Chapter 4
Caroline was nine when she first met Charlie.
As a child, she was often ill. But when she was not confined to her bed with a summer fever or winter cold, she was headstrong, and lonely. When her sadness gave way to tantrums, as it often did, her father shut his door or absconded to London and left her alone with the staff.
Governesses and tutors came and went, none staying longer than a few months. Caroline thought it was she, with her deep and volatile sorrow, who sent them away. So she learned to rein in her emotions lest the people around her disappear.
It wasn’t until her father died that she learned he often did not pay them.
Carys was the one exception. She did not abide Caroline’s foul moods and was not the warm, maternal companion that the young girl so craved, but she never left.
After the storm of fury and tears passed, Caroline would tiptoe to Carys’s room and rap on the door.
As Carys brushed and plaited Caroline’s hair, she told her stories from her native Wales: of the fairies of the dell, and the giantess’s apron, and the legend of Saint Ciwa, who was suckled by wolves.
Carys had been Lady Foster’s maid before her death and had accompanied her, upon her marriage, to Staffordshire.
When she was younger, Caroline often peppered the maid with questions about her mother.
But at the mere mention of Helen Foster, née Blevins, Carys’s stern and rather froggy face began to crumple. Caroline stopped asking.
Carys did, however, take Caroline to visit the graves of her mother and infant siblings. They visited every Sunday, and often during the week; whenever Carys got a melancholy gleam in her eye, she tied her bonnet strings and summoned the third-best carriage to drive them into town.
It was on a day such as this that Caroline met her brother.
It was March, but the sort of March day that harkened backward to February instead of forward to April. The road was rutted and muddy, the sky colorless. As woman and child descended the carriage steps, the wind snapped at their cheeks and ears.
At first glance, the churchyard was deserted save for a few thrushes pecking about in the path. But as Caroline picked her way over the puddles, she noticed a man standing in the shadows of the yew beside her mother’s grave.
“That young gentleman wishes to speak to you,” Carys said, with an encouraging nod. Caroline blanched and did not release Carys’s papery fingers. “He won’t harm you, Miss Foster. I’ll be right here. You don’t have to stay long. But I think you might be interested in what he has to say.”
She gave Caroline’s hand a reassuring squeeze and pushed her toward the figure. Feeling as though she had stepped into one of Carys’s strange stories, Caroline walked between the headstones toward him.
He seemed taller than he was because of the length of his limbs, which were gangly as a colt’s.
His coat was black wool, his derby too; beneath the brim, his dark hair stuck out at sharp angles.
He was younger than she’d thought, sixteen or seventeen.
His face was severe, the cheekbones too sharp; his eyes, beneath heavy, hooded lids, the same pale blue as hers.
She had never seen a likeness of her mother. But some deep, hollow piece of her recognized him.
“Hallo,” said the stranger, holding out a pale, long-fingered hand. “How do you do? I’m Charlie Foster.”
Caroline glanced at the row of headstones beside him. She could just make out the engraving on the final marble slab.
Charles Wallace Foster
She turned back to face him, her mouth tight with suspicion.
“My brother is dead.”
He lowered his hand. “That’s what the headstone says.”
“Are you a ghost?”
He laughed. “No, though sometimes I feel like one.”
“How do I know you’re my brother?”
He considered this for a moment, cocking his head to one side. And Caroline realized that she was praying, with every fiber of her heart, that the claim was true.
Charlie pulled a ring from his left pinky finger and held it out.
Caroline took it gingerly, turned its face up to hers. It was the twin of the ring hanging on her neck. The same seven blooms, the same seven drops of blood.
“Where did you get it?” Caroline asked.
“I’ve always had it,” Charlie replied. “Just like you’ve always had yours. They belonged to our mother.”
“You could have bought it,” Caroline said. “That doesn’t prove you’re my brother.”
“Fair enough.” Charlie caught his bottom lip between his teeth, thinking. “Let’s see…when you were very little, you slept with a rag doll named…Molly, I believe. Or was it Maggie?”
“Molly,” Caroline whispered.
“That’s right,” said the stranger with another smile. “And your favorite food in the world was caramels, even though Carys said they rotted your teeth and wouldn’t let you have them.”
Caroline prodded a sensitive molar with her tongue. “If you’re my brother,” she said, not trusting the swelling feeling in her chest, “why did you never visit me before now?”
“I did come. When you were very little. But once you began to speak in full sentences, Carys and I decided I shouldn’t come back until you were old enough to keep a secret.”
“Why?”
He dropped to his haunches before her, so pale eye looked into pale eye. “I have an awful lot of explaining to do, Caroline. And I promise to answer every question you have. But first, you must answer one of mine. It’s very important. Are you old enough, now, to keep a secret?”
Caroline glanced over her shoulder to where Carys stood on the path, watching them from beneath her bonnet. Then she met her brother’s gaze and nodded.
—
Charlie came nearly every month after that. He only visited when Lord Foster was away, and despite Caroline’s pleas for him to compliment her new dressing table or search the attic for hidden treasures, he never entered the walls of Audley House.
Caroline never had any notice of his visits.
Carys woke her early to tell her that Charlie was in the sycamore grove, or by the stream, or at the top of the drive, and made excuses to her tutors for her absence.
No matter the weather, the pair spent the day out of doors.
If it was raining, they played shipwreck, building makeshift shelters and catching rainwater in leaves.
If it was sunny, they climbed trees or made a game of picking apples from the orchard without being seen by the gardener.
When she was ten, Caroline asked him, “Will you ever live with me?” They were sitting on the banks of the stream, Charlie with a sketch pad open on his lap, Caroline with a book.
“I don’t know, Cat. One day you will marry and start your own family.”
Caroline pulled a face. “No, I won’t. I will never marry.”
Charlie laughed. “You say that now. But time changes things.”
Caroline glanced up at him, eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Will you ever marry?”
Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it.”
“Well. If neither of us ever marries, can we live together here?”
Charlie gazed out over the stream, which he had captured on the notepad before him in strokes of black ink. “Yes. One day, if neither of us marries, after Father dies, we can live here together.”
Their mother had sent Charlie away, he told her, as an infant, for his own protection. No, their father could not know of his existence. It was very important, very, very important, that Caroline keep these secrets. She had promised, remember?
“And then you will tell me? Why you were sent away, why you cannot be here with me?”
Charlie’s eyes clouded, and he wore the expression she knew and loathed, of a truth withheld, an impulse quashed. A frustrated lump rose in her throat. She looked away from her brother at the fast-moving water. She must not push him away. He had only just arrived.
Her brother reached out and tucked a piece of wind-blown hair behind her ear. His fingers were warm, their brush against her skin featherlight. But she felt herself flinch beneath it, so unused was she to tender touch.
He lowered his hand with a sigh. “I will tell you one day. I promise.”
Caroline knew better than to press him further.
No matter how often she asked, he would give her nothing more than that.
If she would not drop it, he threatened to cut the visit short, which shut Caroline’s mouth.
He spoke a bit about St. Mathew’s, but mostly he wanted to know about her.
What was she learning? Who were her friends?
What did she like best? What flowers, what weather, what tastes? Was she still taking her medicine?
And in this way Caroline, who had spent all her young life as a tight green bud, began to blossom.
But when he left, catching, always, the 6:09 train back to London, she descended into a deep gloom, and the melancholy at his absence often led to illness.
Through the days she spent in bed, with leeches on her chest and Dr. Hoffman’s potent medicines fogging her head, she thought of Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.
Did he miss her, as she missed him? What was he doing? Who was he with? Where did he sleep?
Now, as Caroline stood in room 203, she realized she had the answer to that final question.
For she knew in her bones that this had been Charlie’s bedroom.
Never mind that the view from the window matched exactly the sketch on his letter—which she had pulled from her pocket to compare the angle of the shed’s roof, the shadow cast by the back fence in the afternoon light—she would have known it if she had been deposited here in the middle of the night.
She took a slow circle, marking each detail.
His bed with its worn but finely stitched quilt, the indigo faded to sky blue. His desk. His armoire. She opened the doors, holding her breath. It was empty.
But it smelled like him. Like paper and the faded sea smell of cuttlefish ink, like light and rain and cheap cologne.
The desk drawers were empty. Caroline dropped to her hands and knees. There was nothing under the bed, no note, not even a lost sock.
She held his pillow to her face and inhaled.