Chapter 6: Honora

I didn't say anything in the car back to Harrow Point.

Tobias drove. He kept glancing at me.

I watched the dark fields go by and waited for Echo.

She waited until I was alone on the barracks roof, past midnight.

"You asked me once how I knew you weren't imagining me," she said.

"You said I wasn't the first."

"You're not. I was."

"Honora."

"Honora Halston. Your great-great-grandfather's sister. I was born in 1883."

The cold went into my back through my jacket.

"Show me," I said.

"It isn't pleasant."

"Nothing this year has been."

She didn't tell me. She showed me.

It came, except it wasn't mine.

A room with dark wood walls and a fire.

A painted screen in the corner, and a young woman sitting behind it on a hard chair.

Men at a table on the other side of the screen, talking money.

A man with red-gold hair at the head of the table.

The young woman listening. Not to their words. Under them.

Afterward, the man with red-gold hair came around the screen.

"Well?"

"The shipping agent is hiding a second set of books," she said. "The alderman is afraid of his wife."

The man smiled and kissed her forehead.

"Good girl."

The room changed.

Years later. Same screen. Same chair.

"I won't," she said. "Not anymore. You ruined the alderman. He shot himself, Cormac."

The man came around the screen.

He didn't say anything.

He hit her across the face with the back of his hand, and the ring on his finger split her lip.

"You'll do what you're for," he said.

The room changed again.

A wooden wharf at night, fog on the water.

The young woman walking to the end of it with one hand flat on her stomach.

"I'm sorry," she said to the baby. "I won't let him have you."

Then nothing.

I was on the barracks roof again, gasping, with my palms pressed on the frozen slates.

"Pell's Wharf," Echo said. "1906. The Fitzgeralds still own it."

"Cormac Fitzgerald."

"Lachlan's great-grandfather. He had a portrait painted of me before I died. He liked to look at what he owned."

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