Wendell looked at Dr. Grenville, who had remained silent. “Sir, you would allow such an injustice against Norris? He deserved better.”
Grenville said, softly: “I know.”
“It’s a false honor your family clings to, if it requires you to blacken the memory of an innocent man.”
“There is Charles to think of.”
“And that’s all that matters to you?”
“He is my nephew!”
A voice suddenly cut in: “And what of your son, Dr. Grenville?”
Startled, Wendell turned to stare at Rose, now standing in the parlor doorway. Grief had drained her face of all color, and what he saw bore little resemblance to the vibrant young girl she once was. In her place he saw a stranger, no longer a girl but a stone-faced woman who stood straight and unyielding, her gaze fixed on Grenville.
“Surely you knew you fathered another child,” she said. “He was your son.”
Grenville gave an anguished groan and dropped his head in his hands.
“He never realized,” she said. “But I saw it. And you must have, too, Doctor. The first time you laid eyes on him. How many women have you taken advantage of, sir? How many other children have you fathered out of wedlock, children you don’t even know about? Children who are even now struggling just to stay alive?”
“There are no others.”
“How could you know?”
“I do know!” He looked up. “What happened between Sophia and me was a long time ago, and it was something we both regretted. We betrayed my dear wife. Never again did I do so, not while Abigail lived.”
“You turned your back on your own son.”
“Sophia never told me the boy was mine! All those years he was growing up in Belmont, I didn’t know. Until the day he arrived at the college, and I saw him. Then I realized…”
Wendell looked back and forth between Rose and Grenville. “You can’t be speaking of Norris?”
Rose’s gaze was still fixed on Grenville. “While you lived in this grand house, Doctor, while you rode in your fine carriage to your country home in Weston, he was tilling fields and slopping pigs.”
“I tell you, I didn’t know! Sophia never said a word to me.”
“And if she had, would you have acknowledged him? I don’t think so. And poor Sophia had no choice but to marry the first man who’d have her.”
“I would have helped the boy. I would have seen to his needs.”
“But you didn’t. Everything he accomplished was by his efforts alone. Does it not make you proud, that you fathered such a remarkable son? That in his short life, he rose so far above his station?”
“I am proud,” said Grenville softly. “If only Sophia had come to me years ago.”
“She tried to.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ask Charles. He heard what his mother said. Mrs. Lackaway told him she didn’t want another one of your bastards suddenly showing up in the family. She said that ten years ago, she was forced to clean up your mess.”
“Ten years ago?” said Wendell. “Isn’t that when—”
“When Norris’s mother vanished,” said Rose. She drew in a shaky breath, the first hint of tears breaking her voice. “If only Norris had known! It would have meant everything to him, to know that his mother loved him. That she didn’t abandon him, but was instead murdered.”
“I have no words in my own defense, Miss Connolly,” said Grenville. “I have a lifetime of sins to atone for, and I intend to.” He looked straight at Rose. “Now it seems there is a little girl somewhere in need of a home. A girl whom I swear to you will be given every comfort, every advantage.”
“I’ll hold you to that promise,” said Rose.
“Where is she? Will you take me to my daughter?”
Rose met his gaze. “When the time is right.”
In the hearth, the fire had guttered out. The first light of dawn was brightening the sky.
Constable Lyons rose from his chair. “I leave you now, Aldous. As for Eliza, this is your family, and how much you choose to acknowledge is your decision. At the moment, the public’s eyes are on Mr. Jack Burke. He is their current monster. But soon, I’m sure, there’ll be another one to catch their attention. This much I know about the public: Their hunger for monsters is insatiable.” He nodded farewell and left the house.
After a moment, Wendell, too, rose to depart. He had intruded upon the household far too long, and had spoken his mind too bluntly. So it was with a note of apology in his voice that he took his leave of Dr. Grenville, who did not stir but remained in his chair, staring at the ashes.
Rose followed Wendell into the foyer. “You have been a true friend,” she said. “Thank you, for all that you’ve done.”
They embraced, and there was no awkwardness despite the wide gulf of class that separated them. Norris Marshall had brought them together; now grief over his death would forever bind them. Wendell was about to step out the door when he paused and looked back at her.
“How did you know?” he said. “When Norris himself did not?”
“That Dr. Grenville is his father?”
“Yes.”
She took his hand. “Come with me.”
She led him up the stairs to the second floor. In the dim hallway she paused to light a lamp and carry it toward one of the portraits hanging on the wall. “Here,” she said. “This is how I knew.”
He stared at the painting of a dark-haired young man who stood beside a desk, his hand resting atop a human skull. His brown eyes gazed straight at Wendell, as though in direct challenge.
“It’s a portrait of Aldous Grenville when he was nineteen years old,” said Rose. “That’s what Mrs. Furbush told me.”
Wendell could not tear his gaze from the painting. “I did not see it until now.”
“I saw it at once. And I had no doubt.” Rose stared at the young man’s portrait, and her lips curved into a sad smile. “You always recognize the one you love.”
Thirty-six
DR. GRENVILLE’S fine carriage took them west on the Belmont road, past farmhouses and wintry fields that were now familiar to Rose. It was a pitilessly beautiful afternoon, and the snow glittered beneath clear skies just as it had glittered when she had walked this road only two weeks ago. You walked beside me then, Norrie. If I close my eyes, I can almost believe you are here with me now.
“Is it much farther?” asked Grenville.
“Only a bit, sir.” Rose opened her eyes and blinked at the empty glare of the sun. And the hard truth: But I will never see you again. And I will miss you every day of my life.
“This is where he grew up, isn’t it?” said Grenville. “On this road.”
She nodded. “Soon we’ll come to Heppy Comfort’s farm. She had a lame calf that she brought into the house. And then she grew so fond of it, she could never slaughter it. Next door to her there’ll be Ezra Hutchinson’s farm. His wife died of typhus.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Norris told me.” And she would never forget. As long as she lived, she would remember every word, every moment.
“The Marshall farm is on this road?”
“We’re not going to Isaac Marshall’s farm.”
“Then where?”
She peered ahead at the tidy farmhouse that had just come into view. “I see the house now.”
“Who lives there?”
A man who was kinder and more generous to Norris than his own father.
As the carriage came to a stop, the farmhouse door opened, and elderly Dr. Hallowell emerged on the porch. By the bleak expression on his face, Rose knew that he had already learned of Norris’s death. He came forward to help her and Dr. Grenville from the carriage. As they climbed the steps, Rose was startled to see yet another man emerge from the house.
It was Isaac Marshall, looking infinitely older than he had only weeks before.
The three men who stood on the porch had been brought together by grief over one young m
an, and words did not come easily to any of them. In silence they regarded one another, the two men who had watched Norris grow up, and the one man who should have.
Rose slipped past them into the house, drawn by what the men’s ears were not attuned to: a baby’s soft cooing. She followed the sound into a room where gray-haired Mrs. Hallowell sat rocking Meggie.
“I’ve come back for her,” said Rose.
“I knew you would.” The woman looked up with hopeful eyes as she handed over the baby. “Please tell me we’ll see her again! Tell me we can be part of her life.”
“Oh, you will, ma’am,” said Rose, smiling. “And so will everyone who loves her.”
The three men all turned as Rose came out onto the porch, carrying the baby. At the instant Aldous Grenville gazed for the first time into his daughter’s eyes, Meggie smiled up at him, as though in recognition.
“Her name is Margaret,” said Rose.
“Margaret,” he said softly. And he took the child into his arms.
Thirty-seven
The present
JULIA CARRIED her suitcase downstairs and left it by the front door. Then she went into the library, where Henry was sitting among the boxes, now ready to be transported to the Boston Athenaeum. Together, she and Henry had organized all the documents and resealed the boxes. The letters from Oliver Wendell Holmes, however, they had carefully set aside for safekeeping. Henry had laid them out on the table, and he sat reading them yet again, for at least the hundredth time.
“It pains me to give these up,” he said. “Perhaps I should keep them.”
“You already promised the Athenaeum you’d donate them.”
“I could still change my mind.”
“Henry, they need to be properly cared for. An archivist will know how to preserve them. And won’t it be wonderful to share this story with the whole world?”
Henry slouched stubbornly in his chair, eyeing the papers like a miser who won’t give up his fortune. “These mean too much to me. This is personal.”
She went to the window and gazed at the sea. “I know what you mean,” she said softly. “It’s become personal for me, too.”
“Are you still dreaming about her?”
“Every night. It’s been weeks now.”
“What was last night’s dream?”
“It was more…impressions. Images.”
“What images?”
“Bolts of cloth. Ribbons and bows. I’m holding a needle in my hand and sewing.” She shook her head and laughed. “Henry, I don’t even know how to sew.”
“But Rose did.”
“Yes, she did. Sometimes I think she’s alive again, and speaking to me. By reading the letters, I’ve brought her soul back. And now I’m having her memories. I’m reliving her life.”
“The dreams are that vivid?”
“Right down to the color of the thread. Which tells me I’ve spent entirely too much time thinking about her.” And what her life could have been. She looked at her watch and turned to him. “I should probably head down to the ferry.”
“I’m sorry you have to leave. When will you come back to see me?”
“You can always come down to see me.”
“Maybe when Tom gets back? I’ll visit you both on the same trip.” He paused. “So tell me. What did you think of him?”
“Tom?”
“He’s eligible, you know.”
She smiled. “I know, Henry.”
“He’s also very picky. I’ve watched him go through a succession of girlfriends, and not a single one lasted. You could be the exception. But you have to let him know you’re interested. He thinks you’re not.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“He’s disappointed. But he’s also a patient man.”
“Well, I do like him.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Maybe I like him too much. It scares me. I know how fast love can fall apart.” Julia turned to the window again and looked at the sea. It was as calm and flat as a mirror. “One minute you’re happy and in love, and everything is right with the world. You think nothing can go wrong. But then it does, the way it did for me and Richard. The way it did for Rose Connolly. And you end up suffering for it all the rest of your life. Rose had that one short taste of happiness with Norris, and then she had to live all those years with the memory of what she’d lost. I don’t know if it’s worth it, Henry. I don’t know if I could stand it.”
“I think you’re taking the wrong lesson from Rose’s life.”
“What’s the right lesson?”
“To grab it while you can! Love.”
“And suffer the consequences.”
Henry gave a snort. “You know all those dreams you’ve been having? There’s a message there, Julia, but it’s wasted on you. She would have taken the chance.”
“I know that. But I’m not Rose Connolly.” She sighed. “Goodbye, Henry.”
She had never seen Henry look so dapper. As they sat together in the director’s office of the Boston Athenaeum, Julia kept stealing glances at him, amazed that this was the same old Henry who liked to putter around his creaky Maine house in baggy pants and old flannel shirts. She’d expected him to be wearing that same wardrobe when she’d picked him up at his Boston hotel that morning. But the man she’d found waiting for her in the lobby was wearing a black three-piece suit and carrying an ebony cane with a brass tip. Not only had Henry shed his old clothes, he’d shed his perpetual scowl as well, and he was actually flirting with Mrs. Zaccardi, the Athenaeum’s director.
And Mrs. Zaccardi, all of sixty years old, was obligingly flirting right back.
“It’s not every day we receive a donation of such significance, Mr. Page,” she said. “There’s a long line of eager scholars who can’t wait to get their hands on these letters. It’s been quite some time since any new Holmes material has surfaced, so we’re delighted you chose to donate it to us.”
“Oh, I had to think about it long and hard,” said Henry. “I considered other institutions. But the Athenaeum has, by far, the prettiest director.”
Mrs. Zaccardi laughed. “And you, sir, need new glasses. I’ll promise to wear my sexiest dress if you and Julia will join us tonight at the trustees’ dinner. I know they’d love to meet you both.”
“I wish we could,” said Henry. “But my grandnephew is flying home from Hong Kong tonight. Julia and I plan to spend the evening with him.”
“Then next month, perhaps.” Mrs. Zaccardi stood up. “Once again, thank you. There are few native sons so deeply revered in Boston as Oliver Wendell Holmes. And the story he tells, in these letters…” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “It’s so heartbreaking, it makes me choke up a little. There are so many stories we’ll never get to hear, so many other voices lost to history. Thank you for giving us the tale of Rose Connolly.”
As Henry and Julia walked out of the office, his cane made a smart clack-clack. At this early hour on a Thursday morning, the Athenaeum was nearly empty, and they were the only passengers in the elevator, the only visitors who strolled through the lobby, Henry’s cane echoing against the floor. They passed a gallery room, and Henry stopped. He pointed to the sign outside the current exhibit: BOSTON AND THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS: PORTRAITS OF AN ERA.
“That would be Rose’s era,” he said.
“Do you want to take a look?”
“We have all day. Why not?”
They stepped into the gallery. They were alone in the room, and they could take as long as they wanted to examine each painting and lithograph. They studied an 1832 view of Boston Harbor from Pemberton Hill, and Julia wondered: Is this a view that Rose glimpsed when she was alive? Did she see that same pretty fence in the foreground, the same vista of rooftops? They moved on, to a lithograph of Colonnade Row, with its tableau of smartly dressed ladies and gentlemen standing beneath stately trees, and she wondered if Rose had passed beneath those very trees. They lingered before portraits of Theodore Parker and the Reve
rend William Channing, faces that Rose might have passed on the street or glimpsed in a window. Here is your world, Rose, a world that has long since passed into history. Like you.
They circled the gallery, and Henry came to an abrupt standstill. She bumped into him, and could feel his body had gone rigid.
“What?” she said. Then her gaze lifted to the oil painting he was staring at, and she, too, went instantly still. In a room full of strangers’ portraits, this face did not belong; this face they both knew. The dark-haired young man gazing back at them from the painting stood beside a desk, with his hand laid upon a human skull. Though he had the heavy sideburns and topcoat and intricately tied cravat of his era, his face was startlingly familiar.
“My God,” said Henry. “That’s Tom!”
“But it was painted in 1792.”
“Look at the eyes, the mouth. It’s definitely our Tom.”
Julia frowned at the label mounted beside the portrait. “The artist is Christian Gullager. It doesn’t say who the subject is.”
They heard footsteps in the lobby, and spotted one of the librarians walking past the gallery.
“Excuse me!” Henry called. “Do you know anything about this painting?”
The librarian came into the room and smiled at the portrait. “It’s really quite nice, isn’t it?” she said. “Gullager was one of the finest portrait painters of that era.”
“Who’s the man in the painting?”
“We believe he was a prominent Boston physician named Aldous Grenville. This would have been painted when he was around nineteen or twenty, I think. He died quite tragically in a fire, around 1832. In his country home in Weston.”
Julia looked at Henry. “Norris’s father.”
The librarian frowned. “I’ve never heard he had a son. I only know about his nephew.”
“You know about Charles?” asked Henry, surprised. “Was he notable?”
“Oh, yes. Charles Lackaway’s work was very much in vogue in his time. But honestly, between you and me, his poems were quite awful. I think his popularity was mostly due to his romantic cachet as the one-handed poet.”