"Clara," Noah said quietly, behind her. "Whatever is in there, you don't have to open it today."
"Yes," she said, and turned the key. "I do."
A tune began at once, thin and sweet and thirty years old β FΓΌr Elise, missing every fourth note β and Clara lifted the lid of her mother's music box, and looked inside at the thing Rose had hidden for her daughter to find.
Chapter 12: Letters in Rose's Hand
The music box did not contain jewellery.
It contained paper β so much paper that the velvet tray bowed under it β and on top of the paper, weighted with a single dried camellia, lay an envelope in Rose Sinclair's unmistakable hand, the tall, looping script Clara had last seen on a birthday card when she was nine years old.
For Clara, when the locket opens. If it never opens, burn this unread. Mama.
Clara sat down on the attic floor, among the dust and the trunks, and did not care at all about her dress.
"Do you want me to go downstairs?" Noah asked.
"No." She caught his sleeve like a child. "No. Stay. If I stop, read over my shoulder and make me keep going."
Under the envelope was a diary bound in green cloth, its spine cracked, and beneath that a bundle of letters tied with the ribbon off a christening gift, each one addressed and never sent. To Thomas. To Thomas. To Thomas, Savannah. To my daughter, for later. To my daughter, for later still.
She read the diary first, and Rose leapt off the pages so alive that Clara kept stopping in shock at how funny, how fierce, her mother had been.
June 1993. Father has engaged a portraitist for my twenty-first, because a Sinclair must be painted as other families are photographed. The portraitist is twenty-nine, has paint under every fingernail and no idea how to talk to rich people, and I have laughed more in his studio in three sittings than in this house in a year. His name is Thomas Wren. He says a face is a country and most people only let you see the capital city.
July. He has painted the locket miniature in secret, from memory, in one night, because I said no one had ever really looked at me. He is wrong about one thing. He looks.
August. I am in love, and it is not a fever and it is not rebellion, whatever Father says. It is the quietest thing that has ever happened to me. Thomas wants Tuesday afternoons, a house with light, and a life built layer on layer. I did not know wanting could be quiet.
September. He has begun teaching me to see, which he says is different from looking. Looking is what people do at menus. Seeing is an act of trespass. He set an apple, a glass of water and my own left hand on the studio table and made me describe them for an hour, and when I cried with frustration he was delighted, the wretch, and said now I understood what every sitting costs him. I came home with paint on my cuff and told Father it was from the garden. I am becoming an accomplished liar. It frightens me how little it frightens me.
September 28th. Today, in the middle of a sitting, with the light going, he put down his brush and said, quite conversationally, that he intended to marry me. Not asked β intended, as if it were weather already on its way. I said a Sinclair does not marry her portraitist. He said a Sinclair apparently does anything she likes in his studio, including stealing his best brushes, and would I please stop pretending either of us believed in the word apparently. I laughed until I cried, and then I cried until he held me, and somewhere in the middle of all that water I said yes. There. It is written. Yes.
Then the handwriting changed. The jokes stopped.
October 12th. Father found the letters Thomas sent to the studio address. I have never seen him frightened before β angry, yes, a hundred times, but tonight he was frightened, and a frightened Charles Sinclair is the most dangerous animal in South Carolina. He said the Wrens were nobody. He said Thomas had a record β a fight, a debt, things Father has clearly paid someone to dig for and perhaps to invent. He said if I saw Thomas again he would ruin him so completely that even his paintings would be taken down and burned. He used that word. Burned. I cannot stop hearing it.
October 19th. Henry Bennett has proposed. Of course he has. Father chose him the way you choose a merger: good family, good prospects, a kind face in the photographs. Henry knows. That is the worst of it β Henry knows I do not love him, knows there is someone else, and has agreed anyway, because Father asked him, and because he believes patience can make a tragedy into a marriage.
October 26th. I am pregnant.
The attic seemed to tilt.
Clara read the next entry through a blur and then had to read it aloud to believe it, her voice going out across the dusty rafters while Noah sat very still beside her.
"I told Thomas tonight, in the studio, by the river. He held my face in both his hands β paint on his thumb, green as spring β and he said, 'Then we begin now.' Not a word of fear. He is drawing plans for a cradle on the back of a receipt. We are going to Savannah before Christmas. We are going to be married, quietly, and by the time Father learns of it there will be a ring, a licence, and a child to make his rages pointless. I believe him. I have to believe him. It is the only plan my whole heart has ever made."
"Clara," Noah said, after a long moment. "There is more. The handwriting β look."
November 9th. Something is wrong. Thomas did not come to the studio. His landlady says men came asking for him, respectable men, a lawyer's men. Silas Crane called at this house today and took tea with Father behind a closed door for two hours, and when he left he looked at me on the stairs the way you look at a parcel you are deciding how to post. I am so frightened I cannot eat. I have put the miniature in my locket, behind my own portrait, where Father will never think to look. If anything happens to me β if anything happens to us β let whoever finds it understand: he was not a scandal. He was my husband β let the world make what it will of a word it never earned the right to question β and this child was made in love, not in shame.
She untied the christening ribbon with her teeth because her fingers would not obey her, and read the unsent letters standing up, as if sitting to read them would make them official.
Thomas β The miniature is in my locket, behind my portrait, where he will never look. He never looks at anything he believes he already owns. If you are reading a copy of this in some other life, know that the original stayed with me because the posting of it felt like the last thing I would ever do, and I find I am not ready for last things. I am ready, God help me, for first ones. Come and get us. β R.
"Then she wasn't writing to him," Clara said slowly. "She was writing so that someone, someday, would know she had tried. She was writing to the record." She looked down at the bundle in her hands with something close to awe. "She was an archivist, Noah. She just didn't have an archive. She had a music box."
Clara closed the diary. Her face was wet. Underneath the bundle of letters she found the one she had been dreading and needing in equal measure, and she opened it last, alone in her reading even with Noah beside her, because some things a mother writes only to one pair of eyes.
My darling Clara,
If you are reading this, the locket has opened, and I am so sorry, and so proud, and so sorry again. I hid the truth to give you a childhood without whispers β a father in the photographs, a name no one could sneer at, a life that was yours and not a story other people told about you. It was a coward's bargain and a mother's bargain, and they were the same bargain, and I made it every morning at that piano while you ate toast underneath.
Your father β the father of your heart's beginning β was Thomas Wren. He did not abandon us. Whatever they tell you, hold to that. He did not abandon us.
Love, always, Mama.