Secrets of a Charmed Life (25 page)

ISABEL
Crofton married Jonah MacFarland in a London courthouse on May 8, the day the Allies declared victory in Europe.

The end of hostilities.

The newlyweds left for America with Isabel’s brand-new passport on a foggy morning in July after a tearful, long weekend at Thistle House where she said her farewells. The morning of their departure, Isabel found herself as she had been the day she left London after Mac had saved her life, desperate to be far from it. She felt the stitching of any last ties to her old life break away as London fell behind her. In her suitcase in the belly of the ship, she carried a small stack of maternity clothes, her watercolor brushes, her birth certificate, a felt box of trinkets, a book of fairy tales.

And a hammer.

She would not see England again.

The hammer would remind her, lest she forget, that she had made a transaction when she became Isabel.

Leaving England forever meant she could leave Emmeline Downtree and her terrible sorrows there with it.

It seemed a reasonable exchange.

KENDRA

I
look at the woman across from me on the sofa, framed by her iconic Umbrella Girls paintings behind her. Her hands are crossed in her lap and she is staring at them.

She is Emmeline Downtree. She is Isabel MacFarland.

“But you
did
come back to England,” I say. “This is Thistle House, isn’t it?”

She nods once. “It is.”

“What—what made you return?”

Isabel raises her head but turns to gaze out the window. “Oh, I suppose the mighty hand of God. That’s what it usually takes to move someone who is holding on to what doesn’t belong to her.” She laughs lightly, as though the details of her return still surprise her.

“I—I’m not sure I follow you.”

Isabel tips her head to glance at me, but only barely.

“You haven’t made the mistakes I have nor have you been flung into a tempest that forces you to make choices you are not prepared to make—I know that. But I hope someday you will remember I told you that you do not own your sins.”

I am still at a loss. “You’re not saying people aren’t responsible for the wrong they do,” I say, though I can’t believe this is what she means. Not after all that she has told me.

She sighs gently, wondering perhaps how to make it clear to me.

She is revealing something to me, I think. Her purpose for having allowed me to interview her perhaps?

“I am saying, when you make a choice, even if it’s a bad one, you’ve played your hand. You cannot live your life as though you still held all your cards.”

“Is that why you agreed to let me talk to you today? To tell me this?”

Isabel laughs. “Good Lord, no. My reason is far more selfish than that.” She smiles at thoughts I am not able to guess at. She shakes her head. “Far more selfish.”

I wait for her to continue.

She looks at me. “You might have guessed I have not been very adept at being transparent with people. I agreed to let you interview me because I plan to leave my history with you.”

“Me?”

Isabel crooks an eyebrow. “Yes, of course you. Why not you? You are a history major. This is history. My history. And only a handful of people know it.”

“You . . . never told anyone who you are?”

She lifts the corners of her mouth in a half grin. “I told a few. Gwen knows. And Beryl.”

“Gwen?”

“My daughter. Mine and Mac’s. We only had the one.”

I hear children outside the door on the staircase. Isabel hears them, too, and turns to the sound of innocence.

“Did you ever tell your husband?” I ask.

She faces me again. “Eventually. Took me twenty years but I finally told him.”

“When you came back to England?” I had done my research. I knew the artist Isabel MacFarland had returned to England for a visit in 1958 with her daughter and stayed. Her husband joined her several months later.

“Yes,” she says, drawing out the word and giving it an emphasis I don’t understand. “When I came back to England.”

Isabel reaches for the cloth-bound bundle that she came into the room with a couple hours earlier.

“Mac and I started out very happy,” she says as she unties the ribbon on the bundle. “At least as happy as two people who have survived the horrors of war can be. We bought a little house in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and lived near his parents for the first few years. They were very sweet to me and utterly devoted to Gwen. They were far better at being grandparents than I was at being a mother. I worried all the time about her safety. I was sure that I would lose her like I lost Julia.

“Mac wanted to make it in broadcasting but for whatever reason, he didn’t. He started writing children’s books instead. Mysteries with a teenaged, aspiring journalist and his artsy next-door neighbor as the hero and heroine. Joey and Izzy.”

“You and Mac?” I say, proud of myself for figuring this out.

“Naturally.” She unfolds the fabric. Inside the bundle
are a yellowed envelope and a leather-bound notebook, tawny with age. “The books did well enough for us to live off that income alone,” she continues. “I had my little studio, and I started painting the Umbrella Girls. At first they were just for me. I found that remembering Julia in this secret way assuaged the guilt I still felt. I missed this house, and I missed Charlotte and Rose, but I could not bring myself to visit them, not even when Mac’s books did well enough that I could have. And then, one day in April 1958, I got a letter.”

Isabel hands me the envelope. There is no name on the outside. Opening it carefully, I withdraw three sheets of lavender-hued paper. I read it aloud:

October 12, 1957

My dear Emmy,

If you are reading this letter, then you will know that I have passed on from this life and that I’ve left you Thistle House in my will. I have always known I would leave it to you, from the moment you returned to me seventeen years ago, after having lost so much. I knew that very day that you and I were bound together as surely and as irrevocably as those who share the same name, the same blood. You are as much my daughter as any child that could have been born from my body.

It does not matter to me that after you left England to begin your new life you felt it necessary to keep me at a distance, not just physically but within our souls. I know how precarious it can be to live the reinvented life. Your birthday cards and Christmas gifts to me over the years, while they may have seemed small and insignificant to you, have meant the world to me, especially after the passing of Rose. I wrote to you only as often as you wrote to
me because I wished nothing to upset the careful balance you had struck with what was, what is, and what might be.

It is my hope and prayer that you consider Thistle House as your rightful inheritance. I wish I were able to maintain it as beautifully as it was when you last knew it. Underneath the peeling paint and chipped plaster and wild vines, the cottage is still a grand old friend who longs to welcome you back.

I have left Thistle House to Isabel Crofton MacFarland because that is the name you go by and I wish to make it as seamless as possible for you to take possession of it. But should you encounter any difficulty, my attorney has a sealed letter from me verifying your true identity that need only be opened if anyone doubts your claim to my property.

Please come as soon as you can to claim Thistle House, Emmy. I do not know how many months or even years will have transpired between my writing this and your reading it. The doctor says my heart is giving out and I find that I agree. It is my earnest desire to give the heart of my home to you, dear Emmeline.

And there is another reason I am hoping you will come back to see Thistle House. I shall not trouble you with the details of this reason if your wish is to sell the cottage unseen and be divested of your last tie to the person you were when first I met you. If you come, as I truly hope you will, then you will be able to do what you wish with the letter that is waiting for you in the top drawer of my bedside table.

I have prayed every day since you left twelve years ago that you would find the courage to forgive yourself for what seem to you to be unforgivable actions. There was a time, decades ago, when I felt as you do, and was granted the same courage because my dear husband prayed the same for me.

Rose’s accident was my fault, Emmy. At least that is how I saw it. I was angry with her the day she went swimming alone. She liked the same boy I liked, and she knew I liked him. Rose
was pretty and graceful and could have had the affection of any boy in our neighborhood. She chose Martin because I liked him. It was petty sibling rivalry, nothing more, but I let it get the best of me, in every sense of the word.

She asked me to come swimming with her the day of her accident. Begged me to. It was a sweltering-hot day and there was a lake near this summer place that we went to for holiday every August. I said no, just because I was mad at her. I was fourteen; she, thirteen. Since I was the older, my parents had always looked to me to watch out for her, a charge I had begun to detest. Rose was clearly the more confident, the more engaging, the more capable. And we were not little children anymore.

Our parents, schoolteachers on term break, had gone to the city that afternoon to pick up the post, get some groceries, pay bills. They had left me in charge. Rose and I weren’t supposed to swim at the lake alone; that had been the rule since we were young. But she went anyway and told me if she drowned, it would be all my fault.

She didn’t drown when she hit her head diving into the lake, but to nearly drown can be just as life changing. And for her, of course, it was. If the two boys who had been fishing had not walked by at just that moment, she would have died. As it was, she lived, but her brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long. She was different when she finally came home to us. And so was I.

And while I knew she should not have gone swimming alone, and that what she did was not my fault, I had wanted something bad to happen to her, Emmy. It was this fleeting but ferocious desire for harm to come to her that haunted me for years afterward. She did not remember begging me to come with her. I could not forget that she did.

In my more desperate times I let myself believe God kept me from having children to punish me for what I did to Rose. But in the end I came to see that we all make choices, Emmy. I made mine; Rose made hers. Our parents decided to leave us
alone that day. Those boys decided to go fishing. I am not such a significant creature in God’s universe that it is my decisions alone that can change the destiny of another.

We make our choices—you and I—in a world that isn’t perfect. And while I wish I had made different choices, as I know you do, which one of us can say that if we had, nothing bad would have ever happened to the people we loved?

You are not to blame for what happened to Julia, any more that I am to blame for what happened to Rose. I have wanted to tell you this for many years, but I did not want you to think that I see my loss as comparable to yours. I know yours is the greater.

It has been a joy to know you and to love you, Emmeline. I am thankful every day that God brought you and Julia into my life.

I leave to you the only treasure I have in hope that it will bring you peace.

Yours always,

Charlotte

I look up from the letter. Isabel is staring out the window again, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears.

When she speaks, her voice is hushed. “Mac was sitting next to me at the kitchen table as I was reading that letter because it had not occurred to me when I opened it that I would need to hide it from him. He kept saying, ‘Isabel, what is it? What’s wrong?’ I knew I could no longer keep the truth from him. I told him everything. It was a very complicated day after that. He was not happy with me. I had not trusted him with the truth about who I was and that hurt him to his core. We barely spoke to each other for the next few days. Weeks, really. Gwen could see that we’d had an argument and asked me repeatedly what it was about. I finally told her that a distant aunt
had left me a one-hundred-year-old cottage in England and that we were at odds about what to do with it.”

She pauses for a moment and then continues.

“By May, things were no better between Mac and me. We both decided it might be best if I came to Thistle House for the summer, assessed the future of both it and our marriage. Mac had a manuscript due, so it made sense to our friends and family that I would take Gwen for a three-month stay in England to check out an inheritance and that Mac would stay and work on his book. So that was what we did. Gwen and I arrived in June of that year.”

“But . . . you stayed,” I say, when she pauses. “Your husband joined you, right?”

“Yes. We stayed.”

“Did you stay because of that other letter that Charlotte mentioned? The one in her bedside table?”

Isabel tips her head. “Oh, I suppose that had something to do with it. But it’s not the primary reason we decided to stay.”

I wait.

“You recall that I told you that once you play your hand, you can’t live as though you still hold all the cards?”

“Yes,” I said.

And she hands me the leather-bound notebook in her lap.