"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."
"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 — well." A glance at Noah. "Nearly alone."
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 — Clara's breath stopped — 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.
"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 — Für Elise, missing every fourth note — 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 — so much paper that the velvet tray bowed under it — 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.