Free Twain's End by Lynn Cullen

quickly with a pony cart, stood a step-down shelf of bare trees lit oddly from below, as if they stood on the edge of the world. Beyondthem, in a rocky canyon over a mile wide, the Hudson River, its deep blue skin scaled with whitecaps, lumbered toward the sea with saurian unconcern.
    Isabel stopped to look out over it, the wind banging her skirt against her boots. She’d grown up with a similar grand view. In her mind, she saw herself as a four-year-old. Her mother was lounging on a rug with her toddling sister on the lime-green lawn of Spring Side; her baby brother slept in a pram. Her father made her sit next to her mother, and then he put the infant, heavy as a small sack of sand, into her arms. When Baby Charlie had scowled up at Isabel with his double chin and furrowed brow, a petulant worm being pulled into the light, love had surged through her bony chest. Gritting her teeth against the overwhelming pain of it, she squeezed his arm. He cried out.
    â€œCharles!” her mother exclaimed. “Take him away from her.”
    Isabel’s heart had broken as her brother had been wrenched from her. Even now, as she looked out over the majestic river, she could taste the bitterness of being misunderstood.
    The sound of a woman singing penetrated her thoughts. Isabel listened: it was Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” sung with more volume than control. The warbling came from a massive chestnut tree located a whack of a croquet ball across the lawn. Stairs led up the side of a tree to a wooden shelter tucked among the spreading boughs.
    A gravelly drawl punctured the singing: “Could you at least wait until I get down?”
    Isabel felt a jolt. She hadn’t expected to be affected by him after all this time. It had been at least a dozen years. She reined herself in. He was an old man in his sixties now. He wouldn’t remember her. His wife had been the one to hire her.
    Boots with soles much scarred by match strikes appeared on the board steps descending from the treehouse, followed by gray trouser legs riffling in the wind, a flapping coat, and a mane of silvered hair. Their owner saw Isabel as soon as he hit the ground. He stopped. The trauma that she’d heard had befallen him in the intervening years—losing his daughter Susy to meningitis, suffering from bankruptcy,embarking on a worldwide speaking tour to pay off the debts on the Hartford house, in which he could no longer afford to live—seemed not to have defeated him. He stared at her from beneath those frightening eyebrows, as bold as ever.
    The singing ceased. Velvet pumps, slim ankles in black hosiery, and then a fluttering lavender skirt hem piped in black came down the steps. “I’m getting very good, Papa. Everyone says so. Would it grieve you so much to compliment me every once in a while?”
    He wouldn’t stop staring.
    â€œI won’t let you discourage me, Papa.” The singer hopped the last step to the ground. With a bushy mass of auburn hair that resisted the restraints of a pompadour and the endearingly stooped figure of a shy child, the young woman, of perhaps thirty years in age, instantly charmed. Her features were rounded and girlish yet accurate copies of her father’s—she was what he would have looked like as a pretty girl. Although her black straw boater was pinned to her pouf in a jaunty tilt, she ducked her head further when she stood next to him, her submissive air contradicting her hat.
    â€œClara.” Mr. Clemens kept his gaze on Isabel. “I believe your mother’s new secretary is here. This is Miss Lyon.”
    The long ribbons of her hat jerking in the wind, Clara briskly crossed the lawn, hand extended, to Isabel. “Welcome to our home. If you ever call me Miss Twain, you will be instantly dismissed.”
    Isabel laughed until she saw that Miss Clemens was serious.
    Mr. Clemens ambled his way over. “So you’re a secretary these days. Well, if you are