Then she looked directly into his face.
“Did your mother ever call you Mouse?”
The nickname struck with such force that he put a hand against the wall.
“Who are you?”
Before she could answer, Vanessa appeared.
“Max? The photographer’s waiting.”
Her eyes moved to the violin.
“What is that doing down here?”
Elena lowered the bow.
“I was asked to bring it.”
“By whom?”
“Your groom’s mother.”
The silence changed.
Vanessa laughed once.
“My fiancé’s mother is dead.”
Elena said nothing.
Vanessa seized Maxwell’s arm.
“Come on. We are not doing this today.”
But Maxwell stayed where he was.
On the violin’s lower edge, beneath a patch of worn varnish, he could see a tiny white scar.
He knew that scar.
He had made it with a toy sword when he was seven.
The maid was holding his mother’s violin.
Isabelle Anderson had possessed the sort of beauty people described badly after she was gone.
They called her elegant.
Maxwell remembered jam on her sleeve.
They called her fragile.
He remembered her carrying an injured sheepdog half a mile through rain.
They called her troubled.
He remembered his father saying that word whenever she disagreed with him.
She had once been a concert violinist. After marrying Philip, she performed at charity evenings beneath the ballroom chandeliers while he accepted congratulations for having such a gifted wife.
Sometimes, late at night, Maxwell heard them arguing.
Not about music.
About money she wanted returned.
About a woman called Mara.
About things adults stopped discussing when a child entered the room.
Then came the fire.
Maxwell remembered smoke under his bedroom door and his father’s hand on the back of his neck, steering him down the stairs.
He remembered asking where his mother was.
He remembered Philip answering, “Outside already.”
She wasn’t.
By morning, everyone spoke in lowered voices.
By the following week, there was a closed coffin.
His father said Isabelle had locked herself in the conservatory, knocked over a lamp, and failed to escape.
Later came another explanation, offered reluctantly, as though Philip were protecting his son from an uglier truth.
His mother had meant to die.
Maxwell spent twenty-one years wondering what he might have said to make her stay.
Now a maid stood before him holding the one thing his father had sworn the fire consumed.
“Give me a moment,” Maxwell told Vanessa.
“No.”
He looked at her.
Perhaps it was the first time she had ever said the word so plainly.
She softened immediately.
“Darling, please. You can’t let some stranger upset you.”
Elena’s fingers tightened around the violin.
“There’s a letter.”
Vanessa released his arm.
