“Yes, please.”
After the espresso machine had begun to hum away, Miriam took a small china jug from a low shelf on the dresser, filled it with water, and set the posy inside. “There. So lovely.” Then she turned to Heather.
“You must know that it is one of the great regrets of my life that I lost touch with your grandmother. For a time we were very close, you see. We shared a house for much of 1947, the year I came to England, but she emigrated to Canada at the end of the year. I never heard from her again.”
“She just left?” Heather asked, dumbfounded yet again by another of Nan’s long-ago decisions. “Even though you were friends?”
Miriam nodded, her expression bittersweet. “It was a long time ago, and in those days Canada seemed very far away. It was not unusual to fall out of touch with people, you know, and we had no Facebook or Google. And I . . .”
The espresso machine began to sputter, and Miriam turned and fussed with the buttons before retrieving the cups she’d set beneath. “Would you mind taking these through to the sitting room? I almost forgot about the biscuits. Beautiful sablés from my favorite patisserie.”
The sitting room was large and bright, with one wall taken up entirely by three enormous bay windows. Bookshelves rose to the ceiling on either side of the fireplace, and opposite, out of reach of the sun, an embroidered panel hung from a scrolling wooden valance. It was as wide as the sofa below but half as high, and the view it depicted was a twin to the one from the sitting room’s windows: a green, sloping hill woven through with walking paths and ancient woods, the sky above a clear and limitless blue. Only just seen, in the far distance, was the familiar silhouette of London’s skyline.
“It is rather out-of-date,” Miriam said, nodding apologetically at the embroidered panel. “When I made it forty years ago, the church spires were all I noticed. Now it is nothing but skyscrapers. Yet I still love the view. We both did, Walter and I.”
“He was your husband?” Heather asked.
“Yes. For forty-eight years. He died twenty years ago. At his desk, pen in hand, exactly as he would have wished.”
“I am so sorry.”
“It has been a long time. And yet, even now I am surprised when I wake in the night and he is not there. I suppose I shall never get used to it.”
They sat in silence for a moment, and Heather sipped at her coffee and nibbled at the edge of a cookie. How should she begin? She had so many questions—
“She never told us anything,” she said abruptly, her voice a degree too loud, too sharp, for the sunny room and their tentative friendship.
But Miriam didn’t seem to mind. “It does not surprise me at all,” she said.
“My entire life I thought she was a shopkeeper. She sold yarn and knitting needles and buttons. Not once did she ever mention that she’d worked on the queen’s wedding dress. I mean—I’m not wrong about that, am I?”
“You are not wrong. Some of the most beautiful embroidery on Princess Elizabeth’s gown was your grandmother’s work. She was exceptionally talented, and she was very, very kind to me when I first came to England.” Miriam smiled rather tremulously. “She was my first friend here.”
“I know she was upset about my grandfather and being widowed and all, but . . .” Miriam had smoothed out her expression and was examining the crumbs on her plate. “Oh, boy,” Heather said. “Was she married when you knew her?”
Miriam looked her in the eye. “No.”
“But she had my mom in 1948, so she must have been involved with . . .”
“She was. Briefly.”
“Wow. Just . . . wow.” Of all the things she’d expected to learn today, the fact that Nan had been a single mother had not been one of them. Never mind that it actually made a weird kind of sense. “Times were different then, I guess.”
“They were. And such a thing was more complicated, I think, than it would be today. Perhaps we should begin by your telling me what you know. Then I will tell you what I know.”
“Okay. I guess I don’t actually know all that much. She only ever said that her parents had died when she was young, that her brother was killed in the Blitz, and that she came to Canada at the end of 1947. I do remember her saying the snow wasn’t that much of a shock because the previous winter in England had been so bad. And that was about it. She never talked about my grandfather, not even to my mom. We just assumed he had died. And there weren’t any pictures of him anywhere. I did ask her, once. She had photographs up of her parents and brother, but not my grandfather, and it made me curious.”