My heart leapt. Slowly, carefully, I undid every painstaking fold, until a scrap lay in front of me that was barely legible around all the creases. I flicked on my phone flashlight and leaned over it.
very heart. I understand the obstacles. Ellie will see only the betrayal. We may lose her, but we will gain life. For I die when I can’t feel your presence. I suffocate when I don’t breathe your air. I love you. I am yours. Always. Be brave.
Forever,
Georgina
“Holy shit, I found it!” I crowed aloud to the crumbling, crumpled piece of paper. Then I squinted at it and realized something was scribbled on the other side. She’d addressed it with a crooked heart, and H. V. written inside.
“H. V.,” I murmured. “H. V. Who are you?”
I tucked the page in the back pocket of my jeans, taking care not to rip it, and then heaved the box back where I’d found it, atop a chaise longue that had an old rusted French weathervane standing next to it with an O where the W would have been. I turned to figure out how to carry the elephant trinkets upstairs when suddenly I sat down hard on the couch.
A vane. Vane. Henry. Nick’s grandfather. Eleanor’s husband.
H. V. was Henry Vane. It had to be.
I raced up the basement stairs, leaving my pile of elephants for later as I speed-walked through the house to get to my bedroom and up to Narnia. It was serene as ever up there, but my brain felt like it was on fire. Did he reject her? Did she demand the note back, hurt and enraged? Or did she never send it, and hold her secret to herself for her whole life? Did this break her?
Nothing up there had a keyhole that would fit the silver one she’d hidden with the letter’s end. I unzipped the throw pillow case in which I’d stashed the original pages, pulled them out, and added the last—only one, but somehow it made the whole thing infinitely heavier in my hand. I heard Nick enter the bedroom below me and came within a second of calling out to him. But my voice died in my throat. The doomed love of a sibling’s partner. A spurned spare whose relationship with her sister never recovered. This all felt uncomfortably familiar. Was Georgina’s future the same one that awaited Freddie? If I told Nick, would he feel like destiny foretold that he’d never forgive Freddie, and needlessly self-fulfill a prophecy?
I prayed he wouldn’t notice the armoire door ajar. The letter burned hot in my palm. But then Nick’s footsteps receded and I let out the breath I’d been holding. I wasn’t about to let Lyons family skeletons intrude on another Porter wedding day, so I folded the whole thing up with the key inside it and zipped them back into the pillow. The secret had kept for half a century. It could keep again. For now.
* * *
Nick and I drove into Cambridge the morning of the wedding. My loyalty as far as ancient university towns went obviously lay with Oxford, but its rival was nonetheless powerfully charming. If Oxford felt like living history, then Cambridge and its picturesque river dotted with punters was a living postcard, and especially on my sister’s wedding day, I would be delusional not to see them as gems of equal beauty. We could arm-wrestle for ultimate bragging rights later.
The service at the registry office would be families only, and then we’d head over to the pub for a small party. The Eagle was an ancient, boxy spot on a nondescript street off King’s Parade, famously where Watson and Crick barged in to announce their discovery of DNA, and it had won Lacey’s heart because the ceiling of the otherwise generic back bar was covered in graffiti, courtesy of British and American World War II pilots who’d burned their names and squadron numbers into it with lighters and candles. (She liked the nod to the alliance of her and Olly’s birthplaces.) My haul of elephants waited for us on the tables there. Everything was ready.
“Do you think she’s going to come?” Lacey asked as Kira wrapped her hair into a loose chignon.
“No,” said Mom.
“Yes,” said my aunt Kitty, who was nose deep in Tatler across the room.
“No,” I said. “She was being extreme. I cannot imagine she’s going to want to burn her energy on this. No offense.”
“Trust me, none taken,” Lacey said. “I do not need to have hostess anxiety about the freaking Queen.”
“It would be amusing, though, if she went to Bex’s wedding because she had to and Lacey’s by choice,” Aunt Kitty said.
“Katherine, enough,” my mom tsked.
“No, she’s right,” I said. “Eleanor definitely would have called in sick to the Abbey if we’d given her the option. Of course, if we knew then what we know now, Nick and I would have, too.”
“Not me,” said Kitty, smoothing her brown waves. “Semi-King Richard is a fine hunk of man in person. I’m just sorry he’s not at this one.”
“Ew,” I said.
“He’s not even divorced!” Mom said.
“I’ve got three under my belt,” Kitty said. “Perhaps I could offer my counsel.”
Mom tsked again, but she was laughing. Kira wove a few final pearl pins into Lacey’s hair and then stepped back to admire her work.
“Beautiful,” she said. “This updo turned out so much better than one I did for the Made in Chelsea wedding episode. Of course, I had to buttress that one in case someone threw a drink at it.”
Lacey was radiant in a vintage, short-sleeve, bias-cut cream gown. I had loaned her one of Georgina’s extravagant fur-trimmed capes, and when Lacey swung it over her shoulders and gazed in the mirror, Georgina’s face as I’d seen it in photographs flickered over my sister’s. Lacey’s was the picture of a glamorous courthouse wedding, the kind I imagined Georgina herself might’ve had if she’d been born with romantic
