第30章 The White Heather

Lord Vane came on the fifth of November, in a carriage as black as the lawyer's coat, and he came alone, which surprised Eleanor more than anything else about him. She watched him from the library window as he descended, an old man, older than she had expected, with a face that had been handsome once and was now carved into lines of weariness and caution, and he stood in the courtyard for a moment and looked up at the house the way a man looks at a door he has been afraid of his whole life. Then he came in, and he took off his hat, and he looked at the unfinished portrait of the woman in the tower, and Eleanor saw his hands tremble. They sat in the library, the five of them — Eleanor and Sebastian and Gabriel and Violet and the old man — and Graves served tea and withdrew, and for a long moment no one spoke. “You have the letters,” Lord Vane said at last. “We do.” “And you know who I am.” “We know you are the grandson of the man who took the child,” Eleanor said, “who paid for her keeping out of the Thorne estate, and who made my husband's family believe the painter died in the fire.” Vane's face did not change, but his hands, folded on his walking stick, tightened. “My grandfather believed he was doing his duty. He believed the child's existence was a scandal that would destroy the family, and that he was saving it. He did not believe he was stealing a child. He believed he was settling a debt.” Eleanor said nothing. The silence stretched. “I have spent forty years,” he went on, in a voice low and careful, “learning that my grandfather's beliefs were not the truth. He is dead now. He died without ever admitting what he had done — but he left me his papers, and among them the record of the payment, the letters of the woman who kept the child, and a note in his own hand that I have carried in my pocket for twenty years.” He reached into his coat and drew out a folded sheet, yellowed with age, and laid it on the table. The hand that had written it was old and unsteady. *The child had her mother's eyes. I saw them only once, when I gave her to the Farrow woman, and I have seen them in my dreams ever since. I believed I was doing right. I was wrong.* “He could not say it aloud,” Lord Vane said, and his voice cracked. “He wrote it down instead, and made me promise to find the child's line and make what amends could be made. I searched thirty years. Two years ago, through an agent, I found the painter's letters in Wapping — and learned that a granddaughter of the maid Jenny had taken them away, north, toward Blackmore. I wrote to test you, my lady, and you answered exactly as I hoped. Then I sent Mr. Copple, and Copple misunderstood me, and sent his clerk to steal the portrait in the night, and I am ashamed, more ashamed than I have words for.” He bowed his head. “I have come to make amends, and to ask your forgiveness — and to tell you that the second portrait, the one Elian Vance painted of the child before she was born, lies in the vault of my house in London, where it has lain since my grandfather died. It is yours, my lady. It was never mine. It belongs to the child's line, and I have been its keeper only to keep it safe until I could give it back.” The room was very quiet. Eleanor looked at the old man, at the folded note, at the hands that trembled on the walking stick, and she felt the anger she had carried since the night of the theft slowly leave her, the way water leaves a stone, not because it had not been real but because it had been spent. The child's line, she said, is here. She is seated beside you. Violet had gone very still, her hands folded in her lap, and when Eleanor looked at her she shook her head, slowly, as if she could not believe it. I did not know, she said. My grandmother never said. She said it was a story, she said the letters would tell the truth, but she never said there was a portrait. There is, Lord Vane said. And when you are ready, I will bring it to you myself, and I will carry it through the door of this house on my own shoulders, because my grandfather owed your family that, and I have owed it to you all my life. Violet looked at him for a long moment, and then she said, very softly, I should like that, my lord. I should like that very much. That evening Violet sat with her grandmother's Bible open on her knee and laid a copied page flat between its covers, where the family had kept flowers and funeral cards for sixty years. She did not pray aloud. She sat with one hand resting on the paper the way one rests a hand on the shoulder of someone who has finally come home, and the candle burned down beside her, steady and small. He did not stay for dinner. He left at dusk, in the black carriage, and Eleanor watched him go from the window, and she thought that a man could carry a weight for so long that it became part of his shape, and that it was possible, just possible, that Lord Vane would be lighter now than he had been when he came. The unfinished portrait hung over the fireplace, and Eleanor looked at the small dark shape beneath Marguerite's gown, and she thought of the second portrait, the one of the child before she was born, waiting in a vault in London for thirty years, and she understood that the story was not finished, and that it might never be finished, and that this was not a grief but a gift. Some stories, she thought, are handed on, and the handing on is the point. She went up to the tower at midnight, alone, and she stood in the round room where Marguerite had died, and she looked out at the valley, silver under the moon, and she said, quietly, to the darkness, She never stood here. Amarantha. She died without ever seeing the tower her mother was locked in, without ever reading the letter her mother wrote her. And now her granddaughter will come, and stand here, and we will tell her the whole story, and the story will be longer than it was, because it will include her. She felt the night air move around her, carrying the scent of heather and wood smoke, and she smiled. In the highest window of the tower, the light kept its watch. In the morning, Eleanor found Rosalind's newest drawing on the library floor, and she picked it up, and the child had drawn the tower again, and in the highest window of the tower, in charcoal that had been pressed so hard it shone, there was a woman with a child in her arms, and behind them, half hidden in the shadow of the room, a man with a paintbrush in his hand. Eleanor looked at it for a long time, and then she carried it to the nursery, and she kissed her daughter's dark hair, and she said, softly, You will paint them all someday, Rosalind. All the ones who waited. And she hung the drawing beside the portrait of Marguerite and the child and the man in the mirror, so that the women in the tower faced each other across the room, one in oil and one in charcoal, one in the past and one in the future, and the light came through the windows and fell on both of them, and the house was quiet, and the story, still and always, went on. ---