第27章 The Woman at the Inn

The letter came three days later, and this time it was not left at the gate but slipped under the door of the library, and Eleanor found it at dawn, a cream square on the stone floor, as if someone had passed it through in the dark without ever setting foot inside. She picked it up with a hand that was not quite steady and opened it. The hand was small and careful, not the perfect copperplate of the first letter, and there was no signature, but folded into the paper was a sprig of dried white heather. You found the grave, the letter read. I am glad, because I have been afraid to be certain of you. Come to the inn at Millbridge, ask for the room above the kitchen, and tell the woman there that the flower was white. Come alone, and come before the clocks strike four. Eleanor stood in the cold morning light and read it twice, and the thing that frightened her most was not the letter but the difference between the two hands. Whoever had written the first letter, the one signed with a V, wrote like a man who had been taught by the best governess in England. Whoever had written this one wrote like a woman who had taught herself, and who did not want to be found. So Eleanor did what the letter asked, which was nothing at all like what it demanded. She brought Sebastian, and she brought Gabriel, and she left the twins with Chloe and the servants, and she went to Millbridge with the two men she trusted most in the world, because a letter that insisted on solitude was a letter that deserved an audience. The inn at Millbridge was a low timbered building on the green, and the landlord, a broad man with a face like a folded map, did not want to speak about the woman in the room above the kitchen. Never saw her, he said, with a glance at the ceiling that gave him away entirely. Eleanor thanked him and walked past him up the stairs, and Sebastian and Gabriel waited below, one by the door and one by the fire, and neither of them looked at the other, and both of them listened. The room above the kitchen was small and clean, and the woman who opened the door was not what Eleanor had expected. She was young, no older than Eleanor had been when she first came to Blackmore, with dark hair pulled back under a black bonnet and eyes the color of the millstream, and she looked at Eleanor for a long moment before she said, You brought them anyway. I did, Eleanor said. They are my husband and my friend, and I do not lie to them. The woman smiled, a small tired smile, and stood aside. Then you had better come in, my lady, and bring them too, since I have been telling myself for a month that I would do this alone, and I find that I do not want to. Her name, she said, once they were all inside and the door was shut, was Violet Farrow, and her grandmother had been the maid called Jenny. “Jenny March,” Eleanor said — and saw the woman's eyes widen. “We found the grave, in the wood, beneath the oak.” “My grandmother used to say the whole story was buried there with her,” Violet said quietly, “and that one day the house would have to be told.” She looked at Eleanor, eyes bright and tired. “I have been watching you since September, my lady. Not to frighten you — not to harm you. My grandmother made me promise, on her deathbed, that I would put the letters into the hands of the woman of Blackmore myself, and only hers, and only when I was certain the house was in kind hands.” Eleanor sat down slowly on the edge of the bed. “What letters?” “All of them.” Violet lifted a bundle from the floor — an oilcloth parcel tied with black silk thread — and laid it in her lap. “My grandmother kept them her whole life. The painter wrote to her from Clerkenwell for fifteen years, and she kept every page; when she died my mother kept them, and when my mother died I did. I never opened the parcel. I wanted to bring it whole, the way it was given.” Eleanor looked from the parcel to the woman, and asked the question that had waited in her chest since the first letter came. “Did you write to me, before you came? I received a letter signed with a single V, offering to buy the portrait of the woman in the tower.” Violet went very still. “No. I have never written to you in my life. I have left heather at your gate and watched your house from the wood, but I could not address a letter to Lady Thorne if my life depended on it.” “Then there are two of them,” Eleanor said slowly. “Two people who know the story — and they do not know each other.” Violet's face had gone pale. “There is a man in London. A collector. He has been hunting my family's letters for two years, and I have run from his agents since June. His name is Lord Vane — and my grandmother's papers say his grandfather was the man who took the child.” Eleanor felt the pieces of the story shift and settle into a shape she had not seen before. “The letter signed V,” she said. “Lord Vane wants the painting — and you have been watching to make sure he never gets it.” Violet nodded, and there was a stubbornness in her face that reminded Eleanor of Gabriel. “He will not stop. He wrote to you, and if he has your answer he will come — and he will not come alone.” “Then we shall be ready for him,” Eleanor said. “And you will not run anymore, Miss Farrow. You will be coming home.” They came back to Blackmore in the late afternoon, Violet on the box beside the driver, and the household came out to meet them, Chloe and the children and Graves and the maids, and Eleanor watched Violet look at the house with the same expression Gabriel had worn when he first saw it, the expression of a person who has lived a long time inside a story and has suddenly walked into it. Graves came forward and stopped, and the old steward looked at Violet for a long moment, and then he said, very softly, You have your grandmother's eyes. Violet went very still. You knew her? I knew of her, Graves said. My grandmother used to speak of her. She said Jenny March was the bravest woman in Derbyshire, and that the house owed her a debt it could never repay. He bowed, an old man's bow, stiff and sincere. Welcome home, Miss Farrow. Violet's chin trembled, and Eleanor took her arm and led her inside, and behind them, in the hall, the servants parted to let them pass, and the house, which had been waiting, seemed to settle around them like a garment that had at last found its owner. And that night, when Violet had been fed and settled in a room above the garden, Eleanor sat alone in the library with the oilcloth parcel on the table before her, and she opened it. The letters were there, page after page, in the small precise hand of Elian Vance, and beneath them, wrapped separately in a square of linen, was a single sheet, folded small, sealed with wax that had gone the color of old blood. Eleanor did not open it. She laid her hand on the linen and sat in the darkening room, and above her, in the tower, a light kept its quiet vigil, and she thought, This is the letter that has been waiting thirty years to be read. Tomorrow, she said aloud. Tomorrow I will read it with everyone who needs to hear it. She left it on the table, and in the morning it was still there, waiting, the way the heather had waited, the way the house had waited, the way some stories wait for the one reader they were written for. ---