“No, Kitty, no. It was a personal letter. From my father, the first one he has — had — written me since I married Anne. I was carrying it with me that day on the Pike. It was why I dismounted. So I could read it again.”
I shifted so I could see him better. “What was in it, Robert?”
“Alex is dead,” he said. He turned his head and gazed at me steadily. “Kitty, my brother is dead.”
*****
Remembering grief and loss is almost like reliving it fresh. For an hour or more I laid in his arms and listened as he talked. “We were very different and never close,” Robert told me finally. “But he was my brother and I cared deeply for him. It is another loss. I seem to remember nothing but losses.”
Something tugged at a corner of my mind, something I couldn’t quite grasp. I brushed it aside. “You remembered the weeks you spent with him in London,” I reminded him consolingly. “When you came back from India. Those were good memories, weren’t they?”
“Ah, yes.” He smiled. “Wining and dining and wenching. Forgive me, Sweetheart. It was one of the few times I enjoyed London. Oh — and playing cards. Alex and his endless round of cards. It’s what killed him.”
“A card game?” I hadn’t thought to ask how he died.
“Cheating, actually. He was shot by a better cheater, who found him out.”
I was astounded, but for some reason Robert was amused. I heard him chuckle quietly. “Better than fever or pox or evisceration on a battlefield, I imagine. He knew it would come to that, one day. Had to know, and had to choose it.”
Suddenly, and for no particular reason, I captured that elusive thought.
“Talbots will go to you now.”
“It will go to my son.” He looked at me. And spoke the next words carefully: “I will not go back.”
My heart stilled. My breath failed me. In a split second my life and everything in it changed. We stared at each other in perfect silence. Then I drew away. “You cannot mean that.”
“Of course I mean it. The issue is no longer can I return. Am I able to return. It is that I do not choose to return.
“But you have to,” I cried, suddenly frantic. “You have to go back. We’ll find a way. We will. We have to. You love Talbots. You’ve always loved—” I stopped, almost overwhelmed by a sense of urgency. “Oh, God, Robert!” I said, sitting up abruptly. “What will happen if months pass before you’re able…”
“Months will pass anyway. Months passed before my father’s letter found me. Recollect how slowly things move on the other side, Kathleen. Letters are carried by horse and ship.” He paused. “My regiment will presume I am dead. Already do, very likely. Eventually they will inform my family. And Edmund will be my father’s heir. He will be perfect for it.”
“He has never even seen Talbots!”
“But Richard has —
“Richard?”
“Richard is a younger son and could not have Snowdon, which he loved nearly as much as I loved Talbots. He will be Edmund’s regent, and Edmund will learn to love Talbots because Richard will. He will learn to manage it because Richard will teach him. After all, he wishes to be a banker because Richard is a banker — not a soldier to follow me. So he will catch Richard’s enthusiasm for the land. No one could teach him to love it or care for it better.”
“You could.”
We looked at each other. Then Robert shifted so that he was sitting upright, the sheets rustling as he moved. “I could not, Kitty, and that’s a fact,” he said, reaching out to touch my hair. “I’m not going back. I no longer belong there.”
I was appalled. “You’ve wanted Talbots all your life!” I nearly shouted.
“I want you more!” he shouted back.
I gaped at him, speechless.
“Can you believe I would bed you and then leave you?” he asked more quietly.
I hesitated, framing my answer carefully. “I believe you can be…practical about women.”
My words stung him into silence. “Then I have been impractical twice in my life, madam,” he said finally. “Once, when I fell in love with Anne, and the second time with you.”
Suddenly I bolted out of bed and across the room, whipping a robe around me on my way to the door. But Robert, who didn’t waste time with modesty, got there first and blocked the doorway with his arm.
“I’ve been a fool, Kathleen. I’ve gone about this all wrong. I should have coaxed and charmed and properly courted you. But it seemed like so much artifice when what I feel for you is so…forthright. So plain and clear.”
I looked at him, waiting for the rest of it.
“We’re old friends, you and I,” he said, meeting my gaze. “We have met many times before.”
“That’s crazy.”
“It is not. The universe is filled with things we once knew nothing of, like quasars and black holes, and a million mysteries and miracles still wait to be discovered. We know that first hand, Kitty, you and I. We know time has rips and warps that have never been imagined! Once upon a time people thought the earth was flat and now we know it’s not. So why can’t—”
“No!” We faced each other, still in the doorway, for a long second.
“Of all the people I’ve ever known,” Robert whispered in the silence, “I’ve known you the best. And the longest.”
“Two weeks,” I shot back loudly. “Less than that.”
“Forever,” he countered. “And you damn well know it, too.”
His words sent goosebumps up my spine. Abruptly, I ducked under his arm and marched swiftly across the hall to my room, Robert on my heels. “This is nonsense,” I told him sharply. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But I was lying, and Robert knew it.
“Yes, you do,” he said. He grabbed my arm and spun me around. “You helped me. You could have walked away from me that day in Pennsylvania, but you didn’t. We argued back and forth, denying and disbelieving, and then … and then … we simply fell in together, like two old soldiers. Somehow — somehow — we were already comrades, you and I, as if we had fought in battle side by side.”
I pressed my hands to my ears, trying not to hear his words. “No, no, no—” I closed my eyes and against the blackness of my lids I saw the garden shed, saw Robert in that instant of discovery, still as a statue.
He drew my hands away and made me listen. “I love you without beginning or end, Kathleen. It did not start that day in Pennsylvania.”
“No—” But I remembered something. I remembered what it was I felt the first time I ever saw him.
“You’re one of the keys,” he went on, “part of the sequence. Had you not been somewhere on the other side, the trap would not have sprung. T’was not merely a rogue current, a vagrant tide of time that brought me here. T’was you.”
“Stop it!” All at once the memory overwhelmed me: that eerie familiarity I sensed when I found him in the shed, that uneasy déjà vu — before I ran and Robert followed, stepping into the sunlight of a different place in time.
“I’ve relied on you,” he said, his voice urgent. “You! A woman! In a way I’ve never relied on anyone, not the best and bravest soldier, not even my closest friends. Yet I knew I could. It was instinct, an intuitive knowledge. And you felt it, too. You never hesitated, never flinched—”
“I thought you were nuts!”
“And then you believed me! And you couldn’t tell me why — do you remember? Even now you cannot tell me why.”
“It was the way you looked,” I said desperately. “Your expression out there on the pike with all the traffic. I can’t explain it, but it was—”
“What, Kathleen? It was what?”
I held up a palm to him, a warning: don’t-push-me. “And I helped you,” I went on (forcing myself to sound calm and rational), “because if I didn’t, you would have been picked up by the guys in white coats and butterfly nets. I had to help you. And now you have to go back. We agreed to that. You would go back. We would find a way
. You have two children, Robert. And now you have Talbots.”
“Are you afraid for me, Kathleen? Or are you afraid for yourself? That’s it, isn’t it?”
I was angry now. What did he know about how I felt? “I’m not afraid of anything,” I told him, hearing my own voice rise. “Not a single goddamned thing—”
“The hell you aren’t. You’re afraid of us!”
All at once I was in motion, pacing the room, panicked. I couldn’t look at him. I was twisting my hands together, literally wringing them. I forced myself to drop them at my sides.
“If you stay,” I said finally, “if you stay…”
I stopped pacing and turned to him, laid it out before him, laid it out for myself. “If you stay, I will come to love you.”
“It’s too late, Kitty,” he said softly. “Too late for either one of us.”
“If you stay, you will regret what you’ve given up. You will come to regret me. I will love you and you will regret that, too.”
“You already love me. You love me as I love you!”
I began to weep.
“I am not like your husband, Kitty. I will not do to you the things he did. I will never treat you thus. Find the courage to search your heart—”
I grabbed a pillow and flung it at him. When he stepped toward me I fell back, flinging another pillow and then another, pelting him with ineffective ammunition until he closed in on me and grabbed my wrists.
“I’ve crossed time for you. I’ll stand at your back. I will never leave you, Kitty. You will never need to be afraid.”
I stared at him for a long minute, willing myself not to believe. And then I gave it up and came into his arms.
“I am lost.” I whispered.
“Nay, Kitty,” he breathed against my cheek. “You are found.”
Chapter 35
It was all true, everything he said. What we had together was born out of something very old, something that went beyond this one summer of this particular century. I helped him because we were already friends, and because I knew, in some deep and honest place within myself, that we had been many things to each other, many times.
We never brought the subject up again. It was too weird, even for us.
I laid awake for a long time that night thinking he’s not going back, he’s staying because of me. In the instant that I accepted this, ceased fearing and embraced it, a missing piece of myself somehow slipped perfectly into place. For the first time in my life I was whole and strong and unafraid. Robert believed in me, trusted me, relied on me. I had his back. He had mine.
And there was something else, a stray thought that hovered at the edges of my consciousness. Something Julie and said about Lila. About redemption. And finally it came to me with a swiftness that took my breath away.
I am who I am because of Lila. Because of the marriages, the moods, the madness and the mania, not in spite of them. I might be confused, clueless and boringly conventional at times, but there’s a flip side: I am a survivor. I’m a good parent, a good friend and even, on occasion, a good daughter. I am a halfway decent person because of Lila. I am smart, empathetic, compassionate and brave because of what happened to her and, by extension, to me.
I am the sum of my parts. And Robert loves me for all of that. He loves me for what I am. He loves me for who I’ve become.
In those quiet hours before sunrise, as I strung thought onto thought, I knew he was wakeful, too. Looking back on it, I am struck by how little sleep we had in all those days, how little we even ate, as if routine and basic needs used up precious time, took us away from each other.
When the sky began to lighten I turned on my pillow. “Tell me a memory,” I said.
“You know all my memories.”
“No, you have more than you think. They’re out there, just beyond reach. Fleeting ones, like snapshots.”
“Snapshots,” he repeated, and I could tell even in the half-light that he was smiling.
“Tell me,” I said, “something from your childhood. Tell me your earliest memory.”
“Raking gravel,” he replied almost at once.
I waited.
“I was very small. Maybe three years old. I was helping the gardener’s men rake the gravel of the carriageway, and I had a little rake, just my size. Important work, that. I felt quite grown up.” He shifted to look at me. “Your turn.”
“The scent of honeysuckle,” I said. “And someone — I can’t remember who — showing me how to taste the nectar of the blossoms.” I closed my eyes, searching for a face. Was it my father, the elusive and melancholy Charles? I shook my head and looked at Robert. “Now tell me another,” I said.
“Music,” he said, “and the Irish stable lads at Talbots. Tim fiddling us some lively jigs while his foot beat out the time. And his brother — Liam — had a pair of drummers’ sticks, which he beat upon the stable walls and doors. Fresh as yesterday, that recollection.” He looked at me expectantly.
“My first fence.”
“Not early enough,” he accused knowledgeably. “Far from it.”
“But it’s important,” I told him, recollecting. “I was ten and I was scared.”
It had been a real fence, not a jump set up in a riding ring. Ahead of me Lila and her male companion of the day had already cleared it, coming down on the other side in an eruption of shouts and laughter. “I was riding to it too hard,” I said, “rushing it, not sure I could do it. It seemed so impossibly high.”
“So you threw your heart over and followed after,” Robert said, with the instinctive empathy only a horseman would have.
“And landed safely. And knew I could do it again.”
“Yes, it was important, that one.” Robert touched his lips to my temple.
“Your turn,” I smiled.
“Eating custard in the nursery,” he offered. “A spoon advancing on my spoon, an invader spoon, pillaging my custard. I parried, spoons clashed. And I remember a woman’s laughter with the warmth of sunshine in it.”
“Who was the woman?”
Almost imperceptibly, Robert stilled. And then he knew.
“My mother. ‘Tis my only memory of her — sitting at the nursery table with me, plotting for my custard.” He paused. “She made me happy.”
Suddenly, risking everything, I threw my heart over the fence.
And followed after it.
“You make me happy,” I said.
*****
When we awoke late that morning I remembered we had planned to make a field trip to the bank. I laid in bed a moment, trying to talk myself out of this errand, but the thing was, I was running low on cash. And since I had ditched all of Cameron’s credit cards, that posed a problem.
Groaning, I tumbled out of bed, dressed, and found the checkbook for the account Lila and I shared at the local bank. Robert watched while I wrote out a check in the amount of a hundred dollars.
“A bank draft,” he said. “I’ve noticed that people use them with greater frequency than they do — did — on the other side, like a form of self-issued currency. That and, um, those cards.”
“Credit and debit,” I supplied.
“Yes. Exactly so.”
The subject bored us already. I am not a great business intellect and my knowledge of banking is limited to two steps: first you put the money in and then you take it out again. And Robert was so disdainful of money that he signed over all his own to his children, happily dumping the entire mess in the capable hands of his wife’s brother-in-law. Obviously, a banking lesson was in order.
Before we left I called Blythe and Sammy at Uncle John’s. I suspected that a houseful of women and children would be quite sufficient to upend John’s routine and derail his good humor (always marginal at best), and I was right. John answered the phone sounding short-tempered and put-out and quickly handed me off to the children, who were too busy watching kittens in Helen’s big, cookie-filled kitchen to spend much time speaking to me.
“Don’t make us come h
ome too soon,” Blythe told me, “because the kittens have all their eyes open now and Aunt Helen says they’ll be able to play soon.”
Suddenly I recalled my promise to myself that we would have a cat as soon as we settled — and here was a kitchen full of cats, anyone of which I was sure Helen would be happy to part with in a heartbeat. Foolishly, I almost mentioned this to Blythe, when she broke in with an announcement of her own.
“I have to go because I’m going to have a toedacure.”
I worked this quickly a dozen different ways in my mind, but I could not crack the code.
“A toedacure?”
“Uh-huh. Lalla said I may have pink and Aunt Helen is going to do it. And I get to soak my feet in bubble bath first.”
“Oh!” I said brightly. “You mean a pedicure.”
Silence. Then: “No. I don’t have peds. I have toes.”
“Well, that’s what it’s called, Sweetheart. Ped come from Latin for foot…” Was it Latin? I paused, thinking. Robert would know, of course, but I couldn’t just sing out and ask. “So when you put nail polish on your toes, you have a—”
“I have to go or the bubbles will be flat,” Blythe interrupted gracelessly, and promptly handed the phone to her brother.
“I can’t talk right now,” Sammy announced with equal tactlessness. “Uncle John is going to take me fishing.”
Dejectedly, I hung up and gathered together car keys, my check, and (as I deliberately and carefully pointed out to Robert), my ID.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“I suppose you’re going to insist upon driving.” This was supposed to be a joke, but I didn’t laugh.
“Um, yes, well, I can see that you are.”
“Come along,” I said sternly, and we clattered down the stairs to the car. On the drive to the bank Robert half sang and half hummed one of his endless tunes, piecing together a verse. “Then get you some buxom young maidens,” he rumbled, and followed the line with more humming.
“And then what?”
He hummed. Then: “And line them all up in a row. Let them drink out of half gallon bottles…” More humming. More rumbling. Then we turned into the parking lot of the bank and all his noises stopped. “What’s that?” he asked suddenly.
Out of Time Page 26
