He hated to see how much this place had hurt her. How it had the power to diminish her.
He wished he had not encouraged her to make this drive.
“Sera,” he said slowly, “perhaps it would be best for you not to come tonight. You’re welcome, of course. But if it’s too painful to be here, you needn’t come for our sake. The children will understand.”
She shook her head. “Nonsense. Of course I’ll come. I’m quite all right.”
It was obvious she wasn’t. She worked her fingers together in her lap with such agitation that he wanted to take her hands in his to calm them. But when he tried to touch her—just a gentle pat over her knuckle—she pulled her hand out of reach.
They drove back to her house in silence.
“I’ll collect you in my carriage at seven,” she said when they arrived. “Have the children wear gloves as the torches can be hot.”
“You’re sure you wish to come?”
She sighed, like he was trying her last nerve. “I wouldn’t miss it, Adam.”
He was not reassured. He wanted to follow her inside and discuss the matter further, but she was already walking toward her door, and her posture did not suggest she would welcome being followed.
“We’ll look forward to it,” he called after her uneasily.
She nodded without turning back around, and went inside.
Chapter Twenty
First she resolved not to think about it.
It was nothing. The fact that Trewlnany had a family was not new information. That her hands had not stopped shaking since she’d seen him was ridiculous.
When another quarter hour passed and still she could not think of anything save the sight of Trewlnany with four red-headed children, she decided to pour herself a dram of brandy to calm her nerves.
One dram was not going to do the trick, it seemed. She poured another.
The spirits, as spirits did, reduced the gnawing sharpness of the present.
Which left her with the past.
She had come here to stare it down but she had not found the fortitude to hold the memories squarely in the foreground of her mind. She’d yelled at Adam for doubting her bravery but he was exactly right: she was a coward.
She had to stumble upon Trewlnany to force the past fully into focus.
But now she felt it.
All of it.
It was so bright and hot it burned her belly, sent acid rising to her throat.
She prepared a fresh quill and resolved to write down whatever came into her head.
Damn Paul Bolitho, but what came to her was her father.
Every daughter wants her father’s good opinion, she scrawled.
Even if she does not like him, even if no love is lost between them, she desires the affection of her parent. Mine was not fond of me. I was a tall and solemn-looking girl responsible by way of cursed birth for the death of his wife, for which neither of us could entirely forgive me.
When my courses stopped, I knew that I would lose what little esteem he had ever had for me.
But I also knew that he would save me.
She paused, closed her eyes. Took another sip.
For there’s another truth about girls and fathers. A daughter never doubts her father’s power. We are raised to believe he is omnipotent, second only to our Maker.
And so I confessed my sins. I told him of my lover, of the promises he’d made. I thought my father could take these things and transform them into that glimmering solution: marriage.
As I told him my secret, I saw hatred cross his features.
Not disappointment. Hatred.
The nib of her quill caught against the paper and discharged a spray of ink. She paused to mop it up with her sleeve. The ink bled into the papery lines at her wrist.
He hated me because he knew what was and was not possible. He knew what his powers were, and he knew their limits. I made him see the exact size of his influence.
Some things, once done, cannot be fixed by fathers.
That was when I understood what it meant to be a wealthy tradesman’s daughter.
I was not the kind of girl whose honor would be redeemed by an inconvenient marriage.
I was the kind of girl who’s offered money, not redemption.
She thought of the kingfishers. She thought of how she’d been paralyzed at Paul Bolitho’s, sitting hot and rancid in the sun, remembering the taunts and jeers that had greeted her once whenever she’d gone outside.
The stories about me began to spread. Whispers of my wantonness. My lusts. People who’d known me since I was a baby saw me on the street and moved away, like I might infect them with disease.
I wanted to believe my lover had not spread these whispers, but only him, his father, and my own parent knew of my condition.
He made my private passion a public perversion.
She did not elaborate on his reasons. That there were things he’d told her, things she knew that could damn him. They were not part of this story. She’d promised him she’d never tell, and if she did, she was no better than he was. Besides, the point remained:
He destroyed my name to spare his own.
Perhaps I let him.
After all, who would believe me, if I had named him? Who would believe me, if I said he’d professed love, promised marriage?
Why would a man like him say such a thing to a girl like me?
And so I went from a fallen girl to a ruined woman.
She read over what she’d written, trying to collect herself by focusing on the words.
The prose was overly florid, but then, that was the effect of the brandy. She’d revise the pages later. She checked the clock. Five. She had time still. Better to write while the words beckoned. Then she’d sober up with bitter tea and go to collect the Andersons.
The solution was marriage to a man forty years my senior, a cousin of my father’s. I would travel to his plantation in Barbados and become mistress of his home, where three previous wives had died in childbirth or illness. An aunt whispered to me of the state in which he kept his slaves. Of the brutality, the heat, the maladies, the desperate air of madness.
When he arrived to claim me, he was crass and ignorant and looked on me in a way that made my skin crawl.
It woke me from the stupor of my broken heart.
To save myself, I announced the truth of my condition at our engagement supper.
She could feel them, her family, looking at her. The shock. Her father, pretending she was joking.
Her insistence: I am with child.
The planter leaving in a rage, yelling he’d been duped.
My father locked me in my bedchamber and seethed so volubly the house shook.
My aunt offered me a room in London and passage on a mail coach and I took it.
The day I left was the last time I saw my father alive.
She was trembling, her writing scarcely legible, but she could not stop now.
There was only one thing to do. Finish it.
Tell the end of the damned story. The part she’d barely acknowledged to herself in years.
She needed more brandy.
She emptied the rest of the bottle into her glass.
The blood appeared on my linen three months before the child’s term was due.
The child. That was how I thought of her.
I resented her for springing up inside of me, a living embodiment of my shame who kicked my ribs and swelled my stomach, growing like a tumor as my guilt became more evident to all who looked on me.