the same sentence to herself over and over again.
The words are too soft for Alba to hear and the light too dim for her to see their letters, so she creeps a little closer, stepping across the wooden floorboards with great care so they won’t squeak. When she’s only a few feet away Alba stops, seeing what her mother says before she can hear her. The words are royal blue, the color of sorrow.
“Where are you? Why did you leave me? I need you. Please, Ella, please come back, I need you, I need you now.”
Alba frowns. Who on earth is Ella?
Chapter Six
Alba is curled up on the bed in her childhood bedroom. She’s always hated it: the dark mahogany-paneled walls, four-hundred-year-old furniture, ancient oak bed facing an enormous wardrobe and everything draped in the dust of long-dead Ashby ancestors.
Hot white sparks flash in the air around her. From far off she hears the high-pitched shriek of her sister’s laugh as the siblings set the table for dinner. During the few instances of family tragedy to date—their father’s disappearance and their mother’s madness—Charlotte has always tended toward slightly maniacal laughter instead of tears. Her brothers, on the other hand, just shut down their emotions completely and say nothing.
After getting out of dinner last night, Alba knows they won’t let her off the hook again and she’s dreading it, wondering how long she’ll be able to fend off their interrogation. She wishes she could stay locked up in her bedroom until the funeral. She still can’t believe her mother is actually gone, after half a dozen suicide attempts in the last decade. Alba had long since stopped believing her mother even wanted to die. It was a bid for attention, the doctors had said, the act of a broken mind, though Alba had never entirely understood that rationale. If Elizabeth Ashby wanted attention, then why didn’t she speak to anyone? Why did she lock herself away and refuse to see her children? A psychotic breakdown, the doctors explained. An already unstable person pushed over the edge by the desertion and disappearance of her husband.
Alba can feel tears running down her cheeks. After a lifetime of shutting down, she’s now overwhelmed by emotions. Loss. Love. Longing. Grief. Fear. Relief. Relief is the one she really can’t bear. It makes her feel selfish and guilty.
Alba shuts her eyes and switches off her heart and wills herself not to think of her mother. But memories of seeing her in so many hospital beds rise up, memories of Elizabeth staring out of windows, rocking back and forth, of finding her in the garden in the middle of winter in her nightie. When Alba was very little she loved the manic times until she learned to be scared of those, too, because she knew what followed. Once, when Alba was five her mother turned up at school in pajamas, telling the teachers it was a family emergency and she had to take Alba home. Instead they had gone to the zoo.
“Let’s go and see the monkeys, Mummy, they have the best laughs.”
“The chimps blow blue bubbles,” Elizabeth, said, smiling. “The baboons’ bubbles are yellow.”
“Yes,” Alba giggled, happy to be with the one person who shared her strange secret. She gripped her mother’s hand as they walked to the monkey cage. It had been a wonderful afternoon until at last they reached the hippos and Elizabeth started to cry. She couldn’t explain why but sat by the enclosure sobbing until a zoo attendant finally ushered them both away. Alba had sat in a cold white waiting room, her cheeks stained with ice cream and tears, until her father had come to collect them.
Of all her childhood memories, most are of her mother or of nannies, very few of her father or siblings. Alba saw her brothers and sister only when they returned from their respective boarding schools during the summer. All extreme extroverts, they refused to play with their strange and painfully shy sister. Occasionally, while having picnics with cream teas and jugs of Pimm’s, Charlotte would permit Alba to sit on the same lawn and read while her giggly teenager friends squealed about boys and other things Alba didn’t understand. These experiences rarely ended well for Alba but, suffering with a manic-depressive mother and an uninterested father, she continued to covet Charlotte’s picnics anyway.
One summer afternoon, a month after her seventh birthday, Alba lay on the grass with her feet in the air, reading an Agatha