Chapter 108: Visiting Weekend

Chapter 108 — Visiting Weekend

By ten o’clock on Saturday morning, the academy courtyard had stopped looking like a school and started looking like a market. Parents threaded through the crowd with baskets and parcels, small siblings darted between legs, and somewhere near the fountain an elderly uncle was explaining the history of the building to anyone who stood still long enough.

Students who normally strode across the yard as though they owned it had shrunk into themselves. A boy from the senior year, famous for his temper, was being kissed on both cheeks by a woman half his height, and he stood there with the expression of a man enduring a necessary medical procedure.

Liam was attempting to slip along the edge of the yard, head low, shoulders hunched. "If I reach the east door before they spot me," he muttered, "I can claim I was in the library all morning."

"Your mother is wearing a red hat," Lucien said, without turning. He stood near the gate with a list in his hand, greeting relatives and directing luggage with the calm of a general. "She has been watching you for three minutes."

Liam closed his eyes. "Betrayed by my own brother."

Roshan had already been surrounded. Two small cousins hung from his arms, firing questions about whether the academy had a dungeon, whether he had ever fought a bear, and why the lamps were so tall. He answered every one with the same patient seriousness, and Roxanne heard him say, quite gravely, that there was no dungeon, but that the cellar was haunted by a very rude ghost.

Near the steps, Kai stood stiffly while an older woman in a patterned shawl reached up to straighten his collar. "I am perfectly well dressed," he said.

"You were a messy child."

"I am eighteen."

"Still messy." She patted the collar flat. Kai looked up at the sky as if asking it for strength, and Roxanne laughed into her hand.

She was still smiling when she noticed the others. A girl from her history class was running across the cobbles with her arms open. A father lifted his daughter clean off the ground and spun her around. Two brothers pounded each other on the back, and a mother cupped her son’s face in both hands, just looking at him. Roxanne’s smile thinned.

"It’s not too late to pretend you have a fever," Isla whispered, appearing at her elbow with a pie box balanced on one arm.

"I’m not afraid of my mother."

"I didn’t say you were."

Roxanne gave her a look.

"Fine. You’re terrified of a perfectly ordinary family visit."

"I’m bracing for it. That’s different."

"It is exactly the same," said Isla kindly, and went to find her aunt.

Amelia arrived a little after eleven, stepping out of a dark carriage with her husband beside her. She wore a pale coat that fit her perfectly and carried a small bag in both hands, as though afraid to set it down. She looked, Roxanne thought, like someone who had rehearsed this moment for weeks and still did not know where to put her hands.

"Roxanne."

"Mother."

Amelia stepped forward and lifted her arms, then stopped halfway, waiting. Roxanne hesitated. She could feel the whole courtyard around her, and her own pulse, and the small stubborn voice that said she did not owe anyone a hug simply because they had travelled to give one. Then she stepped in and allowed it. It was brief and a little awkward, and it smelled of the same lavender it always had.

"I brought you a few things," Amelia said, offering the bag. "Warm socks, and some of the biscuits you liked."

"Thank you."

"Are your classes going well? Are you eating properly?"

"Yes. And yes."

"Good. That’s good." Amelia’s smile flickered. She wanted to ask something else, anything else, and could not find it.

Edward cleared his throat. He was a pleasant, anxious man with grey at his temples, and he had clearly decided to be friendly at all costs. "It’s a remarkable place. I had no idea the grounds were so extensive. Do you enjoy the training?"

"It’s fine," Roxanne said, politely, and did not elaborate.

His smile faltered. "Well. Good."

She felt guilty for a moment, then felt the guilt settle into something less certain. He wasn’t unkind. She simply did not want him in the conversation, and she was not going to pretend otherwise.

Amelia noticed. Roxanne watched her notice. Her mother’s eyes dropped to her gloves, and something hurt crossed her face, quickly folded away. But she didn’t reach for her daughter again, and she didn’t ask for more than she had been given.

Margaret came alone, on foot, from the gate at the far end of the yard.

Roxanne knew her at once, though she had only ever seen her in a photograph. She was smaller than she had expected, silver-haired and straight-backed, with a worn wooden box held against her chest. But it was her eyes that stopped Roxanne where she stood. They were her father’s eyes, sharp and kind at once, and when Margaret smiled, it was his smile exactly, a little lopsided on the left.

"Roxanne," Margaret said. She didn’t come closer than a polite distance. "You have his chin, you know. I’m sorry. That’s probably a ridiculous thing to say first."

"It’s all right." Roxanne’s voice was not entirely steady. "I can see him in you."

"Can you?" Margaret’s eyes went bright. She blinked it away briskly and held up the box. "I’ve brought some of his things. I didn’t want to hand them over like a parcel, though. Would you rather look through them privately, or together?"

Roxanne looked at the box. She looked at her mother, standing a few paces away with her hands folded, and then back at the woman who had written letters for years and never received an answer.

"Together," she said.

They sat on a bench in a quiet corner of the garden. Margaret lifted the lid, and Roxanne looked inside.

There was nothing grand. An old academy photograph, curling at the edges, of a row of boys squinting in the sun. A battered recipe book with a cracked spine and a stain on the cover. A small notebook, the pages soft with handling.

She opened the notebook and found pancake recipes, dozens of them, crossed out and rewritten, with notes in the margin. *Too flat. Try more eggs. Burnt AGAIN.* Between them ran shopping lists in a tilted, spidery scrawl.

"His handwriting is terrible," Roxanne said, and laughed. "Is this a *b* or an *l*?"

"Neither. It’s a smear." Margaret was laughing too. "He never could write a legible word."

Roxanne turned another page, and her laughter slowly faded. These were his lists. His crossings-out. His small, daily corrections. She had a few photographs and a handful of stories, and here, suddenly, was the shape of how he had spent an ordinary Tuesday. It was a life she had never been allowed to see, and she held it very carefully, as though it might fall apart.

Margaret said nothing. She only sat close enough to be there.

Lunch was served in the long dining hall, at a table by the window. Amelia sat opposite Margaret, with Roxanne between them, and Edward had tactfully vanished to find coffee.

The first quarter of an hour was an exercise in politeness. Margaret asked how Roxanne’s classes were going, and Amelia answered before Roxanne could. Margaret asked what she liked best, and Amelia said she had always been fond of history. Margaret asked whether she had made friends, and Amelia began, "Oh, she has a lovely group—"

"Mother." Roxanne set down her fork. She kept her voice gentle, though it was firm. "Please let me answer for myself."

Amelia stopped. A flush rose in her cheeks. "Of course. I’m sorry."

"It’s all right. I just want to say it myself."

"Yes. Go on."

Roxanne answered. Margaret listened closely, nodding in the right places. She did not take sides, and when the silence grew heavy again, she set down her cup and said, "Did I ever tell you about the time your father tried to impress a girl by making breakfast?"

"No," Roxanne said.

"He was seventeen. He had decided that the way to a woman’s heart was through a fry-up. He put the bacon on, forgot it, and went to find a clean apron. By the time he came back, a kitchen towel had caught fire, and he was trying to put it out with a loaf of bread."

Roxanne stared at her. "With *bread*?"

"It was the nearest thing."

She laughed, helplessly, with her hand over her mouth, and even Amelia smiled, a small, startled smile. For a moment the table was warm. But it faded, and when it had, Roxanne turned to her mother.

"You could have told me these stories."

"I know."

"You could have let me know his family."

"I know that, too."

Roxanne looked down at her plate. "I don’t know what to do with that answer."

"You don’t have to know today," Margaret said quietly.

That afternoon, Roxanne wandered back into the courtyard and found herself drawn toward a clump of familiar faces.

Kai was sitting on a low wall while a small girl in a yellow coat stood in front of him, hands on her hips. "Mama says you were much less scary when you were little," she announced.

"I was never scary."

"You had a *frown*."

"I have always had a frown."

"Not a *big* one." She patted his knee, as if offering sympathy.

Nearby, Liam’s mother was telling a story to a circle of his friends about the day he had hidden in a laundry basket to avoid a haircut, and Liam stood beside her, scarlet to the ears, saying, "That is not how it happened," to no one at all. Roshan was kneeling over a jigsaw puzzle with a cousin, tapping one piece gently into place. Lucien was crouched between two arguing uncles, speaking quietly, until both subsided.

Roxanne stayed for a while. She laughed at Liam’s laundry basket and held a puzzle piece for Roshan. The brothers looked different with their families around them, younger and more ordinary, and she liked it.

Kai found her at the edge of the group, his shoulder close to hers. "Is everything all right? With your family?"

She considered it. "Not exactly. But it isn’t all bad, either."

He nodded. He didn’t press, and she was glad.

Margaret left late in the afternoon, when the light had turned gold. She pressed the battered recipe book into Roxanne’s hands at the gate.

"Keep it. He’d have wanted you to have it." She hesitated. "If you ever want to visit during the holidays, you’d be welcome. There’s no obligation."

"I won’t promise," Roxanne said honestly. "But I’d like to see you again. I just need time to understand what that means."

"That’s a good answer." Margaret’s smile didn’t falter, and there was no disappointment in it. "Take all the time you need."

Afterwards, Amelia asked quietly if Roxanne would walk with her to the carriage. Roxanne agreed. They walked the long way, past the training yard and the empty benches.

"I’m not ready to pretend it didn’t happen," Roxanne said.

"I understand."

"I don’t know when I will be."

"I understand that too." Amelia stopped at the carriage and touched her daughter’s sleeve, very lightly. "Thank you for letting me come."

It was not a reconciliation. They both knew another conversation was coming, and neither pretended otherwise.

That night, alone in her room, Roxanne sat on her bed and opened the recipe book again. She turned to the inside cover, where her father’s cramped hand ran across the yellowed page.

Beneath his name was a short line, addressed to her.

*For Roxie, when she’s old enough to make her own choices.*

She traced the words with her thumb, slowly, twice. For once, the past had given her something other than another reason to be angry.