The Colonel, not knowing what to expect, grabbed my wrist and shoved me behind him in a noble, gallant gesture that both touched and amused me.
“They’re the good guys,” I whispered.
“We’ll see,” he replied.
The cops were very efficient. Not only had they managed within a very few minutes to sort through a crowd of about thirty people, issue more than a dozen citations, and call in another police car, they also (and most unfortunately) asked to see everyone’s IDs. And everyone had theirs, even the drunks, the disorderlies, and the guys who made animal noises. Everyone, it appeared, except the Colonel and me. As punishment, the cops included us in the eight they selected to actually haul off to jail. That is, the Colonel, me, and half a dozen of our more aggressive comrades who were about to converge on the Colonel and beat him to a pulp.
This was not going well. In the back of the police cruiser where we were packed in with two of our close, personal friends (including the guy who tore my dress), the Colonel fixed me with a long-suffering gaze.
“I believe you said these were, the, um … good guys. Wasn’t that what you called them?”
I dug an elbow into his ribs and we rode the next few miles in silence. At the police station we were escorted inside and led to a desk where a deputy with graying, reddish hair and a pleasant, square-featured face wordlessly motioned us to sit. He looked at us wearily, sighed audibly, and got with up to consult with the arresting officers. A few minutes later he ambled back, sat down heavily, and drew a couple of sheets of paper from a drawer.
Mercifully, he turned to me first. “Name?” he asked.
I told him.
“Address?”
I told him that, too.
“You a summer visitor?” Summer Visitor was a polite term for tourist.
“Not exactly,” I told him.
He raised his eyes to look at me. “What, exactly?”
“Well, I live there. Here.”
The deputy sighed. “Ma’am, what state is your driver’s license issued in?”
“Virginia.”
“So you are not actually a resident of North Carolina.”
“Well, I live in Virginia, too.”
The deputy laid down his pen and gazed at me. “I see. You own the house at, ah…” He looked down at the page to the address I had given him. “Six Gull Lane?”
“Yes. Our family does. My mother. And me.”
“And you live here part of the time?”
“Yes, I do.”
“How many years of residency at, ah…six Gull Lane?
“All my life.”
He looked at me as if he were trying to place me, and frowned. “The name isn’t familiar,” he said. “And I know most of the regular folks around here.”
I had given him my married name — Finlay. “How about Mansfield,” I offered cautiously.
At that, his face lit up. “Oh, hey — you related to old Sam Mansfield?”
“His granddaughter.”
“Well, that’s interesting. He and my daddy used to hunt ducks up around Oregon Inlet. Years ago. I was a little kid. Went along with them once or twice.” He paused. “Heard his daughter had the cottage. Fixed it up and all.”
“My mother.”
“Well, is that so? ‘Course, I never met her.”
That was a relief.
“And this is Mister…” The deputy’s eyes travelled back down the page. “Finlay?” he asked.
“No, this is Robert Upton. A family friend.”
“I see.” The deputy turned his attention to the Colonel. “Address?”
I held my breath.
“Number nineteen, Gramercy Row, London,” the Colonel supplied without a trace of hesitation.
“Is there a zip code or anything?”
“He means your city zone,” I interjected. “SW11, isn’t it?” I didn’t know if SW11 was actually called a “zone,” but it was a legitimate part of a real London address belonging to a friend who spent a year in Britain doing graduate work on Restoration theatre.
The Colonel took the hint. “That’s right,” he agreed. “It’s London, SW11.”
“SW11,” the deputy repeated back, adding it to his form. Then he looked up.
“Occupation?”
“Lieutenant-Colonel, British Army.”
I stared at the Colonel in dismay. The deputy, meanwhile, dropped his eyes to his paper, where he dutifully filled in the occupation blank. He would notice, I felt sure. He had to notice. And then, to my unspeakable relief, I heard the Colonel add: “Retired.”
Without raising his eyes from the paper, the deputy said, “I was going to ask about the hair.”
The Colonel chuckled sagely. “Fortunately, there’s no regulation concerning dress in retirement. One has enough of that while on, ah, active duty, what?”
The deputy nodded agreeably and looked up. “And you don’t have an ID on you, either, I guess.”
“No, not on me.”
“Well, if you did,” the deputy pursued a little wearily, “if you had your passport, what would it say under place of birth?”
“Kent.”
“Kent, England? That’s all?”
“Talbots, Kent, England.”
“Date of birth?”
My jaw dropped. I gazed from the Colonel to the deputy and back again.
“August 8th,” the Colonel lied fluently. “Nineteen—”
I never even heard the year he gave. I dropped my eyes and clasped my hands in my lap, willing them to stop shaking.
“So,” the deputy said conversationally. “You all want to tell me how you came to be on the beach with those individuals over there?”
The “individuals” were lined up on a bench against the wall where, one by one, they were answering the same questions we were at the hands of another patient deputy.
“Mrs. Finlay went for a walk along the beach,” the Colonel said simply. “When she didn’t return after a reasonable amount of time, I went after her.”
“What time was this?”
“Oh, nearly midnight, I should say.”
The deputy looked at me. “A little late for a walk,” he said.
“We had just gotten back from dinner,” I told him.
“I see. So you walked down the beach and encountered those boys over there. And then what?”
So I told him, truthfully and honestly, and he wrote it all down, asked a couple of more questions, then pushed his papers aside.
“Well, I think that will be all. Unless you want to press charges against your assailants.”
The Colonel raised an eyebrow at me. “Would you care to, Mrs. Finlay? After all, the gentlemen in question detained you a bit roughly and quite ripped your dress in the process.”
I looked at my assailants, two of whom were dozing peaceably on the bench. I would have liked to press all sorts of charges. They were not nice guys. What would have happened to me if the Colonel hadn’t shown up? And what would have happened to him if the deputies had not arrived? But pressing charges would involve the Colonel and inevitably require proof of his identity, which we didn’t have.
I turned to the deputy. “Do I have to?” I asked.
“No, you don’t.”
“Then I think I’ll pass.” I said.
The deputy looked at the Colonel, mutely asking the same question, and the Colonel shook his head.
The deputy nodded. “Probably more trouble than it’s worth,” he said. “We’ll charge them with being drunk in public. They’ll spend the night in jail, pay a fine, not much more.” He looked at us. “Can someone come get you?” he asked hopefully.
“No,” I told him. “There’s no one home.”
“Then I’ll get someone to drive you back,” he sighed, and signaled to another officer across the room. Almost immediately we were escorted to the front steps of the station and left there for several minutes while a cruiser was brought around to collect us.
I looked at the Colonel standing
beside me on the steps. “Gramercy Row?”
“Beth’s home,” he explained. “Anne’s sister, where Edmund and Nannie live.”
“Which you remembered,” I pointed out.
“Just in the nick, I should say.”
“And the birthdate?”
“The year I would have been born, to be the age that I am, had I been born the same century as you. Oh, and by the bye,” he went on, “I thought I was rather clever to have remembered the hair thing. You mentioned it on the ferry — that soldiers wore their hair short.”
“What if the deputy pursued the retirement issue? I mean, you’re a little young to retire, aren’t you?”
“Not if I was on the disabled list. Wounded. In, um, Iraq. My shoulder, you know. Damn bullet impedes the movement of my arm.” The Colonel smiled at me, pleased with his performance, then gently lifted my sleeve where it had separated from the bodice of my dress. I couldn’t imagine what I looked like, barefooted and disheveled, my shoulder exposed and the hem of my dress, which had pulled loose, hanging unevenly across my calves. The Colonel, on the other hand, still managed to look fairly unscathed. His shirttails had pulled out a little, but there wasn’t a mark on his white shirtfront.
“Your poor gown,” he said.
I smoothed down the front of my skirt. “I think I can mend it,” I told him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the police cruiser rolling toward us. “I look pretty disreputable, don’t I?”
“You look like a camp follower,” the Colonel elaborated fondly. “A regular trollop.”
“A piece of baggage,” I offered, mimicking him.
He smiled again, and his face lit up with humor.
“Come along, then, Baggage,” he said affectionately. “Allow me to see you home.”
Chapter 27
In the back seat of the cruiser a few minutes later, I began to think. Something wasn’t quite right, I decided. Things had gone a little too smoothly. We had glibly lied our way through our interview with the police and had lived to tell. And then it hit me. As soon as we got home, our driver would simply escort us inside and ask us to see our IDs. And then what would we say?
I closed my eyes and imagined it. I could see myself fumbling around in my purse, which was probably hanging from the doorknob of the coat closet, producing all the identification anyone would want. And then I’d turn in utter dismay to the Colonel and say, “Oh my goodness, Colonel Upton! Your briefcase! All your identification was in your briefcase, wasn’t it?” And then I’d turn to the deputy and say, “All his identification was in his briefcase, and we’ve left it on the kitchen table at my uncle’s house in Pennsylvania!”
And the deputy would say—
Suddenly I felt the tires of the cruiser crunch familiarly over broken oyster shells. My eyes flew open and I realized my head was resting against the Colonel’s chest, his arm around my shoulders.
Abruptly, I pulled away.
“You fell asleep,” the Colonel explained comfortingly, as if he were reassuring a disoriented child. “And now we’re home.”
The cruiser slowed to a stop and the deputy got out, coming around to open the door for us. The Colonel slid out first, reached back in to hand me out, then thanked the deputy, who returned his thanks and departed. We stood for a moment, the Colonel and I, watching the cruiser disappear down the driveway.
“I thought he’d ask us to go inside and show him some identification,” I said.
“Did you? It never occurred to me.”
“He could have, you know. I’m surprised that he didn’t.”
“I’d have been surprised if he had.”
I looked at him.
“Well, why would he?” the Colonel asked. “We’re obviously quite above suspicion. And except for the year of my birth and the, ah, retirement thing, we were completely honest. Weren’t we?”
I sorted through our lies and realized they were mostly sins of omission. “Well, there was the SW11 episode,” I pointed out dubiously, “but on the whole I guess we were pretty convincing.”
“Of course we were,” the Colonel assured me.
“Thank you,” I said suddenly. “For coming after me on the beach.”
“If I preserved you, madam, it is thanks enough.” He chuckled. “And fortunately, the sheriff’s men arrived in time to preserve me, or your thanks would be for naught.”
He offered me his arm and led me up the steps into the cottage. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning but we were more hungry than tired. So we heated up a couple of cans of chowder, poured ourselves some wine, and took our midnight supper out to the deck where I lit every citronella candle I could find to keep the mosquitoes at bay. We even dragged out Lila’s tape player as far as the extension cord would let us, and popped in some Baroque. For half an hour we sat at the wrought iron table absorbed in soup, rosé, and Vivaldi, saying very little, watching the moon rise, knowing the sun would not be far behind. Then the Colonel poured himself more wine and adjourned with the glass to one of the cushioned deck chairs.
“You were right,” he said presently. “I did remember something. Something other than being inoculated with cowpox.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said virtuously. “I should never have pressed you.” But I got up from the table anyway, and pulled a chair close to his.
“I remembered it this morning,” he went on. “Before you were awake. I went down to the kitchen to make some tea, and I saw the glass jar you keep on the counter with the cinnamon sticks in it.”
“It’s been there all along,” I reminded him.
“I know it has. I don’t know why it waited until now to jog my memory, but there you are.”
“So what did it remind you of?”
“India.”
“They have cinnamon in India?”
“Cinnamon comes from India, actually. The spice is obtained from the bark of the cinnamon tree. Cinnamomum zeylancum is the correct Latin name, I believe, although botany is not my forte —
“Cinnamon comes from a tree?” I was incredulous, although it was obvious even to me that it wasn’t grown in the wheat fields of Kansas.
“Pray, madam, may I continue with my story?” the Colonel asked testily.
Chastened, I sat back in my chair. “You saw the jar,” I prompted demurely.
“Yes. But this time I opened it and it was the scent, I suppose, that made me remember. It wasn’t precisely being in India that I recalled, it was returning from India, being in London, and seeing Edmund and Nancy for the first time in — oh, God — nearly seven years, I suppose.”
“You were in India seven years?”
“Very nearly. I went directly after Anne’s death, as I believe I told you some days ago. I knew, in a general sense, that I returned to England and afterwards went on to America.” He paused. “But until this morning I had no recollection how long I was away or how briefly I was home before I sailed for Boston.”
Boston! Well, that might answer a question or two. But India seemed far more pressing at the moment. “Do you remember much about India? About your time there?” I asked.
“I remember little. Yet. Only having been there. Part of a regiment on loan, so to speak, to the East India Company. And that I wanted to go, that I sought the assignment.”
“So this…memory really has nothing to do with—”
He shot me an impatient glance. “I’ve been trying to make that point, madam, if you will but listen.”
I was all ears.
“I told you that I had been angry all my life. And so I was. Angry that I would never have Talbots when, after all, my brother didn’t love it. Angry that my father would accept neither my marriage nor my children. Angry that Anne died. So I ran off to India hoping to die as well, and when I didn’t I was angrier still.
“During all that time I wrote the children regularly. I wrote Beth and Richard, too, and I knew the children were well and happy, that they were very much loved by their aunt and uncle. I had no qualm
s about that, ever. I sent gifts — a set of ivory soldiers for Edmund, a bronze horse, and silks and dolls for Nannie. All sorts of things. India is rich in treasures.”
“So the children knew you,” I said quietly, guessing his point.
“So they did,” he agreed. “They wrote me often. Gracious, dutiful letters, very correct. The sort of letters, I realize now, that children write to benevolent strangers: the little-known uncle who lives in a fabulous far-off place, a cousin in the colonies. But it didn’t matter. I treasured every word they wrote, all their childish scrawl. Edmund was five when I left and twelve when I returned; his sister two and nine. I saw them grow through their letters.”
He was silent for several minutes. I listened to the lapping of the waves and realized the tape had played itself out. I got up and turned it over.
“I have a memory of arriving in London,” he went on presently. “The family knew I was coming, of course, and I was to stay with them indefinitely. My future plans were still unsettled, and the whole issue of the children hung around us like the threat of rain on a summer day — an unasked question. I remember thinking it would resolve itself during my weeks in London. In truth, I avoided thinking about it almost altogether.”
“So when you came home,” I said, “nothing had been resolved.”
“No. Nor much discussed in our letters.”
“What did you want?”
“I wanted the children. I tried not to think that Beth and Richard wanted them, too — or that the children themselves had any particular desires and expectations. I remember arriving at the house in my best dress uniform. I remember standing in the hall and seeing Beth rushing down the stairs to embrace me, looking for a heartbreaking instant like her sister. I remember how she and Richard greeted me with real affection, even happiness, although — considering the issue surrounding the children — they must have wished me still abroad.
“And then I was ushered into the drawing room. Beth ordered tea while I waited in an agony of suspense to see the children. An eon passed, or so it seemed, before Beth finally left to fetch them. When at last she brought them to me I knelt before them on one knee, in my best breeches and polished boots, so that I was shorter than they. For a long minute, the children held back. Nannie clutched her aunt’s hand and Edmund stuck to his uncle’s side — until, without any prompting, he suddenly stepped forward and bowed. ‘How do you do, Sir?’ he said. ‘Must we go live with you now?’ ”
Out of Time Page 19
