Chapter 7: Tea With Finbar's Grandmother

The old woman wrote her address on the back of a program in a shaking hand and put it in my glove.

"Sunday," she said. "Four o'clock. Alone, please."

Then she walked away with her cane before I could ask who she was.

"That's Finbar's grandmother," Eliana said when I told her. "She's the head of the Hulme family. She doesn't ask anyone for anything."

"She asked me."

"Then you should go."

I went on Sunday in my own jeans, with the brooch on my coat.

The Hulme house was in Cleveland Heights, behind an iron gate with an R worked into the bars.

I stood in front of that gate for a full minute.

I had seen that R before.

It was stamped on the bottom of a tin box in my mother's closet, a box she had never once let me open.

I had been seven, and she'd taken it out of my hands and put it on the top shelf, and she hadn't said a word.

The housekeeper let me in without speaking.

The old woman was in a glass sunroom, in a chair with a rug over her knees, and a tea tray on the low table between us.

She did not stand.

"Sit down, Miss Drinkwater," she said. "I won't bite. I'm too old for it."

I sat.

She poured tea with a hand that shook only a little.

"Your mother," she said. "Is she living?"

I had been practicing an answer for the whole drive.

None of it worked.

"She died three weeks ago," I said. "A stroke. She was fifty-two."

The teapot stopped in the air.

It stayed there for a long time, and then she set it down, so carefully that the cup didn't rattle.

"Three weeks," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"I had a daughter. I told everyone she died in 1999, in Lisbon. That she'd gone abroad and caught a fever."

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