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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — paint on his thumb, green as spring — 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 — 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 — if anything happens to us — let whoever finds it understand: he was not a scandal. He was my husband — let the world make what it will of a word it never earned the right to question — and this child was made in love, not in shame.
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 — 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 — the father of your heart's beginning — was Thomas Wren. He did not abandon us. Whatever they tell you, hold to that. He did not abandon us.
Love, always, Mama.
Clara folded the letter against her chest, over the place where the locket used to hang, and wept — not for a secret any longer, but for a girl of twenty-one, writing by candlelight in this same house, trying to be brave enough for both of them.
Chapter 13: The Fire
The official report on the death of Thomas Wren was eleven pages long, and Noah had been trying to obtain it, on and off, since he was twenty-three years old.
"Fire departments archive by incident, not by name," he told Clara, spreading photocopies across Priya Shah's kitchen table three nights after Sinclair House, while Priya — Clara's best friend, and an attorney who read footnotes — made tea nobody drank. "Once I was told the file was destroyed in a flood. The archive is on the third floor."
"So how did you get it now?"
"I stopped asking as a nephew. I asked as a journalist, with a records request under state law."
Clara read. She had dreaded this document for weeks the way you dread a hospital corridor, and now that it was under her hands it was worse than dread. It was banal. Incident 93-1187. Structure fire, single occupancy studio, rear of 14 Legare Street. Alarm raised 11:42 p.m., 9 December 1993, by a neighbour. Occupant: Wren, Thomas, male, 29, presumed within. One body recovered, badly burned, from the rear room. Cause of death: smoke inhalation and thermal injury. Manner: accidental.
"Keep reading," Noah said.
Page four. Origin of fire: undetermined, probable electrical fault in a space heater.