he now found the place uncanny. “I would be happy to send for anyone you name,” he finished.
“I have no family,” she informed him stiffly.
He looked as if he found the idea incredible. “There must be someone.”
“There isn’t,” she told him in a tone that she hoped would close the subject.
“That’s impossible.”
He sounded maddeningly certain. “Do you claim to know more about my family than I do?” she demanded. “Bess had no family, and I had only… Bess.” Her voice wavered on the last word, and Ariel bit her lip to stop its trembling. This was intolerable, she thought. He had no right to look at her that way, with some sort of irritated kindness.
“Your father?” he suggested.
Ariel’s fingers curled into fists in her lap. This conversation was going exactly where she did not wish it to go. “He is…not available,” she said.
Lord Alan’s face grew hard. “He could be made to be.”
“No, he couldn’t,” she answered curtly. She wasn’t going to tell him about the many, many times she had asked Bess about her father. Or about the stories Bess had made up, changing them each time, so that it became a kind of game between them, though terribly serious to Ariel. She wasn’t going to mention the agate ring, the only thing in the house that she knew had come from her unknown parent, and which she had been frantically searching for since her return. She refused to expose herself to this aristocrat and risk the kind of ridicule and contempt she had learned to endure at school.
“He might be important to the investigation,” Lord Alan urged.
If he was, she couldn’t do anything about it, Ariel thought, since she had no clue to his identity. She caught her breath on a sob and immediately suppressed it.
A silence fell. Ariel waited for Lord Alan to probe further, to force her to admit that she was the bastard child of a common actress and then he’d reject any further contact with her. Let him, she thought. She had hoped for help, but she would go on without it if necessary. She was accustomed to isolation, and to relying on her own resources.
“Aunts and uncles?” he said finally, sounding not at all censorious. “Cousins? There has to be someone.”
Ariel shook her head.
“Are you sure? We could consult records, ask neighbors. Where did your mother come from?”
He seemed genuinely engaged with the subject. There was none of the mock solicitude and sly entrapment she had endured over the last ten years. “Nowhere,” Ariel blurted out. “She came from nowhere.”
Lord Alan raised his auburn brows in inquiry.
Something in his eyes, or the silent house, or the situation made Ariel, uncharacteristically, rush on. “Once when I was small, we were driving somewhere. There was a fire up ahead, and we had to stop. Bess pointed to it and told me to look. I remember she said, ‘What a spectacle.’”
The picture was sharp in her mind. She had had to struggle to her knees on the seat of the coach and hang on tight to the strap to see out. The fire was being swept by high winds along an ancient row of tall wooden houses, many of them caulked with pitch so that they went up like torches, with a burst and a roar. Rainbows of sparks crackled over the street and a great pall of red smoke billowed into the heavens. Even far from the flames, ash fell, and the smell of charred wood caught at Ariel’s throat. Dazzled and terrified, she had listened to the fire breathing like a gigantic animal.
“It took a while to turn the carriage, because the street was so crowded,” she said breathlessly. “Bess was laughing and saying the fire was glorious. And then when we finally were moving again, all of a sudden she pounded on the roof and told John to stop the coach. She made me get up again and look out.” The pall of smoke had made it seem like dusk, she remembered. “There were people walking along the street, carrying whatever they’d managed to save from the fire. But Bess was pointing at an alleyway beyond them.”
Ariel glanced quickly at her companion, then away. “It was narrow and twisting and muddy. The houses leaned, and their doors were all cracked and broken. There were piles of garbage rotting, and some kind of disgusting liquid running along the center of the lane.”
Ariel stared at the wall and recited from memory. “My mother said: ‘I