“That is cruel,” I said.
Ransom nodded. “Yes, it is. But everything about this story is cruel. The beginning, the middle, the end. All of it.” He sighed. “I was the Greer family lawyer in the years before I went into defense work full time. Julian came to me the year I took over my father’s practice. Lily had been coming to the house for some years by then. Mariana always passed her off as a distant relative, but of course Julian knew the truth. He found out about Lily when Mariana’s mother died and left him all of her papers. When the secret came out, Mariana wanted the little girl to visit for Christmas. It destroyed the marriage for him. He never forgave her.”
“I guess it’s unsettling, to learn that your wife had a child before you met her,” I said.
Ransom gave me a disgusted look. “An eighteen-year-old girl from a good family, completely sheltered from the facts of life, doesn’t get pregnant because she decides to,” he said. “Have you ever felt shame?”
The question was so startling that I could think of nothing to say.
Ransom’s watery, intelligent gaze was fixed on me. “You have,” he said, reading my face. “We all have. Shame is corrosive and draining, and it never lets go. Mariana’s father was gone—he walked out on the family shortly after he came home from the war. Her sister died in a drowning accident. Mariana was taken advantage of, pure and simple. She was practically a child. And then she was ashamed, and she paid with that shame for her entire life. Over and over, every day, she paid.”
I was watching his face as he spoke, and I could see it. It was so easy to see when you knew what you were looking for. “You loved her,” I said.
The wind blew and lifted his thinning white hair. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now,” he said. “She’s been dead for over forty years. But, yes, if Mariana had even lifted a finger at me, I would have left my wife for her. But she never did. Don’t worry, there is no torrid affair you need to write about after all this time. Mariana had no idea how I felt, and I never told her. It was strangely innocent, in its way.”
Innocent, and sad. I couldn’t think of anything to say but “I’m sorry.”
Ransom shrugged. “Time passes, and these things cease to matter. They’re just thoughts that float away on the wind. I don’t need you to pass on my silly emotions to the next generation. I have information I need you to pass on instead.”
I felt my spine stiffen, some of the old excitement moving into my veins. It was a part of me, that excitement, and it always would be. “What information?”
“I’ll give it to you in my own good time. You’re here at my invitation, and I’ll do this the way I want to. What I was trying to say was that Julian came to me about his wife’s illegitimate child. He wanted to know if the girl had a legal claim on his money. The answer was no, and I told him so. We both laughed at that idea. I remember it very clearly.” He tapped his fingers on his cane, then stilled them again. “Lily was an embarrassment, but she was just a little girl. Frankly, I put her out of my mind. I barely thought about her again until she found me in the law library six weeks after Julian died. She just walked in and sat down opposite me at the table I was reading at.”
“Lily came to find you?” I said.
“Oh, yes. God knew how she knew where I was, but she did. She was lovely by then, and very sensual in a strange way. But when I saw her face-to-face for the first time in my life, she wasn’t lovely at all. She radiated something . . . repellent. A coldness. It’s hard to explain when you haven’t been in its presence. I know that Beth loved Lily, that they were sisters, but I have loved Beth for nearly fifty years, and Lily made me want to crawl out of my skin. She made me check the room, looking for the exits, wondering how quickly I could get to one. She made me want to call my children, make sure I knew where they were. She could fool a lot of people with her pretty, young exterior. But she couldn’t fool me.”