So if she wasn't going to write her own life, that didn't mean she couldn't participate in some way. Just for the fun of it, she decided to invent a person to write about.

She sat thinking for a moment, then pulled a legal pad and pencil from the kitchen "everything" drawer and started writing:

“They say I was born in London to the woman I learned to call Mother, but when I was seventeen I learned that my origins were quite different. The woman who actually gave birth to me—in the rude colonial town of Boston—would not have dared darken the doors of the mansion I grew up calling home.”

Jane sat back and reread this, smiling. "Where in the world did that come from?" she asked herself aloud. It was funny—and a little bit scary, how easilythat had gone onto the paper. She hadn't really thought it out until she was actually writing it.

An image of a person was forming in her mind. She bent over the paper again.

Priscilla.

3

  Cecily Grant arrived at three in a cab. Jane was writing at the kitchen table, where she could see the driveway, and rushed out to help bring her mother's luggage in, but there was only one medium-sized suitcase. Jane should have realized. Her mother always, of necessity, traveled light. During the whole of her married life, Cecily Grant had never had an actual home, only a long series of residences supplied by the State Department. A few were hovels and glorified tents, most were luxurious houses, a couple had been modest castles.

Jane's father was a cultured, handsome man who had an uncanny gift for languages, being able to pick up the most obscure dialects in a matter of days. Sometimes he used these languages overtly in helping arrange treaties and trade agreements. More often he was sent in to look decorative and mildly perplexed, all the time eavesdropping like mad. Neither his wife nor his children had acquired a smidgen of this language gift, so they made a terrific cover for his more covert activities. In fact, it wasn't until Jane was an adult that she understood what her father's job really was and how important it was.