But I knew. Everybody stared at me. Perhaps I was beautiful in the firelight, too.
It could be Agatha admitted Teddy was mine because she didn’t want Archie anymore, and knew her pronouncement would make me go back to him. Or else she knew it was inevitable, that her marriage was over, and now she’d ensured that no matter what happened next, I’d always look out for her daughter as if she were my own. Perhaps she felt terrible for all I’d been through, and wanted to let me believe Teddy was mine, because my real child was lost to me forever, and with this kind lie she could return her to me, if only in deception.
Or perhaps the solution was simpler. Occam’s razor. Perhaps she told me Teddy was Genevieve for one reason and one reason only:
Because it was the truth.
Upstairs Finbarr sat on the bed. I stood in front of him, his knees bracing either side of me. He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. ‘Remember when you used to wear it long?’
He’d never seen it cropped far shorter than this, up above my ears. ‘I remember everything.’
‘Will you remember this?’
‘Always.’
If not for the fire, the room would have stood completely dark. As it was, our faces were obscured enough to look like they had our first summer – open to and untouched by the future. I could almost pretend I didn’t know: we’d never be together like this again.
The room glowed with the fire’s warmth. Smoke from the manor’s chimneys should have given us away – four love-struck outlaws. The flames made the windows glow. This night in particular: when I picture the Timeless Manor, I picture the view from outside, every last window thrumming and glowing like a place possessed.
The Disappearance
Day of Discovery
Tuesday, 14 December 1926
I WOKE LONG BEFORE dawn and put more wood on the fire. At any moment the owners of the house could return, from wherever their primary residence was, or else the new owners, if this were a time of transition. Or, more likely, servants sent ahead to prepare. Whoever walked through the door next would find clues we’d been here. Ashes left in the fireplaces. Tins of food gone missing. Empty bottles slid back into place on the cellar’s wine rack. And perhaps the remnants of happiness infusing the rooms, swirling like dust mites.
I kissed Finbarr’s sleeping head and stole out of the room to walk the country roads in the low mist, not afraid of a thing: not of dogs barking from their fields, or the frigid air, or even the form of a man, who walked by me as a shadow and tipped his hat. If I’d walked right off the road into another world, it wouldn’t have surprised me. But no matter how lovely the other world turned out to be, I’d do anything I could to claw my way back into this one, because my child still lived here, and I must never be far from her, not in this lifetime.
I crept up the stairs at the Bellefort and crawled into bed, where I slept for hours, until I woke to the sound of a familiar voice, loud enough to reach me from the lobby, searching – but not for me.
Chilton woke early too. He sat up in bed beside a sleeping Agatha. Last night they’d decided to move to one of the grander bedrooms on the first floor. He hadn’t questioned Agatha’s assertion about her daughter （did it contradict what she’d told him previously?）， nor the assumption all three of them made, that he would protect me. Two people dead. And Chilton expected to just let it go.
He stroked Agatha’s hair, softly, so as not to wake her. Somewhere in what passed between them a tacit agreement had been made, never to say the words. But now that she was safely, deeply asleep – her lips parted, her face flushed with that childlike fever dreams can induce – he let himself whisper it: ‘I love you, Agatha.’ Beneath their lids her eyes moved. A slight smile curled across her lips. Why shouldn’t they expect him to do the wrong thing, where Nan was concerned? He’d done the wrong thing for Agatha.