by Davis Bunn
“I did. Back in the front parlor. There isn’t anything more.”
“Tell me again.”
“She saw me climbing the crest of a hill. The highest hill in the area. Round at the top. Partly covered by forest. There was a town down below, she counted three steeples. The bells were ringing. It was clear and cold. Behind me was a tower, like something from an ancient castle. I just stood there and looked over the valley and the town.” He glanced over. And held his breath.
Kayla asked, “Your mother said climbing this hill was important?”
“The word she used was vital. It was vital that I go there.”
“And you felt it was important too.”
“I told you, Kayla. I thought it was the hospital calling. My heart was going about a thousand beats a minute. So it was hard to tell anything for certain. But yes. I guess I did.”
“You’re not telling me everything, are you?”
The wind drummed softly about the car. “Mom said I was happy.”
Kayla did not speak.
“Not just happy. Content. Full of joy and wonder. Looking forward to a new and wonderful future.” The words gummed up his mouth even after they had emerged. “Which is impossible.”
Adam could not remember the last time he had faced a woman’s parents. Not since high school, certainly. The two years he had spent acting professionally had cauterized all such memories, like passing from a schoolyard into a blast furnace.
He stood by the living room window and tried to come up with something proper to say. There was little privacy in the open-plan house. Which meant Adam heard the conversation between father, daughter, and stepmother taking place in the rear dining area. He could not hear the exact words, but he knew they were concerned. Yet the longer they talked, the more Adam wanted her to come. He had become very adept at wanting nothing and expecting less. But not today. So he scripted in his head what he would say to Peter Austin, how he did not intend anything improper, how they’d take separate rooms, how he respected the family, yada yada.
The conversation ended. Footsteps ran lightly up the stairs in the newer stone quarter. The upstairs floorboards creaked softly. Adam heard two voices approach. He found himself beset by first-date nerves.
Peter Austin held his wife’s hand. He was dressed in Saturday gardening clothes. His features were creased with worry and fatigue, yet he still looked every inch the captain of industry. Craggy-faced, uncompromising gaze, deceptively mild voice. “Might I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“The way you identified the German company.”
Honor said, “Peter, invite your guest to sit down. Offer him coffee.”
“He’ll be sitting for hours. They’re going for a drive. Do you want coffee?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
“There, you see? Niceties done. Back to my question.”
“Herrstadt.”
“Not the company. The process. How did you come by this?”
“You want to know how I structure my analysis.”
“Precisely.”
Adam knew the question was a test. He also knew it was out of line. Analysts lived by holding their cards close. Even so, he liked the question and the reason.
Either he trusted the man, or he didn’t. The unspoken challenge went as follows: If you can’t trust me with the secrets of your craft, why should I trust you with my daughter?
Adam heard the rapid tread of footsteps back down the stairs. Kayla popped into view carrying a minuscule shoulder bag, scanned their faces, and said, “You’re grilling him.”
“Very mildly,” her father replied.
Adam told Peter, “I need to explain something.”
“Daddy . . .”
Peter Austin replied, “This is important, Kayla.” When his daughter dropped her bag and crossed her arms, he said, “Go on.”
“There are a hundred thousand analysts out there following company numbers. Others make it their life’s goal to be first in the know. And the largest group follow market trends. I don’t have the resources to build a hunter-seeker team. And I can’t stand graphs.”
“So you fashioned for yourself a different course.” Peter Austin nodded once. “I thought that about you the first time we chatted.”
“I call it the macro process. I study historical fracture lines. Economic crises, war, raw material surges, major market cycles, political trends that affect markets.”
“Any number of people search the past.”
“Right. But there are two differences here. First I identify what I think is a trend in today’s world. Then I go back and build historical data around past trends that follow as closely as possible what is happening today. I study companies that reaped the whirlwind. Who survived and prospered, and why. And the same for those that failed spectacularly. Then I look for parallels in today’s market.”
“History repeating itself,” Peter Austin said.
Adam replied, “All the time.”
“I like your response, young man,” Peter Austin said. “I like it immensely.”
Kayla said softly, “Can we go now?”
Kayla soon had them off the main road. She said the Cotswolds should only be visited on lanes less than ten feet wide. Adam drove because she asked. He felt happy for the first time since leaving America. No, it was longer than that. He scanned back, searching for a time when smiles had come easy.
“What’s going on in that mind of yours?”
“Am I that easy to read?”
“Answer my question.” But her tone was light.
“I was thinking about the day I put my mom on the plane to Africa. It was the first time I can remember actually giving her a lifetime dream.” He shrugged. “Most of my life was spent being a major disappointment.”
“You don’t know that.”
He did not answer, because to do so would mean giving in to the clouds, blocking out the sun that streamed straight through him.
“What was it like, acting in a television show?”
“Do you realize every time we’ve met, we talk about me and I hear almost nothing about you?”
“I don’t like talking about myself.”
“That makes two of us.”
Kayla was quiet long enough for them to pass through a hamlet of stone and timber and wintry smoke. “So ask.”
But he didn’t. Not just then. Instead, he let the silence ease them through yet another tiny village. Kayla rode with a Cotswold Country map unfolded in her lap. There was no hint of civilization and modern times. The only road signs were wooden fingers planted alongside lanes that emerged from the stone walls and hedgerows. The narrow roads were burnished by a sunlight strong as heat. The landscapes were brown and earthy. Adam drove a grand old beast of a car, so broad he had to reverse away from incoming traffic, for the lanes were too narrow to permit anyone to pass them except where he could ease into a farm lane or lay-by. He kept his speed to thirty miles an hour. He did not care how long it took to get wherever they were going. Or if, in fact, they ever arrived at all.
Finally Kayla did as he had hoped. She sighed, and for once the sound was not full of the tension that etched her features and carved shadows in her cheeks. Instead, it was a sound of release. Kayla eased down to where her head rested on the seat-back. Her hair spilled over the leather, russet upon brown.
Adam wanted to hear her voice without the stress, with-out the worry. But all he could think to say was, “This is one amazing car.”
Then he was glad, because Kayla smiled. It was a rare gem of an expression, for it softened her. He slowed further, so he could look over and drink in the sight of this very different lady.
Kayla said, “It was my mother’s. Daddy kept it mostly for the memories. He hates to drive.”
He waited to see if she would talk about her mother. Or explain why her father preferred not to sit behind the wheel of such a machine. But Kayla remained as she was, watching the lane ahead, in silence. And Adam decided no
t to ask anything more just then, content with the easy silence and the day.
They bought cheese, stone-ground bread, and apples from a village shop. They ate at a stream with a rock as both table and bench. The valley was steep-sided, shielding them from the wind. Sheep supplied the entertainment, calling in cadence to the rushing water.
Adam decided it was time to ask, “Would you tell me about your project?”
Kayla stared at the water. “It all seems a million miles away right now.”
“Forget the bad stuff. Practically all I’ve heard so far has been about the guy and the damage. Tell me the good.”
She looked at him. The sun played upon her gaze, turning it to russet gemstone, clear as the stream that rushed beside them. “There was a lot of it. The good. A lot.”
It seemed the most natural thing in the world to do as she had done in the coffee shop. Adam reached over and took hold of her gloved hand.
Kayla stared at the two hands, one bared and the other in leather. Adam waited for her to break the moment and say they needed to be getting on. But when Kayla lifted her hand free, it was merely to slip the glove off. She settled her fingers back into his and said, “How much do you know about Oxfam?”
“The name only.”
“In the middle of the Second World War, the college chapels got together with the city churches and founded the Oxford Famine Relief Committee. Their aim was to bring food and shelter to the innocents of Greece and Netherlands who had been made homeless by the war. Other British cities set up similar groups, but Oxfam was the only one that kept going after the war. Oxfam now operates in seventy-four countries. They are often the first to bring supplies to disaster-hit regions and the last to leave. Their aim is not merely to feed and shelter the destitute, but once the crisis is under control, to help rebuild shattered lives.
“Before the drought struck East Africa, Oxfam helped start a worldwide project called the Fair Trade Initiative. In many of the poorest countries, farmers who raise the crops receive almost none of the profits. They are told what to grow by middlemen, who then pay them in seed and supplies, creating modern servitude. Oxfam sought to break this stranglehold by taking the place of the middlemen and giving all the profits back to the farmers and their villages.”
The sun touched the lip of the western slopes. Instantly the sky overhead was filled with an orchestral array. Every tree, every rocky outcropping, became a symphony of light and tone. Adam drank in the day and the brook and the country-side perfumes, knowing Kayla was no longer entirely there beside him. She had drifted away, captured by a hot and dusty realm.
“No one expected the level of success Oxfam experienced with this project. Nowadays, many of Europe’s supermarket chains have entire aisles for Fair Trade products. The result has been an anchoring of entire regions. Villagers were no longer giving up on land their families had farmed for generations and migrating to the cities. Why should they, when they could remain where they were and earn a decent wage and send their children to school and preserve their way of life.” Kayla was silent for a moment before adding, “Then disaster struck.”
Adam guessed, “The drought.”
“Oxfam is now the major supplier of food and shelter to nine hundred thousand people in East Africa. The problem is, more than four million people are starving. Oxfam’s central committees in Kenya and Tanzania and Ethiopia and Eritrea had to make a critical choice—continue to support the Fair Trade projects or feed the starving. They really had no option, not when faced with the prospect of babies dying if they didn’t change directions.”
Shadows drifted east until twilight’s gentle blanket slipped over their resting place. The temperature dropped with the sun. Adam saw his breath as he said, “So they gave the project to you. Smart.”
“They had just started to organize the farmers of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya when the drought hit. The areas where water remained plentiful were growing flowers that required enormous amounts of handwork. Asparagus, artichokes, some fruit trees. But the biggest crop by far was coffee. We continued where Oxfam had been forced to stop, building drying sheds, set-ting up a sorting operation and cold-storage facility for cut flowers and out-of-season vegetables.”
Adam massaged the fingers going cold in the frigid dusk. “How many people were you helping, Kayla?”
She was quiet for a time, then used the hand that was still gloved to swipe at the edges of her eyes. “Almost a hundred villages. I wish you could have seen it when we were going strong.” Her voice was not broken, not really. Just trembling hard, as though revealing the joy was only possible if she shared the sorrow as well. “We would go into the villages to deliver their quarterly paychecks. They would line the road. If you can call a dusty track through the veld a road. They sang us in, they sang us out. This region, the north of Tanzania and the south of Kenya, is mostly Kikuyu and very strong Christian. They gave us names. They called me . . .”
Adam reached over and enfolded her in his arms. She did not actually cry. Adam understood. She was strong, and the sorrow was old. She just needed a moment to collect herself. Oh, yes. He understood all too well. When she started to straighten, Adam released her, knowing she needed to rely on her own strength. After all, she was going back. She had to fight this battle to the bitter end. Alone. She was going in seven days.
The internal reverberation increased to the point that his voice was almost as unsteady as hers. “We need to be going.”
chapter 13
The road crested a rise so high Adam caught a final teardrop of sunset gold amid the crown of trees. They descended with a tumbling river for company. A valley opened, wide enough to welcome both them and the river. Steep-sided hills brooded on all sides, bearing their cloaks of night like sentinels from an age of armor and warlocks, of seers and white-bearded kings. The sun was gone from this realm, yet the sky maintained its abundance of dusky hues. At the vale’s heart rose a village of stone that glowed in the final light. The dominion of Broadway began with a sign declaring its royal charter of 1134. The central road deserved the village’s name, for it was wide as a four-lane highway, yet paved in stone as ancient as the houses. At the village’s heart was a coaching inn, with a domed entrance where carriages drawn by six matched steeds had once passed. Planted at the roadside was a sign declaring in Gothic script that the inn was the oldest in all England.
Kayla spoke for the first time since leaving their rocky haven. “Let’s stay here.”
Kayla had not taken so much time dressing for a dinner in a long time.
Her bathroom was almost as large as her bedroom. A huge tub stood on four lion’s paws beneath a window she soon frosted with steam. She used all the hotel’s wide array of free gifts—herbal shampoo and bath salts and conditioner and lotion, all from the same shop that supplied Buckingham Palace. She dried her hair, combed it carefully, and held it away from her face with her mother’s jeweled clip. Kayla had decided not to take the jewelry pieces she had inherited from her mother to Africa, which was the only reason she still had them in her possession. Her watch, a graduation present from her father, and the one necklace she had in Dar es Salaam were gone now. In the weeks after Geoffrey vanished, Kayla had found these small thefts the hardest to bear. It felt as though he had stolen them intentionally to rub her nose in the dust. To break her just as hard as he possibly could.
And now there was Adam.
She sat in her slip before the little makeup table and oval mirror. The table was an old-fashioned affair, with a padded top and pink lace draped around the edges and a matching padded stool. The mercury-backed mirror rested in a gilded frame, with two miniature chandeliers dangling to either side. In the mirror Kayla could see a four-poster bed so high the hotel supplied an embroidered footstool to climb in and out. Across from the bed hung a portrait of a young woman, her face almost lost to candle soot.
She knew she would remember every little item about this room and this day for a very long time.
She lined up her makeup items like little chess pieces. She had not used any of them in months. The powder compact was cracked as the parched earth of Africa. The lipstick was almost gummy. The eyelash brush was rock-hard and left her dabbing gobs instead of evenly applying the ink. But she was able to achieve the un-made-up look she preferred. She finished with a trace of perfume behind each ear. She screwed the top back on the tiny bottle. One by one she placed the containers back in the little pouch. Then she lifted her gaze.
And stared straight into the truth.
Her father was right. Adam was a good man. He deserved far better and far more than the few fractured minutes she had to give.
Kayla rose from the stool. She picked up the dress on the bed. It was a midnight blue Feraud, high-collared and long-sleeved, fashioned of merino wool so fine it floated cloudlike over her head and clung invitingly to her form. She slipped into stockings and shoes to match. She drew out her mother’s pearls from her shoulder bag’s side pocket, and stepped back to the oval mirror.
Kayla fumbled with the clasp, then dropped her hands and said to her reflection, “You were a fool to come.”
Even in the off-season, the two single rooms cost more than Adam paid for a month at the Oxford boardinghouse. He mused over how little this bothered him as he showered. He had never spent money easily. In his youth, there had been none to spend. When older and earning, he had always been too focused on the goal of future freedom. Adam dressed in the suit he had purchased with company money. He had felt silly packing a suit and dress shirt and new tie. Yet now, as he took the carved wooden staircase down to the main gallery, he was doubly glad, both because all the men he saw were equally well dressed, and because Kayla would no doubt have come prepared.
The hotel’s main gallery was an odd juxtaposition of the antiquated and the polished. The flagstone floor still had grooves where metal-wheeled carts had brought in the packing chests used by guests arriving for the season. The front door was peaked and banded in iron, and each time one of the liveried servants opened it, Adam spotted another car from his dreams—a Bentley sports car, an Aston Martin, a vintage Rolls. The fireplace burned logs four feet long, casting a glow over the easy smiles and the dripping jewels. A giant Christmas tree draped in baubles and lights added to the festive atmosphere.
