第28章 The Letter to the Daughter

They read it together in the chapel, because it seemed to Eleanor that a letter meant for a daughter should be read in a place where daughters were named and blessed, and because the chapel had been the scene of her own vows, and because, she thought, some words need a roof that has heard prayers. The household gathered, Sebastian and Gabriel and Chloe and Violet and Graves, and the twins were left in the nursery with a maid who had been sworn to silence with a shilling and a stern look. Eleanor broke the seal of wax and unfolded the sheet, and the handwriting was not the neat hand of the journal or the shaking hand of the last pages. It was the hand of a woman writing quickly, in the last hours she had, and some of the words were blotted where the pen had slipped, and one corner of the page was stained, whether with water or with tears, no one could say. My dearest child, Eleanor read, and her voice carried in the cold clear air of the chapel. If you are reading this, then I am gone, and you are alive, and there is no world in which both of those things should not have been true. I wanted to hold you. I want you to know that, more than I have ever wanted anything, more than the house, more than the paintings, more than the life I thought I would live. They will tell you that I was a madwoman, or a traitor, or a woman who chose badly. Do not believe them. I chose the only thing I was ever truly given a choice about, and I would choose it again, even knowing it would end here, even knowing it would cost me you. Eleanor paused, and the silence in the chapel was so complete she could hear the drip of water from the eaves and the breathing of the people gathered. She read on. His name was Elian, and he painted the light of this house better than anyone who has ever lived, because he loved it, and because he loved me, and because love is the only thing that has ever been able to see clearly. He is gone, or they will tell you he is gone, and perhaps he is. But I will tell you this, child, so that you will know it when you are old enough to understand. He painted a portrait of you before you were born. He painted you standing beside me in the tower, and he said that you would be brave, because you were made of the same thing he was made of, and he was the bravest man I ever knew. Find that painting if you can. It is the only part of me that will grow up with you. Marguerite had written of the garden and the tower and the way the light came through the windows in the morning, of the songs she sang, of the name she had chosen, Amarantha, for the flower that never dies, and of the fear that had come to live in her chest when she understood that her family would take the child. They cannot take what you are, she wrote. They can take your name and your home and your mother, but they cannot take what you are. You are a Thorne and a Vance, and both of those names have been made of love, and nothing they do can change that. Be brave, my Amarantha. Be kind. And when you are grown, come home to Blackmore, and stand in the tower, and I will know you, wherever I am, because a mother knows her child in any language, in any life, in any world. There was more, a page and a half more, and Eleanor read it all, and when she finished the room was very quiet, and she looked up and saw that Violet was weeping without a sound, her hands pressed to her mouth, and that Gabriel's face was wet, and that Graves had turned away to the window, and that Chloe was holding Violet's hand as if she were the sister she had never had. Sebastian came and took the letter, and he stood with it in his hands for a long moment, and then he said, She never came home. The child. Amarantha. She never came home to stand in the tower. Violet found her voice at last, and it shook. She could not, she said. My grandmother used to say that the family sent her away so far and so thoroughly that she was never told the name of the house. She was told she was an orphan and a foundling and a ward, and she grew up believing her mother had abandoned her, and she died in childbed at thirty, never knowing any of it. My grandmother never forgave herself. She said she should have found a way. She looked at the letter in Sebastian's hand. But she kept it, she said. All her life she kept it, waiting for a woman of Blackmore who would know what to do with it. She kept it for you, my lady. For the house. For the child's child. Eleanor took Violet's hand and held it. Then we will do what the letter asks, she said. We will stand in the tower, all of us, and we will tell Marguerite that her daughter is remembered, and that her letter came home at last. And we will not let her name be forgotten again. They went up the tower together, the six of them, and the light in the highest room burned as if it had been waiting for them, and they stood in the round room where Marguerite had died and where Eleanor had first seen her, and Eleanor read the letter again, once, aloud, to the stones and the sky and the memory of a woman who had loved and lost and loved anyway. When she finished, the silence was deep and warm, and Eleanor felt, for the first time since the night of the fire, that Marguerite was truly present, not as a ghost but as a blessing. Then we shall hang your letter, she said, softly, as if she were speaking to the air. We shall frame it and hang it in the library, beside the painting, so that everyone who comes to Blackmore will know that the house was built on love, and that love was strong enough to survive being hidden, and that it came home in the end. She looked out the window at the valley, at the long green fields and the winding lane and the wood where the heather grew, and she thought of the child who had never come home, and of the child's child who stood beside her now, and she understood that the story was not finished, and that perhaps it never would be. Some stories, she thought, are not meant to end. They are meant to be passed on. That night Eleanor sat in the nursery with the twins asleep beside her, and she read Marguerite's letter once more by the low light of the candle, and she thought of the daughter who had never come home, and she made a promise to the sleeping children that the letter would hang in the library until the house fell down, so that no one who came after would ever forget. In the highest window of the tower, the light burned on, steady and quiet, like a candle kept for someone who is still expected home. ---