“Well, Jonathan, I think no offense was meant.” My father chuckled. “Just another indication, I’m afraid, of how ill-mannered we southerners are in the babel of Manhattan.”

Mama leapt into the breach. “And Mr. Lanman,” she said, addressing the younger brother, “are you also an aspiring shipping magnate?” He blushed and mumbled, “No, ma’am.” And despite Mama’s welcoming attention, he did not elaborate, indeed seemed incapable of continuing any sort of conversation. Mrs. Lanman, however, turned toward Mama, asking some small question about the weather here, and Papa took the opportunity to engage Jonathan Lanman in a slight business matter.

I turned away to look out upon the twilight, the sharp tops of the trees cutting a ragged black line along the sky streaked with clouds and the leftover color of the day. Leaning my forehead into the glass, I was aware of Cynthia’s figure standing beside me, shed of Ruth for a rare moment and able to rest quietly there.

There was a moon that evening, just rising, a bright white orb in the darkening sky. We both lifted our eyes to it and watched in silence as it topped the tree line of the near cove.

“Mother, I will,” said Cynthia, and then she turned to me, her face grown unexpectedly solemn. “Do you remember that phrase, Maisie?”

I shook my head, mystified.

She smiled and turned back round to that moon, resting both her elbows upon the sill, her face tilted up to the light. “It is what Jane Eyre calls back to the moon, on the dreadful night where she is in danger of losing her soul.”

“To Rochester?”

Cynthia nodded.

I smiled. “I detest that scene. I think she should have stayed with him the whole while, and never left.”

“And never met the Rivers?”

“Never left the side of the man she loved.”

Cynthia frowned at me over her shoulder. “She would have forfeited her soul!”

“Because her lover was married to a madwoman?”

“Yes.”

I shrugged, enjoying the consternation I caused in Cynthia, then grandly proclaimed, “Love is love; there is altogether too much fuss made about marriage.”

“Maisie!”

I had shocked her, and when the bell rang us into dinner, she hurriedly joined her parents. I lingered at the window for an instant, looking back up at the moon. My daughter, flee temptation, the moon had cried. And Jane Eyre had answered, Mother, I will. But that night, the sky appeared to me filled with motherless daughters, and the moon’s face seemed to be Halcy’s peering down.

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

Grange House slowed and quieted in the days following Halcy’s and Henry’s deaths, the afterclap of their loss heard in the hush belowstairs and all about the House, as if a breath were taken but not released—until the plain pine coffin drew slowly forward through the front door.