Chapter 11: The Test
Peter Whitmore said the word science the way other men said the word lawyer, as a threat dressed up as a procedure.
"There will be a test," he said, standing in the gatehouse doorway with the October fog at his back and his coat still buttoned. "A proper one. Accredited laboratory, chain of custody, none of this β " he looked at the tobacco tin on Silas's shelf, at the brass key lying on the table between two cups of tea gone cold, "β none of this folklore. If she is who she says she is, a laboratory will say so. If she is not, a laboratory will say that too, and we can all stop performing."
Hannah Hart looked at him for a moment without anger, which seemed to unsettle him more than anger would have.
"Of course there should be a test," she said. "I would want one, if I were you. A photograph can be anyone's uncle. A letter can be written by anyone with a steady hand. But blood is blood, Mr. Whitmore. Test it."
"Peter," Clara said from the window seat, quietly. "His name is Peter, Hannah. He's my brother. He's frightened, which makes him rude, which he then mistakes for strength. It's a family condition."
"I am not frightened," Peter said.
"You have been frightened since Tuesday," Clara said, "and so have I, and so has Mother, and Father has been frightened since 1975, so you are in excellent company. Sit down, Peter. You're blocking the light and Silas's tea is getting cold."
He did not sit down. But something in the room had shifted, because Hannah had not flinched. In Peter's experience the guilty flinched. They bargained. They arrived with lawyers and left with settlements. This woman, who taught school in Maine and had arrived out of the fog with nothing but a key and a letter, had agreed to his test the way a person agrees to have their height measured. As if the fact of herself were not in dispute anywhere except in his own house.
"Mr. Hollis will arrange it," Peter said at last. "Tomorrow morning. A nurse will come here. Samples from you β and from me. A control from the main line of the family." He paused. "So there can be no question of the comparison."
"There won't be," Hannah said. "But thank you for offering yourself. That was decently done, whatever your reasons were."
He stared at her.
"I didn't β "
"I know why you did it," she said gently. "You did it so that if the answer is yes, no one can say you hid from it. My grandfather had a saying: a man who walks toward the wave isn't braver than the wave. He's just tired of standing in wet sand." She picked up her cup. "Drink your tea, Peter. Silas makes it strong enough to stand a spoon in, but it grows on you."
The nurse came the next morning in a gray car, with sealed kits and printed labels and the brisk kindness of a woman who had swabbed half the drawing rooms of Connecticut. Hannah rolled up her sleeve in Silas's little kitchen while the kettle ticked on the stove. The needle went in cleanly. Beside her, in the chair Silas had wiped down twice for the occasion, Peter Whitmore held his arm out with the expression of a man defusing something.
"You don't have to watch," the nurse told him.
"I'm not watching," Peter said, watching.
Hannah's blood filled its small labeled tube. Peter's filled his. The nurse sealed them both into the same gray transport case, wrote her initials across the seal in Hannah's sight and in Peter's, and drove away down the long drive between the wet lawns, and the whole thing took eleven minutes and fifty years.
Afterward there was nothing to do but wait, and waiting, Hannah discovered, was the thing the house had been practicing for half a century and had never once learned to do well.
It was August who decided where she would do it.
The message came down from the sickroom that evening, carried by Mrs. Adey the housekeeper, who delivered it to the gatehouse with the air of a woman repeating something she had made the messenger repeat twice before she believed it. The old man had asked where the girl was lodging. He had been told: the gatehouse, with Silas, at her own request. And August Whitmore, who had not given an order about any living person in some months, had raised his head from the pillow and said β Mrs. Adey quoted it exactly, because she had written it down β
"Good. Let her stay there. She waits where Samuel waited. Then we will see."
Silas set the words down on the table between them like something made of glass.
"He means the night your grandfather waited in this room," he said. "June, 1975. Samuel sat where you're sitting, Miss Hart, from ten o'clock until midnight, with his bag packed and his whole life decided, waiting for a seventeen-year-old boy to come off his rounds and unlock a gate. He waited here. Two hours. Longest two hours of my life, and I was the one with the keys."
"Then I'll wait well," Hannah said. "I've had practice. I waited nineteen years for my mother to tell me who we were, and she never did. I waited a year beside my grandfather's bed for him to tell me, and he did it with a key instead of words." She turned the brass key over in her palm. "A few days for a laboratory seems almost quick."
But the days were not quick. The laboratory had its queues and its protocols; Mr. Hollis telephoned twice a day and was told, twice a day, that the analysis was proceeding. Hannah filled the waiting the way a teacher fills a classroom hour, completely, so that fear had no empty chair to sit in. She walked the grounds with Silas in the mornings, learning the estate the way her grandfather had known it at twenty β the ha-ha, the orchard wall, the boathouse path, the place in the fence where the deer came through. She shelved books in the gatehouse. She mended Silas's coat. She wrote to her school in Maine, where a substitute was teaching her fourth-graders, and told them she was attending to family business and would be back when it was done.
Clara came down every afternoon with something from the house β cake, news, her father's blood pressure rendered as theater criticism. "He is holding himself together like a man carrying a full bowl across a room," she reported. "He asks for you twice a day and then pretends he asked for water."
Peter did not come. Peter, Silas reported from his rounds, was at his office in Hartford until all hours, or at the house arguing with Mr. Hollis in the library in voices too low to carry, or simply walking the drive at dusk the way his uncle had walked it in a photograph neither of them had yet admitted they kept thinking about.
On the fourth day it rained, a straight gray Connecticut rain that drummed the gatehouse roof and turned the drive to a mirror. Hannah stood at the window watching the great house blur behind its own weather and thought about the mathematics of her own existence: that she was twenty-nine years old, that her mother had been born in a cottage in Maine to a man the whole world believed drowned, that everything she was stood at the end of a corridor of closed doors β a gate unlocked at midnight, a letter hidden in a drawer for fifty years, a bride who married the brother, a patriarch who found the truth in 1981 and locked it in a desk. Any one of those doors staying shut, and there is no Hannah Hart at this window. There is no one waiting at all.
"You'll wear the glass out, looking," Silas said, not unkindly, from his chair.
"I'm thinking about how close it all came to not happening," she said. "Me. Any of it."
Silas was quiet a moment. Then he said the truest thing anyone had said to her since she arrived.
"Everything that matters comes that close, Miss Hart. That's how you can tell it matters."
On the fifth morning, Mr. Hollis telephoned the gatehouse himself, which he had never done, and Silas put the receiver into her hand with both of his, like a christening.
"Miss Hart," the old lawyer said, and she could hear paper being arranged on a desk, and underneath it something in his voice that had not been there before, something almost like awe held in check by seventy years of professional habit. "The laboratory has issued its report. I have it in front of me. I think you should hear it at the house β all of you together, as a family. If β " he stopped, and corrected himself, with the care of a man amending a document in ink, "β as the family. Mr. August is asking for you. Both of you. All of you. Come up to the house, Miss Hart. Bring the key."