Rope of Sand

by C F Dunn

  After completing the simple tasks I had been set by Pat, chosen, I suspected, with the intention of turning me into a competent cook one day, I retreated once more to the study. Engrossed by both the book I had found and by the intoxicating music playing on the superb system, I didn’t know that the family had returned until I heard the faint slamming of car doors and, by then, Matthew had found me.

  “Mmm, you smell of cold air and mountains,” I said between kisses, “and you taste of them too.”

  “Which do you prefer: mountain or chocolate?” he asked, with just enough space between our lips for me to answer.

  “No contest,” I mumbled, leaving him none the wiser. “How’s Ellen?”

  “She’s fine and she said for me to say ‘Happy Christmas’ to you, and she looks forward to meeting you.”

  “Bizarre,” I said. “Perverse. I hope you returned the greeting from me to her.”

  “I did, as I promised. Now, what have you been up to left to your own devices – apart from eating chocolate and listening to The Lark Ascending and…” he turned his head so that he could see the book I had been reading, “… raiding my books for Culpeper’s Herbal.”

  “I’ve never seen an original edition before,” I mused. “It’s beautiful – oh, and so is the chocolate – a masterpiece of confection. And before I forget, can you explain what is so educational about a plastic castle and a fantasy space station?”

  He grinned. “Ah, so you’ve spoken with the twins, have you? Did they like their presents?”

  “No, I haven’t spoken to the twins because they were too busy playing with their favourite Christmas presents to speak to their aunt, but no doubt they’ll want to speak to you. Archie’s already started chewing the dog’s ear, apparently, so that was a hit, too.”

  “Excellent,” he beamed, “and the educational value is in the imagination of the child, not of the giver.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him. “Stop being so reasonable, it’s galling.”

  He rolled his hands down my waist making me giggle so that I had to try very hard to look stern. “Would you rather I were unreasonable?” he asked, raising one eyebrow. His hands moved an inch lower. “Have you had your lunch?”

  I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. “Lunch? What lunch?” His eyes were remarkably blue today, the irises wide, inviting pools.

  “The lunch I left for you in the fridge, Emma – didn’t you find it?”

  “Mmm?”

  He withdrew his hands and stood with them on his hips instead; I felt their absence. “So you haven’t eaten since breakfast. I despair of you sometimes. Come on.” He took me by the hand and led me towards the kitchen.

  “I had chocolate; it’s full of iron.”

  He didn’t credit my comment with a reply.

  Joel deposited another heavy box on the kitchen table. “Grams says we’ll need these for dinner, and she said for me to ask you if you’ve put the oven on, Emma?”

  I confirmed that I had once Matthew had shown me how. “And she says have you put the fat she left out in the big roasting trays?”

  “Uh huh. And I’ve cut up the potatoes as she said and boiled them for exactly five minutes, drained them, and let them dry – for whatever reason, she did say – can’t remember. Anyway, they’re done.”

  Joel shook his head sorrowfully, “Gee, Emma, she’ll try to make a cook of you; you gotta watch her every move.”

  I grinned. “I’m pretty resilient; I wouldn’t worry.”

  “I can confirm that,” Matthew said as he unpacked the contents of the box onto the table. Jars of different coloured jams and jellies glowed under the late afternoon sun. I scanned the gathering collection, ignoring his remark.

  “Where are we eating? There won’t be enough room in here, not with all this.”

  “Despair not, Dr D, we have a dining room – all very formal – tux and tiaras for dinner. Only the best for the guest.”

  I looked in horror at Matthew, who was smiling. “Emma, he’s joking. Joel, stop making trouble and fetch the trunk for me, please. You know where the key is.”

  Joel sauntered out, hands in his pockets, whistling “There May Be Trouble Ahead”.

  “It won’t be too formal, will it?” I asked anxiously, when he had gone.

  “No, not at all, he’s only teasing you because he knows he can. You haven’t seen the dining room yet, have you? Come and help me get it set up. It’s not used the rest of the year; it’s a pity.”

  He took me to a room the same size as his study, but here the furniture was older – much older. I stood transfixed. Before me was the closest thing I had seen to a seventeenth-century dining hall outside of a museum or country house, and I inspected the room with a historian’s sense of awe. I stroked the wood of the long elm table dominating the centre of the room, feeling the slight drag of wax, and let my fingers negotiate the carved backs of the tall chairs ranged around it, noting the tiny indentations where they had been nibbled by worm. Wax had gathered over the centuries in the thick split planks of an oak sideboard between the two windows, and large pewter chargers and two Delft bowls sat on the surface. Around the walls, early landscapes and Dutch still-life injected colour, echoed by the stronger reds and blues of the Turkish rug, and, above the fireplace, two swords hung: the one heavy and designed to cleave, the other a rapier – svelte, elegant, and every bit as lethal. The room felt as if it had been there forever, solid and enduring, comforting in its great age.

  I turned back to Matthew, who watched for my reaction, his smile now reticent as he repeatedly rotated his signet ring on his little finger.

  “Matthew, it’s beautiful. It feels like home should.”

  He crossed the floor, his face becoming animated and bright, taking both my hands in his. “Do you like it? It’s as close to how I remember my home was. The rug isn’t an original of course, but everything else is English or Dutch and is more or less what we had. My father always grew bulbs every spring in a bowl like that one,” he indicated the blue and white bowl on the left hand side of the sideboard, “in memory of my mother. He said she loved flowers. The first spring bulbs were in bud when she and my brother died…” He stood looking at the bowl for a few seconds longer, giving me time to snatch my hand away from his, and quickly wipe my eyes. He gazed back down at me, his smile soft and his eyes warm. “In all the lifetimes I have been on this earth, you are the only person I have ever been able to share this with who understands.”

  “Oh…” I clasped my hand to my mouth, my voice breaking along with my heart with the rending poignancy of it all.

  “My love, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  I shook my head, laughing shakily at my own stupidity. “You haven’t. This is so right, and I love you so much.” I flung my arms around his neck, taking him by surprise. He lifted me up and held me close to him, burying his face in my hair, emotion rendering us both speechless.

  “I didn’t know if you would like it,” he said finally. “My family think it’s too old-fashioned, though they wouldn’t say so to my face.”

  I rubbed my cheek against his. “You know I like old things.”

  “Well, thank God for that,” he said, meaning it, his jaw moving against my face as he grinned.

  “I do, every day.”

  In the kitchen, a door slammed back against the wall and the sound of someone struggling with something heavy resonated through the walls. Matthew looked up.

  “I’d better give Joel a hand. Are you any good at polishing?”

  “A good sight better than at cooking.”

  “Well, we have plenty to do before we can lay the table,” he said mysteriously, pushing the door open for me.

  Joel wrestled with a large, domed metal trunk of the sort you often see battered and rejected in flea markets. Matthew relieved him of the weight and put the trunk down under the west window, where the sunlight leached from the sky towards gloaming. He thumped Joel’s back good-naturedly. “Way to g
o there yet, Joel. Perhaps I should fetch it next year?”

  “Not – a – chance, old man. I’ll be a year older and a year stronger by then. Just don’t tell Mom or she’ll freak,” the boy panted, holding out a key, which Matthew took and pocketed. “Grams says, ‘Can you put the oven trays in the oven to heat up now, please, Emma?’” He dawdled as I did as asked.

  “Don’t bother waiting, Joel, and you can tell Pat that I know what the oven looks like and anyway, Matthew’ll tell me if I get it wrong.”

  Joel chuckled as he went back the way he had come. I closed the heavy oven door on the trays. “Is it just Joel who’s getting stronger, or does it seem to be happening to all of your… er, descendants?”

  Matthew smiled at my use of the word. “It’s not yet clear exactly what my descendants have inherited, but they all seem to have enhanced strength, among other things. Why?”

  “Just wondering. So there is a genetic element to what you are? There must be if your offspring show similar traits.”

  He took another key and unlocked the padlock holding the trunk’s hasp in place.

  “Obviously, but it couldn’t have originated from my parents as there was no sign of any of these abilities or longevity in them of which I’m aware. It must have been the result of a spontaneous genetic mutation caused when I was stabbed by that…” he muttered something under his breath, which I might have heard except that the lid of the trunk fell back with a crash against the kitchen surface.

  “Is that likely or even possible?” I asked.

  “Am I either likely or possible? I’ll keep looking for an answer until I find one, if not for me, at least for the family.” He took a bulky item in a soft cream bag out of the trunk, and peered into it. “Not too bad,” he said, putting it to one side.

  “And when you’ve found the answer, what then? How will that affect the children? Will you tell them you’ve found a cure – because that’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? A cure.” Try as I might, I couldn’t keep the raw edge from my voice.

  His hand stopped mid-way to lifting another object from the trunk and he viewed me soberly. “We’ve had this conversation before, Emma. There’s no likelihood I will find anything like an answer in the near future.”

  “In my lifetime, do you mean?”

  A muscle worked in his cheek. “Yes, in your lifetime – and probably that of my great-grandchildren.”

  Crossing my arms, I leaned against the side of the worktop. “And if you did, what then? If it meant that the effects could be reversed, would you?”

  He turned so that he faced me squarely. “I don’t want to be left behind. It’s hard enough watching Henry age, even though it’s slower than normal. I know I will see my son die and his children and theirs. And then there’s you.” He brushed the back of his fingers up the side of my cheek. “And then there’s you,” he repeated softly, pressing his lips against my forehead.

  “Matthew, you will tell me if you discover anything – anything at all – that will affect you or the family, won’t you?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, a little too easily for me to believe him. He carefully lifted a series of similar-looking bundles out of the trunk and handed them to me. They were heavy. “Please would you put these on the table; I’ve made space for them.” He made it clear that he didn’t want to discuss it any further. There was too much emotion, too much of his history bound up in all of this, and I was only at the tail end and beginning to unravel it inch by inch.

  He finished emptying the trunk, and then went to fetch some bottles and cloths from a cupboard under the sink. I took the first object out of its small cloth bag. Dull silver in colour and round – more like a shallow bowl than a plate – it had a finely rolled edge for a rim. It weighed heavy for its size and had a faint coat of arms engraved on one side.

  “Bloody hell!” I exclaimed before I could stop myself.

  “I hope not,” Matthew said dryly, smiling nonetheless at the look on my face. I turned it over as if it were made of glass, not silver. I peered more closely at the coat of arms.

  “But this is…” I stammered, looking first at the salver, then at Matthew and back again. He looked more amused by the second. “It’s… it’s a… good grief, Matthew… and it has your coat of arms on it!”

  He nodded towards the similar-shaped bags in front of me. One by one I divested them of the contents, each being a similar dish, until twenty-three sat in front of me, reflecting the light from the lamp above the table. My heart beat unevenly.

  “Divers goodes,” I muttered, fanning my face with my hand as it suddenly flared with heat. “Is this what Nathaniel referred to in the journal as the ‘divers goodes’ that went missing?”

  “Probably,” he said, quietly.

  I shook my head to clear some space for my brain cells to start working again. “But that was after you had left. There was some sort of a wrangle about it with your aunt Elizabeth.”

  “Was there? I’m sorry to hear that. She always did like them. I would be disappointed to think that they were the cause of any dissension.” He picked one up and regarded it, far away in the distant past.

  “How did you… how come you have them?”

  “Mmm?” He looked up. “Oh, I went back to see my father shortly before he died. I couldn’t leave the country without saying goodbye. I couldn’t leave him with so much… unsaid.”

  “But Nathaniel didn’t mention you coming back.”

  “No, he wouldn’t, and nobody else knew that I came to see him in the autumn – around Michaelmas, I recall. Perhaps the dogs recognized me, because they didn’t bark for some reason. It wasn’t hard to get in the house; we had a small postern gate by the moat and I knew where the key was kept.” He smiled. “Nat and I used it when we were younger when we wanted to leave undetected.” The look he threw me had a touch of something about it – guilt perhaps – leaving me to come to my own conclusions about what they had been up to. “Anyway, I managed to get past the household servants. The hour was late and there were fewer than I had been accustomed to – as there should have been. Things were looking more rundown, the fires unlit, the furniture dusty, unkempt. It had the air of decay, of lost… hope.” Fleetingly, his face creased with painful memories.

  “I think Nathaniel did his best, Matthew,” I said gently, “but how could they have carried on the same way without you? They didn’t know what had happened any more than you did.” And some of the servants wouldn’t have wanted to work in a household tainted by suspicion of witchcraft, no matter how respected it had been. I recalled Matthew’s broken image on his parents’ tomb, of his name expunged from the parish records. No, he didn’t need to know that; he didn’t need to carry the burden of the knowledge as well as everything else.

  “Emma, I’m not blaming Nathaniel. I brought it upon my family no matter how unwittingly. It was pitiful to see, that’s all. My father was ill, and I didn’t know how he would receive me. It broke my heart to see him so grateful when I returned. I feared for him when I told him I couldn’t stay, but he accepted it; I think he already knew.” As he spoke, the language he used slipped back and forth in time as if, with each moment drawn from his memory, came the words he had used to frame the image of it. He rubbed his hand across his forehead, where lines betrayed his distress. “He had heard the rumours, of course, although he said that Nathaniel had tried to protect him from the scandal. He knew that to stay would endanger me, but he needed to see me, to see that I hadn’t become a… monster.” He looked at his hands, then turned them over as if he might find traces of his father’s fear sprouting from the palms. “That was important to him. He had to know before he died that I had some hope of salvation. Neither of us knew then that I wouldn’t die, and he had been so fearful for my eternal soul. But he was comforted when at last we spake… spoke.”

  He looked me straight in the eye as if he had to convince me that he had no other choice. “I had to leave, Emma, not just because of the gossip or what I fear
ed might happen if I stayed, but because I didn’t know what was happening to me. I had to leave to sort my head out, as you said once.” He smiled thinly. “My father knew he was dying – I knew he was dying, although it was only a feeling then and I didn’t know how to interpret it.” Matthew held one of the silver bowls under the light as he rotated it between his hands. “He told me to take the family plate, take anything of value. My aunt didn’t need it and I was still his heir even if I couldn’t take the house and land. He said he would say that it had been taken in the night – that amused him – and he had no further need of it.”

  “So you did,” I whispered, looking at the array in front of me.

  “Yes, I did,” he confirmed. “I still felt like a thief, but I needed it to live off until I found some other way of making a living, so I sold some of it – as little as I could get away with – just enough for passage to new lands and somewhere to hide.”

  “How much more of it was there?”

  “There were twenty-four plates originally. I sold five of them initially and over the years I’ve bought them back one by one. It’s just the last one I can’t find. Perhaps it didn’t survive, who knows. I would like to get it back if I can; it belongs with the others. Somebody probably has it in a private collection. It’s not in any museum as far as I know.”

  The silver discs showed their history in the little scratches and dints on the surface of some of them as he lifted them into the light.

  “How old are they?” I asked.

  “My grandfather was given them by the young queen for his loyalty to her in the last years of her sister Mary’s reign, when her future was uncertain. He was particularly handsome, apparently, and very brave. He helped her secure the throne, and the queen was rather fond of him as a result, as you can see.”

  “A princely gift.”

  “Indeed.” He grinned, looking more like himself again. “We always used them at Christmas – all the way through to Epiphany – that’s why I like to use them now; there’s no point in having them otherwise.”