Seven candles, each in a different holder and at different points of waxy disintegration, surrounded the library’s low table. The electrics had shorted out again, so Gwilym and Jo peered over the well-lit middle, heads bowed, fingers tracing neat, compact handwriting. It occurred to Jo that the arrangement resembled a séance, and that this might be highly appropriate. They were raising the ghost of Ida Hobarth and her mostly anonymous clients. The carefully preserved binders included hand-drawn pictures of medicines, preparations, test tubes, and even wound-closing in colored inks.
“A hemoglobin precipitin test!” Gwilym bent closer, his glasses almost touching paper. Jo squeezed in for a closer look.
“That’s blood analysis! They injected rabbits with human blood to develop the antibodies—” she said, and Gwilym made a squeeing sound.
“You know about the rabbits!?” He shook his head. “You’re a blooming wonder.”
“Well, you know about them, too—look at this. She did a whole series on stages of pregnancy.” Jo had to get up and do a circuit of the table; they were getting close, which made her almost shy of it—like flirting with the denouement of a favored novel.
“Good God, imagine her stuck here with the rest cure doctor.” Gwilym gave an exaggerated shiver. “Like a horror novel. I confess I don’t really want to give these back to Roberta.”
“She will kill you.” Jo had started reading again, her eyes flying along and stopping only when the writing couldn’t be deciphered. “What would you do with all these things, anyway? Sell them?”
“Lord no. I’d hide them in my treasure room with all those glorious atlases. What else is in the box?”
Jo dug around, eagerly but carefully. Please be a patient register and photos. It was neither. She weighed it in her hands: a rectangle of papers, enclosed in wrapping and tied with twine.
“They look like letters,” she said, and if Gwilym was excited before, he now looked positively incandescent.
“Oh my God.” He twitched his fingers. “I love old letters—open them, open them!”
“You say that about almost everything,” Jo said, getting a fingernail under the knot. “I have known you less than a week, but I’ve lost count of your hobbyhorses.” This wasn’t true; she’d been making an unintentional list; antiques, photos, microfilm, obscura—along with a surprising grasp of Roberta’s agriculture and the desire to be an editor, too, “someday.”
“Oh I know,” he said, eagerly taking half of the letters. “I can never quite finish anything because I want to do everything. You’re not so different.”
“Mmm,” said Jo, because she’d already started reading.
“It’s true, though! You’re a walking encyclopedia. And I’m a walking junk attic. We’ve both got all the stuff up there, for certain. But you’ve a much better search engine—”
“Gwilym? Shut up, please.” December, 1906. To Ida Hobarth, MD; from Lady G.A. “I’ve just found something.”
Dear Dr. Hobarth, it read,
You will forgive this second intrusion upon your time but I was too distraught to think clearly after our meeting. They told me I needed only to rest. The doctor prescribed powders, and I used every one, thinking we had hopes. You have dashed them, but I thank you for it; who knows how long I would have hoped in vain when nothing will ever help? It hurts more than you could know. I have to tell William I cannot give him an heir...
“Shite,” said Gwilym, but Jo was on her feet, flapping her hands at the wrist.
“Gwen can’t have kids. Ever. Get it? Ever. But the room is made into a nursery, right? And the only other woman living there is her sister.”
“Is that proof, then? It’s not exactly a dead ringer for evidence,” Gwilym pointed out. “There’s no record of a baby, no birth certificate.” Jo ignored this setback and shook her head firmly. A whole picture was forming in her mind: Evelyn may have hidden the pregnancy at first, but what would happen if her father found out she was carrying the child of her lover, out of wedlock?
“You said Davies was a social climber, yes?” Jo’s circles had gotten smaller; she was just turning in place, now. “If Evelyn got pregnant, he couldn’t marry her off to suit him. If the father hasn’t turned up to claim his child, no one will believe that it wasn’t her own fault. She’s damaged goods. Either she is sent—or runs—away. She goes all the way to Abington to live with people who at least don’t hate her for being pregnant out of wedlock. People who want a baby, too, and can’t have one.”
Jo had started to get dizzy; she steadied herself against the mantel. Her heart was beating fast. Above her, the portraits looked down, as austere and poised as ever: she had been Evelyn’s only haven—Gwen—even as Aunt Sue had been her own mother’s only refuge when she was pregnant with Jo.
“It runs in the family,” she said, still not looking at Gwilym but settling on a space in the middle distance.
“Do I get to hear this story?” he asked. Jo picked at her cuticle.
“It’s not something we talk about,” she said. But there was no we. Not anymore. She felt a stab of loneliness. “I didn’t even tell Tula about it—though I don’t know who I’m protecting.” Jo sat down on the settee. “My mother left England because she was pregnant. She told me she didn’t know who my father was. Except she lied.”
It happened in the strange half-lit days after Aunt Sue’s funeral. Jo was in college, then, about nineteen, and her mother had gone to pieces. She remembered the strange, hollow way she moved—as though every muscle had to be reminded of its job, as if her mum walked and breathed in pain. She leaned heavily on Jo, and Jo tried to bear up, and to anticipate her need. She’d been doing that her whole life anyway: how could Jo be more useful, more fit, and less of a weight on the tiny, fragile family to which she belonged? Now that family had been reduced to two. Jo went to the funeral homes, was there to answer questions when her mother had been too distant or too wounded to approach. The arrangements for burial, for viewing hours, even how to serve as executor of a will technically entrusted to her mum—these became Jo’s employment by day, leaving her alone with her grief by night.
Did Jo miss Aunt Sue? Yes. She loved her, too, as much as she could. As much as Sue let her. Her aunt married an American serviceman at seventeen (and a half) and moved with him to the US. She dreamed of a big family, something the Ardemore/Davies never had. But her husband died in an artillery accident on base only two months later. Sue wanted kids; she got half of Jo. It just never seemed to be the right half. Jo lay awake at night trying to parse her own feelings, but mostly she nursed a horrible loneliness. And then, while searching for necessary account numbers in her mother’s bureau, she found the book.
Held together with rubber bands, it had been tucked into the very back of her mother’s bedside table. It was secret, and Jo couldn’t pretend she didn’t know better. But here it was, her mother’s cramped handwriting in blue on faded lines: a diary. About the past. Jo felt an almost electric jolt; it tingled her fingers, and the sensation was still as vivid as ever. She held the key, maybe, to all her mother’s silences. She’d hoped for talk of the old country—the old family—even Uncle Aiden. Or maybe it had just been her usual raw curiosity for the written word. Either way, what she read couldn’t be taken back: I am pregnant with his child and I don’t know what to do. His child. His. But there wasn’t a name.
Jo had read greedily, guiltily. Her mother had been ostracized by her father. And then, by her brother, Aiden. They don’t believe me. My God, they don’t believe me. Her side of the story didn’t mean anything. And she would not live like that.
“My aunt Sue was really my mother’s aunt,” Jo explained to Gwilym. “The much younger sister of my grandfather. But she was more like a sister to my mum. They both felt alone in their family.” Jo hugged her knees on the sofa. “I know, because she wrote that down. But in all those pages, she never said my father’s name. Only that it was her brother Aiden’s best friend... And that he was married to someone else.”
“Then what?” Gwilym asked. He’d inched forward so far on his chair that he practically hovered in thin air. Jo gave a shuddering sigh. The next part was worse. So much worse.
“Then,” she said slowly, fighting the urge to chew the words back. “Then my mother walked into the bedroom and caught me reading.”
It had all begun so innocently; Jo hadn’t trespassed against any known prohibition. But she’d also been the first to speak, to apologize, to make it right—
“I didn’t mean to,” she said. Those weren’t the right words, though. She had meant to; she always wanted to know and to be known, and it was always denied. Now she saw a part of the truth, and it was good, like clear water after so much dusty silence. Her mother was better and bolder in Jo’s eyes. The fumbled apology did not communicate this. And her mother could spot a lie.
When Jo turned to face her, it wasn’t the mother she’d always known. All the familiar lines had been smoothed out, and in their places were the alien contortions of abject horror.
“How could you?” her mother asked in a voice desperate and shrill. “How dare you?”
Jo didn’t know what to say. Her words evaporated, even as they had in the front room of the Red Lion. Nothing would come. Her mother crossed the room; it seemed to take eons. Jo remembered every muscle as they expressed themselves in order, the strained white lines that pulled back from her mother’s eyes, the teeth bared under thin and panicked lips.
“Give it to me. It is mine and you have no right to touch it.”
But Jo wouldn’t let it go. In it was the only proof of a family, albeit unnamed, beyond her mother and now-deceased aunt.
“I have a right,” she’d managed to say. Quietly. Almost a whisper. “I have a right to know.”
Jo had a father. She might even have siblings. And maybe—just maybe—some of them were like her. Maybe somewhere there were blood kin who saw the world the way she did, the way she always had. Her mother closed one hand on the book. Jo did not relent. Feelings were rushing up out of all the places she carefully hid them, unruly, messy. Angry.
“How could you hide this from me?” she asked, voice shaking. A tremor had started in her legs and traveled up her torso until her arms and hands were vibrating, too. She let go of the book, and her mother hugged it to her breast as if it were a baby. She rocked there, in place, chin folded down over something precious and strange and forbidden. Then she spoke:
“You are a hard-hearted, unfeeling girl. You have never loved me the way a daughter should.”
Jo had just spoken the words out loud, in the ruined library. She heard them in her mother’s voice, even so, as clear as the day they were spoken. On the other side of the table, Gwilym heaved a tremulous sigh.
“Oh, Jo,” he said. Jo wished he hadn’t said it so gently. It threatened to spring something inside her.
“We never spoke of it again,” Jo said, biting her lip. Keep your shit together.
“Can I ask—and tell me if I shouldn’t—did you ever reconcile?”
Jo curled her thumbs in crushingly tight fists. She felt the pressure of something big and ugly pressing against her ribs.
“I tried. I told her what she had said, and how it hurt me.” The words were coming faster, pacing with her heartbeat. “But it didn’t matter. She’d just—forgotten it.”
Jo’s body betrayed her. Sobs came, and hot tears. That day, the horror of being discovered, of being accused, of feeling small—it had been one of the most awful moments of Jo’s life. But for her mother, it was just a Tuesday. Not worth remembering. And so it wasn’t real to her. Jo may as well have been hurt by someone else, someone who didn’t even exist anymore. They never spoke of it again, not when her mom became ill, not in the months of watching her decline. Her mother died without telling her the truth, the last link in a chain to some other family, somewhere else. And then the lawyers called to say she’d inherited a house in England. And Jo had come and hoped.
“So-s-sorry. I’m not sup-posed to be cry-ing,” she stuttered over the hitch of a sob. Gwilym was still there, not speaking, just looking on. He looked puzzled.
“Why?” he eventually asked. “Why should you not cry?”
“I’m sup-posed to be bouncing back. I’m s-starting over. I’m—” Jo gestured at the things she’d tried to do already: the library, the estate, the roof... She felt pathetic. “This isn’t what it’s supposed to look like.”
Gwilym got to his feet and joined her—not on the sofa, but the floor. Then he took a diver’s breath.
“To whom? Who gets to decide what anything looks like?” he asked. Jo sat straighter and tried to claw back a bit of dignity.
“I’m not weak,” she said, but Gwilym was shaking his head before she finished.
“No—I know. It’s an act of revolution just to be what you are.”
“And what’s that?”
“Whatever you want! But not because someone else wants it. Shite, your mum said terrible things to you. And you just carry it around by yourself. My trauma’s not anything like as bad—even with an overprotective mum, and a da that didn’t believe ADHD was a thing.”
Jo unbent herself and rubbed the salt from her cheeks. She’d never heard anyone call her life traumatic; it sounded alien and strange.
“I loved my mother. I miss her every day,” she said, standing up slowly. “But I only ever had bits and pieces of her, I guess, and I just keep losing more family. I wanted to know more about Aiden. And—it matters, you know. That he was looking at our history. That he had the photograph.” She walked to the mantel and peered up at the portraits. “Maybe he was lonely, too.”
Gwilym joined her and patted her shoulder tentatively.
“We’ll find Evelyn,” he offered. “We still have boxes left.” It didn’t have the cheering effect he expected; Jo had an emotional hangover already, and her head hurt from crying.
“It’ll keep,” she said.
It would take a few trips to stow it all back in the car—but Jo’s phone double-buzzed as soon as she stepped outside.
“Hang on,” she said, steadying a box against the hood and chasing the vibration. She didn’t recognize the number—but it appeared to be local to Abington. “I just can’t,” she said, handing it to Gwilym.
“Oh, er. Jo Jones’ phone?” he said into the receiver. “Roberta! We’re just—what? When? Um. Okay, I’ll tell her.”
“What was that all about?” Jo asked. Gwilym handed back the phone.
“I have no idea. But we’re supposed to be at the museum tomorrow—and an hour earlier, too. Seven sharp.”