Chapter 21
The ambient light inside the speeding ambulance flickered rhythmically as streetlamps flashed across the rain-streaked windows. I sat on the narrow metal bench beside Eleanor, my thumb tracing the rough, raised edges of the dark blue wax seal. The initials V and B were entwined in elegant copperplate script, locked within the coiled body of a silver serpent. It was the personal seal of my late father, Arthur Blackwood, a man who had been buried eight feet beneath the frozen earth of the family plot a decade ago.
"Clara," Eleanor whispered, her voice barely audible above the low hum of the vehicle’s engine and the distant wail of sirens. She pulled her wool blanket tighter around her shoulders, her brown eyes fixed on the heavy parchment envelope resting in my lap. "Where did you find that?"
"It was at the bottom of Maya's bag," I said, my throat feeling dry as bone. "Someone slipped it into her things before the police arrived."
I turned the envelope over in my trembling hands. The paper was dry and stiff with age, smelling faintly of old leather and cedar wood. My father's distinct handwriting cut across the front in dark ink: To my second daughter.
My mind raced through the narrow corridors of my childhood memories. My parents had only two children—Julian and myself. My mother had died when I was four, leaving my father to raise us inside the oppressive, silent halls of the Blackwood estate. He had never spoken of another child. He had never spoken of another woman after my mother's passing. Yet there it was, written in his unmistakable hand, a message sent from beyond the grave to a daughter he had kept hidden from the world.
"Open it," Eleanor murmured, reaching out with a thin hand to touch the corner of the paper. "Please, Clara. I need to know."
Using the edge of my fingernail, I carefully broke the dark blue wax seal. The hard wax cracked with a sound like a dry twig snapping. Inside lay a single sheet of heavy parchment accompanied by a folded birth certificate issued thirty years ago by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
I unfolded the birth certificate first under the dim yellow interior light. My eyes scanned the black typewriter ink until they landed on the mother's name: Helena Vance. Beneath it, in the space reserved for the father's identity, was typed: Arthur Blackwood.
May you like
The child's full name was typed in bold letters near the top of the page: Eleanor Vance Blackwood.
I stared at the document, the air leaving my lungs in a cold, ragged rush. Eleanor was not just Julian's abused wife. She was not a stranger he had randomly encountered in Cambridge four years ago. She was our half-sister. Julian had known. He had known the entire time he was forcing her to kneel in the basement pantry, transcribing thousands of forced confessions into leather-bound ledgers.
