Page 46 of Mail-Order Lady

The second was a portrait of a woman in a high lace collar, very still and pale, with a face Clara had never seen.

“His Grace’s mother.”

“Robert’s grandmother?”

“Yes.”

She studied the features. There was something around the eyes—the set of them, and maybe the intelligence shimmering from them—that Robert had inherited.

The third painting was a country scene. A small bridge over a river with a child standing on it. Not enough detail to identify a likeness.

She set the paintings aside. “What else?”

“More trunks.” Bea waved a hand toward the far wall. “Some are clothes. Some are papers. Some I do not remember.”

Clara moved to the end of the row.

The first trunk held women’s dresses from another age—silks, brocades, and an elaborate gown carefully wrapped in muslin that made her breath catch with its beaded splendor. She eased the lid back down on that one.

The second contained books. Heavy leather-bound things in English and Latin and maybe even Greek. Robert may have read all these. They made her head hurt though. Not a story among them, as far as she could tell.

The third trunk didn’t open easily. The latch had stiffened with age, but Clara worked at it with her thumbnail until it gave. She raised the lid to reveal papers—long sheets of heavy stock, the kind a man used for drawing.

The first sheet contained a map, and she eased it out to look closer. All the detailed lines had been drawn with careful precision—ink lines measured and deliberate, notations written in small, even script along the margins.

She tilted it toward the window, and the light exposed even more detail. A road. A river. A cluster of buildings with names written beside each one in that same careful hand. It had the hint of a youthful flare, but too precise to have truly been made by a child.

She set it aside and lifted the next sheet.

Another map. Larger scale, showing the same area but pulled back to reveal the surrounding country. Hills marked with hatching. A village. A church. Two farms along the eastern edge.

She set that one aside too and reached deeper into the trunk.

There were perhaps a dozen sheets in all, each tucked between pieces of stiffened card. She spread three of them out on the floor, side by side.

The largest one showed a house. Not a floor plan exactly—more an aerial rendering, trying to capture the whole shape of a place. The main structure ran long and irregular, with two wings extending at angles from the central block. The wing on the left was narrower and ended at what the notation beside it called the kitchen garden.

Her breath stopped.

She knew this house.

Not from memory—she had never been to England, never stood on any ground that wasn’t American. But she knew it the way you knew a face from a story told so many times it had become more real than the world outside the window.

The long central block. The two wings at angles. The narrower one ending in the kitchen garden.

She had drawn this house, or a house just like this, in her mind dozens of times. In the stories she told Kate when they were small on the bad nights—the princess in the castle, the stone walls that kept the cold out, the kitchen garden where the princess grew herbs that smelled sweet like summer.

Once there was a castle, she had always started. With two wings like arms that reached out to hold everyone inside.

It wasn’t identical. The proportions were different from the shape she’d imagined—the right wing longer than she’d made it in her mind, the central block narrower. The kitchen garden sat at an angle she’d never pictured.

But very close. Close enough that looking at it felt like opening a door in a house she thought she’d invented and finding someone else had been living there all along.

She pulled the sheet closer and turned it toward the window light.

“Those are Robert’s.” Bea’s voice came from behind her.

Clara glanced up at her.