Chapter 23: The Vault at Marlowe Hall

The flat tin box I had pulled out of the fire was gone from the kitchen shelf.

I stood in the gray dawn with the empty shelf in front of me and knew where she had gone.

Rhys drove, with his good hand on the wheel and mine on his knee, and neither of us said anything for the whole hour.

The gates of Marlowe Hall stood open.

Each of them still had its heron, black with soot and bent at the neck.

Beyond them a long drive ran through dead lawns to a house with no roof.

Four walls of stone stood against the sky.

Soot ran black up every one of them.

My mother was in the cellar.

I found the steps behind what had been the kitchen, cut into the floor, going down into the dark.

At the bottom was a steel door with a heron cast in its face.

It stood open, and a lantern lit the room inside.

She sat on the floor with her back against a shelf, wearing Rhys's old jacket over her nightdress.

The tin lay open beside her, with a ring of old keys on top.

She held a single sheet of paper in her bandaged hands.

"Mama," I said.

"Come in, Nesta."

I knelt in the dust beside her.

"Twenty-two years ago, a day before the wedding, I put things in here," she said. "My mother's jewels. The deed. And this."

She turned the paper toward the lantern.

The ink had gone brown, and the handwriting was young and quick.

My dear Gareth, it began.

I am going to say it tomorrow, with the ring on, so you cannot run.

I want a house with children in it, and I want them to have your eyes.

I read it to the end.

I could not read the last lines clearly.

If we have a girl, she wrote, I want to call her Nesta.

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