Read Online A Sudden Sun by Trudy Morgan-Cole - Free Book Online Page A

in New York, you know,” Mrs. Parker said. “Oh, I’m not the one to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty like you. I chair committees, sit on boards, raise funds, that sort of thing. Ladies devoted to good works—men dismiss us, but the fact is there’s very little good works that would get done without ladies. So much suffering in the war, but so much here at home, too! Newfoundland seems a simpler, finer place, but I know—I remember—there’s hardship here too. So, what do you think of Lloyd George?”
    Grace felt like she was being given an oral examination in school by a very distracted and scatterbrained mistress who had forgotten to tell her what the subject of the test would be. Fortunately, Grace did have opinions on the subject of the British prime minister, and was able to gather them. The conversation broadened, then, like a stream widening out into a pond, taking in the whole group, and Grace had no more private conversation with Mrs. Parker until the guests were leaving. Her mother’s old friend turned to her again at the door and said, “Expect an invitation from me within the week, unless poor Papa takes a sudden turn for the worse. Just you alone, so we can really have a proper talk.”
    Late that night, when the guests had gone and her grandfather and Daisy were in bed, Grace slipped out of her bedroom and climbed the staircase to the third floor. Grandfather and Daisy only used the first two floors of the three-storey house; they had given Grace what used to be the spare bedroom across from theirs. Annie, the maid, went upstairs once a week to dust but otherwise the top floor was unused, furniture shrouded with sheets so the rooms were like ghosts of rooms. Grace had not been up there since she was a child and had played hide-and-go-seek with Charley in the old house. Now she went slowly up the stairs, thinking of Abigail Parker telling her she was just like Lily in spirit, and of Daisy saying Lily had “fine ideas” once. What kind of ideas?
    She didn’t know which of the old rooms was which. Even when her mother was young, would they have needed so many rooms? Lily had been the only surviving child, two others having died young of diphtheria. Had they had a cook or maids who slept in these upper rooms? One might have been a guest room, since the spare room on the second floor used to be Grandfather’s study. And this room—this must have been Lily’s bedroom, Grace thought, as she pushed the door open.
    A broad bay window looked down on Queen’s Road and the huddled shades of two wingback chairs flanked it. A mirror over the dressing table was unshrouded and thick with dust. Annie was not being particularly diligent, then, about dusting. And why should she? Grace stood in front of the mirror, seeing a greenish, distorted picture of herself—the old mirror, the dust, moonlight filtering in through the blind windows. Was she really the living image of Lily? People said so, but Grace had never been able to see it.
    This could not, after all, have been her mother’s room growing up, not this exact room, for Grace remembered her grandfather saying he had had to rebuild the whole house after the Great Fire, and Lily must then have been—Grace counted backwards—about nineteen, as old as Grace herself was now. So this room, if it was Lily’s, must have been hers after the fire, in the new house.
    She pressed the light switch and a dim bulb flickered to life. Grace folded back the sheet that covered a small dressing table. A silver comb and brush set sat on top of a lace doily. One drawer was empty except for sachets of potpourri. The one below that held ribbons and gloves. At the bottom of the drawer, a tiny key. But the dressing table had no locked drawers.
    On the other side of the room, similarly shrouded, was a rolltop desk with one locked drawer. Not much of a system for hiding secrets, Grace thought—a locked drawer with the key just across in the dressing table. But perhaps