought that there must have been something wrong.”

“Like what? What did you think?”

Aunt Hortense glanced at her, embarrassed. At first Alexandra thought she would not answer, but at last she said, “I wondered if perhaps you were not Hiram’s child, if you were a—a love child that she had conceived with another man. She loved Hiram—I know she did. But she wanted a child so badly I could imagine, if it was Hiram’s fault they couldn’t, that Rhea would have had an affair with someone else so that she could get with child. Or even that Hiram had perhaps had an affair. Men do, you know. And Rhea, wanting a child so badly, might have been willing to raise it as her own if he asked her to. But then I would reject the idea as soon as I thought of it. My brother would not have participated in a deception. He was always honest and straightforward.”

“But he was dead by the time she came home,” Alexandra pointed out. “So he wouldn’t have been participating in it. Perhaps he would not have claimed the child as theirs.”