The Death of Mrs. Westaway(83)

“Oh dear, I am sorry, I’m keeping you dripping in the corridor. Don’t mind me, I’ll see you downstairs for a gin and tonic, perhaps?”

Hal nodded, stiff with the knowledge of all that she had left unspoken; and then, unable to think what else to say that was not an addition to all the lies she had already told, she turned and made her way up the stairs to the attic room.

? ? ?

IT WAS PERHAPS HALF AN hour later when she pushed open the door to the drawing room and found all three brothers sitting around the coffee table, in front of a roaring log fire.

There was a bottle of whiskey on the table between them, and four tumblers—one unfilled.

“Harriet!” Harding said heartily. His face was flushed, with a mix of heat and whiskey, Hal suspected. “Come in and have a drink. I’m afraid my offer of gin and tonic turned out to be premature—there’s no tonic in the house. But I did take the precaution of buying a bottle of whiskey when I was in Penzance earlier, so we do at least have that.”

“Thanks,” Hal said, “but I don’t really—”

She stopped. She didn’t drink, not anymore. There had been too many oblivious nights after her mother’s death, too many times when one glass had dissolved into many. But now she had a sudden, powerful yearning for something, however small, to nerve her for what she was about to do.

“Actually, thanks,” she said, and Harding poured her a generous, overgenerous, measure, and pushed the tumbler across the table to her.

He refilled his brothers’ glasses at the same time and then raised his own.

“A toast,” he said, meeting Harriet’s eyes. “A toast to . . .” He paused, and then gave a short laugh. “To family.”

Hal’s stomach tightened, but she was saved from answering by Ezra’s derisive snort. He shook his head.

“I’m not bloody drinking to that. To freedom.”

Abel gave a chuckle and picked up his own tumbler. “Freedom seems a little harsh. I’ll drink to . . .” He raised his glass, thinking. “To closure. To seeing Mr. Treswick tomorrow and getting home to Edward ASAP. Hal?”

The acrid smell of the whiskey stung her nostrils, and she swirled it, looking down into the tawny, glinting depths.

“I’ll drink to . . .” Words crowded in—unsayable words. Truth. Lies. Secrets. Her throat tightened. There was only one toast that she could find in her heart, the crowding, painful truth, waiting to be blurted out. “To my mother,” she said huskily.

There was a long pause. The whiskey in Hal’s glass trembled as she looked around the circle of faces. Harding’s mustache quivered as he raised his glass.

“To Maud,” he said, his voice harsh with suppressed emotion. The whiskey caught the light, winking solemnly.

Abel swallowed hard, and raised his own tumbler.

“To Maud,” he said, very softly, his voice so low Hal would not have been sure of the word if she had not known what it was already.

Ezra said nothing, but he raised his glass, and his dark eyes were bright with a grief Hal found almost too painful to look at.

For a moment they sat, all four of them, glasses raised in silent remembrance, and then all of a sudden, Hal could bear it no longer. In one movement, she threw back her head and gulped the whiskey down in three long swallows.

There was a short silence, and then Harding burst out with a kind of shakily relieved laughter, and Ezra clapped a slow round of applause.

“Well done, Harriet!” Abel said drily. “I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you, you little mouse.”

There it was again. Little mousy Harriet. But it was not true. It had never been true. After her mother’s death, she had made herself small and insignificant, but the fa?ade that she showed to the world was not the truth of her.

Inside there was an iron strength—the same strength, Hal realized, that had enabled her mother to escape Trepassen, start again in a strange town, pregnant and alone, and build a life for her baby daughter. At the heart of Hal, beneath the unassuming layers and drab clothes, was a deep, resilient core that would keep fighting, and fighting, and fighting. Mice hid and scuttled. They froze in the face of danger. They allowed themselves to be made prey.

Whatever Hal was, she was not a mouse.

And she would not be anybody’s prey.

Uncle Harding, I’m not who you think I am.

When she put the glass down, it rattled against the tray, and she cleared her throat, her cheeks burning with the consciousness of what she was about to do. She remembered Mrs. Warren’s look that first night . . . the look of someone watching a flock of pigeons, who sees a cat suddenly creeping from the shadows of a nearby tree. The look of someone who stands back . . . and waits.

“Well—” Harding began, but Hal interrupted him, knowing that if she did not do this now, she might never do it.

“Wait, I—I have something to say.”

Harding blinked, slightly put out, and the corner of Ezra’s mouth quirked as if he was amused to see his brother discomfited.

“Oh, well, please.” Harding waved a hand. “Be my guest.”

“I—” Hal bit her lip. She had been turning this moment over and over in her mind ever since she left Cliff Cottages, but the right words had not come, and suddenly she knew that it was because there were no right words, there was nothing she could say that would make this okay. “I have something to tell you,” she said again, and then she stood up, not quite knowing why, but feeling unable to stay slack and safe in the corner of the sofa. She felt like she was about to fight, to defend herself from attack. The muscles in her neck and shoulders hurt with tension.