The Legacy (35 page)

“White Cloud? May I come in?” she called tentatively, but there came no reply. Breathing fast, Caroline lifted the tent flap and went inside. White Cloud lay crumpled on the ground like so many old rags. Her gray hair was slick with sweat, matted to her scalp. With her bright eyes closed she was just an elderly lady, small and weak, and Caroline felt ashamed for fearing her. “White Cloud?” she whispered, kneeling beside her and shaking her as she had done Magpie. But White Cloud did not stir. She would not wake. Her skin radiated heat and her breathing was fast and shallow. Caroline had no idea what to do. She went back outside and then faltered, standing alone with her hands shaking, surrounded by people who suddenly had need of her help.

At Magpie’s insistence, Caroline took William back to the house with her. He was fast asleep, his fist wedged into his mouth. She put him in the coolest, shadiest spot she could find and began to explore the kitchen cupboards, looking for food she could take over to Magpie. Steeling herself, she went over to the bunkhouses and found three of the beds occupied. The stricken riders murmured in helpless embarrassment when she entered, assuring her that they were quite well even though they were too weak to rise. Caroline fetched pails of water and made each of them drink, before leaving a further cup of water beside each man’s bed. She had been hoping to find somebody able to ride to town and fetch the doctor, but there was no way any of those remaining could do so. The thought made panic close her throat. She went back to the house and began to make a soup from dried beans and the carcass of a chicken Magpie had roasted two days before. She also fetched a pumpkin up from the root cellar and cooked it up into a mash for William.

In the night William woke her up with thin cries of distress and she rose, holding him to stop his crying with comforting words and kisses. She laid him back down as he went back to sleep, then sat on the edge of the bed and cried quietly to herself, because it was all she had ever wanted to have a baby sleeping next to the bed, and to comfort it and love it. But this child was not hers, and Corin was not lying beside her, and this tiny taste of what should have happened, of how things should have been, was so bitter and sweet.

By morning, there was no denying that William had caught the fever as well. He slept too much, he was hot, and was groggy and limp when he woke. Caroline went over to the bunkhouses with the soup she had made, and then to the dugout to Magpie, pausing outside the teepee. She knew she should go in and try to wake White Cloud again, try to make her drink some water. But fear gripped her, a new and horrible fear born of instinct rather than conscious thought. It made the hair stand up on the back of her neck as she forced herself to lift the tent flap. White Cloud had not moved. She did not move. Not at all. Not even her chest, with the rise and fall of breathing. Caroline dropped the tent flap and backed away hurriedly, horror squeezing her insides, shaking her from head to foot. Breathing fast, she went down into the dugout.

Magpie was weaker, and harder to wake. The whites of her eyes looked grey, and her skin was even hotter. Caroline washed her face with a wet cloth, and ladled more water through her cracked lips.

“How is William? Is he sick?” Magpie whispered.

“He . . .” Caroline faltered, unwilling to speak the truth. “He has a fever. He is quiet, this morning,” she said gravely. Fear lit a dull light in Magpie’s eyes.

“And White Cloud?” she asked. Caroline looked away, busying her hands with the cloth, the water pail, the ladle.

“She is sleeping,” she said shortly. When she looked up Magpie was watching her, and she could not hold the girl’s gaze.

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help myself or White Cloud,” Magpie whispered, despairingly. “We must hope for Annie to come back soon, and to bring medicine.”

“That will take far too long!” Caroline said desperately. “Somebody will have to go! You can’t wait for Annie!” She stood up, pacing the dugout. “I’ll go,” she said in the end. “I’m well enough. I’ll go, and . . . I’ll take William with me. The doctor can see to him straight away and then come back with me and look after you and everybody else. It’s the best way.”

“You will take William with you . . . ?”

“It’s the best way. You can’t look after him, Magpie! I can do it. I’ll take the buggy and that way the doctor will see him this evening. Tonight, Magpie! He could have medicines
tonight
! Please. This
is
the best way.” Now that she had decided, she was desperate to start. She thought of White Cloud—her denuded, too-still form. “It might be too late, otherwise,” she added. Magpie’s eyes widened with fear, and she blinked tears away.

“Please, take care of him. Please come back quickly,” the girl implored.

“I will! I’ll send the doctor to you at once. It will be fine, Magpie—truly it will,” Caroline said, the speeding of her heart making her voice tremble. She took Magpie’s hand and squeezed it hard.

She loaded her vanity case, the carrycot and a bag of William’s things into the buggy and drove it as quickly as she dared, steering the horse between thickets of brush as she had watched Hutch and Corin do. The North Canadian was low between its banks and cool droplets of water spun up from the wheels as they took the ford, stirring up the sweet, dank, mineral smell of the river bottom. Pausing to rest herself and the horse, Caroline lifted William into her arms. He was still hot and cried fitfully each time he woke, but now he was sleeping, and his face had settled into a calm slump that so reminded Caroline of how Corin’s face had looked when he’d slept in his chair that she caught her breath. Thinking again, even for a second, that this might be Corin’s child stole the air from her lungs. She sat down in the sand with William in her lap, and she studied him, running a finger from his hairline to his toes. Long toes, spaced widely apart, just like Corin’s. His hair was dark, but his skin was lighter than either Magpie’s or Joe’s. His eyes, although brown, had a greenish ring around the iris that lightened them. In the furrow of the tiny brow, and the pout of his lips above a tucked-in chin, Caroline thought she saw traces of her husband. She cradled the child to her chest and she wept. She wept for Corin’s betrayal, and for the loss of him, and for the perfect, agonizing feeling of holding his baby to her.

T
he doctor took one look at Caroline’s frantic face and the child in her arms and ushered her inside. He took William and examined him closely, quizzing Caroline about the symptoms the adults at the ranch were showing and how long the illness had been rife. He listened to the baby’s heart and breathing, and felt the heat glowing in the soft skin.

“I think he will be well. His fever is not too high as yet, and his heart is strong, so please, try not to worry too much. Are you staying in town tonight? Good. Keep him cool. The main thing is to bring his fever down as soon as possible. Cold wet cloths, changed regularly. Give him three drops of this on his tongue, with a teaspoon of water afterwards, every four hours. It’s an antipyretic—it will help break the fever. And if he will eat or drink, try to let him do so. I believe he will recover quickly. Don’t look so afraid! You brought him to me in time. But I must leave for the ranch, for if it goes unchecked this sickness could prove more serious. You will follow on tomorrow, so I can check the child again?” Caroline nodded. “Good. Rest, for both of you. And cold cloths for your child. Are there any others at the ranch as young as this, or any of great age?” The doctor asked as he ushered her from the room.
Your child.

“There are no other children. White Cloud . . . she is advanced in years, although I cannot say how old she is,” she whispered. “But I think . . . I think she has died already,” she said, her throat constricting. The doctor shot her an incredulous glance.

“I must leave at once and travel through the night—I can hope to be there by sunrise. A fellow doctor can be found at this address—if William takes a turn for the worse, call upon him.” He handed Caroline a card, nodded briskly, and stalked from the room.

Caroline did not sleep. She fetched a basin of cold water from the hotel kitchens and laid damp cloths gently onto William’s skin, as instructed. She was loath to take her eyes from him, studying each line of his face, each hair on his head. She checked the clock obsessively, giving him his dose when four hours had passed. He woke up from time to time and studied her in return, grasping her finger in a strong grip that reassured her. By morning she was light-headed with fatigue, but William’s color was better, and his skin was cooler. He ate some rice pudding that the landlady had made for him, studying the women with a calm appraisal that made them smile. Caroline wrapped him in the crocheted blanket, laid him in the carrycot, put a pacifier into his chubby hands and gazed at him. He could be hers—the doctor had immediately thought so. He could be the child of a respectable white woman—nothing about his person marked him out as a Ponca. Indeed, he could have been hers, she thought. He should have been hers.

Caroline was reluctant to go back to the ranch. She should have left hours before, with the sunrise, but the thought of starting back made her so tired inside that she averted her eyes from the black buggy, parked outside in the yard, and from the corral where the buggy horse had spent the night, chewing hay and scratching its sweaty head against the fence. The doctor would see to the sick, and when Caroline returned she would have to give William back. She thought of White Cloud’s body, lying untended in the teepee. She thought of Magpie, helpless and sick. She thought of life, stretching on for year after empty year, and all of them without Corin. But when she looked at William she smiled and felt something swelling up inside her. Something that pushed the other thoughts aside and made it bearable to go on. She could not go back. It was a prospect as black and terrifying as the grave Hutch had cut into the grassland to take Corin’s coffin.
She could not go back
.

Across town, plumes of steam rose from the railway track. Caroline walked in that direction, her case in one hand, the carrycot in the other. The weight of these two items made her unsteady on her feet, but she moved purposefully, her mind now empty of thought, because her thoughts were too dark. The platform was wreathed in steam and the hot metal smell that had accompanied her to Woodward in the first place. But this immense, black locomotive was facing the other way. Northward, to Dodge City, Kansas City and beyond. Back the way she had come, away from the prairie that had torn out her heart.

“Look, William, look at the train!” she exclaimed, holding the baby up for his first sight of such a thing. William eyed it distrustfully, putting out a hand to grasp at a wisp of steam as it scrolled by. Then the guard’s whistle startled them both and the train exhaled a vast, ponderous cough of steam, its wheels easing into motion. A latecomer ran onto the platform, wrenched open a carriage door and leapt aboard, just as the train began to inch slowly along the platform.

“Come along, ma’am! Quickly now, or you’ll miss it!” the man smiled, holding out his hand to her. Caroline hesitated. Then she took the man’s hand.

Chapter 6

M
eredith’s laughter was the rarest of things. Even at the summer ball, or at the dinner parties she sometimes hosted—where children were not allowed and we would creep from our beds to eavesdrop—I hardly ever heard it. She would just smile, and sometimes make a single, satisfied sound in the back of her throat when something pleased her. Like most little girls, laughter came as easily to me as breathing. I remember thinking it must be something that got used up as you got older, as if laughter was like a mass of colored ribbons, bundled up inside you, and once it had all spooled out, that was it.

But I did hear it once, and I was stunned. Not just by the sound—high and loud, with a rusty edge like an old hinge—but by what had caused it. An overcast day, not long before Henry disappeared, with a quiet breeze blowing. We were in Mickey and Mo’s motor home, listening to the radio and playing rummy with Dinny, who had a slight temperature and had been told to stay indoors, much to his disgust. I tried to tempt him out, up into the tree house to play there instead, but he did what Mo told him. He was more obedient than Beth and I. The camp was quiet, most of the adults out working. Outside, sheets were drying on a line strung between the vehicles. They drifted in and out of view through the window, moving with a regular swell and fall. I could see them, in the corner of my eye, as I shifted my thighs against the vinyl bench and silently urged Beth to discard a four or a Jack. So I saw it first—the change in the view from the window. The sudden oddness of the sheets, the color, the way the sky above them thickened.

The sheets were on fire. I gaped at them, stunned by this unexpected thing. Pale yellow and blue flames tore across them in odd patterns, scribbling lines of charred black, pouring smoke up in clouds, reducing the fabric to dark shreds that tore away like cobwebs. There was a shout from outside and Dinny got up, leaned past me to look out of the window.

“Look!” I gasped uselessly.

“Erica! Why didn’t you say!” Beth admonished me as Dinny ran out and we followed. Outside, two women who had been laid up with the same bug as Dinny were yanking the sheets from the line, stamping at them frantically. The plastic-coated line itself had melted and fallen into pieces, scattering the burning remains of the sheets on the ground, which was perhaps for the best. On the side of the motor home, an ugly, brownish smear showed how close the flames had got.

“How the
bloody hell
did that happen?” one of the women swore, catching her breath as the last flames went out. Hands on hips, surveying the smouldering remnants.

“If we hadn’t been here . . . Mo only hung those just before she went off—they can’t even have been all the way dry yet!” the other exclaimed, fixing us kids with a serious eye.

“We were inside playing cards! Swear to God!” Dinny said emphatically. Beth and I nodded in frantic support. The smoke got into my nose, made me sneeze. The first woman crouched, picked up a shred of fabric with her fingertips, sniffed at it.

“Paraffin,” she said grimly.

Beth and I left then, running as soon as we were out of sight. We skirted the stables, looked in the coach house, found Henry in the woodshed. He had a flat plastic bottle of something, with a squeezy red nozzle on it. I thought of the patterns the flames had made, almost as though they’d been following lines. He put the bottle back on a high shelf, turned to face us, smiling.

“What?” He shrugged.

“You could have set the vans on fire. You could have killed somebody,” Beth said quietly, watching him with such a grave and serious look that I was even more upset, even more afraid.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said loftily. The stink of paraffin clung to him, was on his hands.

“It
was
you!” I declared.

“Prove it.” He shrugged again, smiling now.

“I’m telling. You could have killed somebody,” Beth repeated, and now Henry stopped smiling.

“You’re not supposed to go to the camp. You won’t tell,” he sneered. Beth turned on her heel, stalked away toward the house. I followed, and so did Henry, and soon it became a race, and we thundered into the hall, shouting for Meredith, out of breath.

We thought that it was too serious not to tell. We thought that, even though Henry was her favorite, she would have to reprimand him for this. Making dogs sick was one thing, but Beth was right. The fire could have killed somebody. Even for Henry, it was too much.

“Henry set fire to the Dinsdales’ washing!” Beth got her words out first, gasping them as Meredith looked up from the letter she was writing, sitting at the davenport in the drawing room.

“What is all this racket?” Meredith asked.

“We were at the camp, and I know we’re not supposed to go, but we were only playing cards, and Henry set fire to the sheets that were hanging out on the line! He did it with paraffin from the shed! And the motor home nearly caught on fire, and somebody might have been killed!” Beth said, all at once but enunciating clearly.

Meredith took off her glasses, folded them calmly. “Is this true?” she asked Henry.

“No!
I
haven’t been near their filthy campsite,” he said.

“Liar!” I shouted.

“Erica!” Meredith silenced me, the word like a whip crack.

“So how did this fire start, if indeed there has been a fire?”

“Of course there’s been a fire! Why would I say—” Beth protested.

“Well, Elizabeth, you also said you weren’t going to associate with the tinkers, as I have repeatedly requested, so how am I to know when you are lying and when you are not?” Meredith asked, evenly. Beth clamped her lips together, her eyes fierce. “Well, Henry? Do you know how the fire might have started?”

“No! Except—well . . . these two seem to get on with the gyppos like a house on fire. Perhaps that’s what did it,” he said, looking up at her carefully, almost smiling, gauging her reaction. Meredith studied him for a moment, and then she laughed. That rare, loud sound that startled us all, even Henry. Two bright spots of pleasure bloomed in his cheeks.

I
n spite of the fact that Caroline never, apparently, went to visit her in Surrey, in spite of her no-show at Charles’ funeral, Meredith did come back to live here with her. Perhaps life got too hard, with no husband and two children. Perhaps Caroline needed looking after, and Meredith loved her in spite of everything. And she was to be the next Lady Calcott, after all; perhaps she thought it was her duty to return to the family seat. I’ll never know, of course, because the letters stop upon her return. I think of the care and attention she showed Caroline when she was ancient—feeding her, dressing her, reading to her. What if she did all that and still got no love back for her pains? What if she’d hoped for some deathbed confession that never came—that her mother had always loved her, that she had been a good daughter? What if she’d had dreams of marrying again, of starting over? Perhaps she expected Caroline to die soon after she returned, and had ideas about bringing the house back to life, of tempting a new husband with it, of having more children to fill it? But like the queen, Caroline lived on and on; and the heir grew old, waiting to ascend. I think it must have been something like that—some crushed hopes, some vast disappointment. To make Meredith turn out the way she did. To make her treat our mother so harshly, when our mother refused to make the same sacrifices.

These are my thoughts on Monday morning, as I dress in warm cords and slide the teething ring into my pocket. The bell makes a cheerful little giggling sound. I go to the study, look in the desk drawers for a pen and a pad of paper and stuff them into my bag. Outside is another of those crystal-clear days, painfully bright. I try to feel the optimism I felt the last time the sky was this blue, and we went to Avebury, and Eddie was here to make us glad. I leave Beth on the phone to Maxwell, bargaining for the return of her son. She sits by the kitchen window in a shaft of incandescent light that blanches out her expression.

The sun is low in the sky, inescapable. It stabs at me through the windscreen, lances up from the wet road so that I must drive through a blinding wall of light. I turn gingerly out of the village onto the main road and see a familiar figure walking along the frosty white verge. Light clothes, as ever; hands thrust into his pockets the only concession to the biting cold. Something leaps up inside me. I pull over, wind down the window and call to him. Dinny shades his face with one hand, hiding his eyes, leaving only his jaw visible—that flat line of his mouth that can look so serious.

“Where are you headed?” I ask. The cold stabs at my chest, makes my eyes water.

“To the bus stop,” Dinny replies.

“Well, I gathered that. Where then? I’m going into Devizes—do you want a lift?” Dinny walks over to the car, drops his hand from his face. With the sun this strong, I can see that his eyes are brown, not black. The warm color of conkers; touches of tortoiseshell in his hair.

“Thanks. That’d be great,” he nods.

“Shopping?” I ask, as I pull away from the verge, the engine sluggish with frost.

“I thought I’d get something for the baby. And I need a few supplies. What about you?”

“I’m going to the library—they’ll have internet access there, won’t they?”

“I don’t know—never been in, myself,” he admits, a touch sheepishly.

“For shame,” I tease.

“There’s more than enough drama in the newspapers, without reading made-up dramas as well,” he smiles. “Checking your email?”

“Well, yes, but I’m also going to look something up in the births, marriages and deaths index. I’ve been tracking down a Calcott family secret.”

“Oh?”

“I found a picture of my great-grandma, Caroline—do you remember her?”

“Not really. I think I saw her from afar a couple of times.”

“She was American. She came over to marry Lord Calcott late in 1904, but I’ve found this picture of her in 1904, in America, with a baby.” I fumble blindly in my bag and pass it to him. “Nobody seems to know what happened to that baby—there’s no record of her marrying before, but I’ve also found a letter that suggests otherwise.”

“Well, the baby probably died there, before she came over.” He shrugs slightly.

“Probably,” I concede. “But I just want to check—just in case he’s mentioned in the records. If he is . . . if I can prove that Caroline lost a child—another child, since we know she lost a daughter here in Barrow Storton—it might help explain why she was the way she was.”

Dinny says nothing to this. He studies the photo, frowning slightly.

“Perhaps,” he murmurs, after a while.

“I’ve been trying to find out, you see, why the Calcotts—the earlier Calcotts—had such a bee in their bonnets about you Dinsdales. Caroline and Meredith, I mean. I’ve been trying to find out why they behaved the way they did toward your family,” I say, suddenly keen to have his support in this quest.

“A bee in their bonnets?” he echoes quietly. “That’s a gentle euphemism.”

“I know,” I say apologetically. I change the subject. “So, how’s Honey doing?” We chat about his sister for a while, until I try to park in Devizes and am met by swarms of people, row upon row of parked cars.

“What on earth is all this?” I exclaim.

“Sale mania,” Dinny sighs. “Try Sheep Street.”

Eventually, I creep the car into a space, bumping the one next to me when I open the door. Skeins of exhaust twist up into the sky and the town hums with voices, the ring of purposeful footsteps. It all seems too loud, and I feel as though the quiet at Storton Manor has snuck into me, somehow. It’s performed a stealth coup; and now I notice its absence like something vital gone.

“Do you want a lift back as well?” I offer.

“How long will you be?”

“I’m not sure. An hour and a half? Maybe a bit longer?”

“OK—thanks. I’ll meet you back here?”

“How about in that café on the High Street—the one with the blue awning? It’ll be warmer if one of us has to wait,” I suggest. Dinny nods, twists his hand in salute and strides away between the packed cars.

The library is on Sheep Street, so I don’t have far to walk. The fan above the doors pours out a stifling wave of warmth and I stop the second I am through, struggle out of my coat and scarf in the cloying heat. It’s almost empty inside, with a few people perusing the shelves and a severe-looking woman at the desk who is busy with something and does not look up at me. Seated at a computer, I search for deaths in 1903, 1904 and 1905, to cast a wide net, and the names Calcott and Fitzpatrick, in London and in Wiltshire. I skim these results for the deaths of children under the age of two. My pad of paper remains blank on the desk beside me. After an hour, I scrawl on it:
He’s not here
.

I stare at the last list of names on the screen, until my eyes slide through the pixels, focus on a point in the middle distance. The baby probably died in America. That, and whatever happened to make Caroline leave the man who signed himself C, might even be what made her come over to England in the first place, and could certainly have contributed to her distance, her frigidity. So why can’t I let it go at that? What is it that is pulling at a far corner of my mind, begging me to grasp it? Something else—another thing—that I know and have forgotten. I wonder how many of these things are lurking in my head, waiting for me to chase them out. I pull the teething ring from my pocket, run my fingers around the smooth, immaculate ivory. Inside the bell, on the rim, is the hallmark. A tiny lion cartouche, an anchor, a gothic letter G, and something I struggle to make out. I turn it to the light, hold it close to my face. A flame? A tree—a skinny tree like a cypress? A hammer? The light bounces from it. It’s a hammer head. Vertical, as if viewed from the side when striking something.