6 - Pages of Sin

a mission with my church group, living in a small village in Senegal in West Africa. We rarely got mail because we were so far from civilization. But one day a letter came through from my sister Marjorie. I was thrilled to hear from someone back home—until I read it. She wrote to tell me that Byron had married Wanda. My own sister! I felt so betrayed, so heartsick, I wanted to die.”
    Now that I could understand. I had sisters, too, and if one of them were to sneak off with Derek. . . . Yeah, I could appreciate that kind of pain. Not that my sisters would ever do that. Or Derek, either. Still, I could totally sympathize with Elaine’s distress.
    Last night when I arrived home from my book-repair class, I’d shown Mom and Dad the letter my student found in the Jane Austen book. Dad had said we should give it to Byron immediately, but Mom thought we should talk to Elaine first. I’d wondered aloud if Byron had ever seen the letter, or if he’d blown off Elaine simply because she’d left him alone too long. And how had Wanda gotten hold of the letter? What was it doing inside her copy of Pride and Prejudice ? Had she slyly intercepted it before Byron saw it? Who was at fault here?
    My parents and I had too many questions, so we’d decided we wouldn’t yet mention to Elaine that we’d seen the letter. Maybe it was unfair to her, but Mom and I wanted to hear her side of the story first. Depending on what she said, we would decide whether to hand the letter back to her, or give it to Byron. Or we could just let sleeping dogs lie and do neither of the above.
    “So you came home and confronted Byron, I hope,” I said, too intrigued to care whether I was snooping or not.
    “Of course I did,” she said stoutly. “I confronted all of them. Wanda, Marjorie, Byron—they all knew what they’d done to me. But they wouldn’t say anything. They wouldn’t explain and they wouldn’t defend themselves. It drove me crazy. It wasn’t fair. It was as if the three of them had deliberately conspired against me. So I left in a huff and went off on another of my missions. This time it was a refugee camp in Sarajevo, and that’s where I met Radisson.”
    “The Earl,” I whispered.
    Mom leaned forward. “And you married him.”
    “Yes.” She smiled. “And I moved to his home in England, in Somerset. He was a good man, but after a few short years, I grew to miss my family terribly. So one Christmas, Radisson invited them all to the castle. It was a tremendous surprise to me and I wasn’t sure whether to be angry or not. I decided to be happy.” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “I missed my family. I missed Byron. The estrangement never sat well with me.”
    Mom squeezed her hand. “It’s good that you all made amends.”
    “Yes, it was.” She sipped her water, then frowned as she remembered more. “Wanda didn’t come with them. I felt sad at the time, but Byron told me that she had insisted that he come to England without her. She wanted our rift to end, even if she couldn’t travel. So we all chose to enjoy the holiday in spite of her absence.”
    “Did you see her again after that?”
    “Yes, we spoke on the phone that Christmas and I finally came out to California to see her. It was a good reunion. I yelled at her and she cried. Then I cried. Then we hugged and dried our tears, got over it and moved on.”
    But had she really moved on? I paused, unsure whether to ask the question, but my curiosity won out. “You mentioned that the last time you saw Byron, the two of you had a fight.”
    “Yes.” She closed her eyes and shook her head in apparent disgust. “One night after a few glasses of wine, I was feeling glib and made the mistake of saying that marrying Wanda was the best thing he ever did for me.”
    Oh, boy. “How did he react to that?”
    She shrugged, but I could see that it cost her to say it. “He was angrier than I’d ever seen him.”
    Ouch. I tried to keep my expression neutral. “What did he say?”
    “I could tell he was seething, but he asked me to elaborate. I finally told him that because of him and Wanda, I had lived a full, happy life with many adventures. And Wanda, well, she’d been stuck behind those dreary walls all these years. The minute I said the words, I wanted to take them back. Byron told me to leave and never return. I was so upset and felt so stupid. Marjorie tried to intervene, but Byron was too angry. That was well over five years ago.”
    “And yesterday