Chapter 34 THE MARGARET YEARS
Chapter 34
T HE M ARGARET Y EARS
Boston, Massachusetts
1900–1925
New York had been too much for Miles, so he’d caught a train to Boston and never looked back. He’d taken a variety of jobs, anything to keep food on the table. He found no joy, but he could not bring himself to take his own life.
Suicide would have removed his guilt, and the guilt was his self-imposed sentence. He wanted to live out his days thinking of her, punishing himself for ever pulling her into his family.
Nearly two decades after his arrival to the United States, a woman named Margaret Taylor came into his life. Margaret shopped in the grocery store where he worked and would often stop to talk to him. He wouldn’t have called her pretty, but she had a warm regard that always seemed to give a lift to his day. She showed a keen interest in him early on, and he thought her mad. He was no company to keep at all.
But she was relentless and kept talking to him, prying stories out of him, including the one he came to tell everyone, that he’d lost his parents to typhoid in London. In turn, he learned about her life as well. Her family had emigrated from Leeds, England, a century earlier. She lived with her parents and worked at a textile mill that turned raw cotton into cloth. What struck Miles was the way she could illuminate a room by simply being in it. And she had a lively and often inappropriate sense of humor that was a spark of light to Miles’s dead soul.
Little by little, Margaret took the darkness from him. Little by little, he started to smile again. One day he took her to dinner. Only a few months later, he asked for her hand.
They married and moved to Cambridge, where Miles took care of horses for Harvard. Soon she was pregnant. A few years later, they were parents of a girl and a boy. Miles tried his best to be there for them, to raise them in a household so different from the one he knew as a child. One with love and support.
Though he’d lost his chance to become an actor, he taught his two children to act, and often they would perform together in the living room, acting out scenes from plays by the likes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo and Oscar Wilde.
He tried to be the husband that Margaret deserved. It was only sometimes that he faked his happiness. Because he would often think of Lillian. He would take out the photograph that he’d carried with him on the ship and fall back through the years, wondering if there could have been another way.
As he grew older, he began to consider returning to England. He was almost sixty. This would not be a trip of vengeance against his brother. He was in no shape to kill a man, nor was he the murdering type.
No, he wanted to find Lillian’s brother, Arthur, and tell him the truth. To apologize for his hand in the murder. Arthur had been good to him, and it wasn’t fair that he had been kept in the dark. Miles thought letting out the truth could finally make his heart stop hurting. And he wanted to find Lillian’s grave and say goodbye.
In the fall of 1921, he told Margaret that he was going to search for his family and took a boat to England. By now, Samuel Hall was his name, and it took him some time to get used to the name Miles Pemberton again. He took the train to Winchester and could not believe the change. He hurt more and more as he drew near the city, and when he first set eyes on the Smythun Inn & Pub, he nearly collapsed.
Someone behind the bar told him Arthur was not working but that he could find him at home at #7 Winslow. Miles recalled the location from when he’d first met Arthur and Sadie. He could still see Lillian speaking to the unborn baby with such tremendous joy, and Miles remembered how he was so sure that they would one day have a baby of their own.
How wrong he’d been.
Miles found Arthur in the garden. After a brief altercation, Miles told him everything that had occurred. The men soon hugged, and Arthur took him to Lillian’s grave, where he left her flowers and they wept together.
Later, they went to the pub to drink and reminisce of simpler, happier times. In the morning, Miles returned to Southampton and boarded a ship bound for Boston. As he watched his homeland fall away on the horizon, he promised himself he would finally let go of the past and spend the rest of his days being the husband, father, and grandfather that his family in America deserved.