"All right, Mr Wren," she said. "Noah. We investigate. Together, on my terms: nothing published, nothing recorded, nothing of my mother used without my consent, until we know what we actually know. And when we go to Sinclair House, we go legally, or we go cleverly β but we go."
"We go," he agreed, and held out his hand across the key, the sketch, the spilled coffee.
Chapter 11: Sinclair House
Sinclair House had been shut for eleven years, and it looked like a place that had learned how to hold its breath.
The wrought-iron gates on Meeting Street stood chained, their scrollwork choked with jasmine gone wild. Beyond them, the great white house rose three storeys above a garden that no one tended any longer β camellias blooming madly in the wrong season, moss hanging from the oaks in grey curtains, a fountain choked with brown leaves. Clara Bennett stood on the pavement with Noah Wren beside her and felt, absurdly, like a trespasser at the door of her own childhood.
"I spent every Christmas here until I was twelve," she said. "Grandfather Charles at the head of the table. Nobody was allowed to speak about art. Or feelings. Or my mother, if she wasn't in the room."
"And when she was in the room?"
"Then everybody pretended she was happy."
Noah said nothing. In the three weeks since the locket had broken Clara's life apart β since an appraiser at her engagement party had opened her mother's heart-shaped locket and found, hidden behind Rose's portrait, a miniature painting of a man, and the police and the newspapers and Julian Ashford had all done the rest β Noah had learned when her silences were questions she was asking herself.
She took the tiny brass key from her coat pocket. It had fallen out of the locket's false back along with the miniature: a key no longer than her thumbnail, green with age, its bow shaped like a treble clef.
It did not fit the gates. It did not fit anything Clara had tried β not her mother's jewellery box in Charleston, not the desk Henry Bennett had given her, not any lock in the apartment she had already half moved out of, having lost Julian, her gallery job, and the easy trust of everyone who had once called her respectable.
But she had remembered, at four this morning, the music box.
"You are expected, Miss Clara."
She jumped. The side gate β the tradesmen's gate, painted green β had opened without a sound, and Mrs Delia Brooks stood in it, seventy-eight years old and straight as a ruler, her white hair pinned in the same knot she had worn for fifty years, first as the Sinclair family's housekeeper and then, after Rose married Henry, as the woman who had quietly followed her girl into exile and stayed until Rose died.
"Delia." Clara's voice broke on the name. "You still come here?"
"Every Tuesday and Friday. I air the rooms. I dust your mother's piano. Mr Charles's will pays a company, and the company pays me, and nobody asks what an old woman does in an empty house." Delia's eyes, dark and shrewd, moved to Noah. "This is the journalist."
"Former journalist, mostly," Noah said. "Thomas Wren was my uncle. I'm here for Clara."
"Then you are here for Rose too, whether you know it or not." Delia stepped back and held the gate. "Come in through the garden. The front hall makes people whisper, and I am too old for whispering."
The house smelled of lemon polish, damp, and roses left too long in water. Sheets covered the furniture in the drawing room like patient ghosts. But Delia had, as she said, aired the rooms, and in the morning room at the back β Rose's room, the one with the French windows and the piano β the covers were folded away and a vase of garden camellias, pink as cheeks, stood on the sill exactly as Rose had always kept them.
Clara stopped in the doorway, undone.
"She played here every morning," Delia said, not looking at her, busying herself with a duster she plainly did not need. "Even after the marriage. Especially after the marriage. She would play, and you would sit underneath the piano in your nightdress with your toast, and she said the music got into the floorboards and kept the house from being entirely her father's."
Before she could stop herself, Clara lifted the piano lid. The keys were yellowed but dustless β Delia's doing, all these years β and when she pressed middle C, very softly, the note came up clean and true out of the silent house, and a second note answered it in her memory so clearly that for a moment she was five years old again, cross-legged in the dark underneath, listening to the pedals sigh.
"She had it tuned the spring before she died," Delia said. "Drove down from Charleston with the tuner's name in her glove compartment like a β like an assignation. Mr Henry never knew. She sat right here afterwards and played for an hour, and then she cried, and then she made tea, in that order, and never explained a word of it to anyone."
"Did she ever explain anything to anyone?" Clara asked.
"Once," Delia said. "Not in words. She left a wedding ring on top of this piano one night in 1994 β not the ring Mr Henry gave her, a plain gold band I'd never seen before β and in the morning it was gone, and she never wore it, and I never asked. An old servant learns which objects in a house are load-bearing. You don't touch those ones, Miss Clara. You dust around them, and you wait."
"Delia." Clara crossed the room and took both the old woman's hands, duster and all. "Why didn't you come to me? After the engagement party. After the newspapers. I called you six times."
"Because I promised her." Delia's composure, which had survived Charles Sinclair, two funerals, and the razing of everything she loved, finally cracked at the edges. "The night before she married Mr Henry, Miss Rose sat at that piano and made me swear. Whatever happens, she said, Clara is to have an ordinary life. No scandal. No digging. She said the past was a room with a fire in it and she would not have her baby carried into it. I have kept that promise for thirty-two years, Miss Clara, and it has near killed me every one of them."
"And now?"
"Now the locket has spoken, and a promise to the dead cannot stand against the living asking." Delia withdrew one hand and pointed, with great authority, toward the ceiling. "You didn't come for the ground floor. You came for the attic, same as she knew you would, one day. She left her music box up there when this house was shut. She told me: if Clara ever comes with the little key, let her go up alone β well." A glance at Noah. "Nearly alone."
"My knees retired before I did," she said, "and besides β she laid that room for you, not for me. But I'll tell you what's up there, because she told me, the last summer this house was open. Trunks on the left are your grandfather's and can rot for all the good they'll do you. Dresses in the middle. And at the far end, under the round window, a low table that was hers when she was a little girl, when this was her nursery before it was an attic."
"She put it there herself?" Noah asked.
"Carried it up herself, with the house shut and the staff paid off, in the rain." Delia looked at Clara. "Thirty-two years old, engaged to be married in the spring to a man her father had chosen, and eight months gone with child where no one could say so, and she carried a table up two flights of stairs because what was on it had to be in the one room in this house her father never entered. He thought attics were for servants and ghosts. She was counting on that. She was always counting on exactly the thing a man was proudest of not doing."
"You'll bring yourselves down," Delia said. "That's all I ever asked of either of you."
They climbed the back stairs, then the narrow attic stairs, into heat and dust and the smell of cedar. Trunks. A rocking horse with one glass eye. Dresses in tissue, labelled in Charles Sinclair's clerkly hand: Season 1988. Season 1991. And at the far end, under the eaves, on a low table beneath a round window, a music box of rosewood inlaid with mother-of-pearl, shaped β Clara's breath stopped β shaped, in miniature, exactly like a heart.
Her hand was shaking so badly that Noah had to steady her wrist.
The tiny brass key slid into the lock beneath the lid as if it had been oiled yesterday.