by Manda Scott
The one on the right was staring directly at Cedric Owen – and straight through him into the blue of the heart-stone.
Never before had Owen been so immediately, so cuttingly exposed. A bitter wind sliced at his flesh, as if his own clothing had been stripped from him, taking half the skin with it.
In the long paralysis of the moment, it came to him that, unlike his fellow, the native had the stance and countenance of a warrior. A broad zigzag scar that looked deliberately made coursed down his left cheek. With his gaze locked on Owen’s, the man laid the first two fingers of his hand flat across it and then turned his head away.
With the searching gaze gone, the scream in Owen’s ear fell back almost to nothing. He was able to hear things in the outer world again, chief amongst which was the priest saying, ‘Señor Owen? You are a physician as well as a caster of charts. Can you swear before God that your ship brings us no disease?’
The priest threw a shadow like a mountain. It was easiest to look at him and the vastness of his bulk and consider the threat he might pose, and thereby to forget that one had been stripped naked and then reclothed again by a single look from a scar-faced savage.
They were waiting for his answer.
‘No,’ Cedric Owen said. ‘I can promise nothing and would certainly not swear so in the name of God. I can say that I have been at sea with these men for two months and that there has been nothing beyond the usual intestinal instability and a single case of a torn shoulder when a man held too long to a lanyard. I can say that we stopped in Panama to take on board more food and water and that we took on then a native youth who wished to make his way at sea. It is my belief that if there were any disease on board, he would have succumbed to its effects, and similarly that if he brought ill humours, we would have fallen ill by now. In view of that, I will swear in any way you like that I have seen nothing to indicate illness, but no more than that. If you wish us to put back to sea, with our hold full of guns and powder, lead and steel, then you may do so. I am sure that the followers of King Philip at Campeche will welcome us.’
He had planned none of that. The words fell out of his mouth and he heard them at the same time as the others, and with as much surprise.
Fernandez de Aguilar shot him a look of pure astonishment, which turned to something more thoughtful as the priest inclined his head as if in prayer, then said, ‘Well argued, Englishman. If you had sworn by God that your men were clean, I would have had you shot and your ship burned in the open sea. The jetty would have been destroyed with it, as was the last one that brought us infection.’
‘And all in vain,’ Owen said. ‘You have been close enough to Don Fernandez to be a source of infection if he did, indeed, harbour disease. You would have walked back among your people and spread plague wherever you walked.’
‘Except that I would not have walked among them at all. My clerk here, Diego’ – the wave of his hand indicated the scar-faced native – ‘has orders to cut my throat and then his own. Domingo’ – a lifted finger indicated the quieter of the two clerks – ‘would have walked into the sea, this being his choice of death. With us gone, the second rank of warriors would set the fire arrows to your ship. No child willingly shoots his father, but they would kill me on my command; this much I believe in them.’
Owen saw Fernandez de Aguilar sharpen. ‘These people see you as their father?’ he asked.
Gonzalez Calderón’s face was unreadable. ‘I see myself as their father under God,’ he said. ‘I believe that if I tell them that you do not carry pox and come instead to bring gifts and knowledge to help us to recover our losses, they will allow you to land your ship. What happens thereafter is in God’s hands. I cannot guarantee your safety any more than your physician can guarantee the clean health of your men.’
11
Bede’s College, Cambridge, June 2007
A SINGLE STEM of white lilies left over from the wedding decorated the low ash-wood table in Kit’s river room.
By a feat of Tudor engineering, over half of the room’s length projected out over the Cam. Windows on three sides let in the strong summer sun. The river ran greenly beneath. An open window lifted the smell of nearly still water to mix with that of the more colourful, shorter-lived sprays dotted about the room, sent by friends to welcome Kit home from the hospital.
Because they were his friends, they had the sense not to be there when he came home, but let Stella help him out of the ambulance on his two sticks, and manoeuvre him up the stairs into the wide, light space that was his home.
He stood swaying by the table with the flowers, but it was the river running beneath the window that caught him; the slow slide of green-grey water, and the shimmer of air above it and the odd tricks of light and glass that made it seem as if the part of the room projecting out over the river was the greater, that it floated alone, ‘suspended ’twixt sky and water’ as its Tudor designers had intended.
He turned a full circle, taking in the sky and the thin strips of cloud, and the parched, busy grass of Midsummer Common; the crowded river, full of tourists on punts and late students celebrating exams; the perfect lawn of the Lancastrian Court, with its cloistered surround and the bronze statue of Edward III, the Plantagenet monarch whose son had established Bede’s as an act of filial piety in commemoration of his father’s victory over the French at Crécy in 1346.
Stella watched Kit come back to the room, and to himself; to the memory of what he had been, and what he had become. His sticks faltered and stopped. His eyes met hers, green-brown and turbulent, full of new passions she could not read. ‘I remember the lilies,’ he said.
‘Kit …’
She could not move. A patch of sweat grew cold on the back of her neck. From the moment she had met him in the ward, he had been cold and withdrawn and quite different from the man she thought she knew.
Now, she saw him gather himself to deliver something prepared that she did not want to hear.
His face was a harlequin’s: greenly bruised on the one, still side, alive and mobile and white on the other. With that half alone, he made himself smile. ‘You should leave me. Now, while the memories are all good ones.’
His beautiful rolling voice was broken, and spilled over at the edges. He heard it and winced. His eyes never left hers.
‘Don’t …’ She was weeping, which she had promised herself not to do. ‘I won’t leave. You can’t make me.’
‘I can ask you. For both our sakes.’
‘You don’t mean it. You married me less than a month ago. I married you. It’s not time to give up.’
He frowned and shook his head. His hands were unsteady on the walking sticks. She wanted to step forward and catch him, to find him a chair, to reach for the electric wheelchair and make it ready for him, to sit and sleep and be home again and not to worry. She could do none of these things until they had settled a future they could both believe in.
His body did not answer him as he wanted. He lifted his one good shoulder in a shrug. ‘I don’t want to be with you as less than I was.’
‘God, Kit …’ She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and struggled in the pocket of her shorts for a tissue.
He was not what he had been, that much was indisputable. Even so, he was not as bad as the medics had promised at first examination. That he was able to walk at all was a miracle of modern science and testament to the therapeutic value of intravenous dexamethasone given in doses sufficient to drown an elephant, or so she had been informed by the consultant at the hospital in Yorkshire and again, in more measured terms, by the neurology team at Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, who had run their own MRI and CT scans and concluded that either they had been sent the wrong set of films, or the gods of caving had been exceptionally benevolent in awakening Dr Christian O’Connor so early and so relatively intact from his coma.
What they were not able to do was perform further miracles and give him back to her fully mended. They sent him home half done, a man prone to falling asleep
without warning, who could only smile with half of his face, who could not move his left leg fully, who had only partial use of his left arm. They sent him with sticks and a wheelchair and a regime of exercises from the physiotherapist to keep him occupied and perhaps on the route towards healing. They thought, with time, he might be able to dispense with one of the sticks.
They could not say whether he would walk normally, or run, or if the full quirk of his smile would come back from the near-plastic blandness that afflicted the left half of his body.
They could not say, either, whether he would ever recover his memory of the cathedral of the earth, of the white limestone skull they had found there, of the run-crawl along the ledge with two lights and the fall that came after it, with sufficient clarity to be able to persuade Detective Inspector Fleming to reopen the case as attempted murder. At the moment, he could barely remember the details of his own wedding.
I remember the lilies.
Only his eyes were truly alive. She had never been able fully to read them, but always before there had been a clear, sharp humour that had drawn her in to his life. Now, they were shields that kept her out; she met his gaze and had no idea of what he thought or felt.
Quietly, he said, ‘You know I’m right.’
‘No.’
Desperate, she reached down for the backpack she had left beneath the table. Her plans for it had been quite different.
With one hand, she opened the fastenings, drew out the crumbling white stone that had been Kit’s life’s quest and set it on the table, a plain, ugly thing that shed flakes of chalky dandruff on to the bare wood floor.
She felt nothing from it; none of the blue lightning that had seared her mind, or the sense of newborn-ancient vulnerability that had so moved her on the moors by Gaping Ghyll. For three weeks, it had languished in her bag, unseen and unheard. She had not been able to bring herself to look at it. She felt no better now.
She said, ‘I didn’t throw it away.’
‘Clearly.’
His face had become quite still; this once, it was symmetrical. ‘Perhaps I should sit down?’ He swayed on his sticks, and cursed and shuffled stiffly round to his wheelchair.
She wanted him to be glad of her help. He tolerated it with bad grace, letting her bring him to the chair and settle him as the hospital had taught her. Unresisting, he let her place the skull-stone in his lap. For too long, he stared into it and through it in cold silence.
When she thought the pressure might kill them both, he lifted his head and took himself in a whine and squeak of new wheels to the window where he could look down at the water.
The ash table lay between them; a wedding present from her to him and him to her, bought in another era when they were different people. She sat on its edge. ‘If you hate it that much, we can throw it in the river now.’
‘Would that keep us safe?’
‘Is that what this is about? Our safety? It feels deeper than that.’
His face twisted. ‘Someone tried to kill me for this, Stell. How much deeper do you need?’
‘So throw it away.’
‘You told me you’d already done that.’
They had never fought before. This sharp, edgy friction was new and unexpected and terrifying.
She found she was clasping her hands and made herself undo them. ‘Tony Bookless told me to,’ she said. ‘I tried. I couldn’t do it.’
‘But you let him believe you had. And me.’
‘So I’m a liar on top of everything else.’ She spun away. ‘I thought you’d be pleased. I was saving it as a surprise for when you came home. Are you going to leave me for it? Is that what this is about?’
She could not sit. She paced the length of the window, keeping her back to him, watching students play rounders in the sun on the common, wishing she could go back to a time before and make things different. She had completed three full lengths of twelve paces each before he spoke.
‘You’re not a very good liar. He didn’t believe you’d thrown it away. He thinks you’re in love with the stone. It does that to people, apparently. It’s why they die.’
The sound of his voice stopped her more than what he said; a soft throatiness she had never heard before. She turned. His eyes were rimmed red. He made himself look up at her.
‘Are you crying?’
‘I’m trying not to.’
‘Oh, Christ. Kit …’
She had to lift him out of the chair to hold him properly. In that long, wordless moment was more connection than they had managed in all the three weeks since the accident.
Under the haze of hospital-clean, he smelled the same as he had always done. She opened his shirt and pressed her nose to the soft skin under his collarbone and spoke to flesh and bone and the heart beneath. ‘When did Tony tell you?’
‘Last night. He came back again after you’d left for the night.’ His hand teased out her hair, newly cut for his homecoming. It was shorter than before; less than a finger’s length on top. He ruffled it and kissed her crown and she could feel the half of his mouth that worked properly. He said, ‘I promised him I’d get you to destroy it.’
‘Kit, I …’
‘Which was stupid when I hadn’t spoken to you first, I do know that. But I don’t want you to die, Stell. I’ve lost so much chasing after a pipe dream of my own making. I don’t want to lose you too. I couldn’t bear that.’
She lifted her head away from his chest. ‘Why should you lose me?’
‘Because Cedric Owen didn’t write his verse for its poetry alone, he wrote it as a guide and a warning.’
He closed his eyes and spoke from memory.
‘Find me and live, for I am your hope at the end of time. Hold me as you would hold your child. Listen to me as you would listen to your lover. Trust me as you would trust your god, whosoever that may be.’
He opened his eyes. His gaze was green-brown and opaque. ‘Hold me as you would hold your child. Listen to me as you would listen to your lover. Are you doing that?’
She said nothing, there was no need; Kit could still read her even if she could no longer read him. He grasped her two hands and pulled her forward and held her, so that his eyes were all she could see, wide in their earnestness.
‘Stell, everyone who has ever held that stone, and cared for it, has died. I would have done if there hadn’t been water in the cave. You’re in more danger. You’re in love with it.’
Bringing her closer, he ran the tip of his finger over the arch of her ear, in a way that sparked down the length of her spine and into her core.
For three weeks, she would have given anything to feel that. Now, she caught his wrist and held it. ‘Kit, listen to me. It’s not the stone that kills people. It’s people who kill to get hold of it, or to destroy it.’
‘Which?’ His hand lay unmoving in hers.
‘I don’t know. Probably both. In the cave, the pearl-hunter wanted to destroy it, not you. I really believe that.’ Her focus was poor. She stared out of the window and saw only slews of different greens. ‘Not that the police believe us. They think what happened to you was an accident. The Rescue have written us off as a pair of day trippers who got lost in a new cave.’
Kit laughed unevenly. ‘So whoever did this is still out there. He knows exactly who we are and we haven’t the first clue who he is. Christ, I didn’t manage this well, did I?’
‘You didn’t—’
‘I did. I made this happen. My pipe dream, my push, my idea for a wedding present. Please let’s not argue about that as well. If you want to go on with it, you can take all the responsibility from here on in, but this far, it’s mine. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
‘Thank you.’ Clumsily, he turned Stella round, so they were both looking out of the window, and hugged her in to his chest.
Beneath, a student in a straw boater punted a group of tourists along the river. For show, he poled one-handed, holding a full champagne glass in the other hand. American voices floated up, co
mmenting on the river room as they slid underneath.
There was a long moment’s wait; time to feel the warmth of the one thing he said that she could hold on to. I’ve lost so much. I don’t want to lose you too. I couldn’t bear that.
The punt slid on past. The strangers’ voices faded. In their echo, with ice gnawing her stomach, Stella said, ‘If you stay here and I go away to find what the skull’s about, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It doesn’t mean you’re losing me. You do know that, don’t you?’
‘I do. And you need to know that if I come with you, it doesn’t mean I’m jealous of a stone.’ A spark of laughter grated in his voice, and something else she had to strain to hear. He kissed the top of her head. ‘You are a very brave woman. I do love you, did I mention?’
‘Not since the cave.’
Her cheek was against his chest. His heartbeat pushed against her. She raised her head. His face was just above hers. Slowly, not quite accurately, he bent to kiss her.
The need for sleep caught him soon afterwards, for all that it was only a kiss. He lay back in his wheelchair, his face childlike in its peace. Stella sat cross-legged on the bare oak floor and looked out at the river and tried to keep her mind empty. The skull-stone lay on the low ash-wood table between them; an unexceptional, uninspiring lump of chalk that might have been the shape of an unfleshed man’s head.
Or it might simply have been stone pulled from a calciferous eddy pool in an underground cavern.
Her mind remained hers alone; the tenuous thought-feel of a presence that had left her at the mouth of the pothole in Yorkshire was a memory, and even that was fading so that it might have been imagination, pushed by the fear of the cave.
She pushed the skull-stone out into the strong summer sunlight, to the place where its shadow fell most crisply. A noon breeze lifted the smell of slow-running water from the river and brought with it the slow natter of the mallards, and the crisp certainties of a young tour guide leading a group of visiting scholars.
