On His Knees for His Enemy

Chapter 6: Research

There were only three people in the world who had ever known I existed as Ariana Margaret Devlin. My father was dead. Daniel lived in Cambridge. And my mother had been buried eleven years ago in a churchyard in Dedham, next to her own mother, under a headstone that read a line of Emily Dickinson that I could never bring myself to look at directly.

Which was why, at two in the morning, with a mug of tea gone cold at my elbow and the lights of the Mass Pike flickering beyond my windows, I began to understand that I might have been wrong.

Four people had known I existed.

Elena Ashford Cross had known. Elena Ashford Cross had been writing letters to my mother for thirty-two years.

* * *

I had come home from the Gardner Museum at eleven. I had taken off the emerald dress carefully, because I had learned that I would wear it again, and expensive silk did not survive carelessness. I had showered. I had wrapped myself in a bathrobe that smelled faintly of the Seoul hotel where I had bought it, because the hotel used a detergent that I had never been able to find anywhere else and so had accepted that I would always smell, slightly and privately, of a room I had once recovered in.

Then I had gone into my home office and opened my laptop.

Elena Cross's file in my dossier was three pages. Born 1967. Ashford family. Married Marcus 1992. One child, Nathaniel. Active on four charity boards. Alcohol rumors, unconfirmed. Health status unknown. All of it surface. All of it useless.

I cross-referenced. I had never pulled on the Ashford side of the family tree, because I had only ever been interested in Cross. But tonight I ran the Ashfords. I read for an hour. And somewhere around midnight, I saw the name I had missed for five years, because I had been searching from the wrong direction entirely.

Margaret Ashford Devlin — second cousin to Elena Ashford Cross, on their grandmothers' side.

My mother's cousin. Elena Cross was my mother's cousin. And I had walked past her in a museum tonight in a dress she had recognized enough to comment on.

* * *

I went to the closet. I opened the safe. I took out a box I had carried from city to city for eleven years and had never fully opened.

It was a cardboard box, white, the kind you get from a stationer. My father had assembled it himself, in the weeks after my mother died. He had put her letters in it — not all of them; he had kept the ones she had written him — but the letters people had written to her over the years. Condolences, mostly. Old correspondence. A life, catalogued alphabetically by the people who had loved her.

I had read some of them. I had never read all of them. Reading all of them had always felt like a door I was not allowed to walk through yet, because once you had read every letter your mother had ever received, you had used her up, and I had not been willing to use her up.

But there was a stack at the back of the box, tied with a blue ribbon, and every letter in it was from E.

I had never opened it. I had thought, at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, that the ribbon was a marker — this is for when you're older. I had never been older enough.

Tonight, at twenty-five, at two in the morning, in a Back Bay apartment with a river at my window, I was older.

I undid the ribbon.

* * *

I read them out of order. I read the oldest one first, because that was what my hand found. It was from 1986 — Elena was nineteen, my mother eighteen, and the letter was written in a looping hand that had not yet learned to apologize for its shape.

"Darling M — He proposed. I said yes. What else could I have said? Father says the Whitfield matter is 'settled,' which means James is gone, which means I am to stop writing about him, which means I will continue writing about him, but only to you. Marcus is — not cruel, exactly. Indifferent in the way of men who have never been taught that other people are real. I think I can live with that. Don't you think we can live with that? — E."

I read a letter from 1998, when my mother had been pregnant with me. Elena had written: "You will love her. You will be frightened by how much you love her. I have been watching Nathaniel sleep in his cot for six months and I have discovered a truth, which is that all the love I had learned to shut down inside me for my own survival has simply found a new door. Be careful of that door, Margie. It is the only one left open."

I read a letter from 2012.

"Margie — I had to write this by hand because the house phones are — I don't want to say compromised, but I also don't want to say anything else. Be careful of Marcus. He is keeping records I don't understand. He is saving an old grudge, and I don't know at whom it is aimed. Promise me you'll look after Richard, and Ariana — especially Ariana. She is the kind of girl men like my husband destroy, and I cannot bear to watch another bright thing go out in this family. Burn this, please. — E."

My mother had not burned it.

My mother had kept it, and my father had kept it after her, and I had kept it after him, without ever knowing what it said.

* * *

I stayed in the closet until the sky outside the apartment window started turning gray. I had not meant to read every letter. I had read every letter.

My mother had been loved by one of the women I intended to destroy. My mother had been warned, eight years before my father died, by the same woman.

And that same woman, tonight, had held my arm in a museum and said, "You have a way of standing I recognize, but I cannot remember from where."

I thought about the invitation card on the kitchen counter. Saturday. Three o'clock. Beacon Hill.

I was going to tea with a woman who might have been trying, in the only way she knew how, to finish what my mother started.

Or she might have been setting a trap.

I did not know which. I did not know which I wanted it to be.