by C F Dunn
“It’s never far from my mind,” he said gravely. “Talking of which, where did you find this?” He held up the book I had found for him on a website specializing in fine and rare books. It had taken every spare penny I had to buy it.
“You don’t have a book of George Herbert’s poetry already, do you? I couldn’t see it on your shelves if you have. I saw works by Donne, Marvell, and Crashaw, but not one by Herbert.”
He opened the book to the title page and then to an engraving of the poet. “No, I certainly don’t, but I’ve been looking for a copy of this quality for a long time. Thank you.”
“I remembered shortly after we first met you saying how much you liked metaphysical poetry. I didn’t understand why, then, of course; I just thought that you did for the same reason I do, rather than because they were your contemporaries. And I’m sorry it’s not strictly contemporaneous, but it’s the closest in date I could find.”
He held the fragile book open. “I wonder sometimes,” he said, looking thoughtfully at me, “whether we follow some predetermined path, you and I. You seem to know me so well, yet we only met a few months ago.” He let the thought hang in the air between us for a moment before shaking his head, smiling at the idea. “I must be getting fanciful in my old age. Look, this is one of my favourites. ‘I struck the board and cried no more…’”
“‘… I will abroad,’” I finished softly. “Yes, I like ‘The Collar’ too; it suits you somehow.”
“Mmm, does it indeed? I especially like the last few lines:
‘But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word,
Me thought I heard one calling, Childe:
And I reply’d, My Lord.’”
I tried to imagine him in the early years before he came to terms with what happened to him. “Were you very fierce and wild?”
“Yes, I was, quite – for a time. When I realized I would outlive my own generation – and perhaps the next – it was as if everything I had ever believed or understood was turned on its head. Life wasn’t a fragile rope of sand, but a chain of steel keeping me bound to this earth with no hope of eternal reward.” He studied the poem in the little book for a while, then handed it to me. “Which one do you like?”
I took it and carefully leafed through the pages. “This is my absolute favourite.” I gave it back to him.
“‘Life’?”
“Yes. I always thought that, when I die, I would like it read at my funeral.” I meant to be matter of fact about it, so Matthew’s reaction took me by surprise. His eyes spat fire.
“In Heaven’s sweet name, Emma, I don’t need to be reminded of your mortality – or my lack of it!”
“Sorry,” I whispered, taken aback.
“No, I am, you caught me unawares. Just… well, just don’t expect me to be there to recite it.” He shuddered, then regained his composure. “Will you read it to me?”
I didn’t need to because I knew it by heart.
“I made a posie, while the day ran by:
Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.
But time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
And wither’d in my hand.
My hand was next to them, and then my heart:
I took, without more thinking, in good part
Times gentle admonition:
Who did so sweetly deaths sad taste convey,
Making my minde to smell my fatall day;
Yet sugring the suspicion.
Farewell deare flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit, while ye liv’d, for smell or ornament,
And after death for cures.
I follow straight without complaints or grief,
Since if my scent be good, I care not, if
It be as short as yours.”
He remained without moving or commenting as the last words resonated, his eyes closed, the slightest puckering of the skin between them as he concentrated. Then he opened them and smiled at me. “You recite beautifully and yes, it is poignant, isn’t it? I think I had forgotten. But there’s hope there, too, and that’s what we hang on for – especially in my case.”
“I understand,” I said softly.
He put his arm around me and I cuddled into him. “Yes, I know you do,” he said.
I didn’t want to spoil the moment and remind him that he actively searched for a way to undo the creation I so admired. We were warm and at peace together, and there should be time enough in the future in which to pursue that conflict of interests, and that time was not now.
CHAPTER
8
Boxing Day
On the little table in the window of my bedroom, the two marzipan pigs touched noses in the sunshine. Matthew had bound them together, nose-to-nose, with a strand of curling ribbon from my parcel, so that to separate them I would have to cut the ribbon like an umbilical cord between mother and child.
“Good morning!” Matthew was where he had been when I had fallen asleep next to him, the duvet tucked between us so that I could only feel him when he moved. I turned over. He lay on his side, watching me, his book of poetry closed in his hand. I wondered if I would always be so fortunate to wake with him beside me, and felt the familiar grope of doubt in my heart. “I’ll get you some breakfast. Get up when you’re ready.”
“I could do with some exercise,” I said after breakfast when we were in his study, feeling the stiffness in my limbs and distinctly pudgy around my tummy. Matthew looked up from the computer screen.
“Would a walk by the river do?”
“Admirably.”
“Good. I think we can rustle up ample exercise for you later on.”
That sounded oddly portentous and I could swear he was hiding a smile behind his hand. No matter, music would have to do for now. Selecting Mozart’s Requiem Mass, I settled back onto the pile of cushions on the floor in front of the fire with a book.
Matthew leaned back in his chair and put his fingers together in the way Henry sometimes did, looking at nothing in particular.
“I heard Mozart play once when in Vienna; a quite remarkable young man.” He said it as he remembered it, not for effect.
“Don’t think you can say things like that and get away with it,” I said, nonetheless impressed.
“Sorry, I forget sometimes. But I can with you – who else can I tell?” He had a point.
“You can tell me anything, but you have to expect a full interrogation if you come out with stuff like that, otherwise it would be like putting a child in a sweet shop and telling them not to touch. Torture.”
“Understood – I’ll try to remember.”
“I won’t let you forget.”
He grinned and turned back to his computer screen, which he was finding more absorbing than the book I was failing to read. I suddenly remembered something I had forgotten to do the evening before. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, and made for the drawing room before he could ask.
I stuffed my hand down the side of the sofa, but the book wasn’t there. I searched along the sides of the cushions all the way round in case it had somehow migrated of its own accord. “Blast,” I muttered under my breath. I straightened and cast around the room in desperation, hoping that Matthew hadn’t found it. I didn’t see it at first because the unlit lamp cast a shadow across its black cover, but there it was, on the table where I could have sworn I hadn’t left it the night before. If Matthew had found it he would have said something, and as far as I knew, nobody else from the Stable or the Barn had been in the house that morning. “Mrs-bloody-Danvers,” I snarled, snatching the book up. I had no intention of reading it – just a glimpse of the name on the cover was enough to set my skin crawling with revulsion – but I dropped it and the book fell open on the floor. I bent slowly and picked the wretched thing up, my eyes already scanning the page despite myself.
He wrote well – convincingly, I gave him that �
�� but it didn’t take much imagination to see where Staahl was coming from. Even from the first few snatched lines I could hear the echoes of his voice inside my head: the insinuation, the choice phrases loaded with meaning, vile, sickening, depraved. I heard the click of the door behind me and snapped the book shut, the sound loud in the quiet of the room.
Maggie didn’t even bother to feign surprise at me being there. “Good morning, Dr D’Eresby, I see you have found your book.” Not the book, but your book – as if it had been written for me. She came towards me with the same smooth movements of her grandfather, which in him were elegant and lithe, but in her were, quite frankly, sinister. “I understand that your area of research is in a similar vein to Professor Staahl’s. All those monsters; it takes strength of mind not to become confused, no – disturbed – by what one reads. I think you would agree?” Her low voice held a mocking edge, which I imagined she used to reduce subordinates to a quivering mass. Don’t get riled, don’t let her get to you. Danvers – Danny, Danny, Danvers…
I smiled politely. “I’m sure that insanity is more your line of work than mine.”
She didn’t like that; I could see it in the way the lines around her mouth sharpened and her eyes became shrapnel. Yet her voice didn’t betray her.
“Poor Professor Staahl. It is so easy for a man to become beguiled by the whispers in his mind, especially when he has certain vulnerabilities.” She licked at the word, flipping it with her tongue before spitting it at me. “Still, there is always a chance when help is at hand. I do so hope that you are robust enough to cope with what life might throw at you, Dr D’Eresby. It would be such a shame if it proved otherwise.”
What was she talking about? At least Staahl’s ramblings were crystal clear in their madness. With Maggie there were half-truths and might-bes and what-ifs all wrapped up in fog, as was, no doubt, her intention. She made a career of toying with people’s minds, and now she practised on mine. I had never known what to say to the bullies at school, and I didn’t know what to say to her now. I remained impassive so as not to feed her guile.
“I’m remarkably resilient and thick-skinned, Maggie, but I thank you for your concern.” Resilient – yes, to a degree, but thick-skinned? Oversensitive, Dad’s father used to call me. “Toughen her up, Hugh, there’s no place for a simpering ninny in this world. She’ll thank you for it in the long run.” Sensitive soul, my grandad.
I didn’t wait for her reply, I didn’t dare, but it reminded me of the need to speak to Henry sometime soon. I removed myself and the book from the room, hoping that it didn’t look as if I were in flight, and ran up the stairs two at a time, and into my bedroom. Scouting around for somewhere to conceal the book, in the end I hid it in the bottom of my travel bag and stuffed it back under the bed.
I saw Henry sooner than I anticipated. He and Matthew had their heads together at the computer screen, reminding me how alike they were. They both looked up when I entered the study. “Henry, please may I have a word with you?” I asked, not sure how to approach the tangled question of his daughter except directly. Father and son traded glances, and Matthew flipped the lid of the computer shut. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said, and closed the door behind him.
Henry drew another chair out from beside the desk and lowered himself into the seat.
“It’s Maggie,” I blurted out.
“Problem?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said more steadily, thinking about how to continue. “You know that she resents me?” He nodded. “Well, she’s making it abundantly clear that she doesn’t like me or want me here, and it’s getting worse and I don’t know how to deal with it – deal with her.” I looked anxiously at him and made a conscious effort not to fiddle.
Henry tapped his fingers together. “Have you spoken to my father about this?”
“Not recently, no. I don’t want him put into a situation where he has to choose between his granddaughter and me. He has enough to deal with at the moment with… well, with Ellen, if that makes sense.”
“It does,” he said, slowly. “Maggie has problems of her own…”
“Yes, I understand that,” I said a little too quickly, recognizing dodgy ground and not wanting to be seen as being uncharitable. “Matthew said something about her reaction to the crash.”
Henry didn’t look upset at my mentioning it. “It’s more than that,” he said. “She has never really understood why her mother left her, and it has caused some deep scars that we have never been able to heal.”
I looked up sharply – too sharply because he saw my sudden interest at the mention of her mother. “And where is her mother? Surely if she knew, there might be some sort of reconciliation for her?”
Although he tried to disguise it, his face became guarded. “No, there is no chance that they can meet again. Monica was not the best mother for a sensitive little girl like Maggie. When she left the family over forty years ago, it was for good. She won’t be coming back.” He said it with such finality that the speck of unease that had made itself known to me in the cabin when Matthew had spoken of her stirred again.
“What happened to Monica?”
Henry leaned forward in his chair, lending emphasis to his answer. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Matthew dealt with her. I was in no fit state at the time.” He sat back again and took a few seconds in which he looked at the photograph of himself with his mother before resuming. “But you want to know what to do about Maggie? Well, you’ll have to win her respect and she’s obviously not going to make that easy. She’s not a bad person inside, Emma, though it’s hard to believe when you’re bearing the brunt of her spleen, I know. But there is a decent core to her; she wouldn’t be so good at her job otherwise. My advice – for what it’s worth – is not let her see that she’s getting to you. She hates weakness because she sees the vulnerability in herself and it frightens her. But I could have a word with her, if you want me to?”
If only it were that simple, and he probably realized it despite the support he offered. I shook my head. “Thanks, but I’ll try to work this out.”
“I’m not much help, am I?”
“I don’t think anyone can help. It reminds me of when I had trouble with some girls at school.”
“Did you resolve it?”
“Ye-es, sort of,” I evaded, reluctant to explain to what I had resorted when pushed to the limits of my tolerance. They never came near me again and I had managed to avoid being expelled. My father had been furious. I picked up the lethal-looking letter-opener and put it down again hastily before Henry gained the wrong idea.
“Don’t be worried about talking to Matthew about it, Emma. Maggie might be his granddaughter but he won’t allow her to intimidate you.”
Allow her? The woman must be nearly fifty; he could hardly spank her, even if he were so inclined. I peered at him doubtfully. He saw my reservation and smiled sympathetically. “Maggie’s strong-willed, I know, but she’ll not oppose him.”
The fire popped and a piece of burning log slipped through the iron bars of the grate and rolled towards the edge of the hearth. Henry rose and bent down to scoop it up with the small shovel. As he did so, the sun from the east window caught his thick, greying hair. I did a double-take and he saw me looking.
“Ah,” he said, running a hand through his hair and smiling ruefully. “My roots need a touch-up, do they? Good thing you saw them rather than an outsider.”
“I don’t understand. Why…?”
He laughed gruffly. “I see Matthew hasn’t said anything to you about my irregularities. You don’t really think this is my natural colour, do you? Beneath this badger-like appearance, I’m a natural blond.”
“Oh!”
“And, while I’m at it, I don’t need these,” he took off his glasses, “and my eyes are blue, not… whatever these contacts make them – bluey-green, I think. And if I shaved all this hair off my face…”
“You would look just like Matthew,” I finished, already seeing the diff
erence it made.
He replaced the shovel and returned to his chair. “Yes, too like him for our safety. Dan and the boys have to take precautions as well – Dan more so because of his age. And I expect you can see how alike Harry is. He’s managed so far, but he’s becoming more and more like Matthew as he gets older. Only Ellie is darker naturally, like her mother. We can get away with some similarities, but not all of us, not so obviously. The Lynes gene seems very dominant.” Although heavier-browed than Matthew, and his hair artificially grizzled to make him appear his age, Henry would still be considered good-looking – probably how Matthew would look were he twenty or so years older.
“Do you know why the gene is so dominant?”
“The short answer is no, although we have identified the particular alleles that give us our distinctive qualities. What we don’t know is why they became dominant and remained so through the three generations. Matthew says his grandmother had the same colouring, from what he can recall. He doesn’t remember his mother so well, she died when he was very young, although I expect you already know that?”
I made a noncommittal sound, remembering that Matthew concealed his great age and true identity even from his son, and diplomacy – as well as the family’s safety – demanded I pretend to be equally unacquainted with the facts.
“Henry, something both you and Matthew have alluded to, it’s been bothering me…”
“What’s that?”
“You said outsiders earlier. But I am an outsider, Henry…”
“No, Emma, forgive me for interrupting, but you’re not. My father has made that very clear.”
“But I haven’t been, er, vetted, I think Matthew called it. Or is being here part of the vetting procedure?”
Henry laughed out loud and slapped his knees. “You heard about that, did you? No, you’re not to be vetted. If Dad trusts you, I wouldn’t dare presume to gainsay him.”
“Dare?”
“Oh, not in that way. Matthew has never resorted to threats or violence. In fact I can’t remember a time when he even raised his voice – he never needed to and he certainly never lifted a hand to me when I was growing up, although I deserved it at times. I wouldn’t have wanted to provoke him though, no sir-ee.” The shattered window in the cabin and Sam’s broken jaw came to mind. I said nothing, and Henry continued. “No, Matthew’s decisions usually turn out to be correct, even if this is an unusual situation.”
