I opened my mouth to protest, but she cut through me. “Because freedom is not found out-of-doors—one is cold there, and finally, hungry, too. And your father”—she shook her head at me—“your father came to know that. He came to me.”

I stared at her.

“That is the breadth of my knowledge.” She regarded me, two small spots of color fastened to her cheeks, her chest rising and falling with short, harsh breaths.

“Listen, Maisie,” she said. “You are in the grip of some strange lunacy. Else how am I to understand you would rather believe the rantings of a sick old woman?”

“I cannot help it, Mama,” I gasped out, “her words speak truth!”

“Truth!” Mama took two great strides to stand before me. “Here.” She grabbed my hand in hers and pressed it to her face. “Here, Maisie,” she murmured, “here is truth.”

I swallowed.

“Yet I do not know who you are anymore, Maisie Thomas,” she said slowly, and turned right round away from me to stare down the lawn and out to sea.

“Look at that,” she whispered. “He has come early.”

I followed where she looked, to see the tall, inevitable figure of Jonathan Lanman flanked by Bart and Mr. Cutting, advancing up the gangway from the dock. And without another word to me, Mama began to walk away down the lawn. As she left, her back was a remonstrance, and the cord between us tightened. I felt the knot it made within my chest pull against me, pull and pull, so that I almost cried out at the pain. She walked and walked, so slowly, it seemed illusion, this rip inside my breast—so slowly, she seemed to fade from sight even as her absence loomed.

At the bottom of the lawn, she turned round and regarded me still standing in the lee of the House. But she made not a motion. She made not a gesture toward me. She simply picked up her skirt and turned once more, vanishing through the dark doorway of the boathouse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Once upon a time, I considered the most frightening moment of my life that in which Papa lay below us in that shattered hole, down, cast down so far from our help; but as I watched Mama vanish from me, only to emerge again upon the wide platform of the dock to take Jonathan’s hand in hers in greeting, it was as if I lay down with my father in the black hole and saw my mother step up to that pitiless rim, her head floating above us like a flower upon the surface of a pond. She peered down at us there, the two of us fallen and broken open, and shook her head, withdrawing. For she would save only part of the man, my father. She would read but one history. She would pull only the one in her heart back up through the timbered hole and keep him there, and she would dare me to rescue the other. She would dare me, and she would leave me where I lay.