rubbed at the bare skin on the third finger of her left hand and prayed to God for an answer.
* * *
Francis spent the next few days going through every file his uncle had kept on the Sherborne family and there were many. He’d had them brought down from the attic, the dusty tomes holding much in the way of background on both Clive Sherborne and his unfaithful wife. There was little information on the child, however, a fact that Francis found surprising.
Anna Sherborne herself was languishing against the stairwell as he walked up to instruct his men which new boxes he wanted brought down. Her hair had been cut, he noticed, bluntly and with little expertise. It hung in ill-shorn lengths about her face.
‘Did Mrs Wilson cut your hair?’
‘No.’ The word was almost spat out. ‘Why would she?’
‘You did it yourself, then?’ His cousin sported tresses a good twelve inches shorter than she had done yesterday and her expression was guarded.
An unprepossessing child, angry and diffident. He sat himself down on the step at her level and looked at her directly, the thought suddenly occurring to him that he might find out a lot more of Clive Sherborne’s life from questioning her than he ever could from the yellowing paper in boxes.
‘Was Clive a good father to you, Anna?’
Uncertainly the girl nodded and without realising it Francis let out his breath.
‘Better than my mother at least. He was there often. At home, I mean, and he took me with him most places.’
‘Did you have other brothers or sisters?’
‘No.’
‘Aunts. Uncles. Grandparents.’
‘No.’
‘Did Clive drink?’
She stiffened and stepped back. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Because he died in a warehouse full of brandy.’
One ripe expletive and she was gone, the thin nothingness of her disappearing around the corner of the dim corridor. But Francis had seen something of tragedy in her eyes before she could hide it, a memory he thought, a recollection so terrible it had lightened the already pale colour of her cheeks.
He took me with him most places. God, could the man have taken her there to the warehouse and to his appointment with death? Had she seen his killer? Had she seen the only man she knew as a father die? He shook his head and swore again roundly. At his uncle and at her mother. At the unfairness of the hovel Anna had been brought up in, at the loneliness and the squalor. She was angry, belligerent and difficult because in all her life it seemed no one except the hapless Clive Sherborne had taken the time to get to know her, to look after her. And now she was abandoned again into a place where she felt no belonging, no sense of safety, no security.
She’d cut her hair as a statement. No one can love me. I am uncherished and unwanted. His hands fisted in his lap as he swallowed away fury.
Well, he would see about that. Indeed, he would.
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