"Eliza Brennan. And the gate's not famous. I am, apparently."
"In Stonegate, that's fame." He came closer and — to Walter's visible disapproval when he emerged from the gatehouse — crouched down beside her and put a thumb on the hinge strap she'd been measuring, a workingman's gesture, testing the play in it. "Eighth of an inch of wear. These were poured, not milled. You know iron."
"I restore it. Mostly Boston. Churches, fences, one very apologetic lighthouse."
"And one very unapologetic gate." He stood, brushing gravel off his palms, and something in his face changed as he looked through the bars at the house on its rise. "I haven't been summoned home in four years. My brother used the word situation twice in one phone call and the word family four times, which is a personal record. I drove down expecting a planning dispute." He looked back at her. "You're the situation, aren't you?"
"I'm told I'm a situation, a claim, and a trespass," Eliza said. "It depends on the lawyer's mood. Walter will tell you I'm a genealogical inconvenience."
"I'll tell you she's company," Walter said stiffly from the gatehouse door, "which is more than the house has sent me lately. Your mother's expecting you, Mr. Jack."
The dinner that night was laid in the dining room for six: Constance at the head, Graham carving with surgical grievance, Bea quiet between the lawyer and the empty chair where a father used to sit. Malcolm Pierce had the ease of a man who had been eating at that table for thirty years and intended to eat there for thirty more. Jack, showered and still out of place in a clean shirt, ate two helpings of everything and waited until the plates were being cleared to ruin the evening.
"So," he said. "The woman at the gate. Somebody tell me the version you'd tell a stranger, and then somebody tell me the truth, and I'll try to guess which is which."
"There is a claim," Malcolm said smoothly, "of the most tenuous kind. A photograph, some letters, a story. The family handled a similar unpleasantness in 1969 and there is documentation —"
"An annulment," Graham said. "There was no marriage in any sense that survived it. The woman is the granddaughter of a housemaid who has been told a romantic story, and she has come a long way on the strength of it. I feel sorry for her, brother. I do. But feeling sorry is not a settlement."
"Handled," Jack repeated. "That's the word you used. Handled how?"
Malcolm dabbed his mouth with his napkin, unhurried. "The young woman was a member of staff who found herself in difficulty. Mr. Whitmore senior made arrangements. The matter was regularised on paper, the young woman was provided for, and she left the family's employ with every reasonable advantage. It was, if anything, a generous episode. It has since been improved in the retelling, the way these things are, with every generation that repeats them."
"The young woman," Jack said. "Did she have a name, in the handling?"
"Josephine," said Bea, to her fork. "Her name was Josephine Sullivan. She was nineteen. She worked in this house from the time she was seventeen, and she was godmother to the cook's baby, and there's a sampler she stitched still hanging in the old servants' hall, because Father wouldn't have it taken down. I asked him why, once. He said it was good work." She aligned the fork a final time. "That's all. That's all I know."
Bea said nothing more. She had gone back to silence, and Jack, who knew his sister, understood that it was not agreement; it was Bea deciding where the weight of a thing would fall.
"Has anyone actually spoken to her?" Jack asked. "Sat down. Listened to the whole story. Looked at the photograph properly."
"The photograph is of Edward," Constance said, and the room went still in the way it does when a door opens somewhere in a house and no one remembers leaving it open. She had not spoken Edward's name in that room in years; the staff said she never spoke it at all. "It proves nothing. Young men have photographs taken. It proves nothing at all."
"Mother," Jack said gently, "you went white as paper just now. I watched you. Whatever it proves, it proves something to you."
"Edward is dead," Constance said. "He died in a war this family gave him to, and I will not have his name turned into a parlour entertainment by a girl with a suitcase of old paper."
Graham set the carving knife down with more force than the meat required. "Jack. You weren't here. You don't know what this family has already survived in the newspapers, in this town —"
"In the newspapers in 1969, you mean. When I was minus thirteen." Jack leaned back. "Here's what I know from one afternoon. There's a woman measuring our gate like it's a sick relative, and she does it like someone who expects to be responsible for it. Fraudsters don't bring tape measures, Graham. They bring lawyers. She's brought one lawyer, and he's hers, and he's in Boston, and by all accounts she's told him to sit down and be quiet until she says so." He stood, because he had never in his life been able to have a row sitting down. "You've had Malcolm tell you it's nothing for three weeks. If it's nothing, why did you telephone Maine?"
He found Eliza at the gate an hour later, in the dark, doing nothing more suspicious than leaning on the gatepost looking at the Sound. She had come back from the library through the village and stopped, the way she always stopped, out of a habit she hadn't yet admitted was hope.