‘Sam, Sam,’ Abigail said, shaking her head. ‘Don’t fret so. We’ll manage.’
‘Aye, manage!’ Sam said. ‘That’s about the size of it. If only that damned fool Ripley would listen!’
Abby smiled. She knew all about ‘Ripley van Winkle’, as Sam called the army’s chief of ordnance. Sam had taken an active dislike to the man the first time he laid eyes on him and his latest meeting had not improved matters at all. As soon as the news burst upon them that Fort Sumter had been fired upon by Confederate guns, as soon as they realized that now, inescapably, it was war between North and South, Sam had hurried to Washington to see Ripley. He had come back even more angry and frustrated.
‘Damned fool!’ she heard him say. ‘Don’t want to confuse himself by examining the facts when he’s already got his mind made up! You know what that old fossil Winfield Scott says? Says that the war won’t be won with rifles but with artillery. Artillery! That’s the sort of stupidity I’ve got to reckon with!’
She’d heard it all before. The War Department was unadventurous. They were interested in the fact that Sam had come up with a design for a solid, reliable repeating rifle. But that was all. They were simply not prepared to buy the gun, despite the fact that the Navy Department had not only bought but actively recommended the weapon.
If you gave a soldier a repeating rifle, the army reasoned, he would shoot off twice or three times as many bullets. A man using a muzzle loader which took him half a minute to load would take that much more care firing. Sam had tried every argument he knew and a few he came up with on the spot, but everyone had failed.
‘If I was making the damned gun in Brussels, they’d be falling over themselves to buy it!’ he grumbled.
‘Maybe you should go down to Richmond, Sam,’ Abby said slyly. ‘Try selling your repeater there.’
He looked up and saw the twinkle in her eye. He knew well enough that she was as much against slavery as he was himself, and that he was about as likely to sell repeaters to the seceded states as he was to get up out of his chair and fly. Hadn’t they both helped slaves to escape to the North via the underground railway in Kansas?
Kansas, she thought.
It was like another life. Enough adventures out there to fill a book, Sam used to say. Like that time they were taking a runaway slave to the next station, a big fellow who said his name was Jubal. They dressed him in some of Abby’s clothes and a poke bonnet. Abby remembered how Jubal’s face had glistened with sweat as they drove through the town, Sam on one side of him, she on the other. Right across from the sheriff s office, a screech owl spooked the horses. They bolted down the street, tumbling Abby and the black man from the wagon. Sam fought the team to a stop and they got Jubal into the wagon without anybody noticing. But not before, as Sam later put it, he’d sweated off ten pounds.
Abby wondered if other people had the same kind of memory she did. It seemed to her that when she looked back over her life, it was like she’d lived it in chapters, each with a beginning and an ending, just like a book. The orphanage. Old Dr Parker. Sam. The boys. Sam’s service with Frémont. Kansas. This part, now.
She wondered if every family had secrets. The Strongs certainly had their share. Over the years Abby had taken on the job of unofficial family historian. She even knew where Mary Strong, Sam’s runaway sister, had died, and what had happened to her family, the Christmans. But she had not told Sam or anyone else in the family about that. If Mary Christman had never wanted her family to know, she was entitled to her secrets. Everyone was.
She looked across the room at her husband. Sam was bent over his ledgers, frowning furiously at the figures as if they were disobeying his scratching pen. Dear Sam, she thought, how much I have not told you. Even after twenty-five years of being married to you, still I have secrets.
She had left the orphanage when she was sixteen, a pretty enough girl dressed in hand-me-down clothes carrying her few personal possessions in a battered carpetbag. The nuns had arranged for her to work in the home of a doctor as a scullery maid. And that was the end of the first chapter and the beginning of a new one.
Dr Theodore Parker his name was. If she closed her eyes, she could see him as clearly as if he were still alive, a stooped, white-haired man who seemed very old to her then. He was probably about fifty, she thought. Ancient! But he was a kindly man, and when she came down with pleurisy he put her in bed and nursed her as if she were his own flesh and blood. She remembered how he had asked her if she would like to try and trace her parents.
‘No!’ Abby had told him fiercely. ‘They never wanted me when I was a baby. And I don’t want them now!’
‘You’re young, child,’ the old doctor said soothingly. ‘As you get older, you’ll want to know about your family. It happens to all of us. You’ll see. And Abby, you do not say “They never wanted me”. The correct way to say it is “They didn’t want me”.’
He was a kind old man, gentle and understanding. He became the nearest thing that Abby ever knew to a father. He taught her to speak properly, to dress modestly, to look at life with an eye open for its funny side. And when he died she felt as if her world had come to an end. But it was not the end of the world at all: just another chapter.
So there she was, Abigail Monroe, seventeen years of age, a handsome girl with a fresh complexion and in need of a roof over her head. She didn’t know where she was going, but she did know she was going somewhere. She kept the delivery boys and the postmen and the patrolmen at arm’s length. She had no intention of becoming a working man’s wife, drudging away her life in a tenement with a passel of squalling brats clinging to her skirts till she was too old to do anything but drink gin. She was going to be someone, Abby Monroe was. And then Sean Flynn came into her life.
Ah, Sean, she thought, remembering the corn-yellow hair and the devil’s eyes of him. As ready with his fist as he was with his money and claiming descent on the wrong side of the blanket from a belted earl in Ireland. Abby never really believed any of that because Sean was a great one with the blarney. A woman would be a fool who gave herself to a man like Flynn, Abby told herself. And an even bigger one if she didn’t. And then he was killed in the street brawl and Abby was on her own again, only now pretty sure that there was another life kindling in her belly. So she took the first position she could find, and that was in the house of a New York gun maker by the name of Samuel Strong.
She avoided Sam at first, on purpose. She addressed him as ‘Your Honor’ and answered all his questions with downcast head. She knew from the way that he looked at her that he had more on his mind than housekeeping matters, but she made herself go slow. It wasn’t easy, knowing for sure now that there was life inside her. She would have to time it very carefully indeed. Then one day he put his fingers under her chin and tipped back her head. She knew he hadn’t anything on his mind but having her, and although she felt no love for him, she let him have his way. And it had been her turn to be surprised, for he was lusty and tireless. Ah, Sam, she thought. Not so lusty now, perhaps, but slower, kinder and infinitely sweeter. The thought of him flooded her senses with pleasure. She had not loved him at first. But love had come, and with it came the realization that, after all, she was someone. All it took was for someone else to need you.
She looked at the box on the sideboard. It was made of mahogany with an intricate pattern of marquetry on the lid and sides. An old deed box. She had bought it soon after Sam set off with the Frémont expedition in 1844, planning to keep his letters in it. Only, of course, he wrote no letters worth the mentioning, for there was no way he could post them. So the box was still empty on that fateful day when Abby went back to St Joseph’s Orphanage for the first time since she had walked out carrying her carpetbag a quarter of a century earlier.
It was an open day to raise funds for the school. She went entirely on impulse. There were home-made cakes and bitter tea, and the nuns smiled proudly as the children sang their hymns and performed their dances in that delightful, shyly proud way that little children have. Abby remembered being like them, dressed in those same drab clothes, and she silently thanked God for her own good fortune.
An orphan’s dreams have very close horizons. She could remember that the biggest dream of all was that one day your parents would come and take you home, and explain how it had all been a mistake and that they had always loved you and wanted you, and how they had searched all over America to find you. As you got older you realized that the dream was never going to come true. So you invented ‘memories’, and as time went by the ‘memories’ became as real as if you had actually lived them. All Abby really knew of herself was what the nuns had told her, that she had been born around the end of 1817. For reasons that she had never fully understood, Abby was sure there had been snow on the ground that day.
Watching the children, it occurred to her that she might be able to learn more while she was there. Sister Ursula was the oldest nun at St Joseph’s. She frowned when Abby introduced herself.
‘You’ll have to forgive me, my dear,’ she said. ‘There have been so many children—’
‘Abigail Monroe,’ Abby repeated, instantly transferred back in time by the words, once again the gawky, spindle-legged girl with pigtails reciting her identification, ‘Named for the fifth President of the United States.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Sister Ursula smiled. ‘You were a good girl. A good girl.’
So memory plays tricks on all of us, Abby thought. She had been a naughty girl, frequently punished for fighting, arguing, for talking in class, for not doing her work. Perhaps Sister Ursula remembers us all as good girls, she thought.
‘Tell me, sister,’ she said. ‘Would it be possible for me to see the records of my admission to St Joseph’s?’
Sister Ursula’s eyebrows rose. ‘My dear child, of course,’ she said. ‘But what on earth for?’
‘I’ve become the unofficial family historian,’ Abby said, with a smile. ‘It’s something to keep me busy while my husband is away in the West.’
‘Well,’ Sister Ursula said dubiously, as if she thought delving into family affairs reprehensible, ‘you could speak to the registrar, Mr. Omensby.’
Abby found Mr. Omensby’s office at the far end of an echoing corridor on the second floor of the orphanage building. Grime gritted underfoot; her steps echoed. The place made her feel uneasy. What did it do to little girls?
‘Year 1817, you say?’ wheezed Mr. Omensby. He was a spindly little man with tin-rimmed spectacles that perched on the very end of a narrow nose. He turned the big pages of his ledger, each covered in crabbed handwriting, as though they weighed pounds. ‘1818. And the name was Monroe, you say?’
‘Abigail Monroe,’ she said. ‘For the new president.’
‘Abigail Monroe, Abigail Monroe,’ he muttered, his finger moving up the lines of names like a snail. Abby’s eyes, much faster, saw her own entry long before he did.
‘There,’ she said, putting her finger on the page.
‘Don’t touch the ledgers, girl! ‘ he snapped, giving her a look of pained reproach. ‘You’re not allowed to touch the ledgers!’
‘There’s my name,’ Abby said. ‘Abigail Monroe. There.’
‘I see it, I see it,’ he said, testily. ‘ “Abigail Monroe. Born 1818, possibly late 1817. A female child found on a seat in St John’s Park, Manhattan by patrolman Patrick J. Smith, NYPD Shield Number 869 on February 12, 1818. Estimated age of child, six weeks to two months. Hair brown, eyes brown, weight 6 lb 4 oz. Dressed in good-quality woolen coat and dress, and wrapped in pink woolen blanket. Card with name Abigail pinned to blanket. Miniature gold locket around the baby’s neck. No identifying marks or labels”.’
‘What was that about a locket?’ Abby said, all at once strangely breathless.
‘A locket, a locket,’ Omensby said impatiently. ‘Didn’t they give it to you when you left?’
‘No,’ Abby said. ‘Nobody told me anything about it.’
‘Oh, the devil take it!’ he said angrily. ‘If only people would do their jobs properly! They were supposed to have given it to you.’
‘Well, they didn’t,’ Abby said. Her heart was pounding. ‘Could I – could you see if it is still here?’
‘Good Heavens, girl. I’m not here to run errands for every Tom, Dick or Harry who comes through the door!’ Omensby said. ‘I’m a senior clerk, that’s what I am. I don’t run errands. You’ll have to write in for it.’
‘Please,’ Abby said. ‘Couldn’t you look? Just for me? She thought of fluttering her eyelashes and decided against it. The old man gave her a startled look, as though an idea had just occurred to him that made him uneasy.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Ahem.’ His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. It sounded quite loud in the boxlike little office.
‘Well,’ he said again, sliding off his stool. ‘You wait here, my dear. Yes, hmm.’ He patted her arm and smiled, then off he went up the stairs, quite quickly. As if to show how spry he was, Abby thought with a grin. Silly old fool. Men were all fools, even when they were as old as this one.
Ten minutes later he came noisily down the stairs. She heard his wheezy breathing long before he arrived in person, cheeks stained with effort.
‘There, there you are,’ he said, handing her an envelope. ‘See it’s got your name on it. Abigail Monroe.’
Abby took the envelope from the man with shaking hands. Inside it she found a tiny locket on a fine golden chain. On the reverse of the locket was inscribed a heart and inside the heart were two initials, A and H.
‘Well?’ Omensby said peevishly. She turned to face him. He was watching her with a strange look, his head cocked on one side. He looks like a decrepit turkey, she thought.
‘Now then,’ he said. ‘You’re a pretty one, aren’t you?’ His breathing was very loud. He put forward a tentative hand, touching her breast. Abby slapped him across the face and Omensby reeled back against the high stool. He and it fell on the stone floor with a clattering bump. He touched his split lip with astonishment, then began groping on the floor to find his glasses.
‘Needn’t have done that,’ he whined. ‘No need for that at all.’
‘Maybe that’ll learn you to keep your nasty groping little hands where they belong!’ Abby said, turning and marching out. ‘Bloody men. You’re all the same!’
She hurried back home and when she got there, she sat down at Sam’s desk and examined the locket through a big magnifying glass. She could see a fine join: there was an opening then. With a fine knife she gently levered the locket open. Inside was a miniature of a woman with long dark hair in a blue dress. Facing it, in letters so small as to be almost indecipherable, was the inscription ‘Bellamy’.
Is that my name? Abby wondered. ‘Abigail Bellamy,’ she said aloud. It sounded right but it did not sound familiar. I must find out, she thought. I have to know.
Her first step was to go to the Astor library on Lafayette Street and find the New York City directories for the years 1815 through to 1819. The policeman had found her in St John’s Park. That was down on the Lower West Side, a pretty square bounded by Varick, Hudson, Beach and Laight Streets. She got a map of the downtown area around the square and, street by street, checked for people with the name Bellamy. As the hours slid past, she realized that she was wasting her time. There were far too many. She couldn’t just walk all over the city, knocking on strangers’ doors and asking questions. There had to be an easier way and she thought she knew the man who could help her. His name was Peter O’Hanlon and he was a reporter for the New York Evening Post.
O’Hanlon was as Irish as the Mountains of Mourne, a cheerful fellow who’d come to the party Sam Strong threw for the christening of his first son, Travis. He’d a way with him and Abby had almost fallen for him more than once, before she’d come to love Sam. O’Hanlon was the kind who could almost talk you into his bed, but never really pushed it too hard. So Abby had never slipped, but she was still fond of Peter. There was no sex in it any more: at least, not for her. But she knew Peter still harbored vague notions of having her. Men put you into a corner of their minds like that, sometimes, like dried meat in a larder. As if you were going to just hang there waiting for them to get around to you.
‘Well now, Abby, and this is a lovely surprise, and all,’ O’Hanlon said when she walked into his cluttered office at the Post building. ‘So you’ve finally decided to come and throw yourself into me arms, is it?’
‘You should be so lucky,’ Abby said with a grin. ‘There’s something I want you to do for me, Pete.’
‘Well,’ he said, with a broad grin. ‘There’s something I’d quite like you to do for me, too.’ He gave her a broad wink.
‘You’ll have to try a lot harder than that to get a blush out of me, O’Hanlon!’ Abby retorted.
‘Sure, and it’s more than that I’m tryin’ to get.’
‘Be serious, now,’ Abby said firmly. ‘I need your help.’
His grin vanished and he nodded towards a bentwood chair. ‘Take the weight off your feet, darlin’,’ he told her. ‘And I’ll listen to your tale of woe.’
‘If you wanted to find someone in New York but whose address you didn’t know, where would you start?’
‘Rich or poor?’
‘Don’t know. But not poor.’
‘Male or female?’
‘One of each.’
‘Married?’
‘Probably.’
‘Names?’
‘H. Bellamy and A. Bellamy.’
‘Which is which?’
‘H is the man. The woman’s name is probably Abigail but that’s just a guess.’
‘Abigail is it?’ He cocked a shrewd eye at her. ‘What’s all this about, Abby?’
‘I think they’re my parents, Pete,’ she said. ‘I want to find them.’ He knew the story of her childhood; he was an orphan himself. Both his parents had died on the boat over. He had arrived at Ellis Island in 1820 with nothing but a few dollars and the address of a cousin of his father’s in Milwaukee. He rode the rails out West to find the man, only to learn that he, too, was dead. Eighteen and homeless, O’Hanlon had nowhere to go but the army. He did a three-year hitch and was mustered out at Leavenworth with enough money to get back to New York. He parlayed his military experience into a job as a runner for a reporter and eventually replaced his superior when that worthy was hit by a runaway dray while reporting a fire down on the Lower East Side.’
‘Difficult,’ O’Hanlon said, frowning at the locket. ‘There’s probably thousands of people in New York called Bellamy. Always supposing that they live in New York. And since they abandoned you as a child, it’s not likely they’d welcome inquiries now.’
‘I know,’ Abby said.
‘Give me the date you was picked up in that little park again,’ O’Hanlon said. ‘And we’ll start with that.’
‘February twelfth, 1818,’ she said.
‘Lord, is it only twenty-six you are?’
‘It is.’
‘Wait here,’ he said, and went out of the room. She sat and watched the ceaseless activity in the newsroom, men in shirt sleeves smoking cigars, green eyeshades on their foreheads, scribbling away on yellow legal pads, bawling for coffee. She thought it must be very exciting to work on a newspaper. The place smelled of sweat, cigars, damp paper, printing ink. A big fan turning languidly in the center of the ceiling did absolutely nothing to disperse the aromas. After perhaps fifteen minutes, O’Hanlon came back in. His face was grave.
‘What is it?’ she said getting up.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Read it for yourself.’
He was carrying a thick sheaf of newspapers, held together by two wooden battens with wing nuts at either end. He laid them on his desk and heaved over a great sheaf of them to reveal what he had found, a small item at the foot of the front page of the issue for December 6, 1817.
ABIGAIL BELLAMY A SUICIDE
The body of Abigail Bellamy, twenty-four, was recovered today from the East River by police. Miss Bellamy, a well-known social figure, was considered by many critics to have a golden future ahead of her after publication last year of her novel, No Truer Friend. She is survived by her brother Henry, with whom she lived at their elegant town house at 2’ East 3rd Street. Foul play is not suspected.
Abby stared at the words as though by doing so she could make them answer all the questions seething in her brain. If Abigail Bellamy had been her mother, then she had not been married! That would explain why she had abandoned her baby. But surely, someone like that would have placed the child in a foster home, or seen to it that she was adopted. If she was a writer and a well-known social figure, as the news item stated, it followed that she was an intelligent woman with means. Would such a woman have left her own child on a park bench where it might die of exposure before it was found? It did not seem likely and she said so.
‘I know, I know,’ O’Hanlon said. He got his coat off the hook and stuck a cigar at a jaunty angle in his mouth. Abby looked at him.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to take a walk as far as 21 East 3rd Street,’ he said, grinning. ‘You want to come along?’
The houses on 3rd Street were charmingly elegant. Liveried grooms led horses to the drinking trough at the far end of the street. They rang the bell of the house and a butler with a striped waistcoat opened the door.
‘We’d like to speak to Mr. Bellamy,’ O’Hanlon said. ‘Is he in?’
The butler looked O’Hanlon up and down, priced his suit and smelled his cigar before saying, ‘I’m sorry. There is no one of that name here, sir.’ He started to close the door.
‘Wait!’ O’Hanlon yelped. ‘Hold on, there! Isn’t this the house of Mr. Henry Bellamy?’
‘No, sir, it is not,’ the butler said firmly. He was about to close the door again when a voice, from inside made him turn around.
‘Who is it, Dawkins?’
‘Someone looking for a Mr. Bellamy, sir,’ the butler said. He made way for a tall, thin man with a patrician face, along the side of whose head lay two swooping wings of white hair.
‘Good day to you,’ he said. ‘My name is Pickering. I live here.’ His narrow face was imperious, with a hooked nose and a thin-lipped mouth that made him look like a very elderly eagle. ‘Did I hear correctly? That you’re looking for Henry Bellamy?’
‘Yes sir, we are,’ Abby said.
Pickering looked at her and his eyes softened. Good-looking young gel, he thought. He prided himself that he had an eye for a good-looking girl.
‘I’m afraid I have to disappoint you, then,’ he said. ‘Henry Bellamy is dead.’
‘Oh,’ Abby said.
‘Do you know when he died, sir?’ O’Hanlon asked.
‘Matter of fact, I do,’ Pickering said. ‘But see here, we can’t stand on the stoop talkin’. Come inside and have some tea. Dawkins, bring us some tea.’
‘Very good, sir,’ Dawkins said, with another jaundiced look at O’Hanlon’s suit. They followed Pickering into an elegant sitting room, lined on one side with bookcases from floor to ceiling. The furniture was good, solid stuff that looked old and valuable. There was a fine marble fireplace with a glowing coal fire. A ginger cat lay stretched out on the rug.
They told Pickering their names and, as Dawkins poured the tea, he told them about Henry Bellamy’s mysterious death.
‘Great tragedy, y’know,’ Pickering said, ‘Terrible thing. Shot himself, right here in this very room!’
Henry and Abigail Bellamy were members of a literary circle known as the Belles Lettres Club. They contributed regularly to some of the short-lived literary journals of their day, the Literary Repository, the American Review, and others, he told them. They were both involved in De Witt Clinton’s Free School Society and often attended literary evenings at the New York Society Library on Nassau Street.
‘Oh, they’ve all been here,’ he said proudly. ‘Washington Irving, Noah Webster, Philip Freneau, Charles Brockden Brown. The Bellamys knew everyone.’
He knew only a little about their background, he said. He had been told that they were descended from an old English family, Devon or somewhere like that.
‘I imagine there was a lot about Bellamy’s death in the papers?’ Abby said.
‘I rather think not,’ Pickering said. ‘There was a firm of lawyers involved. Hushed it all up, nasty scandal, y’know.’
‘Scandal?’ O’Hanlon said, casting a wistful glance at the decanter on the roll-top desk.
‘Well, I mean,’ Pickering said. ‘The sister had killed herself just a week or two earlier. Found her in the river, I heard. Then Henry Bellamy shoots himself. Very strange. It was about a year or so after it happened that I bought the house. They couldn’t sell it, you know. People knew about what had happened. Said the place was unlucky. Tish and tosh. I’ve been here years, nothing happened. Lovely house.’
‘It certainly is,’ O’Hanlon said. ‘From whom did you buy it, Mr. Pickering?’
‘The lawyer fellows I told you about, the ones who kept Henry Bellamy’s death quiet,’ Pickering said. ‘You want their address?’
‘If you would be so kind.’
‘Price, Clark & Gray,’ Pickering said. ‘I’ll write you a note to the senior partner, if you like.’
Armed with the old man’s note, they walked across to Broadway, and inside an hour were closeted in the office of the senior partner, Linden Gray. He listened without speaking as Abby told her story, then nodded as if coming to a decision, when she told him how she had been found in St John’s Park that snowy night, years before. He got up, smoothing back his hair. It was as black and shiny as patent leather. I wonder what he puts on it, Abby thought irrationally.
‘On the day that Henry Bellamy killed himself,’ Linden Gray said slowly, ‘he wrote me a letter. In it he told me things he said must never be divulged to a living soul. He said that he was going to take his life. By the time that I received the letter he had already done so.’
‘And the letter?’ Abby whispered.
‘Yes, I still have it,’ Gray said. ‘I warn you, though, Mrs. Strong, that its contents would gravely distress you.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Abby said firmly, ‘if you will permit me to see it, I want to.’
‘Very well,’ Gray said. He picked up a small bell that lay on his desk and rang it. The glass-paned door opened and a young man came in. He was wearing a dark, tightly-fitting suit and a boiled collar with a tie whose knot looked about as big as a full stop. Gray told him what he wanted and the clerk hurried away. Then the lawyer got up and walked around the desk.
‘May I ask whether you are a relative?’ he said to O’Hanlon.
‘Just a friend,’ O’Hanlon said. ‘Why?’
‘I think it may be better if Mrs. Strong does what she has to do in privacy,’ Gray said suavely. ‘Don’t you agree?’ O’Hanlon looked at Abby; she said nothing.
‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘Sure.’
‘You can wait outside,’ Gray said. ‘I’ll get you some tea.’
‘No, thanks all the same,’ O’Hanlon said hastily. ‘I’ll take a walk.’
By the time you read this I shall be dead by my own hand. Be assured that it is my earnest wish no longer to live, and forgive me for burdening you with the consequences of my decision. You know that my sister, Abigail, killed herself a fortnight ago. Now I must tell you why, so that perhaps one day redress for what we have done can be made. Abigail had a child, a little girl who was born in the last week of November. We managed to conceal that, but of course, it was impossible for us even to consider keeping the child. By the same token, we could not take her to the usual agencies. So Abigail wrapped her in her warmest clothes and left her on a bench in St John’s Park. We went back next morning. She was gone. We hope to a good home. However, it was not that act alone which drove my darling Abigail to her death, but a sin far greater, a sin for which I am doomed to pay in Hell for all eternity. Linden, the child was mine! Abigail and I were lovers. Now she is gone and I cannot bear the thought of life without her. She was the sunlight in the garden of my life for as long as I can remember. There is no reason any longer to live. Good-bye, old friend. Take care of my affairs and do what you can to keep it from becoming messy. As for the money, give it to whatever charity you choose. Good-bye.
Henry
‘My God!’ Abby whispered. ‘Oh, my God!’
She sat, stunned, staring at the letter in her hand. She heard Linden Gray speaking, but the words meant nothing. After a few minutes she began to listen to his quiet voice. He had settled the estate and given the money to charity, he said. All there was left was the deed box, which held some photographs and birth certificates. She took them in her nerveless hands and put them into her pocketbook. Burn them, she thought, I’ll burn them and nobody will ever know.
‘I’ll burn them,’ she said to the lawyer.
‘Just as you wish, Mrs. Strong,’ he said softly. ‘Would you care for anything? A glass of tea, perhaps?’
‘No,’ Abby said. ‘I’m all right. It’s all right.’
No one must ever know, she kept thinking. In her mind seethed a word written in letters of fire that nothing would ever extinguish. Incest, she thought, in utter misery. I am the child of incest.
Well, enough of that, Abby told herself. She wasn’t one to sit fretting over things fretting wouldn’t cure. There were some secrets just too deep and too dark and too damning to bring out into the open. Some things people just didn’t want to have to face. If you brought them out anyway, all you did was to flay the other person’s soul. Where was the good in that? She looked across the room at Sam again. Darling Sam. Suppose she told him about Abigail and Henry Bellamy. About Sean Flynn. What good would it do? It would break him.
I’ll never tell, Abby thought. I can live with what I know. I have to. She let her eyes flicker over towards the mahogany box. Henry Bellamy’s letter was in it: she had never been able to bring herself to destroy that one tenuous link to her parents that she possessed. Hidden in plain sight, she thought. Sam respected her privacies; he would never dream of going through her things.
‘Well, Sam Strong,’ she said, in mock anger. ‘Are you going to sit in that corner with your books all night, pray? Or are you coming to bed?’
He looked up, frowning at her over his spectacles. Abby gave him a grin.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Fruity, are you?’
‘That’s for me to know,’ she said, getting up. ‘And you to find out.’ She went up the stairs to the bedroom, smiling as she heard him bolt the front door and blow out the lamp in the hall. She looked at her body in the mirror beside the bed. Not bad for an old woman, she thought. A bit on the flabby side, maybe: kids did that to you. What a mystery we all are. She thought of the men who had touched this body, caressed it, invaded it. The door opened and Sam came into the room.
‘Well, well,’ he growled. ‘You’re already, I see.’
‘Willing, too,’ she said, going to him.