In the entirety of Nora's life, Lady Farroww had never once asked her to walk anywhere privately. They went out through the front entrance and onto the gravel path that curved around the formal boxwood borders. The morning was cold but clear, the first genuinely bright sky of the week, and the light came in flat and white and made everything look very precise. Lady Farrow walked for a full minute without speaking, which told Nora that whatever was coming had required preparation. "I owe you an accounting," Lady Farrow said finally.
Nora waited. "Your mother was my sister," Lady Farrow said. "My younger sister. She was clever and warm and considerably braver than I was and I did not tell her that enough when she was alive. " She paused. "When she died and you came under my general care, I told myself I was doing right by you.
I gave you a room and meals and brought you to the assemblies and the social occasions. " She stopped walking. "I did not give you standing. I let people call you extra. I let my daughters treat you as staff. I told myself it was an honest reflection of your circumstances and that I was not being unkind, merely accurate. " The gravel path curved ahead of them.
A blackbird moved through the bare hedge. "I was unkind," Lady Farrow said. "I want you to know that I know that. " Nora looked at her aunt at the straight back and the careful voice and the eyes that were her mother's eyes, differently arranged. "Why are you telling me now? " she asked. "Because you stood up at that breakfast table and looked Lady Mirabelle in the eye and did not flinch," Lady Farrow said.
And I realized I had spent years handing you reasons to flinch, and you had quietly, without any help from me, decided not to. She pressed her lips together. That is your mother in you. Not anything I gave you. They stood on the path in the cold, bright morning.
I accept it, Nora said simply. Not warmly. Not coldly. Plainly, the way she did things. Lady Farroww nodded once.
It was not a comfortable moment. It was an honest one, which is harder and worth more. They walked back to the house together in a silence that was not comfortable, but was no longer dishonest. And that was something neither of them had managed before. Inside, all of the house was moving with the particular energy of a day that was not standing still.