Authors: Unknown
“Been out working?”
Michael looked up, surprised—he must have been distracted; she’d walked up to him and he’d not seen her. “Shot some vermin,” he answered. He did not try to hide the cigarette. Instead, he reached into his pocket and offered her one.
She took it. She’d never smoked in front of him, but she wasn’t surprised that he knew her little vice. “Thank you. I’ll have it later.”
He took one last deep suck. Getting off the stoop, he dropped the fag end where he’d dropped the ashes, and kicked some fresh snow on top of it. He climbed back up and held open the door for her. “Come inside?”
She preceded him into the parlor. “Your parents resting?”
The Robbinses took naps early in the afternoon. She preferred to visit Michael at that time, to have him to herself, rather than interacting under his parents’ somewhat uneasy watch. The Robbinses were wonderful people. But Verity baffled and alarmed them. They weren’t sure what to make of her or what seemed to them their son’s continued closeness to her.
“They won’t be down for another three quarters of an hour,” Michael answered. “Have a seat. I’ll get us some water.”
She cleared newspapers and a pile of Mrs. Robbins’s knitting from the table. He returned with a small steel kettle—ducking his head so as not to conk it on the low lintel—and set the kettle over a spirit lamp.
“I brought some tuiles—almond biscuits. You’ll like them,” said Verity.
Madeleines were his favorites but she couldn’t bear to make madeleines now, not even for him. It had been a fortnight and a day since she left London, but the pain hadn’t let up at all—pain and regret and occasional outbreaks of angry, insensate hope that made everything even worse.
“Thank you,” he said. He took off his cap and hung it on a coat tree by the door. “I like everything you cook except liver.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Insulting my foie gras again, aren’t you?”
Wisely he did not respond to that. Instead, they spoke of her back, his chores, and Mrs. Robbins’s most recent bout of culinary disaster. Michael toyed with his pocketknife as he answered her questions. She observed his hands, as she always did. No bruises, no scrapes—no recent fights.
When the kettle sang she made tea and served the tuiles on a plate. Michael ate a dozen in a row, one after another. She watched him eat. She used to watch him for hours on end, as he played and read and talked himself through games he’d invented with sticks and rocks.
He glanced at her. She looked away. When he’d been a child, she’d badly wanted him to grow up and be the kind of man she hadn’t had the good fortune to marry. Now she wished time hadn’t gone by so fast, that he still reached only to her waist, and that she could hold him close and he would be content to remain in her embrace.
“I heard you were invited to a classmate’s place. Did you enjoy your visit?”
He shrugged. “You don’t refuse an invitation to Buckingham Palace, even if you’d rather have your tonsils removed than sit down with the queen for tea.”
“Was it that bad? I thought the Baldwins were a good lot.”
“I didn’t go to the Baldwins’. I went to the Cove-Radcliffs’.”
The tuile in Verity’s hands broke in two. The Countess of Cove-Radcliff was the Dowager Duchess of Arlington’s eldest daughter. “I didn’t know you were acquainted with anyone from that clan.”
“Nigel Granville worked with me on the newspaper this year. To be sure, I didn’t expect an invitation from him and he seemed almost embarrassed to be inviting me. But he did, and I went.”
“His sisters, did they treat you well?”
“How do you know he has sisters?”
“They always do, don’t they?”
Michael shrugged again. “They were perfectly decent to me. But enough about me, what is going on between you and Mr. Somerset?”
Miraculously she did not spill her tea all over the small table. That was another trouble with such elderly children. They saw and heard far too much. She looked to make sure the door to the parlor was firmly closed before taking refuge in the present tense he’d employed.
“Nothing.”
She half despised herself for not having left yet. She’d handed in her resignation letter but had put her last day as the thirty-first of December—as much time as he’d allowed her. She wanted to spend these last ten or so days she had with Michael. But that wasn’t the only reason: If she was no longer at Fairleigh Park, how could she stomp all over Stuart and heave him to the curb as he’d done to her, should he turn up begging for forgiveness?
“Nothing now, or nothing ever?” asked the boy. “I showed him a photograph of you and he turned the color of death.”
So that was what had happened. By the time Stuart came back to 26 Cambury Lane, he’d already known what he was going to do with her.
“Mr. Somerset and I met once before, ten years ago. I was set upon in London and he came to my rescue.”
“Really? I’d have thought, judging by his reaction, that there was more to it than that,” Michael said, coolly alleging scandalous behavior on her part.
“Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it, Mr. Somerset proposed to me.”
Michael choked on his tea. “He did what?”
Verity smiled a little and shook her head inwardly: Michael wasn’t surprised that she might have slept with yet another employer, but he was shocked that someone had offered her marriage.
“He asked me to marry him.”
“Then why in the name of all that’s sane and proper didn’t you marry him then?”
“He didn’t know that I was his brother’s cook,” she said. “I left without telling him. And when he found out—when you showed him my photograph—he was very displeased about it. He threw me out of his town house and discontinued my employment. I am to evacuate Fairleigh Park by the end of the year.”
Michael’s expression changed. “You are really leaving?”
“I should have left after Mr. Bertram’s funeral. But yes, I’m leaving.”
Michael poured himself another cup of tea. He drank it, sip by sip, until there was nothing left. “Is there any chance you would grace me with the truth before you left?” he said.
Between them, there was only one truth that mattered.
She looked down into her palms, a broken piece of tuile in each one. “Must we go through this again?”
“I remember you, you know, from when I was a baby. I remember you feeding me from a bottle. And you used to wear a white brooch on your bodice. I would always try to pull at it when I was drinking from the bottle. And one day the brooch was gone, and I was terribly upset about it. I wouldn’t drink from the bottle. I kept trying to find the brooch. You cried and cried.”
She stared at him. He had described a day several weeks before she took him to the zoo. The brooch had belonged to her mother, a cameo brooch which she’d had to sell, for far less than it was worth, because she had been frightened and witless and had not known the first thing about bargaining.
He couldn’t have been more than four months old at the time.
“Why did you never tell me this?” she whispered.
“There are things I do not tell you, just as there are things you do not tell me.” He looked at her. “Would you admit it now? Would you at least admit it?”
She shook her head, still in shock.
His face hardened. “Even Mr. Somerset’s story confirmed it. He said that you’d once taken me to the zoo, and there is that zoo ticket in Mum’s box that has never been accounted for. How can you still deny it?”
“I told you already, Michael, the last time you asked. There was nothing I could tell you about your birth mother then. There is nothing I can tell you about her now.”
His eyes simmered in anger. “Then at least have the decency to tell me why you won’t acknowledge me. It’s not as if I turned out ugly, or stupid, or disgusting.”
“Michael, please keep your voice down. You’ll wake up your parents.” She kept her own voice to a hoarse whisper.
“I don’t care. You owe me this. If Mr. Somerset won’t marry you, then why must you still keep me a secret?”
“Mr. Somerset has nothing to do with any of this.”
“Then tell me why!”
The cottage practically shook with his bellow. Verity stared at him, shocked at his vehemence, at the possibility, no matter how remote, of violence inside him.
“I can’t.”
He smashed the heel of his fist against the parlor door. And then took two startled steps back when a gentle, almost timid knock came at the door.
Mrs. Robbins entered the parlor and suddenly it was very crowded.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Michael immediately said. “Did I wake you up?”
Whenever she saw Michael with Mrs. Robbins, Verity was always filled with envy. He treated his adoptive mother with a care that was now almost entirely absent from his dealings with her. She rose to her feet. “Mrs. Robbins, I apologize for the ruckus we made. I’ll see myself out now.”
“No, please don’t go.” Mrs. Robbins turned to Michael. “I was the one who made Madame promise that she would not tell you the truth.”
Michael paled. He stared at Mrs. Robbins as if he did not know her.
Mrs. Robbins blinked rapidly, her face lined and gaunt. “We are elderly, homely, and unsophisticated, whereas Madame is young, beautiful, and refined. I was afraid you would not want us as your parents if you knew. I didn’t realize that by keeping the truth from you I’d cause you such pain. I’m sorry.”
Michael said nothing.
Mrs. Robbins patted him gingerly on the arm. “I’ll go up and give you two some privacy.”
There was a long silence after the door closed behind Mrs. Robbins.
“How did she know?” Michael finally asked.
“She suspected, not long after I came here—in those days, as soon as she turned her back, you’d come to visit me.” Verity sighed. “I don’t think she expected her suspicion to be quite so accurate, though. She was shocked when I admitted to it—and a bit panicked. She loved you so, and she was terrified I might take you away from her.”
“I’m sorry,” said Michael blankly. “I was quite rude.”
“Yes, you were. I’m hurt that you’d think I would ever deny you the truth so I could marry better, when—” When all of her life’s choices had revolved around him. “But it’s all right. In your place, I would want to know too.”
“I’m sorry,” Michael said again. He plucked at a loose thread on his sleeve. “So you
are
my mother?”
He sounded shocked, for all that he’d insisted he knew all along.
“For a very short while, for as long as I could hold on to you.”
He went to the cabinet where Mr. Robbins kept a bottle of gin and poured directly into his teacup.
“Can you tell me anything about my father?” He turned around.
She sat down again. “His name was Benjamin Applewood. He was a groom who worked in the stables at the house where I grew up. A very sweet, unassuming man.”
“Was.”
Michael took a gulp from the teacup. “He is dead?”
“He died shortly before you were born, from a fever of the blood.”
They had gone to Southampton to buy passages to America. But Ben’s savings had been stolen almost as soon as they got off the train—he’d never been farther afield than Tonbridge, and the chaos and criminality of the city had been beyond him. Neither of them had had any notion that money needed to be sewn into undergarments or concealed underfoot in their shoes.
Third-class train tickets cost only pennies. They sold the ivory buttons from her dress, bought two tickets, and went to London, where Ben said his foster brother lived. They never located the foster brother, but Ben found work at a place that hired out carriages. They lived at Jacob’s Island, an unsavory rookery south of the Thames, hoping to save up enough money, with Verity doing her utmost to pretend that it was just the scary part of the fairy tale she was living through—that her happily-ever-after was but another day, another week, another kiss away.
Ben’s death had stripped the last bit of romance from life in the outside world. As long as he had been there, she could ignore that she lived at the edge of a slum in a mice-infested room. But bereft of his income and his protection, she became utterly alone, without a single skill that could earn her a legitimate penny.
“Were you married?”
The trace of hope in Michael’s voice made her heart hurt. “I’m sorry. We didn’t have the money to marry. We thought we’d have a proper wedding once we were settled and prosperous in America.”
Michael took more from the teacup. “My father’s family, do they know about me?”
She shook her head. “He was an orphan who was fostered with a clergyman for a while. He came into my family’s employ when he was thirteen, after the clergyman passed away.”
“What about your family, do
they
know about me?” He must have seen the darkening of her expression. “They do, don’t they?”
“Some of them,” she said.
“Was it because of me that you had to leave your family?”
“Yes and no. Once it was discovered that I was with child, I was taken away and told that I’d spend the rest of my life under lock and key. It was a future that gave me nightmares. So when your father came to rescue me, I went quite willingly.”