An Echo in the Bone (46 page)

“Assistant choirmaster,” Bree said now, eyeing him.

He drew a deep breath; the evening air
was
fine, clear and soft, if beginning to be populated by midgies. He waved a cloud of them away from his face, and grasped the nettle.

“I didn’t go for a job, mind. I went to … to get my mind clear. About being a minister.”

She stopped dead at that.

“And … ?” she prompted.

“Come on.” He pulled her gently into motion once more. “We’ll be eaten alive if we stand here.”

They strolled through the kailyard and out past the barn, walking along the path that led by the back pasture. He’d already milked the two cows, Milly and Blossom, and they’d settled for the night, big humped dark shapes in the grass, peacefully chewing their cuds.

“I told you about the Westminster Confession, aye?” This was the Presbyterian equivalent to the Catholics’ Nicene Creed—their statement of officially accepted doctrine.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, see, to be a Presbyterian minister, I’d need to be able to swear that I accepted everything in the Westminster Confession. I did, when I—well, before.” He’d come so close, he thought.

He’d been on the eve of ordination as a minister when fate had intervened, in the person of Stephen Bonnet. Roger had been compelled to drop everything, to find and rescue Brianna from the pirate’s lair on Ocracoke. Not that he regretted doing it, mind…. She paced beside him, red and long-limbed, graceful as a tiger, and the thought that she might so easily have vanished from his life forever—and that he’d never have known his daughter …

He coughed and cleared his throat, abstractedly touching the scar.

“Maybe I still do. But I’m not sure. And I have to be.”

“What changed?” she asked curiously. “What could you accept then that you can’t now?”

What changed?
he thought wryly.
Good question
.

“Predestination,” he said. “In a manner of speaking.” There was still enough light that he saw a look of mildly derisive amusement flicker across her face, though whether simply from the ironic juxtaposition of question and answer or from the concept itself, he didn’t know. They’d never argued questions of faith—they were more than cautious with each other on
those
grounds—but they were at least familiar with the general shape of each other’s beliefs.

He’d explained the idea of predestination in simple terms: not some inescapable fate ordained by God, nor yet the notion that God had laid out each person’s life in great detail before his or her birth—though not a few Presbyterians saw it just that way. It had to do with salvation and the notion that God chose a pathway that led to that salvation.

“For some people,” she’d said skeptically. “And He chooses to damn the rest?”

A lot of people thought
that
, too, and it had taken better minds than his to argue their way past that impression.

“There are whole books written about it, but the basic idea is that salvation’s not just the result of our choice—God acts first. Extending the invitation, ye might say, and giving us an opportunity to respond. But we’ve still got free choice. And really,” he added quickly, “the only thing that’s not optional—to be a Presbyterian—is a belief in Jesus Christ. I’ve still got that.”

“Good,” she said. “But to be a minister … ?”

“Yeah, probably. And—well, here.” He reached abruptly into his pocket and handed her the folded photocopy.

“I thought I’d best not steal the book,” he said, trying for levity. “In case I
do
decide to be minister, I mean. Bad example for the flock.”

“Ho-ho,” she said absently, reading. She looked up, one eyebrow quirked.

“It’s different, isn’t it?” he said, the breathless feeling back beneath his diaphragm.

“It’s …” Her eyes shot back to the document, and a frown creased her brow. She looked up at him a moment later, pale and swallowing. “Different. The date’s different.”

He felt a slight easing of the tension that had wound him up for the last twenty-four hours. He wasn’t losing his mind, then. He put out a hand, and she gave him back the copy of the clipping from the
Wilmington Gazette—
the death notice for the Frasers of the Ridge.

“It’s only the date,” he said, running a thumb beneath the blurred type of the words. “The text—I think that’s the same. Is it what you remember?” She’d found the same information, looking for her family in the past—it was what had propelled her through the stones, and him after her.
And
that
, he thought,
has made all the difference. Thank you, Robert Frost
.

She’d pressed against him, to read it over again. Once, and twice, and once more for good measure, before she nodded.

“Only the date,” she said, and he heard the same breathlessness in her voice. “It … changed.”

“Good,” he said, his voice sounding queer and gruff. “When I started wondering … I had to go and see, before I talked to you about it. Just to check—because the clipping I’d seen in a book, that couldn’t be right.”

She nodded, still a little pale.

“If I … if I went back to the archive in Boston where I found that newspaper—would it have changed, too, do you think?”

“Yeah, I do.”

She was silent for a long moment, looking at the paper in his hand. Then she looked at him, intent.

“You said, when you started wondering. What made you start wondering?”

“Your mother.”

IT HAD BEEN a couple of months before they left the Ridge. Unable to sleep one night, he’d gone out into the woods and, roaming restlessly to and fro, had encountered Claire, kneeling in a hollow full of white flowers, their shapes like a mist around her.

He’d just sat down then and watched her at her gathering, as she broke stems and stripped leaves into her basket. She wasn’t touching the flowers, he saw, but pulling up something that grew beneath them.

“You need to gather these at night,” she remarked to him after a little. “Preferably at the dark of the moon.”

“I shouldn’t have expected—” he began, but broke off abruptly.

She laughed, a small fizzing sound of amusement.

“You wouldn’t have expected that I should put stock in such superstitions?” she asked. “Wait, young Roger. When you’ve lived as long as I, you may begin to regard superstitions yourself. As for this one …” Her hand moved, a pale blur in the darkness, and broke a stem with a soft, juicy snap. A pungent aroma suddenly filled the air, sharp and plangent through the softer aroma of the flowers.

“Insects come and lay their eggs on the leaves of some plants, do you see? The plants secrete certain rather strong-smelling substances in order to repel the bugs, and the concentration of these substances is highest when the need is greatest. As it happens, those insecticidal substances happen also to have quite powerful medicinal properties, and the chief thing that troubles this particular sort of plant”—she brushed a feathery stem under his nose, fresh and damp—“is the larvae of moths.”

“Ergo, it has more of the substance late at night, because that’s when the caterpillars feed?”

“Got it.” The stem was withdrawn, the plant thrust into her bag with a rustle of muslin, and her head bent as she felt about for more. “And some plants are fertilized by moths. Those, of course

…”

“Bloom at night.”

“Most plants, though, are troubled by daylight insects, and so they begin to secrete their useful compounds at dawn; the concentration rises as the day waxes—but then, when the sun gets too hot, some of the oils will begin to vaporize from the leaves, and the plant will stop producing them. So most of the very aromatic plants, you pick in late morning. And so the shamans and the herbalists tell their apprentices to take one plant in the dark of the moon and another at midday—thus making it a superstition, hmm?” Her voice was rather dry, but still amused.

Roger sat back on his heels, watching her grope about. Now that his eyes were accustomed, he could make out her shape with ease, though the details of her face were still hidden.

She worked for a time, and then sat back on her heels and stretched; he heard the creak of her back.

“I saw him once, you know.” Her voice was muffled; she had turned away from him, probing under the drooping branches of a rhododendron.

“Saw him? Who?”

“The King.” She found something; he heard the rustle of leaves as she tugged at it, and the snap of the breaking stem.

“He came to Pembroke Hospital, to visit the soldiers there. He came and spoke separately to us—the nurses and doctors. He was a quiet man, very dignified, but warm in his manner. I couldn’t tell you a thing that he said. But it was … remarkably inspiring. Just that he was there, you know.”

“Mmphm.” Was it the onset of war, he wondered, making her recall such things?

“A journalist asked the Queen if she would be taking her children and evacuating to the country—so many were, you know.”

“I know.” Roger saw suddenly in his mind’s eye a pair of children: a boy and a girl, thin-faced and silent, huddling near each other beside a familiar hearth. “We had two of them—at our house in Inverness. How odd, I hadn’t remembered them at all until just now.”

She wasn’t paying attention, though.

“She said—and I may not have the quote exactly right, but this is the gist of it—‘Well, the children can’t leave me, and I can’t leave the King—and of course the king won’t leave.’ When was your father killed, Roger?”

Whatever he’d been expecting her to say, it wasn’t that. For an instant, the question seemed so incongruous as not to be comprehensible.

“What?” But he
had
heard her, and shaking his head to dispel a feeling of surreality, he answered, “October 1941. I’m not sure I remember the exact date—no, I do, the Reverend had it written on his genealogy. The thirty-first of October, 1941. Why?”
“Why in God’s name,”
he wanted to say, but he’d been trying to control the impulse toward casual blasphemy. He choked off the stronger impulse to escape into random thought and repeated, very calmly, “Why?”

“You said he’d been shot down in Germany, didn’t you?”

“Over the Channel on his way to Germany. So I was told.” He could just make out her features in the moonlight, but couldn’t read her expression.

“Who told you? Do you remember?”

“The Reverend, I suppose. Or I suppose it might have been my mother.” The sense of unreality was wearing off, and he was beginning to feel angry. “Does it matter?”

“Probably not. When we first met you—Frank and I, in Inverness—the Reverend said then that your father had been shot down over the Channel.”

“Yes? Well …”
So what?
was unspoken, but she plainly picked it up, for there was a small snort of not-quite laughter from the rhododendrons.

“You’re right, it doesn’t matter. But—both you and the Reverend mentioned that he was a Spitfire pilot. Is that correct?”

“Yes.” Roger wasn’t sure why, but he was beginning to have an uneasy sense at the back of his neck, as though something might be standing behind him. He coughed, making an excuse to turn his head, but glimpsed nothing behind him but the black-and-white forest, smudged by moonlight.

“I do know that for sure,” he said, feeling oddly defensive. “My mother had a photograph of him with his plane.
Rag Doll
, the plane was called; the name was painted on the nose, with a crude picture of a dolly in a red dress, with black curls.” He did know that for sure. He’d slept with the picture under his pillow for a long time after his mother was killed—the studio portrait of his mother was too big, and he worried that someone would notice it missing.

“Rag Doll,” he repeated, suddenly struck by something.

“What? What is it?”

He waved a hand, awkward.

“It—nothing. I—I just realized that ‘Rag Doll’ was probably what my father called my mother.

A nickname, you know? I saw a few of his letters to her; they were usually addressed to
Dolly
.

And just now, thinking of the black curls—my mother’s portrait … Mandy. Mandy’s got my mother’s hair.”

“Oh, good,” Claire said dryly. “I’d hate to think I was entirely responsible for it. Do tell her that, when she’s older, will you? Girls with very curly hair invariably hate it—at least in the early years, when they want to look like everyone else.”

Despite his preoccupation, he heard the small note of desolation in her voice, and reached for her hand, disregarding the fact that she still held a plant in it.

“I’ll tell her,” he said softly. “I’ll tell her everything. Don’t ever think we’d let the kids forget you.”

She squeezed his hand, hard, and the fragrant white flowers spilled over the darkness of her skirt.

“Thank you,” she whispered. He heard her sniff a little, and she wiped the back of her other hand swiftly across her eyes.

“Thanks,” she said again, more strongly, and straightened herself. “It
is
important. To remember.

If I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Tell me … what?”

Her hands, small and hard and smelling of medicine, wrapped his.

“I don’t know what happened to your father,” she said. “But it wasn’t what they told you.”

“I WAS
THERE
, ROGER,” she repeated, patient. “I read the papers—I nursed airmen; I talked to them. I saw the planes. Spitfires were small, light planes, meant for defense. They never crossed the Channel; they hadn’t the range to go from England into Europe and back, though they were used there later.”

“But …” Whatever argument he’d meant to make—blown off course, miscalculation—faded.

The hairs had risen on his forearms without his noticing.

“Of course, things happen,” she said, as though able to read his thoughts. “Accounts get garbled, too, over time and distance. Whoever told your mother might have been mistaken; she might have said something that the Reverend misconstrued. All those things are possible. But during the War, I had letters from Frank—he wrote as often as he could, up until they recruited him into MI6. After that, I often wouldn’t hear anything for months. But just before that, he wrote to me, and mentioned—just as casual chat, you know—that he’d run into something strange in the reports he was handling. A Spitfire had gone down, crashed—not shot down, they thought it must have been an engine failure—in Northumbria, and while it hadn’t burned, for a wonder—there was no sign of the pilot. None. And he did mention the name of the pilot, because he thought Jeremiah rather an appropriately doomed sort of name.”