He goes upstairs. I’m happy for him and sorrier for myself. As I wipe my eyes, I hear knocking at the front door and Fitzmorris letting someone in. The sound of a familiar step launches me to my feet.
“Sarah?” Barrett stands in the parlor doorway.
His image shimmers in my tears like a mirage. I blink in astonishment. Instinctive caution tamps down my joy.
Barrett’s manner is stiff and somber as he says, “Can I talk to you?”
I think I know why he’s here. A pulse of dread pounds through my veins, but I nod and compose myself. We sit on the sofa by the fire. The few inches between us seems like miles.
“Is this about the inquest?” I want to get this over with. “Did you come to tell me that you disagree with the coroner’s ruling?” Barrett must have seen something of what happened on the heath that night; he must intend to warn me before he tells his superiors.
“No! That’s not why.” Barrett’s color rises. He draws a deep breath and says, “I came to ask you to take me back.”
My spirits soar, but I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “But why . . . ?”
“When I thought you were dead, I realized I couldn’t bear to lose you.” His voice shakes, and his keen gray eyes shine with tears. “When I found out you were alive, I realized how much I’m still in love with you, and there’s no use trying to pretend I’m not.”
I can hardly find the breath to say, “Why did you wait two days to come?”
“Because I was afraid you wouldn’t want me. I said some awful things to you. I didn’t mean them. I’m sorry.” Barrett blinks, swallows, and takes my cold hands in his warm, tense clasp. “Can we start over?”
I want it so badly, I could shout it to the skies. But I know he did mean the things he said, and there was truth in them.
Disappointment eclipses the hope in Barrett’s expression. “Shall I go?”
“No!” I clutch his hands as he starts to withdraw them. But even as renewed hope brightens his eyes, I know it wouldn’t be fair to let him think that we can pick up where we left off as though nothing happened. I grope for the words to explain. “If we’re to start over . . .”
He exhales and smiles with relief. “I’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me what it is.”
“I need you to understand that there will be things I can’t tell you.” Those things include information related to the events of that night on Hampstead Heath, my father, and my future work for Sir Gerald.
“That’s all right.” Ardor sweeps away Barrett’s recollection of how infuriated he was by my dishonesty.
“There will always be secrets between us,” I warn him.
“I don’t suppose any man and woman know everything about each other,” Barrett says, eager to make concessions. “I don’t care as long as we’re together. Sarah—”
Then I’m caught up in his arms, in our desire that has gone unsatisfied for too long. We don’t kiss because Hugh, Mick, or Fitzmorris might walk in on us, but we hold each other tight. Tears of happiness leak from my closed eyes, and I silently pray that the next time Barrett discovers I kept a secret from him, it won’t be the last, unforgiveable straw.
EPILOGUE
Later that same night as Barrett leaves, I stand by the window and watch him disappear into the rainy darkness. I’m content because I know he’ll come back. My troubles have abated, all except for one: somehow I must make peace with never knowing for sure whether my father is a rapist and murderer, never knowing where he is.
Outside the window, a solitary figure steps haltingly into the light cast by the gas lamp near the front walk. It’s a young woman in a plain, neat coat and bonnet, huddled under an umbrella. She pauses to look at the house. Her face has my own features, albeit younger and prettier.
It’s Sally, my half sister.
I’m astonished because I didn’t expect to see her again. She must have remembered that I said I lived in Argyle Square. Jealous anger lashes out from me like a whip. Sally is the child that my father begot, raised, and loved after he abandoned me.
Our gazes meet. She sees my expression, hers fills with embarrassment and fright, and she hurries away. But now that I’m over my shock, I remember my curiosity about Sally, and I can imagine what these days since we met have been like for her. I’ve had a kidnapping, murders, and a fight for my life to take my mind off that traumatic meeting, but she must have had little else to think of except me. I run out of the house, into the rain.
“Sally, wait!”
She stops and turns. “I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.”
Her eyes fill with tears. They’re water dashed on the fire of my anger, and I remember that my father also abandoned Sally. I think this isn’t her first time here; she’s stood outside the house before, trying to work up the courage to call on me.
“Come inside,” I say. “We can talk.”
A smile blooms through her tears, and a hard, rough soreness that’s been lodged in me since I first met her, like a peach pit in my heart, softens. “Thank you,” Sally says with a gasp of relief. “I’d like that.”
She joins me in the kitchen and expertly builds up the fire in the stove while I fill the kettle and measure tea into the pot. I imagine her doing this every day at the Chelsea mansion, and I deduce that my father never sent money to her and her mother. She hasn’t had an education that would have fitted her for better work.
“Does your mother know you’re here?” I ask while we wait for the kettle to boil.
“No. She wouldn’t have wanted me to come. But there’s something I have to tell you.” Sally takes a deep breath. “My proper name is Sarah. My mother never liked it, so I’ve always been called Sally. The name was his idea. He named me after you. He must have loved you and missed you very much.” Sally sighs. “I just wanted you to know.”
My eyes sting, and not just because I’m so glad that my father didn’t forget me, but for Sally. It must have hurt her to learn that she was, no matter how much he loved her, a replacement for the child he’d lost. Yet instead of hating me for it, she came here to give me this gift.
“Thank you,” I say, sadly aware that she’s a better, more generous person than I.
Sally nods, shy in the awkwardness of the moment. The teakettle whistles. She lifts it off the stove, pours the hot water into the teapot, and says, “All these years I thought I had no family except my mother, and it’s been rather lonely, and . . . well, it would be nice to have a sister.”
The appeal in her eyes is irresistible. “I think it would be nice too,” I say, to my own surprise. We smile at each other, and I know Hugh and Mick would welcome her as a friend. It seems that another good thing has come of my investigations.
“I also wanted to ask you about that photograph of our father,” Sally says. “You took it recently?”
I nod, reluctant to divulge the long, complicated, painful tale.
Sally must perceive my reluctance; she tactfully doesn’t press the matter. “At least he’s still alive. I was hoping you could tell me something about him. There’s so much I don’t know.”
Moments ago I would have enjoyed throwing what I know like acid in Sally’s face; now I hate to repay her kindness with the cruelest tit for tat possible. But I think of how I’ve been living a lie created by the secrets my parents kept from me, and I decide that Sally deserves to know the truth, no matter how painful for both of us.
“We should sit down.”
Facing me across the table, cups of tea in front of us, Sally waits expectantly. I tell her about Benjamin Bain’s police record and Ellen Casey’s murder. Her face pales with shock. By the time I’m finished describing my trip to Clerkenwell, tears are running down her cheeks.
“He can’t have done it!” she exclaims. “He wouldn’t hurt anybody!”
She evidently remembers the same gentle, kind man that I do. Her faith in him restores mine. My almost-certainty that he raped and murdered Ellen Casey begins to crumble.
“If he’s ca
ught, he’ll be hanged!” Sally cries. “What are we going to do?”
“There’s nothing we can do. We’ve no proof that he’s innocent. We don’t even know where he is.” Then I reconsider. Maybe, if we pool our knowledge, it will add up to a clue. “Sally, tell me what happened when he disappeared.”
“There’s not much to tell. One Sunday, he went out to take photographs. He didn’t come home that night. On Monday, my mother went looking for him at the university press, and they told her he’d resigned on Friday.” Sally adds, “We stayed in Oxford until our money ran out. Then my mother found us work in London.” The tight expression on her face must be the same I wear when I’m keeping a secret. There’s more to the story.
“Did anything unusual happen before he disappeared?” I ask.
“How did you know?”
“A lucky guess.”
“About a week before he disappeared, he got a letter,” Sally says. “I’ve never seen him so upset. He turned his back on me while he tore it open and read it. Then he ran outside, and I heard him being sick. When he came back, he looked dead white. I said, ‘Papa, what’s wrong?’ He just said, ‘Promise you won’t tell anybody about this.’ I promised, and he burned the letter in the stove.”
We’ll not speak of the past to anyone, my mother had said after he disappeared, when we moved away from Clerkenwell to start a new life.
“I’ve never told anyone until now,” Sally says. “But maybe I should have broken my promise. I’ve always thought the letter was the reason he disappeared. If I had told, maybe he’d have been found.”
Her expression fills with a guilt that I know too well. I hurry to say, “When he disappeared—the first time, in 1866—I thought that if I had looked harder for him . . .”
Our gazes meet and hold. We share the novel idea that if one of us isn’t responsible for whatever happened to our father, then neither is the other. Smiles tremble on our lips as the weight we’ve borne since childhood lifts from our shoulders.
“Who was the letter from?” I ask.
“Someone called ‘Lucas Zehnpfennig.’” Sally spells it. “I read it on the envelope. I remember because it was such a funny, unusual name.”
“Who . . . ?” A sudden memory stuns me silent. I’m ten years old, coming home from school, and seated in the parlor with my mother is a strange man. My mother looks uneasy, but the man smiles and says, “Hello, Sarah. I’m Lucas.” He says his last name, which is so odd that I giggle. He lifts me onto his lap. “What a pretty girl!” He’s stroking my hair when my father comes in. My father is angrier than I’ve ever seen him. He says, “Go to your room, Sarah.” I obey, and I hear my father ordering the man named Lucas to get out. That night, my parents have one of their whispered arguments.
Sally’s voice draws me back to the present. “What is it?”
“I think I met the same ‘Lucas’ when I was a child.”
“What a strange coincidence.”
I’d forgotten about that day because soon afterward, my father had disappeared and nothing else mattered. “I don’t think it was a coincidence. Lucas comes to my family’s house, and my father disappears. A letter from Lucas comes to your family’s house, and he disappears again?” I shake my head. “I think Lucas had something to do with both disappearances.”
“But what?” Sally asks.
“I don’t know.” But I’ve a hunch that finding Lucas Zehnpfennig is the key to finding my father and the truth about the past. And find him I will, if it’s the last thing I ever do.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Matthew Martz, Sarah Poppe, Jenny Chen, and the whole team at Crooked Lane Books for their enthusiastic efforts on behalf of my work. Also, to Pam Ahearn, my agent, for always being there.
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