While I am sad to be leaving our cozy little apartment above the club, and all the happy memories we made there, I am beyond excited about the new house and cannot wait to move in. That is, if my vexing husband ever finishes planning where he wants Mr. Evans to put the dratted staircase …
—from the diary of Mrs. Venus Sinclair, aged 27
“It’s so much smaller than I remember.” Vee stood in the center of the dilapidated room, taking it all in while the memories assaulted her. Some were good, most were bad, but they were all part of who she was regardless, so she embraced them all.
Minerva frowned at the thick layer of dust covering the tatty windows. “It’s so much more dingy than I remember. But I see the stain is still there.” She pointed to the big, brown smudge on the cracked ceiling. “You’d have thought after ten years the landlord would have had the roof patched.”
It had been a decade since they’d left these depressing rooms in Clerkenwell, and it felt like a lifetime. For nostalgia’s sake, they had come to visit it one last time together before it was all torn down.
“It’s every bit as dreadful as I remember, so good riddance to it.” Diana had always been the least sentimental of the three of them. “If somebody wants to fetch me a hammer, I’d happily knock the place down myself right now. Better still, I’m going to do some digging on our old landlord as he deserves shooting for charging desperate people rent for this!” Her middle sister still worked at The London Tribune and still crusaded against all the wrongs in the world. A happy marriage, two children, and a thriving Shropshire estate hadn’t dampened that passion. Only nowadays, two other anonymous crusaders helped her write the Sentinel’s feared column while the one-legged reprobate Dalton did the legwork.
“I think what you are doing with the place is so fitting, Vee.” Like her, Minerva had let it all go. It was such a blessing to see her older sister so happy after all the years she had struggled to keep the family afloat and raise Vee at the same time. It had taken a few years, but she had finally picked up her art again, and instead of carving woodcuts for a pittance, Minerva now painted landscapes in between raising her own three boys. She’d even sold a few—or rather Payne, the Standishes’ loyal but disobedient butler, had sold them behind her back when she refused to believe her efforts were good enough. “A school is exactly what the poor children around here need.”
“The three of us would never have escaped here if we couldn’t read.” Which was sort of the truth. Reading had always been her escape and she was still passionate about passing on her first love, as well as opportunities, to those who had so little.
But altruism wasn’t the only reason that Vee had purchased this building the second she had learned that it was on the market. She had done it to close the door on that part of her life once and for all. Turn all her lingering and resentful memories of her father into something positive.
A better final memory to replace the one he had left her with.
They never did find out what had happened to Alfred Merriwell. For all the sisters knew he could be either dead or alive, but whichever it was, they didn’t care. They had all thrived despite him and to spite him, so in that respect, with hindsight, he had done at least one thing properly.
“Can we go now? Only this place gives me the shivers.” To prove that, Diana shuddered.
They left together arm in arm, all quiet and lost in their own thoughts as they descended the stairs. Outside, waiting patiently for them, were all the people who mattered.
Hugh and Giles stood chatting, still the best of friends that they’d always been, except nowadays they weren’t outdoors being scandals, but indoors discussing crop yields and newfangled farming methods. Jeremiah and Olivia, the matriarch and patriarch of their oddly blended untraditional family, were bickering, seemingly ageless. The only clue that any time had passed was a few more distinguished silver streaks in Jeremiah’s black hair and some discreet wrinkles on Olivia’s wily face.
The Reverend Smythe now leaned on a walking stick, though his jolly, naughty smile was as vibrant as ever. Vee saw him less nowadays. Since his wife had convinced him to retire, he only visited the orphanage once a week, but everything she and Mrs. Witherspoon did was still very much based upon his original vision, even in its spacious new premises in the leafy village of Hanwell just outside the city.
Galahad had found that new oasis for them, exactly as he had promised, and thanks to his brilliant solution to all their financial woes, the orphanage now funded itself. As much as it pained her to admit it, it had made perfect business sense not to sell her building to him, but to use it as collateral to buy the orphanage a 25 percent share in The Round Table. Which meant that a quarter of his club’s lucrative profits winged their way to Hanwell every month and saved unloved little boys and girls like he had been from the depravity of the streets. Those profits had been so good, she had also been able to buy up this building on the back of it.
Her husband, of course, was busy working. Issuing instructions to the crew he had hired to demolish this old building ready for their new school to rise from the ashes. Galahad being Galahad, he had no end of plans for the place and was still thinking up more on the hoof while his devoted assistant Billy Tubbs jotted them down beside him.
As if Galahad sensed her, he looked up, and as always Vee lost herself in his emotive green eyes for a moment. “And where, pray tell, are our twins?” Because of course she would be cursed with twins. Without thinking, she moved her hand to her distended belly, and she sighed, wondering if the enormous size of it so early in her pregnancy already confirmed that a second set was nestled inside. Her own fault, she supposed, for always wanting a house full of children to love. When she wished that, she forgot to stipulate to fate that she hadn’t intended to have them all at once, but such was life.
Nobody could plan for every eventuality. Not even Galahad.
“In the carriage. Playing cards with all their cousins and the Claypoles.”
“And you thought that was wise? Leaving impressionable minds with them?”
He shrugged, chuckling, the silky sound of it still giving her wayward body ideas after five years of marriage. “I think you’re over-estimating our darling daughters’ abilities to cause mayhem in a confined space and under-estimating Tommy Claypole’s abilities to outwit them.”
“I wouldn’t trust our two troublesome little girls as far as I could throw them. But then again I wouldn’t trust the Claypoles, either.” Not that she could throw a Claypole nowadays. The pair had grown like beanstalks, and after years of working at The Den and The Round Table, they had ceased being gangly and were now both built like brick walls.
“Are you ready to go?”
Vee took his arm and stared at the exciting horizon ahead rather than back at her past. But she couldn’t resist one last peek at where the Merriwell sisters had come from. One last look at the shabby streets and all the flotsam and jetsam they were once a part of. As a tear pricked her eye, she swiped it away, proud of how far they had come. Of all that they had overcome to get to where they were now.
“I’m ready, Galahad.” She smiled at Minerva and Diana, not only her sisters, but the two women in the world who she most admired. “It’s time to turn this page and say goodbye.”