Chapter 5 - The Room with the White Oak
By noon, the fog over Milton had cleared into a hard, pale blue sky that made the winter light look like glass.
Evelyn was sitting up in the broad bed on the third floor of the Vale house. She was wearing a cream-colored wool sweater that smelled of cedar, her dark hair brushed back and pinned with two tortoiseshell combs her aunt had left behind thirty years ago.
The room was full of flowers.
Not the small, plastic-wrapped bouquets Travis used to bring her from the grocery store when he’d stayed out too late on Friday nights, but tall white vases of lilies, roses, and dark green winter boxwood that had been brought up from the greenhouses behind the stable.
A middle-aged woman with sharp blue eyes and a dark grey skirt sat at the small writing desk near the fire, her fingers moving with rapid, silent speed across the keys of a portable typewriter.
"This is the third draft of the custody petition, Miss Vale," the woman said, not looking up from her paper. "Mr. Pierce wants the language regarding the father’s visitation rights to be left entirely to the discretion of the court-appointed guardian."
"Meaning Thomas," Evelyn said.
"Meaning your grandfather," the lawyer corrected her softly. "Or Graham, if Thomas is out of the state."
The door swung open, and a tall man in a heavy black wool coat stepped into the room.
He wasn't old like Thomas, nor as precise as Graham. He was fifty-four, broad-shouldered, with thick grey hair that curled slightly around his ears and a face that was weathered red by thirty years of salt wind off the Maine coast.
He was carrying a large canvas sea bag over his left shoulder and a small cardboard box bound with yellow twine in his right hand.
He stopped three feet inside the door.
Evelyn looked at him. Her fingers tightened around the edge of her cashmere blanket.
"Dad?" she whispered.
Arthur Vale set the sea bag on the hardwood floor with a heavy thud. He didn't take off his coat; he walked straight to the bed, dropped the cardboard box onto the nightstand, and reached out to wrap his large, scarred hands around her head, pulling her face into his coat.
He smelled of salt, diesel oil, and the dry, sweet scent of tobacco she remembered from her childhood in Southbridge.
"I’m sorry, Evie," he said into her hair. His voice was thick, low, and rough as unplaned oak. "I should have come down two weeks ago when the landlord sent the first letter."
"You told me you were in Halifax," she said, her voice muffled against his wool coat.
"I was," Arthur said, pulling back to look at her face. His thumb reached out to trace the faint yellow bruise along her jawline where she had hit the curb the night before. "I was buying three draggers off the Canadian registry. I didn't get Graham’s message until eight o'clock last night."
He turned to the lawyer at the desk. "Leave us for five minutes, Sarah."
The woman didn't argue. She gathered her papers, picked up her typewriter, and backed out of the room with a small, respectful nod toward Arthur's back.
When the door closed, Arthur sat down on the edge of the mattress, his heavy boots making the mahogany frame creak under his weight.
He reached for the cardboard box he’d set on the nightstand and cut the yellow twine with a small pocket knife he pulled from his trousers.
"Your mother left this for you," Arthur said, pulling off the cardboard lid. "She told me not to give it to you unless you were twenty-five, or unless you were going to have a child of your own in this house."
Inside the box lay a small, bound volume covered in faded blue silk, its edges worn down to the white thread beneath.
Evelyn reached out and touched the cover. "What is it?"
"It’s the ledger," Arthur said quietly. "From eighteen-ninety. It has every name of every girl in the South End who ever worked in the mills before your great-grandfather bought them out. It has her mother’s name on page forty-two."
He looked at the window where the cold winter sunlight was hitting the plaster roses on the ceiling.
"Your mother wasn't a Vale, Evie," Arthur said softly. "She was a Mercer. Her grandfather was the brother of Travis Mercer’s great-uncle."
Evelyn froze. Her hand remained resting on the blue silk cover of the ledger. "What?"
"They were the same family," Arthur said, his eyes darkening as he looked at her face. "Seventy years ago, when the mills went down, my grandfather kept the Vale side of the family solvent and let the Mercer side go into probate. They’ve been living in those small four-family houses in Weymouth and Quincy for sixty years, hating us because they thought we stole their share of the harbor leases."
"Travis didn't know," she whispered.
"Travis didn't know because his mother didn't tell him," Arthur spat, his hand coming down flat on the nightstand with enough force to rattle the glass of water. "Colleen knew. She’s had a copy of the nineteen-thirty probate record in her sideboard since she married Travis’s father in eighty-six. She didn't let him marry you because she liked you, Evie. She let him marry you because she thought if you stayed together long enough, she could use the child to claim the old land rights in Nahant."
Evelyn sat very still. The room seemed to turn cold around her, the smell of the lilies suddenly heavy, cloying, and thick as swamp air.
"That's why she wanted the pendant," Evelyn said, her fingers moving up to touch the four-pointed silver star at her throat.
"That’s why she looked at it every time you came into her house," Arthur said. "It’s not just a seal, Evie. The center stone was cut from the rough sapphire my grandfather pulled out of the quarry in Montana in eighteen-eighty-four. It’s the key to the safety box at the Boston Safe Deposit Company on State Street. The box that holds the original harbor charter from seventeen-ninety."
May you like
He reached out, took her hand in his, and squeezed her fingers until the joints went white.
"She thought she was playing a game with a girl from Southbridge," Arthur said, his blue eyes cold as salt ice. "She didn't know that old Thomas had already moved the charter to London twenty years ago."
