The Spinster (Emerson Pass Historicals 2)

“Nah, you need more practice, that’s all. I can help you.” She motioned for me to get up. “Come on, old man. Let’s get Flynn and head home.”

Home. What a lovely word. If only Cymbeline knew how much she would miss home when she left. As determined as she was, this girl loved her family. It wouldn’t be as easy as she thought to leave them.

Josephine

For most of the morning, I paced around the house, going over every detail I could remember of my two weeks with Walter, examining them as Phillip had suggested. Sadly, I couldn’t find the holes in his stories. Like it was only yesterday, I could recall with perfect clarity the sincerity in his eyes and the sound of his laughter.

I went upstairs and opened the box of letters for the first time. I’d stored them under my bed next to the much smaller cluster of those Walter had sent to me. I pulled them both out and sat on the floor between my bed and Cymbeline’s. We shared a room with three single beds as we always had, all lined up in a row according to age.

I read through several of Walter’s first. There was nothing of note in them, other than flowery speech about his love for me. They were short, no more than a few paragraphs, with no details of what his days had been like. At the time, I’d excused the lack of length and detail on the war. Strategic battle secrets shouldn’t be passed through letters. Now, however, it was obvious. He hadn’t cared for me as I had him. Did we truly only see what we wanted?

I burned with shame. Having such an error in judgment over something so important was not like me. Or was it? Did I have a completely false impression of myself?

Did Phillip really think he was in love with me? Was he as deluded as I had been about love? Were his fantasies about me and my life here only wishes, born from loneliness? They had to be. Yet at the same time, his passionate statements thrilled me.

Which led to further shame. What kind of woman was I? Declaring my eternal love to a cunning ghost one day and thinking of a man I’d just met the next.

Was my thrill only an illusion? I’d convinced myself before of a relationship that hadn’t existed. Would this prove more of the same?

I set his letters aside and opened the box with mine. Neatly stacked, they’d been put into chronological order. By Phillip, I suspected, not Walter. Damn him. How could he have lied to me this way? Tears leaked from my eyes. I put the lid back on and slouched over the box and silently sobbed. A creak in the floorboards drew my attention. I looked up, drying my eyes with the backs of my hands. Fiona stood just inside the room.

“What’re you doing, Jo?” The way she asked the question, gently with a tinge of sadness, I knew she knew exactly. She came to sit across from me on the floor.

“Stirring up ghosts, I guess.”

She held out her hands. “No good will come from this. Give them to me.”

I gave her the box. “Mama told you?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.” She shoved the box under the bed, then put the Walter letters back into the stack. She set those aside, as if she wanted them for later.

“I feel foolish and embarrassed,” I said.

She leaned close to brush away strands of hair that had stuck to my cheeks. “You’ve been sad for too long. It’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“Dancing.”

“Dancing?” I giggled and shifted so that my back was against the bed. Fiona joined me and rested her head on my shoulder.

“I was wondering about something,” Fiona said. “Did it ever occur to you that you couldn’t love Mama Quinn because you’d loved our real mother first?”

“No. It was clear to me that Quinn was what we all needed.”

She nodded and made a humming sound. “Hmm…”

We were silent for a moment. My sister wasn’t exactly subtle.

“Our real mother was disturbed,” Fiona said. “But you loved her anyway.”

“True.”

“Perhaps the way to look at this is that Walter was disturbed. You loved him anyway. We can’t always control who we love. Sometimes those people don’t deserve our affection, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Loving someone, no matter how it ends, isn’t something you should ever feel sorry or ashamed about. You didn’t know.”

“I’ve wasted too much time on him.”

“Then don’t waste another minute,” Fiona said.