Chapter 63 The Knox
The Knox
February
Idaresay, I know why Vivian appears familiar.
It took seeing her in a heap at the bottom of my grand staircase, her face as gray-white as Carrara marble, to put two and two hundred years together.
That woman is the spitting image of Margaret Thurgood, née Knox.
They share identical large green eyes and have the same elegant nose and fine cheekbones. They simply must be related.
Why, observing Vivian in that unnatural position brought it all back like it was yesterday: when Margaret lay as cold as an icebox on her son’s medical table in my basement.
I’ll always be grateful to Margaret; she was the one who hired the original Rose, after all, an Irish woman named Aoife.
But when Margaret birthed a baby after Teddy had been at sea for eighteen months—well, the math speaks for itself.
Margaret had to send the baby away, and, naturally, she entrusted the baby to her most loyal servant, Aoife.
Prior to Vivian’s “accident,” I was not certain whether baby Mercy had survived or passed away. But now, I have no doubt.
Margaret hired another “Rose”—one who called herself Sara—and to my utter delight, the second Rose turned out to be markedly better than the first. When Teddy returned from Canton, China, his bags bulging with opium, and they threw the legendary opium parties, Sara would tidy me up the moment the guests left.
Given the nature of those affairs, sometimes that meant the following day, sometimes the following week.
The problem herein lies that Margaret developed quite the taste for opium.
She turned to it after losing all those babies.
And once she gave up Mercy—her only other child, besides Robert—Margaret grew bereft, relying on more and more opium.
Robert grew up rather unattended to; nobody to advise him what was right and wrong.
Naturally here at the society, we follow a moral code of our own devising.
Right can be right, but wrong can be right, too.