He sighed and looked away. “I wish I were in a position to help, but I’m not. However, I will be happy to speak with your father on your behalf. Surely he can—”
“No. Please don’t.” Audrey’s cheeks burned with shame. “Just let me know about the trust fund.”
“Of course. I’ll look into it.”
“Thank you, Uncle Roger.” She rose, longing to flee to her room, yet good manners required her to return to the sitting room and visit with the others.
“I have one further thought,” her uncle said before Audrey reached the door. “In the event that the trust is depleted, as I’m guessing it is, might your husband’s American family offer some support?”
“Perhaps.” The thought had occurred to Audrey before she’d come to London, but she had quickly dismissed it. She had refused the Barretts’ offer after Robert died, and they hadn’t contacted her since. How dare she ask them for help now?
As she drove home to Wellingford the following day, Audrey had time to consider her dwindling options. And to pray. She hadn’t prayed in a while. “What might God be asking you to do?” She still had no idea, but the visit with her uncle had convinced her that she didn’t want to return to a cold, loveless life with the gentry. She would use whatever funds remained in the trust to live in London on her own. After all, Eve had once taught her to cook and run a household without servants.
Uncle Roger telephoned a few days later. “I’m afraid I have bad news, Audrey. Barely five hundred pounds remain in the trust account—not nearly enough to provide interest for a monthly allowance. I’m so sorry.”
Audrey couldn’t speak, couldn’t think.
“Are you still there?” her uncle asked when she didn’t reply.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Are you certain you don’t want me to speak with your father?”
“No. Thank you, but no.” She and Bobby would be disgraced if all of London society learned the truth about her birth. “I will contact my husband’s family in America.” She thanked him again and rang off.
It had been difficult enough to ask Uncle Roger for help, but how did one go about asking American strangers for support? Not by mail, certainly. She would seem grasping and conniving if she contacted them after all this time simply to ask for money. What if she used the five hundred pounds to go to America and ask them in person? If they met Bobby, surely they would want to help, wouldn’t they?
Audrey sat on the bench in the front hall, unmoving, for so long that Robbins approached and asked if she was feeling all right. “Yes, I’m fine. Thank you.” He and the other servants needed someplace to go, too, and had asked her for references. Father had turned all of their lives upside down. Going to America was Audrey’s only option. “Will you kindly fetch my steamer trunk from the storage room, Robbins? My husband’s family in America have never met their grandson, and I believe Bobby is old enough now to learn more about his father.”
“How long do you plan to stay, Miss Audrey?”
“I’m not sure . . .”
A shiver of fear washed through Audrey as she tucked her son into bed that night. They were going to America, alone. She had spent the afternoon looking at travel timetables and ticket costs and deciding what to pack, what to leave behind. Desperation fueled her courage. She had no idea what to expect in America, or what sort of welcome she would receive, but she would try to give her son the life Robert wanted him to have.
No matter what her future might be, Audrey would make certain that her son knew he was loved, every single day of his life.
28
USA, 1950
Eve unfolded two webbed lawn chairs for herself and Audrey, and they sat together in the bungalow’s back garden. “This grass needs to be cut again,” Eve mumbled—as if cutting it would transform the barren space. “I wish George was here to help me.”
“Wellingford’s gardener?”
“He was a genius with hedge clippers. He could turn this place into a paradise. He set a standard I can never live up to.”
A cricket chirped nearby. Fireflies blinked in the bushes—a mating ritual, Tom had told her. A lawn sprinkler whirred in a neighbor’s garden. A dog barked. “Is it always this hot here?” Audrey asked, breaking the silence.
“In the summertime, yes. It could get even hotter next month.” Eve didn’t want to talk about the weather. The boys were asleep, and she and Audrey needed to have it out with each other. Neither of them seemed to know where to begin. Ever since breakfast with Tom and his parents, Eve’s mind had raced with feverish plans and outrageous schemes for solving this crisis. Clearly Audrey wasn’t leaving. She had no place to go. Everything Eve and her son had benefited from these past few years—the house, the car, the income, the grandparents—belonged to Audrey.
Eve knew she couldn’t face the people she’d deceived once they learned the truth. That left her with only one option: she had to disappear. She would rather run away and start all over again in a different city than confess the truth and face the people she’d grown to love. She would have to create a new life, just as she’d been forced to do in the past. And she could think of only one person who might help her. She inhaled the sweet, grassy air, then let out her breath.
“Listen, Audrey . . . I think I know how to fix this ‘mess,’ as you called it. But I’m going to need a little more time. I promise I’ll go away and give everything back to you, but first I have to find a job and a place to live and—”
“I would never turn you out with no place to go, Eve. There’s no need for you to vanish in the middle of the night, is there?”
“You said yourself that what I’ve done is monstrous—lying to everyone and stealing your name and your money. A lot of people will agree with you. I could never show my face in this town again. I certainly can’t count on help from the people I’ve deceived.”
“Maybe if we explain—”
“No. They’ll see the same thing you see—an immoral woman with a fatherless son who lied and committed fraud and took advantage of them for the past four years.”
“Eve—”
“Just listen.” She swatted at a mosquito. “I think I know someone who’ll help me, but I’ll need to drive to a different town.”
“Who?”
Eve didn’t want Audrey to know. “Will you stay here tomorrow and watch Robbie for me until I get back? And if anyone calls or comes to the house, please don’t tell them who you are. I just need a little more time to get settled someplace new.”
“If that’s what you want, Eve. But—”
“Thanks. That is what I want.”
Eve fixed her hair and applied her makeup very carefully the next day, then dressed in a red-and-white polka-dot sundress and a string of pearls that her mother-in-law had bought for her. Eve loved shopping with Mrs. Barrett, who lavished her and Robbie with everything they could possibly want. “I’ve always wished for a daughter to take on shopping trips,” Mrs. Barrett said the day they’d bought the dress—and matching shoes and hat and purse, of course. Today would be the last day Eve would wear these clothes. They belonged to Audrey, the real daughter-in-law.