“I did leave, Maisie. Nay—not a leaving exactly, but a flight. I tossed myself into the arms of Joseph Ames, who had sought me since he was a boy, and departed Middle Haven with him on a whaling ship.”

She looked at me. “A whaling ship? Ho! Do you know what the life of a first mate’s wife is upon a ship? Within four months offshore, the cook took sick and died. And I—proud Susannah Grange—cooked and slopped for the crew.”

I stared.

“And all that year”—her voice quieted—“it was this House that was my firm horizon, and Nell’s face I thought of to soothe myself to sleep.”

She crossed her arms. “How could I leave,” she asked me directly now, “what was my own memory: my history walking, and remarking in her?” She stopped a minute. “Nell need only cock an ear in the family manner and that whole rich year of my love”—she looked quickly at me, wary again, but seeing my steady face turned to hers, she continued—“that thick love that came on so slow, so achingly slow, reappeared in the slant of her cheek and chin as she listened.”

She paused. Neither of us moved.

“I did try, Maisie, to strike out anew. But my sister’s story of our life—nay, my sister’s stories—held me close. I could not tear against them; they were imprinted in me as those tiny hands upon the fictitious walls.” She shuddered quietly and folded her arms before her, finally looking up at me.

“So I returned to the House I had renounced—a widow”—she shook her head—“with my baby in my arms.” Her voice broke, but she said, “With Halcy. And I took up here as the cook—not daughter, never daughter again. For I could not think how else to mark the rupture.”

I reached forward and took her hand.

“You see a woman’s story is not single, never a lone tramp toward the end.”

“Why?” I whispered.

Susannah smiled. “Because there are the voices of her house. The lit rooms, peopled and cushioned, that she carries. And though she may travel—” She broke off, considering. “Aye, that is the horror of it—she may never travel from the house that made her.”

My aunt dropped my hand and looked at me. “I once thought the past to be a faint thing I must paste down in my scrapbooks, so memory might endure.” She gave a bitter smile. “But do you know, my dear? It never avails. What is written, or collected, is but a glance, the flash of a cheek as it turns elsewhere. Nothing speaks correctly for the past. Everything lies.”

“No,” I whispered, “not everything.”

She cast an eye on me and shook her head sadly. “They are gone. All of them gone. And you, who are left, who look at me now, do hardly see me.”