Bewildered, I looked up at her. “But I have read this.”

“No. You have read only the love story. Here lies the understory.” She closed the book. “When I call you again, I shall give this to you, and then you must shape it, Maisie Thomas.”

“I should take up a pen and write what you have written, again?”

She nodded.

“But how should I finish what is already written?”

“Seek the answer to what happened to cause Perdita’s death. Close in the gap and the grave and then”—she smiled—“begin at the beginning and write us anew, all of us—my mother, my sister, Halcy Ames. Start up the story, Maisie; start it up again and carry us forward. Begin it again and finish it—so it will not repeat.”

Slowly, she took one of my hands. The drawing on of evening cast long shadows into the room, and we sat between these shadows in the intense light that evening sometimes shines. Chafing my wrists, she started a tuneless singing. My head leaning against the high back of the chair, I felt flushed and powerless, but calmed by her cool fingers. A current passed through me, like sun stealing through a shaded patch of forest. Much of what she had told, I couldn’t fathom, but resting there, I saw what she told, as with some new faculty of apprehension. In me, the wild tale at which she hinted—the silence of her relations and the girl—developed shadow, line, and a dim but definite perspective. Her fingers on my wrists were soundless bargainers, but it was the promise of the tale itself made its pact with me: a tale of sorrow that held Papa in it, and my sister.

Her voice drew me, a lantern set out for the storm-tossed returning. “Let you not be another buried by a mother’s tale, Maisie. Write us all down, child. And write us new—seek past the lovers and the grave.”

“Yes,” I heard my slow reply, “I will try.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY

Though I descended Miss Grange’s stairs that evening, I had the distinct sense that I pushed upward with each step, back into the light and air of the lively regions of the House, returning to its noisy surface as though I had lain below the water longer than my breath could hold. How could Miss Grange not know what had happened to her child? And how was I to finish a story that was not mine? A story, the outline of which I did not understand? Never, I think, was any child so glad to see her mother as I was catching sight of her just rounding the second staircase dressed and on her way down to the cocktail hour.

“Mama!” I called, and hurried over the intervening passage toward her. The distress on her face was made manifest by her weak smile.