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She went so still that he feared for her. Then she burst out, “I have tried very hard not to dislike my brother, but sometimes I am so angry!”
“He seems to have been reckless—”
“Reckless? He was idiotically rash, uncaring,bumbling. He flailed about and shouted and accomplished nothing but his own death. Such a dreadful waste.” She gripped the inkwell as if she might throw it across the room, but she didn’t, though her fingers whitened with strain.
Daniel put a hand over her free one. “Was he always so?”
She shoved the inkwell away. “The truth is, I don’t know. He went off to school when I was seven years old, and he often spent his holidays with friends. He was my brother, but not my companion. Or my friend.” She sounded sad as well as angry now.
Daniel knew something of distance from family members.
“When hewashome, he did talk about new inventions and change and poverty. But his talk was never systematic. He said nothing to predict what happened. He jumped from one topic to another. He seemed just a young man full of random enthusiasms.” She swallowed. “Papa didn’t like it when he criticized the government. They had one blazing row about that, and Papa forbade him to mention the topic again in his hearing. Philip complied. And stayed away from home even more often.
“I told the agents all of this. I told them everything. Which was really nothing, because I knew nothing. I didn’t know Philip’s friends, if he had any. He must have had some, surely?” She looked at Daniel, her expression desolate. “But after that row with Papa, he would have told them his family wasn’t sympathetic. They would have no reason to apply to me.”
But would the government know that? Daniel wondered. She wasn’t the problem; they were.
“Philip saw me as Papa’s pet,” she continued. “He resented it. He did tell me that once. And I was with Mama much more than he was. She was an invalid. I was her daughter. I helped care for her.” She looked down at her now tightly folded hands. “Philip tired her out. She tried to hide it, but she wasn’t good at dissembling. She was glad when his visits were over, and I know he saw it.”
In her face, Daniel saw a girl struggling to bridge an irredeemable gap that had opened in her family.
“The sad truth is, I scarcely knew my brother. Do you think that can’t be? That I had to know? That’s what the agents believed,” she finished bitterly.
“I’m well aware of what it is to be a stranger to your family,” Daniel said. “Ties of blood are meaningless if people ignore them.”
Penelope turned, moved by the emotion in his voice. His eyes held sympathy and an understanding she’d never thought to encounter again.
“Or if they refuse to reciprocate,” he added. “One can make all the overtures in the world, but if they’re ignored, there’s nothing to be done.”
“Or repulsed, yes. After a while, Philip pushed me away. Can you really know how that is?”
“All my life I was treated like an acquaintance by those most closely related to me.”
“Your parents.” When he looked surprised, she added, “You said you were at odds with them.”
“I did?”
“When we began our search through the papers.” Her easy recollection seemed to startle and then to move him.
“‘At odds’ is too strong a term. I shouldn’t have said that. It implies disputes. We didn’t dispute. We conversed. Wechatted.”
He said the last word as if it was unbearably offensive.
“The last time they were home before their trip to India.” He glanced at her. “They were killed in a shipwreck on the way back.”
“I remember.”
“You do?”
“I remember everything you’ve said to me.”
He blinked as if she’d said something astonishing. He started to speak, then pressed his lips together and swallowed, obviously overcome by strong emotion.
“I’m very sorry about your parents,” Penelope added. Fleetingly, she remembered Lord Macklin’s talk of grief.
Whitfield nodded—more an acknowledgment than an acceptance of sympathy. He cleared his throat. “On that last visit—I didn’t know it was the last, of course. But I was determined that we should do better. We’d been a family for more than a quarter century. I hadn’t seen them in five months. I thought they must, in their hearts, want a closer connection as much as I did. I arranged for us to attend a lecture on African wildlife. It was the sort of thing they liked to do.”
“And you don’t,” said Penelope.
