Outside, the Savannah rain had begun. Clara stood under the portico with the catalogue copy in her bag, next to her mother's diary, and felt β under the fear, under the fury at Silas Crane β the first thin, unstoppable thread of hope. She was ashamed of it, until she remembered Rose writing I have to believe him, and understood that hope was not a betrayal of the dead at all.
It was an inheritance from them.
Chapter 15: Thomas Wren Is Alive
The cottage on the Isle of Hope did not want to be found, and Clara loved it for that before she had even seen it.
There was no number on the gate, no name on the mailbox. The drive was crushed shell, white as bone, winding between live oaks so old their branches stooped to the ground and rose again. Beyond the trees, the Skidaway marsh glittered, and a heron stood in it, patient as a fellow waiter.
"He may not be here," Noah said, for the fourth time since the causeway. "The invoice is twenty years old, Clara. He may have moved. He mayβ"
"I know what he may." She was holding the locket.
Priya had released it from the safe that morning with a lawyer's reluctance and a friend's blessing, in its evidence sleeve, photographed and logged; Clara had taken it out in the car outside Savannah and had not put it back. It lay warm now in her closed hand, the dented heart, the chain pooled against her fingers. It felt less like evidence than like a passport. As if she might need, at this last door, to prove which country she came from.
Halfway down the shell path Clara stopped, abruptly, under the dripping oak, and Noah stopped with her and waited, because by now he had learned the particular geography of her halts.
"I have had a speech ready since Charleston," she said. "Four speeches. In one of them I am dignified. In one of them I am furious, which is dignified wearing a coat. In one of them I am six, which frightens me, because I did not know until this month that the six-year-old had anything to say. I have lost all four of them somewhere on the causeway."
"Good," Noah said. "He's had thirty-two years of other people's speeches. Crane's, in a hospital room. His sister's, in letters he was never sent. Mine, at an empty grave, every Christmas, getting shorter. If anybody on earth has earned an unprepared sentence, Clara, it's the two of you."
From his coat he took a photograph she had not seen: a garden, the 1960s, a boy of perhaps ten with paint already on his shirt, grinning ferociously at the camera, and beside him a little girl in plaits with her hand raised mid-instruction. "Him and my mother," Noah said. "Margaret. She used to say he was the only person who ever listened to her as if she were already grown. I thought you should see him at the age when nothing had happened to anybody. In case β in case the man in there is hard to look at, the first minute. He wasn't always the afterward of something. None of you were."
"He'll know you," Noah said. "But all right. The locket first."
They did not knock at first. From the gate they could see the cottage β one storey, cypress boards, a porch buried in jasmine β and, separate from it, down a path of the same white shell, a studio: a converted boathouse with a north wall made almost entirely of glass. The glass was lit from within, though it was full morning. And a figure moved behind it, slowly, the way figures move in aquariums.
Clara walked down the path. Her legs were doing it, not her courage; her courage had stayed in the car. Noah followed half a step behind, close enough to catch her, far enough not to lead. At the studio door β open, because painters and river air are old allies β she stopped, and the man inside turned from his easel, a brush in his hand, and time, which had been misbehaving for a month, finally stopped pretending to be ordinary at all.
He was sixty-three. He was thinner than the miniature, and silver where the miniature was dark, and the left side of his face and neck bore the pale, pulled shine of old burn scars, running down into the collar of a paint-stained shirt, and the left hand that held the palette had two fingers that did not fully straighten.
But the eyes that lifted to Clara were the eyes in the locket. Not similar to them. Not reminiscent of them. The eyes themselves, thirty-two years older, set in a face that grief had redrawn and not erased.
The brush fell. It made almost no sound on the wooden floor, only a small, wet, green note.
"Rose," he said.
It was not a greeting. It was not even a word, the way Clara would remember it later. It was the sound a held breath makes after three decades.
"No," she said, and her voice came out younger than she was. "No. I'm β she'sβ" The locket was suddenly impossible to hold and impossible to let go of, and she opened her hand, and held it out on her palm across the space between them, the little dented heart swinging on its chain, catching the north light exactly as it caught it in the painting of the woman in the garden. "She kept it. She kept it behind her portrait, all her life. I'm Clara. I'mβ"
He was looking at the locket. He was looking at her hand under the locket, and at her face above it, and his own face was doing something terrible and quiet, the way a landscape does weather.
He reached, blindly and without dignity, for the back of a chair, and Noah moved β not to him, Clara noticed, but to her, one hand under her elbow, holding her up in the doorway of her own beginning while her father learned, standing, that the beginning had happened.
"Clara," Thomas repeated, trying the name as if it were in a frame he had to carry carefully. "Rose wrote it on the β we had a list, on the back of a receipt, for the cradle. Names for a girl. She would not tell me her favourite. She said a name should meet its person first." His face moved. "May," he said. "She would have been born in May."
"The twelfth of May," said Clara.
"The twelfth of May," he repeated, and nodded, too many times, a man agreeing with an executioner and a priest at once. "Nineteen ninety-four."
"I was told," he said at last, with great difficulty, as if the words were in a language he had sworn off, "that Rose died. In Charleston. In the December. And the child with her. Silas Crane came himself β he stood in a hospital room in Jacksonville and he showed me a death notice he had had printed, and my own obituary from a Charleston paper, side by side, like a pair of portraits. He said if I ever went back, he would finish what the fire started." He stopped. Corrected himself, in horror. "There was no baby. He told me there was no baby."
"There was a baby," Noah said, hoarsely, from behind her. He had gone white to the lips, this nephew who had buried an empty coffin with his grandmother. "Uncle Thomas. It's Noah. Margaret's son. There was a baby, and she's standing in your doorway, and Crane lied to both ends of this family for thirtyβ"
But Thomas Wren was not listening to Noah anymore, and Clara understood, with a clarity that would have frightened her yesterday, that for the next minute of the world's history there were only two people in it.
He crossed the studio. The canvases blurred past her β marsh light, a woman's shoulder, the same dark-haired woman at forty, at fifty, imagined forward year by year by a man who had never been allowed to watch her age, so that the whole room was a corridor of Roses who had never existed, growing old in paint because they could not grow old in life. He stopped a careful, honourable distance from Clara, as men of his generation were taught to stop, and also as if she were made of the thinnest glass in Georgia.
His scarred hand rose. It did not touch her. It hovered, shaking, beside her cheek, and she felt the heat of it, and the paint smell of him, turpentine and linseed and river air, which her body recognised before her mind did β the smell in the miniature, the smell Rose had written about, paint under the fingernails, green as spring, thirty-two years old and yesterday.
"You have her eyes," Thomas Wren said.