At the end of that September, I turned eighteen, and Mama insisted we seat ourselves to a formal dinner, and drink a toast. But as we stood across the table from each other in the candlelight, and Mama tried to speak what Papa ought, I could not keep my glass raised, nor keep the tears from spilling over—and both of us sank back down into our chairs. So that day passed wordlessly into the next.

Out of that quiet, our days marched in leaden procession. As though God had gripped Time’s clapper and would not let it swing again, the hours rolled forward soundlessly, without color or light, a blank after blank after blank repeating. There was nought to mark, nought to note, but the quiet tedium of waking and watching Mama grow dimmer, as if her soul were shaded. Yet all that long autumn, I watched her, and listened, though there were no words between us save the most mundane, and no sound save the swish of thread pulled through fabric, or her footsteps pausing in the passage outside my room at night. Pausing, and then stepping on. I grew to be an aficionado of still life, my mother’s face a field of sorrow so infinite in mute variety, I could not look away.

The quotidian matters of our house pressing too heavily upon Mama, I began to answer Miss Matchless’s inquiries as to menus and linens. And though the housekeeper sorrowed for my mother, I watched the woman’s sympathy begin to founder in the servant’s need for order. The house must run. The place must continue.

“Look at Miss Maisie,” I’d heard her mutter belowstairs, “she needs a husband. Who’s to see to that?”

“Hush up, old woman,” Jessie snapped. “You’ve not lost a soul you ever loved.”

“Me?” came the astonished reply. “Why, I’ve lost everyone.” A dish was put back on the shelf. “But there was none of this … mooning.” Another dish replaced. “One goes on. One must go on.”

For whom? my own heart clamored as I climbed back up the kitchen stairs and stood, my foot arrested upon the threshold, listening to the ticktock of that empty house. Nothing material had altered with Papa’s death: Uncle Alec had ably taken up the stewardship of the firm and our fortunes, having worked at Papa’s side all his life. Nothing in the wide front hall cried out the difference, not the thick carpeting upon the stairs, nor the burnished mahogany banister twining its languorous way up into the morning quiet.