Secrets of a Charmed Life by Susan Meissner Read Free Book Online Page A

the hairpins from her cap. Emmy joined her. In addition to the stale aroma of tobacco, she now smelled men’s cologne.
    Not Neville’s. Wherever she’d spent the night, it wasn’t with Julia’s father, whom they hadn’t seen in months. Emmy was both relieved and disgusted. She didn’t like Neville but at least she knew who he was.
    “So you had to spend the night at Mrs. Billingsley’s?” Emmy said, only minimally masking her sarcasm.
    Her mother tossed her cap onto the table. “I told you. It was too dark to walk home.” Mum turned to the sink, grabbed the teakettle, and began to fill it with water. That was her standard practice when she didn’t want to be bothered by anyone or anything. She would turn her back on whatever the nuisance was and make tea.
    Emmy crossed her arms in front of her chest. “So Mrs. Billingsley’s taken up smoking, then? And wearing men’s cologne? Must drive you all batty.”
    Mum switched off the tap and just stood with her back to her daughter, holding the kettle by its handle. A few seconds later she plunked the kettle down on top of the stove. She switched on the burner and then turned to Emmy. “Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t report to you. You’re not in charge here. I am.”
    “So you don’t deny it? You weren’t at Mrs. Billingsley’s last night?” The volume of Emmy’s voice doubled but she didn’t care if she woke Julia.
    “I don’t have to explain anything to you.” Mum swung around to the cupboard to gather the tin of tea and a cup. Emmy saw her slender build under her maid’s uniform, the fullness of her bosom, the shapeliness of her legs and thighs, and the graceful curve of her neck. Emmy saw how pretty Mum was, but how broken. She was only thirty-one, with not a wrinkle or blemish or so much as a strand of gray hair. Emmy didn’t know what her mum had wanted to be at this stage of her life, but it came to her with crashing clarity that surely she hadn’t dreamed of becoming a rich woman’s kitchen maid. Emmy was never more aware of how much her very existence had marooned Mum to this scrabbling life than at that moment, though it wasn’t the first time she had contemplated how her birth changed the trajectory of Mum’s life. On truly terrible days, like when Neville left for good, or when her mother ran into someone she knew who lived a carefree life of normalcy, Mum would stare at Emmy and she would feel the weight of those lost years. Nana had told Emmy when she was ten that it was not her fault she had been born. It was Mum who, at sixteen, let herself get carried away by smooth talk. That was as much as Emmy knew about the man who had fathered her. He was a smooth talker. Nana had known more than that, Emmy believed, although she had acted as if she didn’t. Emmy’s birth certificate read that her father was unknown.
    “How can you not know who my father is?” Emmy had asked Mum once, when she was old enough to know how babies were made but too naïve to figure out “unknown” could also mean “unnamed.”
    Mum had said Emmy was to think of herself as someone who had only one parent. Just a mum. There was no one else. In more recent years, Mum had explained that there had been a party and she’d had too much to drink. A man she barely knew told her she was pretty on a night when she felt ugly. It was as simple as that. Emmy wasn’t to give that man another thought.
    But how could Emmy not think about the man who was her father? He had made Mum what she was—an unmarried mother and a kitchen maid who, as near as Emmy could tell, would struggle the rest of her life to make ends meet.
    “Don’t you ever take on blame for something you had no control over,” Nana had said, and Emmy had sensed in her tone that she’d given herself the same counsel often enough. That advice came back to Emmy now as she stood there, watching Mum make tea; then the years blended in Emmy’s mind and the last words Nana said to her filled her