"I keep thinking about the will," Clara said.
"What about the will?"
"There was a letter. With Mom's will, there was a sealed letter, for me. Silas Crane gave it to me at the reading, in his office, and Dad was there, and Silas said Mom's instructions were that it was mine and private." She was already up, already pulling the fireproof box from the hall closet, because of course she had kept it, she kept everything, she was an archivist: her mother's sealed letter had sat in that box for five years, behind her passport and her birth certificate — her birth certificate, she thought, and felt the room tilt slightly — and she had read it exactly once, at twenty-seven, anesthetized by grief, and remembered only that it had been strange and sad and that she had decided she was too raw to understand it.
She understood it now. Rose's handwriting, the real one, not the looping girl's pencil of 1993 but the slanted, urgent hand of a dying woman, filled two pages. Most of it was love, and apology, and instruction of the ordinary maternal kind. And at the center of the second page, underlined once:
My darling — the locket is yours now, and so I must say the thing I never could say aloud. Do not open the locket until you are ready to lose everything you think you know. It is not a warning against curiosity. It is a promise that what is inside it is true, and that the truth will cost you the story of your life as you have been told it. When you open it — and you will, you are my daughter, you open everything — forgive me. Forgive me for the silence most of all. I bought your safety with it, and I have never been sure, even now, that I did not overpay.
Clara read it aloud to Priya in a voice that failed twice. Through the window the church bells of St. Michael's marked ten, the way they had marked every hour of every crisis of her life.
"She knew," Priya said quietly. "She knew you'd open it. She planned for you to open it, Clara — after she was gone, when he couldn't —" She stopped.
"When Dad couldn't stop her telling me. She waited until she was dead to tell me, and even then she told me by keyhole." Clara wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "The key, Pri. A birth record naming another man as my father, and a key numbered fourteen, hidden behind her wedding — behind her whole life. She didn't just keep a secret. She left me a trail."
Clara looked at the key again, turning it in the light, wondering what kind of woman hides a door inside a heart and then trusts her daughter to find it.
The doorbell rang at ten-forty, in the particular manner of a man who had been ringing doorbells with authority since before Clara was born. Henry stood on her step in a pressed shirt, hat in hand, looking like a mourner at his own funeral. He had driven across town, Clara understood, because a telephone call could be hung up on.
"The locket," he said, when she opened the door. "I have thought about it all night. Give it to me, Clara. Not forever — until the wedding, until this — this fever of curiosity — has passed. It will do you no good, and it can do —" he glanced past her into the hall, and she understood with a small, cold clarity that he was not afraid of the locket. He was afraid of where it had already been. "It can do the Ashfords harm. It can do you harm. Silas and I agree —"
"You discussed my mother's locket with Silas Crane this morning. Before you came to your daughter."
"Clara —"
"No." She said it simply, standing in her doorway in her bare feet, and was astonished at how much of her mother she could hear in it. "It was hers. She left it to me, with a letter that says it is mine and that what is inside it is true. You had thirty years to ask her to take it off, Dad. You never could. You're not taking it off me in one morning."
"Then you are choosing a dead man's photograph over your own family," Henry said, and put his hat on, and his hand was not steady, and Clara watched him go down Church Street with her heart breaking for him even as she closed the door — because she believed, standing there, that he was lying to her. She was no longer sure that lying was all he was doing, or that he was doing it for himself.
Chapter 5: A Name: Thomas Wren
She went to work on Monday, because the Charleston Historical Society's reading room opened at nine whether or not its archivists' lives had detonated over the weekend, and because the archive — she had understood this about herself by Sunday night, sitting sleepless among her mother's reassembled ghosts — was the only weapon anybody in this story had ever left her. Henry had courtrooms. Vivian had telephones. Rose had left her a fragment, a key, and a profession. Clara intended to use it.
She began, professionally, the way she would have begun for any patron: with the name, the date, the place. Thomas Wren. Savannah, August 1993. Painter.
He was not hard to find. That was the obscene part, the part she would return to for weeks: Thomas Wren had been famous, in the small, hot way that regional art scenes make men famous. The Society held the Savannah papers on microfilm and the art quarterlies in bound volumes, and by eleven o'clock Clara had filled four pages of her notebook and forgotten, twice, to breathe normally. Thomas Wren, born 1966, trained in New York, come south in 1989 and taken Savannah by charm and talent. Portraits, mostly — huge, tender, unflinching portraits of women, praised in print for 'refusing to flatter and refusing to look away.' A studio on Jones Street. A show in Charleston, in the spring of 1992, reviewed under the headline A WREN AMONG THE PEACOCKS. Clara read that review three times, hunting between its lines for her mother, and found, in the last paragraph, a list of sitters. Among them: Miss Rose Sinclair, whose portrait the reviewer called 'the exhibition's beating heart — a young woman painted by a man plainly in the process of falling, hopelessly and in public, in love.'
His portrait of Rose hung, it turned out, in no museum. It had been sold privately, in 1992, to a buyer the gallery records listed by a single initial: C. Clara wrote the letter down and underlined it until the paper thinned. C. For Charles. Charles Sinclair, her grandfather, Rose's father, dead twelve years and still — in family memory, in the marble of his monument in Magnolia Cemetery, in the way Henry said his name — the most powerful man any of them had ever known. Charles Sinclair, who had built a fortune and a family with the same set of tools and no visible distinction between them. Charles, who it now seemed possible had bought his daughter's portrait off a gallery wall so that no one else would ever stand in front of it and see what a reviewer had seen in one glance.
The fire was in the December papers, where Clara's hands began to shake. STUDIO FIRE CLAIMS SAVANNAH ARTIST. December 19th, 1993. A fire of unknown origin, consuming the Jones Street studio and the apartment above it. Thomas Wren, twenty-seven years old, presumed dead. She read the follow-ups with her mouth dry: presumed. The accounts of the remains — Clara forced herself through them, archivist's discipline, eyes on the line — spoke of a body recovered from the studio's ruins, of damage so extensive that identification had rested, in the end, on effects: a ring, a watch, the testimony of the landlord. Dental comparison, one late, small item conceded, had proven 'inconclusive.' Inconclusive. Clara sat in the humming dark of the microfilm room and stared at that word as if it might, under sufficient attention, become another word entirely. In thirty years, no one — not the fire service, not the Savannah police, not any newspaper — had ever printed that Thomas Wren's body had been identified. They had printed that he was dead. Those were, her whole training whispered to her, two different documents.
The obituary ran on December 23rd, dignified and brief, placed by no family anyone named — 'friends in Savannah' — and Clara placed it on the light table next to the last document she pulled that day, though pulled is the wrong word: she had known where this one lived since she was nineteen. The Society kept the Charleston wedding announcements the way other institutions keep scripture. Rose Marie Sinclair to Henry Bennett, the younger son of a good family, a rising lawyer — married at St. Philip's, in a ceremony the announcement called quiet, on the 26th of February, 1994, eleven weeks, almost to the day, after Thomas Wren's studio burned.
Clara did the arithmetic the way she had been doing it, unwillingly, since Saturday, the way she understood her mother had done it, in terror, in 1993. August: Savannah, a summer dress, a laughing pregnant girl. December: a fire, a presumed body, a word — inconclusive. February: a quiet wedding, a judge's son, a name with walls around it. May 12th: a daughter, born, as everyone had agreed for thirty-two years, a respectable six weeks early to Henry and Rose Bennett.