Secrets of a Charmed Life (24 page)

AT
first Emmy refused to believe that her mother and Henry Thorne had been together in that hotel. That was impossible. If that was true, then it was also true that on the night Emmy was conceived, he hadn’t been some passing teenage acquaintance that Mum had slept with after having had too many drinks. He wasn’t a person Mum had long put out of her mind as she had led Emmy to believe.

Mum had had a relationship with him. A continuous one. A secret one. Emmy now thought of Mum in those few minutes before she left Emmy at the flat, the last time Emmy saw her. She was going to Henry Thorne for help. She had said they needed someone with connections. Someone with money to help them find Julia. When Emmy had offered to do whatever Mum was willing to do to get what they needed, Mum had laughed in
a sad, funny way because she was going to Henry Thorne for help.

Emmy’s father.

And she didn’t even tell her.

“How—how long did they . . . How long were they . . .” But Emmy couldn’t find the words to phrase so delicate and private a question.

Mr. Bowker gave a mirthless chuckle. “You really don’t know, do you?”

Emmy shook her head.

“On and off since the day you were born. Your mother was a sixteen-year-old maid in your father’s house. He was twice her age and unhappily married. When she ended up pregnant, he put her up in a flat across the river. Paid for the doctor, the hospital. Paid for your nappies and your blankets and your sitters. Found her new jobs when she needed them and got her out of jams when she got herself in them.”

The air in the room felt warm with his indignation.

Or maybe it was just hers.

“Because he had to hide what he’d done to stay out of jail and keep his fortune and reputation?” Emmy said, hotly.

“Because he thought he loved her.”

Emmy was stunned into silence.

Before she could summon words to ask him what he meant by that, the door opened, and an older man in a black suit and cap stepped inside.

“I’m here for Miss Emmeline Downtree,” he said.

Mr. Bowker nodded to the world that waited outside the open door. “Watch your step, Miss Downtree.” And then he pivoted to return to his office.

Emmy walked numbly to the sleek black car waiting
curbside. The driver helped her inside, but Emmy would later not remember whether he said anything to her, nor which streets they drove down before he turned into the curved driveway of a stately home that was as large as the entire row of flats in Whitechapel. The gray-stoned mansion was four stories high, trimmed in white. Miniature topiaries lined the walkway to the massive front door.

The driver parked the car and then came around to Emmy’s side to assist her out. He motioned toward the wide steps that led to the entrance. The front door swung open, and a maid in a navy blue dress and white lace apron appeared on the threshold.

“If you will follow me, please,” she said. Emmy took the steps slowly and then entered a marble-tiled foyer. Gilded mirrors and picture frames hung on walls that seemed endless.

The maid showed her into a room that appeared to be a study or library. Books lined the walls. Leather sofas and chairs were set about in cozy groupings. A fire danced in the grate and wherever there weren’t books or leather, there was gleaming mahogany.

Above the fireplace was a portrait of a man who seemed vaguely familiar to her, seated next to a slightly plump woman who stood next to him with her arm around his shoulder. On his other side was a boy, about twelve, with his forearm draped over the back of his father’s chair. The man in the portrait looked like Emmy. Or rather, she looked like him.

Henry Thorne.

Her father.

For several long moments Emmy just stood there and stared at the man who had fathered her. She didn’t hear footfalls from behind. There was just suddenly a voice.

“Miss Downtree.”

Emmy startled, and turned to see the woman in the portrait, older now.

“Yes,” she answered.

“Agnes Thorne. Won’t you sit down?” The woman’s tone was cool, as though her words had been carved of ice.

Emmy took the chair Agnes Thorne offered her, and the woman sat down opposite, smoothing her wool skirt. Her brown hair held tints of gray, but her complexion was flawless, her lips full and red, and the pearls at her neck and ears luminescent. She was not beautiful, but she had a commanding air, a gracefulness born of a lifetime of privilege. Emmy caught a whiff of the woman’s perfume. It smelled like something from another world altogether.

The world of the wealthy.

A tea tray was set between them. Agnes lifted the pot. “Tea?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The woman poured and then handed Emmy a cup without so much as a tremble in her fingers.

“I want it to be clear between us that the check you were given is the end of the road.” She spooned sugar—something Emmy hadn’t seen in months and months—into her cup and stirred. “There will be no more after this.”

“Pardon?”

Agnes laid the spoon carefully on the saucer that held her cup. “Your connection to this family—however small it may be—is done after this. We will not hear from you again. Is that understood?”

Blood rushed to Emmy’s cheeks as humiliation bloomed inside her. She fought to stay in control and not let this woman see her shame. Emmy needed answers. She deserved answers.

“No. It’s not understood, actually. I have a few questions.”

The woman looked up, surprised. And instantly furious. “You are not in a position to ask questions, Miss Downtree. You have my husband’s money. I suggest you take it and leave.”

“Why did it take four and a half years for me to learn that my father is dead?” Emmy asked.

Agnes sniffed, put her cup down, and stood. “I thought we could have a civilized conversation regarding this. But I see now that we cannot. You will not get another shilling from me. Not a one.”

Emmy was not leaving. Not yet. She stayed seated. “I don’t want anything of yours—you can be sure of that. I just want a few answers. Why did it take four and a half years for me to learn that my father is dead?”

The woman sat back down slowly. “It’s wartime. Very hard to locate people. You are no longer living at your last-known address. We couldn’t find you.”

She was being untruthful; Emmy felt sure of it. “You didn’t try to find me, did you?”

Agnes Thorne crossed one leg over the other. “Be careful whom you accuse of lying, Miss Downtree.”

Emmy saw hurt in the woman’s eyes when she said this. And it occurred to Emmy that this woman had been lied to for years. Henry Thorne had carried on his affair with Mum up until the day they both died. And this woman had never known. Emmy felt a strange and instant kinship with Agnes Thorne. Emmy had been lied to as well, about the very same thing.

“I didn’t know who he was,” Emmy said, her heart aching for the two of them in a way that astounded her. “Mum never said a word. I didn’t even know she was still seeing him.”

“Don’t you dare say a word about it,” Agnes said, enunciating the first three words as if they were arrows. “Not a word!”

“But I didn’t! I knew nothing.”

The woman’s chest was heaving as she locked her gaze on Emmy, her eyes wild with anger. “How could you not know? Do you think I am silly enough to believe you didn’t know where your clothes came from? And your food? And the rent for your flat? And every toy you got for Christmas! I’ve seen the hidden ledgers, Miss Downtree. I know exactly how much money he wasted on you and your whore of a mother all those years. He paid for it all. So don’t you tell me you didn’t know!”

Emmy’s mouth was open but no sound came out. She had no words to sling back in retaliation. She felt as though she had been tarred and feathered, right there in that beautiful room with its expensive furnishings.

The whore’s daughter.

Agnes Thorne could see that she had Emmy now, defenseless, in her grip. She leaned forward. “I don’t know how you found out about the will, but I am telling you, I am finished with you. You go to the press with this and I will spend every penny I have making your life as miserable as you’ve made mine.”

“I didn’t . . . I never . . . I was sent a letter informing me that I had money coming to me,” Emmy finally sputtered.

“Liar.”

“I swear it’s true!”

“You lie!”

“I didn’t even know his name until I got this letter. I didn’t know anything!”

Agnes Thorne was at the ready to denounce Emmy when a voice broke through the heated exchange.

“She’s telling the truth, Mother.”

Emmy turned toward the sound of the voice. A young man, perhaps a little younger than she was, stood in the doorway. He was the boy in the portrait, grown up.

“Colin!” Agnes sputtered. “What did you do?”

The man came into the room. Emmy could see that he favored his mother in looks. But his eyes were not full of hatred and disgust.

“I did what I told you I was going to do when I turned eighteen. I told Mr. Bowker to find her. That money is hers. Dad left it to her.”

Agnes seemed to deflate before Emmy. Where a minute earlier there had been a fiery warrior, now there was a beggar woman. The change in her was that remarkable.

“Colin, how could you do such a thing?”

Emmy could feel the pain behind her words, the sense of betrayal.

“Because it was the right thing to do. You know it is.”

The man turned to Emmy and put out his hand. She shook it slowly and with little enthusiasm, she was still so astonished. “I’m Colin Thorne. Your half brother.”

Agnes winced and turned her face away, as though she could no longer bear the sight of Emmy in her house.

Emmy looked from one to the other, from the half brother she didn’t know she had who’d risked his mother’s wrath to see that she was paid in full, to the wronged woman who’d learned too late that her husband had been unfaithful to her. And then there was Emmy in the middle, the whore’s daughter. The ignorant child who couldn’t see where the good things her mother had had came from, or rather, who chose not to.

Emmeline.

The girl she used to be.

She reached into her handbag, and closed her fingers around the check that had been made out to Emmeline Downtree.

Emmy pulled it out, laid it on the table by her teacup, and stood.

She started to walk away from the man who wanted her compensated and the woman who wished she had never been born. It was several seconds before either one of them realized Emmy was leaving them and their money.

Colin came after her. “Wait, Miss Downtree! Wait.”

But Emmy did not wait.

“Miss Downtree!”

Her hand was at the door when Colin reached her. He had the envelope in his hand.

“It’s yours. He wanted you to have it.”

Emmy looked at the envelope. Such a thin little thing to have caused such grief today.

“But that’s not what
I
wanted,” she said.

And she left him standing there with the envelope in his hand, his fingers covering the word
Emmeline
scrawled across the front in Mr. Bowker’s practiced script.

OUTSIDE
the Thorne mansion, the driver stood next to the vehicle as if he’d been told Emmy would only be a short while.

He snapped to action when Emmy emerged from the house and opened the car door for her. Emmy would have walked away from that place on her own two legs, but she had no idea where she was. She got inside.

“Paddington, miss?” the driver said when he was also back inside the vehicle.

Emmy did not want to go back to Thistle House right then. Not as Emmeline, and that was who she firmly was as she stepped out of the Thorne home slathered in recriminations. She wanted more than anything to go to Primrose and fall asleep on the heap of bridal gowns, and never open her eyes again.

She wanted to wake up in the arms of the angels and
have them tell her she was worthy of love—to give it and to have it given to her.

But there was no place like that in London. Not for her.

Except perhaps . . .

“The Savoy,” she said.

Thirty minutes later, Emmy was inside the lobby of the hotel where she used to go every Monday on her campaign to find London’s orphans. Mac wasn’t there; it was only midafternoon. He was no doubt in the underground studio at Broadcasting House, working dials and switches as someone leaned over a microphone and described the advance of the Allies across Germany.

She settled into a chair to wait for him.

Emmy was not aware she had fallen asleep until Mac was bending over her, gently shaking her awake and murmuring her name.

When Emmy opened her eyes, she saw a woman standing behind Mac, her hand on his arm, and the utter despair of that singular moment was nearly the end of her. But then the woman walked away, clearly having spied the party she was looking for. Mac was now alone.

“Is it really you?” Emmy said.

He laughed. “I was about to ask you the same thing. What are you doing here?”

Emmy stood and threw her arms around his neck and held him tight. It took him a moment to respond in kind, but then his arms were around her as well. She did not want to start crying into his shirt collar but she did, and once the seal was broken, the tears would not stop coming.

Mac cupped the back of her head in his hand and drew her closer. “Isabel. Is it about Julia?”

She shook her head.

Emmy wanted to tell him why she was suddenly at the Savoy, in tears, and wrapped in his embrace. But to repeat every ugly thing Agnes Thorne had said to her and about her, and relive it, held no appeal. Besides, that was Emmeline’s story, not Isabel’s.

“I just had a really terrible day. Awful.” Emmy pulled away and he immediately handed her a handkerchief. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You’re in London,” he said, and it was a question that wasn’t a question.

“There was someone I needed to see. It couldn’t be helped.”

He studied her. “And it didn’t go well?”

“No. It didn’t.”

“Sure you don’t want to talk about it?” he asked.

“Quite sure.”

“Can I take you to dinner, then?”

“Will your girlfriend mind?” Emmy said, handing him his handkerchief and making no attempt to hide her disdain.

He laughed. “She’s just a friend who’s a girl, Isabel.”

“Will there be a stiff drink?” Emmy wanted to drown the word
whore
,
whore
,
whore
, which kept echoing like a clanging bell in her head. Drown it in drink.

“Uh. Sure.” Mac gave her his arm and they started to walk toward the lobby doors.

“You look beautiful when you cry, by the way,” he said.

Emmy leaned into him as they stepped into the early evening. Surely there would be no air raids tonight. Germany had nothing left to send up into the air.

“I don’t like it when I cry,” she said. “Makes me feel weak.”

He slid his arm around her waist and kissed her temple. “Oh, but it’s our tears that make us human, Isabel.”

Being on Mac’s arm as they walked, and in his arms as they danced after dinner, and then as they walked past the ruins along the river, Emmy felt something being returned to her after a long absence. The fires had stopped burning, the bombs had stopped falling, the debris was being cleared away, the slabs where buildings once stood were being scraped clean to begin their second life, a life after the war. It was not far off, this new life. A few months, maybe by the end of the year, but she could feel that the turning of the tide was just beyond the horizon. She was ready to feel again. To feel something good. Chocolate on her tongue. New shoes on her feet. Holidays at the seaside. Blank canvases on which to paint. Kisses on her neck and lips.

They went back to the Savoy to see whether Emmy could get a room as she had missed the last train to Oxford. But the hotel was full.

“Come up to my room, Isabel,” Mac offered. “I can sleep on the floor. Scout’s honor.”

And that was the plan.

Mac would have honored it; Emmy was sure of that.

But sometime in the night she dreamed that she was the one trapped in the basement of the Sharington Crescent Hotel, buried in rubble, and no one would help her. She was suffocating and darkness was closing in on her. She would be buried alive.

Worse, Julia was in the rubble with her, and her eyes were open, glassy, and unblinking, like the dead man on the street during the Blitz whose nose and mouth were spattered with blood.

Her screams woke Mac, who was at her side in an
instant, shushing her, calming her. And then kissing her. Everywhere. When he realized what was happening, he pulled away, an apology on his lips.

But she drew him back to his bed.

Emmy wanted to be with him. She wanted to feel as if she mattered.

As Mac entwined his body with hers, as close as two people could possibly be, Emmy suddenly understood why Mum had kept going back to Henry Thorne, even though he was married to someone else. It wasn’t just about the money he gave her to survive as a single mother. He made her feel wanted. Desired. Precious.

Mum had made an exchange, just like everyone does when quaking under a load that seems far too heavy. She exchanged a transparent life of abject poverty for one of secrets and illusion that kept her and her daughters fed and clothed. Julia had likewise exchanged the brides box for the fairy tale book when she didn’t want Emmy to leave. Emmy had exchanged Julia for her own aspirations when she didn’t want anyone else telling her what she could and couldn’t do.

And that very day Emmy had exchanged the absolution her father had willed to her for her own dignity.

This was how people balanced the scales their world was tipping, Emmy reasoned. It was only after time had passed that a person was able to see whether she might have been able to bear the load she was sure had been too heavy.

But life is lived at the moment you are living it,
she thought.
No one but God in heaven has the benefit of seeing beyond today.

In the morning when she awoke, Mac smiled at her in sleepy wakefulness and fingered a lock of hair away from her eyes.

“Good morning,” he said.

Emmy was afraid to rise from where she lay. Time seemed to have stilled and she didn’t want it to go about its relentless forward march. She didn’t know which girl she would be as she rose from the bed. She whispered her reluctance to leave.

“Stay, then.”

“I can’t. You know I can’t.”

“Then marry me.”

He said it so swiftly. Emmy waited for him to laugh and assure her he was joking. Surely he was joking. But the seconds flitted by and he did not laugh.

“I’m crazy about you. Marry me, Isabel.”

Emmy stared at him openmouthed, not daring to imagine herself the happy wife of a good man. She was no friend of happiness. Mac had no idea whom he was proposing to.

“I’m not who you think I am,” Emmy whispered. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.

He kissed them away. “You’re the woman I love.”

“But you will leave when the war is over.”

“Everyone has to leave sometime, Isabel. Life is about coming and going. Come to America with me. I promise I will live every day to see that you don’t regret it.”

She closed her eyes to stop picturing herself pushing away from England, the only home she had ever known.

Pushing away from Julia, finally and fully.

“Isabel?”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Do you love me?”

The moment the question was posed, she knew that she did. She did love him. But just because she loved him
did not mean she was entitled to happiness with him, nor did it mean she had the courage to leave England and walk out on a promise she’d made to Mum years before on a sunny beach.

“What does it matter if I do?” Emmy said, rising from the bed and reaching for her clothes. Loving Mac changed nothing about who she was and what she had done.

“Isabel.”

She turned to him.

“Please don’t let the unhappiness you knew in the past keep you from accepting happiness now,” he said. “Please don’t.”

The pulling and twisting of her two identities—Emmeline’s past, Isabel’s future—was making her head spin. “I have to get back. Charlotte will be worried.”

“Isabel?”

“I—I can’t think about the future right now, Mac. Please don’t ask me to.”

He said no more about it. He said hardly anything as he walked her to the train station.

Emmy returned to Thistle House and made her apologies for having stayed overnight without letting Charlotte know. Then she told Charlotte what had happened at the lawyers’ office, and at the Thorne mansion.

She didn’t tell Charlotte she’d slept with Mac.

But Emmy thought Charlotte knew anyway.

Mac rang her twice in the weeks that followed, and Emmy kept the calls short, something she had not done before, not when it came to Mac. But his unanswered proposal hung between them like a gift she was too afraid to reach out and take. Her heart ached for Mac, but sleeping with him had been reckless and selfish.

And not without consequence. Seven weeks after
returning from London, it was clear to Emmy that she was pregnant.

As Emmy vomited again and again into the toilet, and as Charlotte placed a cool cloth across the back of her neck, a terrible longing filled the emptiness that gripped her stomach. She missed her mother.

“I want my mum,” Emmy rasped to Charlotte, between heaves.

Charlotte leaned over her and kissed the back of Emmy’s head. “I know you do.”

Through all the years of the war, Emmy had awakened each day as Isabel Crofton. But she was still Annie Downtree’s daughter. Mum had stood where she was now: alone, pregnant, and reeling from choices made in weakness. Mum alone knew where to find the strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other despite the stares, the empty days, and the lonely nights.

Mum knew how to survive in a world without dreams.

“I don’t know how to do this,” Emmy finally whispered.

Charlotte sought Emmy’s gaze, maneuvering her face close to Emmy’s. “Tell Mac. He loves you. I’ve known it all along. And I think you love him, too. This child is as much his as it is yours.”

Emmy blinked back threatening tears. “But . . . Mac is American. When the war is over, he will go back to America.”

Charlotte looked down and nodded. “I know.”

“You . . . would want me to go? Leave here?” Emmy could hardly form the words. Thistle House had been her refuge, a sanctuary after the war had taken everything from her.

“We’re not talking about what I want.” Charlotte
reached for Emmy’s hand. “This is about your life, not mine. You need to make your way back into the world, Isabel. You’ve a place in it. You need to find what it is. I know you’ve said you won’t ever sketch another bridal gown, and maybe you won’t, but you were meant to do something with your life. I can’t believe it’s to sit in Thistle House and watch time pass you by.”

“But I feel . . . safe here,” Emmy said, scarcely breathing.

“Safe is not the same thing as happy. Trust me on this, Isabel.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“I won’t know what to do with myself in America,” Emmy finally said.

Charlotte smiled. “You will build a life with the man you love and the child you created. You’ll figure out the rest. That’s what we all have to do.”

Another stretch of silence passed as Emmy contemplated a future with the only man she could ever see herself loving. It seemed too grand a thing to imagine; it had been too grand for Mum.

Mum.

If she did this, this was where Annie Downtree’s daughter and Eloise Crofton’s would part. For good.

This was where Emmeline Downtree would fade at last into nothing, just like Julia had. Like Mum had.

Charlotte got to her knees and told Emmy she was going to make some chamomile tea to settle Emmy’s stomach.

“You might consider telling Mac who you really are. I don’t think it will matter to him,” Charlotte said as she stood at the doorway.

Emmy murmured that if it didn’t matter to him, then
there was no reason to tell him. Because it mattered to her. Life was about coming and going.

For Emmy, it was time to go.

*   *   *