She took her hands from off my shoulders suddenly. “There is no bravery in casting away a promise you have made. You do not know what you say. We must leave this dreadful House at once,” she said, and raised her hand to touch my hair, but the chill of her voice iced over the gesture. “At once,” she repeated firmly, and started down the stairs, nearly pushing past me.

“But we cannot leave until I have done,” I whispered.

She wheeled round upon the lawn, her two hands knotted into the folds of her skirt. “What is it you think you must do?” There, the unfamiliar hard tone crept in again between us.

“I must settle the past.”

“Ah,” she answered softly, and squared her shoulders. “Why don’t you ask me, then?”

I stared at her. “You, Mama?”

“Yes.” There was that smile upon her lips. I saw the effort in the thin line she set. “I am your own mother, after all. All that you need to know, all that concerns you, I have.” She paused. “I bore you; I raised you. Why need you look elsewhere? Why need you look … past me?”

“Mama,” I asked softly, “do you know about what Miss Grange has written?”

Very slowly, she let loose the folds of her skirt. “It has nought to do with you, Maisie.”

“With whom, then?” I quavered.

“None whom I knew,” she answered me firmly. “None whom I knew.”

She had cast him down. She had cast him away.

“I see I cannot make you understand,” I blurted back angrily, “what you have not the breadth of knowledge to grasp.”

She smiled at me then, a tiny tight smile, as if my words were meaningless as a child’s—a child who does not understand her own desire.

“I know your father once loved someone other than me, Maisie.” Mama’s face forbade a reaction from me, so I stood mute before her. “She was an outside sort of girl, I think, and he was drawn away from me for a time.” She crossed her arms before her. “But nothing can change this fact—there are those who can call a man out to what feels like freedom among wild rocks and trees and bright air—but eventually all men long to come inside and hover round the lit windows of a house.”

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.