Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy

by Henry Gee

  Chapter 17. Seminarian

   

  Gascony, France, Earth, September, 2031

   

  O for a beaker full of the warm South!

  John Keats—Ode to a Nightingale

   

  “Domingo, would you do the honors?”

  “Yes, Jadis, of course.” The big man in the radioactively loud aloha shirt and baggy Bermuda shorts waved his ham-sized hands over the table. The chatter all around it ceased at once. Nothing could be heard but birdsong, the late summer wind sighing in the high branches of the spinney, the lazy plop of a frog into the pond and the distant rasp of the grasshoppers in the field that opened at the end of the garden.

  “Benedic Domine nos et haec tua dona quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi per Christum Dominum nostrum, Amen.”

  The chatter resumed. Jadis had been standing in the doorway of the back kitchen. Walking out onto the terrace, she added an enormous earthenware bowl of lemon chicken and rice to the already laden table. She sat down at its head, slid off her sandals and buried her feet in the furry, dependable bulk of Fairbanks, her gigantic golden retriever, who looked up momentarily, emitted a contented nut-brown growl, and went back to sleep on the cool tiles under the table. Almost.

  Although very much fulfilling his job description as Mobile Self-Warming Hot Water Bottle and Guard Dog (Fierce) for his mistress, he still kept half an eye open, ever watchful for his arch-enemy, Horrible, the squashed-faced tabby that had adopted the household three years earlier, bringing with it a cloud of fleas that had made everyone scratch for weeks. The litter of kittens discovered under a pile of dirty laundry, some weeks later, was the only outward sign of the animal’s gender. But Horrible was in no mood to tease the dog today. Her tiny mind had already been distracted. She slunk off towards the long grass at the edge of the pond, in search of smaller animals to persecute.

  Jadis looked up at the human company, and felt a mixture of emotions. The glow of achievement; the twinge of regret that no more had been achieved; and yet, excitement about the future. This was the final Saint-Rogatien field crew, at the end of six years of excavating the enormous, ancient pyramid about which the modern village of Saint-Rogatien clustered. This was the final dinner, at the end of the final season. She was in the mood for a quiet celebration.

  The dig had closed down that very afternoon. The last earthmover had replaced the overburden; grass-seed had been sown; and the mayor of Saint-Rogatien had had a little ceremony to mark the passing of a remarkable but ultimately frustrating archeological endeavor. In the days ahead, Jadis would pack up the lab specimens, crating them for Cambridge, where, no doubt, they would make a few doctorate projects for graduate students to come. And in the meantime, she and Jack were clearing the decks for something new.

  Jack sat at the other end of the trestle table, laid out in the dappled shade of an ancient sweet-chestnut tree, its fruits already swelling. He returned her gaze, and Jadis momentarily lost interest in the rest of the world’s affairs, as the two of them exchanged in a moment what might otherwise have taken many hours of speech. Oblivious to the swirl of conversation around them, Jack raised one mock-serious eyebrow, just for her. We have our news, his ice-blue eyes seemed to say, but not yet. Her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a giggle, and then, reprovingly as a mother, she affected a mental finger-wag: she was the hostess, and had her guests to look after! And so with a small shake of her head, she broke the link, and the noise of the party flooded back. As if to compensate for her reverie, she waved her hands animatedly at her guests, imploring them to begin, to dig in, dish up, have more wine.

  Not that they needed any encouragement.

  At Jack’s left, Jadis’ technician Primrose Tsien, and her current graduate student Faye Callaghan, were laughing uproariously as Avi Malkeinu, between them (and his arms round both) was telling a probably exaggerated and undoubtedly salacious story about his latest stint as an Israeli army reservist.

  At Jack’s right, the aloha-shirted Domingo was deep in conversation with Mathilde Reynard, a postdoctoral researcher visiting Le Dig for a stint from the University of Montpellier. To Mathilde’s right, Eric Onoye, a graduate student with Ernestine Yanga in Nairobi, was laughing with Marjorie MacLennane. The MacLennanes, now retired, had broken off a motoring tour to visit Saint-Rogatien and close another chapter in the story of Jadis and Jack, their last and most favourite protégés.

  Which left her mentor, and Jack’s, Emeritus Professor Roger Sutherland MacLennane seated at her right, in panama hat and off-white linen suit—a startling change after the rumpled dark suit he’d invariably worn in Cambridge. He looked at her with solicitous eyes, magnified by his bottle-glass spectacles.

  “Are you feeling all right, Jadis?”

  “Roger—thank you, of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  Jadis liked to think of the 2031 crew as her Dream Team, the brightest and best she’d ever assembled. First, and greatest, there was Avi, who’d just published a terse and thoughtful paper on his analysis of the still-mysterious artifacts from what came to be known locally as Le Dig, artifacts that she, his doctorate supervisor, had named as ‘Remillardian’ in her own thesis, two years earlier. These featureless, geometrically perfect, polygonal coins of flint were the only signs of a lost and ancient civilization that had dominated this part of the world for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, except that their meaning—and the identity of the makers—remained frustratingly elusive.

  And yet in the heat of this never-ending battle with the unknown (and at her kitchen table, no less) she and Avi had fused his talent as a data wrangler with her ability to slice through a problem to the core, and in so doing, they had created what a commentator in Antiquity had called ‘analytic archeology’. When asked to define analytic archeology, though, Jadis had always demonstrated her own agenda. “I prefer to call it ‘evidence-based’ archeology,” she’d said in an interview with veteran science writer Marcel Montgolfier in Paris-Match, the one accompanied by the unintentionally sexy photographs that always made Jack laugh. “We see what’s there,” she’d said, her words printed opposite a moodily lit photo of a dark-eyed, wild-haired siren she would never believe was actually her, “and we tell it like it is. Not how we think it should be, or how it ought to go. Just what’s there. That’s much harder to do that you might think. For you can bet that whenever someone holds too closely to their assumptions, these will be the first things to be proven wrong.”

  She liked to think that these were the precepts she held most dear—and that she would never have come to these conclusions without having Jack to hand, whose grasp of landscape was wholly instinctive, and had forced her, as if in opposition, to think harder and more logically than she might otherwise have done.

  Jadis and Avi had not long returned from Avi’s doctorate exam, and a rare trip to Cambridge, at which she had met Ernestine Yanga for the first time. Professor Yanga had been Jack’s external examiner, and Jack had told her not to believe the stories she’d heard about the Kenyan academic’s ferocity. Avi’s thesis defense had been brief, almost routine. “Dr Malkeinu’s work is so bold, and so brash,” said a smiling Professor Yanga, “that he might find himself in very hot water. And I have longed to meet you, Dr Markham. I can see where that husband of yours gets it from.”

  Jadis had said nothing, but looked up with a half-smile of inquisition.

  “You don’t know? Why, my dear, it’s you! Your fortitude.”

  Jadis had wanted to tell her that no, it had been the other way round—that if only she knew—that without Jack to tie her to the Earth she would probably have long since been carried away like chaff on the wind.

  Over the previous two years, Avi had been called up regularly to serve two-month stints in the Israeli Army as a reservist, especially as the perpetually broiling Middle-East Situation was entering a more than usually sticky patch. With the mild, peacemaking Kingdom of Jordan having been swept aside by the green and black
flags of the ever-advancing pan-Islamic Khalifa that had already swallowed most of the rest of the region, the incoming tide of war threatened to break through the ever-fragile, ever-shifting dunes of armed truce. If the Khalifa defeated the still-resisting Saudis, there would be nobody left to fight—except the old adversary. Israel had decided that Avi’s scientific skills were too valuable to be wasted on the dead past when they could be applied to the uncertain future. So Avi would be gone in a week: as it looked, this time, permanently.

  But perhaps, one day, Avi had said, he’d get back to science, for he had something up his sleeve—a proposal for a comprehensive survey of whole Mount Carmel cave complex, where Neanderthals and modern humans seemed to have lived, alternately, like some great Palaeolithic time-share, swapping the same caves, over and over, for a hundred thousand years.

  He’d discussed this deep into the night with Jadis as he finished his thesis, papers strewn on the kitchen table and onto the floor (where, in one of those hazards of fieldwork, he found them the morning after, decorated with the remains of a semi-digested dormouse that Horrible had regurgitated). Our views of Mount Carmel, he’d said, were conditioned by our assumptions, that Neanderthals were the has-beens, and humans the destined inheritors of the Earth. But if there was one thing (he’d said) that Jadis had taught him, it was that hindsight is a very poor guide to understanding prehistory.

  In any case, hindsight couldn’t tell us why Mount Carmel had been a barrier to the expansion of humans out of Africa for at least fifty thousand years. The answer, if you looked at the evidence, was clear: humans had been bottled up in Africa because the Neanderthals had kept them there: a Neanderthal civilization at Mount Carmel that could have matched the civilization in Europe of which Saint-Rogatien might have been the first sign.

  Ah, such castles in the air, Jadis had thought, bringing Avi down to Earth with yet another scheme to classify Remillardian artifacts. But as things stood now, who knew if she’d ever hear from Avi again?

  Not that Avi himself seemed to have any particular worries, and why should he? Here he was, in La France Profonde, in his favourite situation, that is, between two pretty, vivacious women who were plainly hanging on his every word. As Jadis looked over this, the Last Supper, she did not know—how could she have done?—what discoveries Primrose Tsien (squeezed, giggling, in the crook of Avi’s muscular right arm), and all-Texan cowgirl Faye Callaghan (embraced by his equally beefy left) might make, what renown they might achieve—or none? And one might ask the same of Mathilde Reynard, her slim, pale, freckled form like a thin white ash against the dark thundercloud that was Domingo to her left; and Eric Onoye, laughing with Marjorie. What would the future hold for them?

  But wherever they might go, and wherever their lives might take them, she silently wished them all the good fortune she’d had, despite everything. And maybe some of them might like to stay on, for she was convinced that Saint-Rogatien was just the beginning of their adventures.

  Caught once again in daydream, she paused, stopped what she was eating and, fork held in mid-air, looked up at Jack, now deep in conversation with Domingo and Mathilde. Her expression would have been unintelligible to anyone who’d witnessed its brief passage across her face, but the fathomless glints in her eyes turned to sparkles of curiosity, and then laughter: for in one of those random lulls that punctuate dinner-party conversations she heard:

  “…Domingo García Vasquez Santéria Sanchopanza de Orellanzana von Hohenzollern und Taxis.”

  Jack sat back, incredulous. “If I might say so, Domingo,” he said, “that’s quite a handle.” Mathilde leaned forwards on her elbows, gazing in open-mouthed awe at the huge man. Domingo just smiled one of his winningly tombstone-toothed smiles and said, in his characteristically resonant, almost impossibly deep voice: “Of course, my friends just call me ‘Pongo.’”

  There was a brief but significant spell of utter silence, and then everyone started laughing at once. Fairbanks, startled from sleep, sat up, tail wagging, jumping from guest to guest, eager to learn the reason for all the commotion.

  Her first sight of Domingo had been when, two years earlier, she had been hurriedly making herself a sandwich before taking Fairbanks for a walk. All of a sudden a vast shadow loomed in the ever-open kitchen door, and for a fleeting moment she could have sworn there’d been a total eclipse. Looking up, she gasped, as the apparition before her resolved from an inchoate blur into quite indisputably the ugliest man she had ever seen.

  “Please, may I come in?” he’d asked. And so Jadis invited this monstrous troll over the threshold. It was one of those days when Jadis had been trying to do too many things at once. “Dr Markham, please, sit down, and let me deal with that.” So without knowing quite how or why (let alone how he knew her name), Jadis found herself sitting at the table eating a sandwich and drinking a mug of tea that he had made for her. This gave her plenty of time to study this strange, uninvited guest.

  He was, indeed, immense in every direction. Well over six feet tall and broad to match, he had an immense nose; an immense mane of thick, black, spiky hair that ran down the nape of his neck; immense steam-hammer hands, and teeth that looked like Stonehenge. But the perpetually cheeky twinkle of his eyes (each buried beneath a brow seemingly the size of a small hedgehog) revealed this same immensity on the inside, too. As she was later to discover, he was immensely kind, generous, gentle, cultured, sensitive and hardworking. He was also immensely strong, and became known around the village as the L’incroyable Hulk.

  He had originally come from Andalusia in southern Spain, he said, but had traveled, and spoke fluent English (and several other languages) with an accent so slight that one would not have been able to identify its location. Jadis had invited him to join her on her daily round of the village, an act that gave an anchor for her day as well as necessary exercise for the dog. She also found it a great way to get to know new people, for the fame of Le Dig had, over the years, attracted many callers, some of them unusual or even frightening, which was one reason she was grateful for Fairbanks, especially when Jack was away on one of his own explorations, or—now that Roger MacLennane had retired—on business, as Director of the Institute.

  As they bowled along the cow-parsley’d lane that led from the back garden in a slow grade up to the village square—Fairbanks bounding on ahead, twirling his feathered tail like a propeller—they made a contrasting pair. He in what she came to realize was his invariable uniform of Bermuda shorts and Hawai’ian shirt (making his bulk seem even greater), she in the long mackintosh she reserved for walking and shopping. He explained that he was a Catholic priest, newly ordained, who had (he said) ‘been given some time off for good behavior’ before seeking a flock of his own. Even just the way he said things made her giggle like a little girl. She imagined him as a friendly fairy-tale giant who invites small children to play in the gardens of his castle, simply from the goodness of his heart.

  There was a long tradition in Catholicism, Domingo had explained, for clerics to go out into the world, and even be scientists for a while, all the better to appreciate the Mind of the Creator. His greatest hero had been the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, usually noted for his role in the Piltdown hoax of 1912 and for some challenging ideas about collective intelligence, but revered among paleontologists as a skilled field worker. But Domingo had also become something of an expert on the Abbé Gaston de Bonnard, a tireless archeologist and man of God who had worked in this part of France in the late nineteenth century. Would it be possible for him, Domingo asked, to ‘do the Teilhardian thing’ and join Le Dig? Perhaps for a few weeks? Jadis had said yes even before she’d known she had, and Domingo had been there ever since.

  The dinner was beginning to wind down, just as the golden Sun touched the western horizon beyond the village, making a dramatic silhouette of the church on top of the hill that had ruled their lives and dreams for so long. Jack and the students cleared the plates (Marjorie laid a hand on Jadis’ arm before she c
ould stand: “let someone else do the work, dear”); candles were fetched and lit (bringing out a flutter of moths); coffee was made, brandy fetched from the cellar, and the company pushed their chairs back. Roger—ever the most refined judge of such things—felt that it was time for a toast. Rising to his feet, he asked the company to refill their glasses with whatever was handy and raise a toast to “Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards, and all who sailed in her!” The enthusiastic response sent a murder of crows flapping from the spinney.

  Clinks of glasses, more chatter, and then Eric Onoye said—“Yes, Professor MacLennane, but who, precisely, did sail in her? That is the question!”

  It was the one question they could not answer, the brick wall that had stopped every avenue of their investigation. Dozens of trenches and tunnels had been essayed into the cliff beneath the church under Jadis’ direction, and they had found tons of animal bones and plant remains as well as the rare, mystifying Remillardian artefacts. But of human bones they found not one: not a single finger-bone in six years of careful, fingertip search; not even one tooth, despite the arduous sieving of enough sediment to have buried the hilltop church steeple-deep, twice over.

  If the megalith on which Saint-Rogatien church now stood, and around whose slopes the village had gathered, had been a pyramid hundreds of thousands of years earlier, as Jack had believed, then any capping masonry had long since been eroded away or stripped, if it had been there at all, and there were no signs of voids that might have hinted at some unvisited tomb or sarcophagus. The bulk of the megalith—its filling—had been like a compost heap, a disordered mass of earth and rocks, more or less glued together with the limestone precipitating out of the groundwater, making a breccia, a kind of geological blancmange whose antiquity is notoriously hard to judge.

  This was, indeed, another problem. Jadis had called in teams of scientists from all over the world, each an expert in one or other of the many arcane techniques of age determination, from electron spin resonance to amino-acid racemization, from optically stimulated luminescence to uranium-thorium dating—and yet each had come up with their own estimates, to which they held with the stubbornness of the several Blind Men of Hindustan in their variously confused contemplation of the Elephant.

  In the end, the best that anyone could offer was that the megalith had been built sometime between 800,000 and 250,000 years ago, but of the makers there had been no sign. It could have been that there were several different races of maker, different species even, each one adding a little more to the megalith over millennia.

  And so they all talked of the depth of civilization, the antiquity of intent, that had been the legacy of Saint-Rogatien, confirming Jack’s suspicions gathered in a single flying visit so long before—a visit undertaken as a desperate, last attempt to shore up a collapsing doctorate project, and so as not to distract Jadis, then in her final undergraduate year, from studying for her finals.

  “You know,” said Domingo, “what I find most intriguing about the whole panorama is not so much antiquity, but recency.”

  “How do you mean?” Roger said. Domingo had a way of holding an audience, so that whenever he spoke, or even seemed like he might wish to, everyone instinctively turned their heads to him in expectation.

  “Well, do you remember the whole business about Homo floresiensis?” All nodded in assent. The discovery of a strange species of tiny human-like creature that had lived on an isolated island in Indonesia until almost historical times had been the archeological sensation of the turn of the century. “Just think about it. If these creatures were wandering about until as recently as—whatever it was—ten thousand years—how do you know they’re not still around?”

  “But they aren’t!” said Avi—“people have looked! Even though they’re tiny, they couldn’t have crawled under rocks or something…”

  “Hey, aren’t you forgetting something?” This from Faye, disentangling herself from Avi, lighting a cigarette and looking at him sternly: “you know what they say about hobbits and holes in the ground? Maybe we haven’t found all the holes!”

  Laughter, and, had anybody noticed, a sage twinkle in Domingo’s eyes: tiny, newborn stars emerging from beneath the interstellar gas-clouds of his eyebrows.

  “To be sure, Flores is perhaps not such a good example—too isolated, too far away. But what about here? When did our pyramid-builders stop building their pyramids? And why?”

  “Perhaps modern Cro-Magnons came in and stopped them?” ventured Mathilde.

  “That’s, of course, possible,” Domingo replied. “However, consider, if you will, the Neanderthals. We have always had them in our sights for Saint-Rogatien. But that might be an error, might it not? Think of the age of the thing—when the Neanderthals first appeared, our Great Pyramid of Saint-Rogatien might well have been more than half a million years old!”

  “And your point is…?” teased Avi. He and Domingo had become firm friends, and had often been out on Le Dig together, invariably accompanied by Avi’s ghetto blaster and one of Domingo’s old Rolling Stones tapes. As they sat, one each side of a great box-frame sieve, shaking out and winnowing the sediment for tiny plant remains or flint flakes, their eager conversation was as dense—or as airy—as the clouds of tan dust they produced, wafting across the site.

  “My point, my dear Avram Yitzchak, is that their antiquity is a side-issue. But what, I ask again, of their recency? As far as I know, the latest known Neanderthal comes from my—er—neck of the woods, and is around twenty-two thousand years old…”

  “Twenty-one!” corrected Primrose, giggling.

  “I do apologise, and I thank you for making my next point… that the age keeps dropping. Will it keep dropping forever? How will we know when we’ve seen the last of the Neanderthals? It’s a bit like,” he waved his great hands expansively “well, it’s like trying to know if you’ve got rid of every last one of Horrible’s little friends!” He paused. “You can’t!” They all laughed at this: September was peak cat-flea season and Jadis and Primrose had been busy fumigating all the bedrooms.

  Domingo was now a dark shadow in the deepening night, visible only by the glint of candle flames in his eyes: indeed, people could now only be seen from reflections, glances of yellow light on spectacle frames here, a curve of the face there, making them all look like a collection of off-duty models for one of Goya’s Witches’ Sabbaths. This only enhanced the drama of Domingo’s speech: he was a Caliban, stalking the forests of night that run along the edges of dreams.

  “You know, my friends, I shouldn’t be surprised if the Neanderthals survived, perhaps just long enough to have come into the very earliest legends of the human race. And perhaps even more recently than that.”

  There was a long pause, and then came a strange new voice.

  “Ha’nephilim ha’yu ha’aretz ba’yamim…” It was Avi, his eyes focused on some immeasurable distance, as if speaking to a lost past. The table was hushed by his unwonted seriousness. He had never been known to speak any language in their company besides English or French. This was a private side to Avi the existence of which nobody had been aware. None, that is, except Domingo.

  In their long hours together at the dig, Domingo and Avi—the Catholic priest and the Jewish atheist—had turned, inevitably, to religion. Domingo had wondered at what he saw as the manifest contradictions of Avi’s upbringing; that he’d been raised in a Marxist kibbutz community in a land reclaimed by the Jews. “This is a delicious irony, Avram Yitzchak, is it not? That as soon as the Jews found the Land of Israel, after much heroism and effort and struggle, they abandon their religion! And—this is all the more intriguing—those Jews in Israel who cling most firmly to their religion deny Israel’s very right to exist!”

  Avi just laughed. It was not that he was uncomfortable, or that he thought Domingo was trying to convert him, because he knew his friend too well for that. It was just that he completely failed to see what Domingo was getting at.

  So, over the months, Domin
go tried a different tack. The argument that had worked was that if Avi was really as serious about archeology and antiquity as he appeared to be, he might find it all the more enriching were he to have a better appreciation of history, especially his own. “After all, Dear Avram,” Domingo had said, “the Jews are the custodians of the deepest traditions of written history in the western world. Yet bereshit is a fickle mistress. Who really knows how far back that history goes?”

  It was the mention of bereshit—the Hebrew for ‘In The Beginning,’ and the name for the book of Genesis—that had made Avram sit up with a start and look with yet further admiration at his strange new friend, whose erudition seemed bottomless.

  The company now looked at Avi in equal awe, as if he’d just chanted a spell, whether for good or evil they could not tell. Only Domingo had sufficient presence of mind to answer. “Avram’s words are entirely apposite: gigantes autem erant super terram in diebus illis—in those days there were giants that walked the Earth,” he said. “And let us not forget what the giants were up to.” He muttered a string of Latin under his breath, as if trying to bookmark the place in his mind before translating it: “Ah yes, postquam enim ingressi sunt filii… um... Dei ad filias hominum illaeque genuerunt isti sunt. Hmm… potentes a saeculo viri…. er… famosi.” And then, more clearly: “That these giants were great men, who interbred with the daughters of men, who bore great and mighty sons.”

  “But, Domingo, my friend,” said Avi, sitting back in his chair in his usual relaxed way, the seriousness of his face lost in the shadow beyond the table. “The word nephilim in Ivrit does not translate as ‘giants’. It means ‘the fallen ones’…” Avi and Domingo now had the floor before a rapt audience.

  “But that’s precisely it, Avi. They were giants because they were great men, not necessarily that they were aliens or trolls or Neanderthals or anything like that, because the Bible would not have the appropriate language for such things. But we know that they fell, before the Flood, but before they did, they intermarried with human beings. Perhaps the Bible is telling us about human beings and—er—other people, before the floods at the end of the Ice Age? Now, I do not believe that every word of the Bible is true, because it can’t be, but when something is said so plainly…”

  Domingo’s point tailed off into silence.

  “Perhaps we can put Domingo’s ideas to the test,” said Jack, alleviating the suddenly brooding mood.

  “A-ha!” exclaimed Roger, “I just knew you and Jadis had been up to something!”

  “Well, possibly. But we have been thinking of our next move now that we’re winding things up here at Saint-Rogatien. I’ve been scouting around quite a lot, as you know…” General laughter and some groans. Jack’s habits of wandering off for days and returning looking like an ill-used tramp were well known. “And I think I’ve found something rather… well, odd.”

  No laughs at this—it was Jack’s instinct for following the bones of the Earth that had brought them Saint-Rogatien in the first place. Everyone was eager to learn of this new adventure, as if the legacy of Saint-Rogatien—after six seasons of nail-snagging, knee-grazing, backbreaking labor—was already long forgotten.

  “So I took Jadis to see it, on her birthday…” Wolf-whistles from Avi: catcalls from the girls.

  “…and she likes it, which of course is the most important thing…” laughs, hoots of “hear! hear!” and “well done, Jadis!”

  “… and she thinks we should have a more serious look around. Perhaps early next month, dig a few test pits, and see if there’s potential for a field season there.”

  “Now we’re all intrigued,” said Roger. “Where is this interesting place?”

  So Jack told them, and the discussion continued deeper into the night until, well past moonrise, the Last Supper finally came to an end.

  Jadis had known what Jack was going to talk about anyway, so she started to the clear remaining plates and glasses into the kitchen. Marjorie MacLennane, in contrast, had no particular idea of what Jack was going to talk about, but decided to help Jadis, all the same. And so, with the conversation still audible through the back door, now counterpointed by an intermittent frog chorus from the pond, Jadis and Marjorie stood together in the kitchen, one washing up; the other, drying.

  Like the two old friends they were, like two bookends, they stood together companionably, chatting amiably about gardening, and the lives and loves of the friends and colleagues they had in common, back in Cambridge, and what Roger was going to do with himself now he’d retired (“get under my feet, worse luck!”) but neither feeling any need to start a conversation simply for the sake of it. They had both been through too much for that.

  For her part, Jadis felt that she was more in Marjorie’s debt than she could ever express, or thank, let alone repay.

  Marjorie’s thoughts were more complex. From the very first time she had met Jadis, she had sensed an inner toughness quite at variance with her easygoing exterior: but that her mettle had had to be tested quite so brutally was shocking, beyond comprehension. The facts of the accident were quite trying enough, even without further discussion. That Jadis had survived at all was remarkable—that she had thrived, a miracle. Looking at her now, you’d never have guessed that she’d endured so much. This, and the fact that she never once discussed or referred to it, was a testament both to her fortitude: that, and (she had to admit) the support of her husband.

  As the two women finished their work and turned to say good-night, Marjorie’s hand brushed the sleeve of Jadis’ sweatshirt, and they embraced. Neither with ardor, nor with passion, but as friends will: as an expression of knowledge shared that need not be spoken, and in the hope that such shared confidences might help to ease an otherwise intolerable burden.

  One question remained, a question that Marjorie kept to herself, as she settled down in the guest bedroom of the farmhouse next to a snoring Roger, the full moon hanging low over the eastern fields: for she never could—never would—have broached it with Jadis, let alone anyone else. And that question was this: had Jadis managed to reach the hospital unscathed, could she have saved her unborn child, or would she have miscarried anyway? But the mind of Marjorie MacLennane was wired for certainties and decision, not hypotheses and counterfactuals, so she soon abandoned the struggle and surrendered to the arms and armies of sleep.