“I am very busy.”
Hazel made a pointed look around the room. The four men had gone back to their pints. Corinne sat quietly at the table with her hands in her lap. Hazel met Delores’s eyes again and waited.
“I’ve supper to prepare for in the back,” Delores said.
“I am not leaving until we’ve had a chance to talk.”
Delores scowled and turned around. “Stay as long as you like.” She took a step away.
“Are you Duncan’s mother?” Hazel blurted out when she realized that Delores may very well leave her sitting there alone.
Delores kept her back to Hazel for several seconds, but the four men were looking in their direction. Hazel felt sure that was what convinced Delores to turn around.
Delores stared at Hazel for a long moment, her eyes unreadable, but Hazel didn’t sense anger behind them. She relaxed, but only a little. Delores walked slowly to the table but did not sit. Hazel hated having to look up at her, but held her eyes all the same.
“Why would you think that?” Her voice was soft. Scared? “That I’m his mother?”
“You care for him a great deal, and you and he share certain mannerisms and physical traits.” Hazel pointed at her own nose in order to indicate she’d noticed that particular feature between them. “I think that is one reason why you do not come to the house. You do not want me to make the connection.”
Delores swallowed and stared as she sorted out whatever thoughts were going through her mind.
Hazel did not look away, but the longer the silence lasted, the better she understood why Duncan found it difficult to maintain eye contact sometimes. She felt as though she could see all Delores’s feelings: fear, surprise, compassion, anger, annoyance. Adding Delores’s feelings to Hazel’s own was rather overwhelming.
When the moment had stretched to the point of awkwardness, Hazel pushed a bit harder.
“He heard his parents fighting the night before she left. He liked to hide in the kitchen cupboard sometimes when he felt scared or anxious, and he heard his mother say that she could not stand it, that he had to go somewhere else so they would be safe. He thinks she was talking about the dog that had bit him the day before. He thinks she was asking his da to make sure the dog was killed for having attacked him.”
Delores began to twist her apron with her fingers and finally looked away, staring at the tabletop.
Hazel continued. “You did not come into his life until after Leon had died, but you said you knew his father. Duncan hasn’t made that connection either. He thinks you and Catherine were old friends, but Catherine was the daughter of a viscount.”
Delores said nothing.
“After Catherine died, you made sure Duncan was taken care of. You made sure he had dinner every night, you encouraged him to observe different craftsmen around town when he was looking to find an occupation, and you have helped him sort through interactions with people that he did not understand. You were the one who told him to write to me after he met me at my uncle’s house.”
Hazel waited, again, for Delores to answer.
When she did not, Hazel continued. “Are you Duncan’s mother, Delores? Did you come back because you heard of Leon’s passing and felt a pang of conscience to have abandoned your child to the woman he could not marry because Leon had still been married to you?” The one part Hazel couldn’t understand is why Duncan would not recognize his mother; but if her appearance had changed enough then perhaps that might explain it.
“I am not Duncan’s mother,” Delores finally said, so soft that Hazel almost did not hear it. Then she did not believe it. She had been so sure.
“Abigail was my sister,” Delores said. “Younger by near ten years, beautiful and good-hearted . . . in most ways.”
Hazel hurried to recover from her surprise. “Would you please sit down?” she asked in a quiet voice.
Delores considered the request for a long moment, then she sat on the bench across from Hazel. She continued to stare at the tabletop. “You mustn’t judge her too harshly for leaving.”
So, she hadn’t been killed in a carriage accident. Hazel had been right!
“Mustn’t I?” Hazel said before thinking better of it. If she wanted this woman’s cooperation, it would be best not to malign her sister. But who better deserved to be judged harshly if not a woman who had walked away from her husband and child?
“I have said for near twenty years that I love Duncan like my own son, but it ain’t entirely true. I don’t love him the way Abigail did. I think it’s easier for me to care for him than it was for Abigail.”
Abigail, Hazel repeated to herself. Abigail Penhale. “What do you mean by that?”
Delores glanced at her, then back at the table. “Those things about Duncan’s mannerisms that make people uncomfortable now were even harder to tolerate when he was a child. He would throw tempers over the smallest thing, like having to wear shoes or getting his hair combed. Abigail would try to hug him, and he’d kick her away and scream as though she’d burned him. It ate her up month by month and year by year. She jus’ wanted to love ’im.”
“Touch is often difficult for him,” Hazel said.
“It is difficult to mother a child you cannot touch.”
“Difficult, yes, but to leave him? How can you defend that?”
“You canna understand what it was like,” she said sharply, cutting a glaring look at Hazel. “You wasn’t there.”
Hazel startled at the bite of her words, but then nodded. She hadn’t been there, and she wasn’t a mother. She couldn’t understand, but she could try.
Delores took a breath, then paused while the men at the other table burst out laughing at something. When they quieted enough for her to talk without having to shout, she began to explain.
“It weren’t Duncan’s fault, the way he was, but it was hard. We all lived in Manningtree back then—Leon, Abigail, and I grew up there together. Leon worked the shipyard after leaving the King’s navy, and sometimes he hired on to crew a merchant ship, which took him away for weeks at a time.
“Abigail was left alone with Duncan, and it fell on her to manage his strangeness and try to calm him. The older he got, the more difficult he was to manage. That day with the dog . . . She’d convinced him to come outside by promising him a treat if he came to my shop—my husband and me ran a bakery then and my sister hadn’t been out of the apartment for days because Duncan was difficult to control.
“The dog appeared out of nowhere, and Duncan started flappin’ his arms and screamin’ like he did sometimes, which upset the dog, who came after Duncan’s bare feet. I heard the screamin’ but dinna know it was Duncan, course, ’til I came onto the street. Abigail had kicked the dog away, and he’d run off, but Duncan was hitting his head against the cobbles in between pushing Abigail away. She was crying and begging him to stop, but he was too big for her to pick up.