by C F Dunn
She seemed disappointed. “That’s a pity. Gramps is kinda sad about it all. He’d like to know where the family comes from, and Gran can trace hers back two hundred years.”
“Has he said so?” Matthew asked, and I heard the unmistakable signs of anxiety. We reached the covered entrance to the courtyard, leaving the bright light for sudden dark, our voices and footsteps echoing.
“No, but he doesn’t need to; you know how he goes quiet when he’s talking about something he’s not comfortable with. He sort of trails off, like a car running out of gas.”
We both glanced at Matthew because we knew exactly where Henry had inherited that from, but if he registered what she’d said, he didn’t show it. Instead he was looking back the way we had come, twisting his ring. Ellie must have thought she had upset him because she said, “It must have been tough on you not knowing your parents. I can’t imagine what it was like.”
“It was a long time ago, Ellie, and I’m beyond remembering.” But the colours that stalked him were not the deep shades of sadness; they were the leprous hues of guilt.
The horse started forward, then settled again to a well-mannered walk.
“Steady there,” Matthew soothed, patting Ollie’s neck. “Try not to squeeze with your legs, sweetheart; he thinks you want him to go faster. I won’t let you fall.”
I gripped a chunk of dark mane instead, trying not to tug, and recalled my riding lessons from childhood. “I think I’m getting used to riding without a saddle. It’s not easy, is it?”
“No, but it’s a useful skill to have at times. You’re doing very well and he’s a good horse – intelligent and very dependable – you’re quite safe.”
Warmed by the sun, the crushed young grass beneath Ollie’s hooves smelled sweetly fertile. Breathing deep lungfuls, I relaxed as Matthew had taught me, feeling my balance improve. “I’m sorry I landed you in it earlier. That was careless of me.”
“It’s easy enough to do; you covered it well though, so no harm done.”
“Except to you, perhaps?”
“What do you mean?” Matthew tightened his hold around me as Ollie negotiated an uneven rise of ground, but he allowed the horse to find its way, and his own body remained relaxed and fluid as if horse and rider were one.
“I sensed how guilty you feel about not telling Henry the truth.”
“Guilty? Yes, I suppose I do feel guilt, or perhaps remorse is closer to it. It’s never felt right lying to him. I can justify it, but it’s not the same as creating a public lie – this is at the very heart of the family and of who we are. I’ve wondered, over the years, whether I should have told him the truth a long time ago. Now I think it’s probably too late. When you’ve lied to someone for so long, how do you go about telling them the truth? How could he ever trust me again?”
I couldn’t begin to answer that one so I didn’t. Matthew clicked his tongue and Ollie turned right, heading towards the river.
After a while I asked, “Don’t you think Henry would understand if you explained why you never told him?”
He took a moment before replying. “Would you? How would you feel if you were in his place?”
I thought about being Henry, then how I felt when I’d discovered Matthew had consistently lied to me: the sense of betrayal, the anger. Even when he explained why he had done it, I found it difficult to forgive him, until my love for him overcame my hurt, and compassion defeated resentment.
Ollie’s hooves chinked metal on stone as we neared the gravelly banks. The river ran thick with melt-water, deep pools of turgid green, silt-bound and dangerous. Matthew clicked once and the horse came to a standstill. He slipped off his back, landing lightly, and held up his hands to guide me to the ground.
“Thanks,” I said, flexing sore muscles. “I should think Ollie could do with a rest as well.” The horse wandered a few feet away to a lush patch of grass and started grazing, unperturbed. Matthew hadn’t pressed me for an answer, but he waited for one nonetheless.
“I think that if I were Henry, I would love and respect you, and know you well enough to understand that whatever you did, you did in my best interests, despite my initial reaction and however long it might take to come to that conclusion.”
“As you did?” he said quietly.
“Yes, as I did. There are several major differences though; he has known you all his life and so the hurt might run deeper because he will think that you should have trusted him enough to tell him at the outset.”
Matthew’s mouth twisted. “And secondly?”
“And secondly, he has known you all his life and he respects and loves you above all else and will forgive you anything.”
“As you did?” he repeated.
“As I did,” I confirmed. “And I hardly knew you, nor did I know the circumstances surrounding your deception at first.”
“The fabrication is there for a purpose, Emma. While the threat still exists, should I not continue to protect him? And not just Henry, but the family as well. Where should the lie end and the truth begin? Do I tell everyone – Jeannie, Maggie? The more people who know who I really am, the more chance there is that I’ll be discovered, and all those associated with me. At the very least, by telling him I might risk losing my son.”
“But would he run the risk of losing you? What are the alternatives?”
“That I let him live out his life in the lie, until…” His mouth pressed into a line, smothering the words.
“Until?”
“Until time relieves me of the responsibility.” Bitterly, he swept the head off a long-stemmed flower growing proud of the surrounding grass. Ollie lifted his head and shook his mane. “Sometimes I’m so tired of this burden of knowledge, of carrying this pretence.”
“At least I can share it with you for the time we have together.”
“Do you think you should have the responsibility as well, that you become part of the invention – help me sustain it?” He ground the toe of his riding boot into the flesh of the earth and it bled darkly over the leather.
“It was my choice to do so, Matthew. You didn’t choose to be the way you are – you’re just trying to make the best of it, and I’m happy to help you do so. If you decide to tell Henry one day, I’ll support you in any way I can.”
He put his hands behind his neck like open wings and stared skywards into the brilliance of the sun. Minutes passed in which he seemed to be thinking, then, shaking his head once, he said, “Not while the threat exists.”
When would it ever end for him? Not on Henry’s death, nor on mine. For him “eternity” had a completely different meaning.
“Eternity?” he queried.
I didn’t realize I’d said it out loud. “I was just remembering Vaughn’s lines: ‘I saw Eternity the other night, A Ring of pure and endless light.’”
He took off his slim-fitting riding coat and spread it over the ground, inviting me to sit. “And?”
“And I was thinking that for you, stuck as you are, eternity is less certain than it is for me, but no less timeless.”
“Possibly; however, I haven’t had a day’s illness in over three hundred years, I still have all my hair and my own teeth, and above all, I have you.” And to prove it, he nibbled my ear.
“And the sun is shining,” I laughed.
“Why, yes, ma’am, so it is, and you need to rest your weary bones,” he drawled, glancing around. “The grass is soft and there’s no one hereabouts…” His hands whipped about my waist and he had me on my back before I could blink. “Hush there now, or you’ll frighten my hos’.” Ollie swished his tail lazily, paying no attention. “Now that sure is a pretty sight,” he hummed, pulling my hair free of its plait and spreading it out around my head. His voice dropped, becoming honey. “The colour of embers.” He touched my lips with his, then my eyes. “‘… Then fire be set within my flesh, And brand thy name upon my heart…’ Here is one fire I wouldn’t mind being consumed by, my love. What a conflagration you set within me.”
I didn’t want to think of flames and death; I wanted to listen to the sound of his voice among the grasses and the rush of the tree-fringed river. I placed my hand over his mouth. “Shh, don’t talk of fires. Tell me about… horses, instead.”
His eyebrow rose in eloquent disbelief. “Horses? I speak of love and you want me to tell you about horses. Now I know I have competition for my affections. I should never have introduced the two of you. As for you,” he addressed his horse with false ire, “how base is it to steal my maid’s heart when my back is turned!” Ollie pricked his ears and walked over to his master, bit rattling, nudging his face until Matthew pushed his head away with a laugh. “Off with you, vagabond. There’s laws against your sort.”
“I think they’ve been repealed.” Plucking a broad-bladed grass, I trapped it between my thumbs and blew steadily. It gave a satisfyingly raucous rasp. Ollie shied and stamped. “Sorry,” I apologized and set to plaiting stems together instead. “Did you have a horse in Rutland?”
“It would have been a bit difficult getting around without one. I had a very fine courser – Arion. My father gave him to me as a colt when I reached my majority. He took a lot of training, but it was worth it; he served me well. He was fast and strong, like Ollie.” He removed bits of grass from my coat and from my hair.
I knotted the grass plait and circled it around his wrist, tying it into a bangle of green. “Arion sounds familiar; it’s a classical name, isn’t it?” I selected three more long blades, nipping them off at the base. The sun warmed my back; I wriggled pleasurably.
“Arion was the son of Demeter and Poseidon, renowned for speed, and… he was immortal.”
I laughed. “That’s ironic.”
He rotated the rope of grass, the twisted stems bruised. “Quite.”
I started work on a matching braid for me. “What happened after you changed? Did he still recognize you? Ow!” The stem razored my thumb. Matthew took my hand and examined it. Blood beaded my skin.
“No. He was already dead then.” He put my thumb to his mouth and sucked gently. “He was shot from under me at Ancaster Heath in April 1643.” He made it sound matter-of-fact, but I knew it to have been a short, bloody skirmish. “There, that’ll heal more quickly.”
I looked at my thumb; there was barely a sign the skin had been sliced at all. “That must have been soul-destroying.”
“It was, but at least I despatched him myself rather than letting some cack-handed field-butcher do it. I expect you know about Ancaster Heath? It could hardly be called a battle – more of a rout. The whole event was a fiasco from beginning to end and not something to be proud of.”
“But you survived,” I said.
A wry smile tipped his mouth. “Evidently.”
“Who did you serve under?”
“Lord Willoughby, initially. I was in the Lincoln Trained Band at first, then joined Cromwell’s Horse for a brief while.”
“I thought you were in the infantry. I’m sure Mrs Seaton said something about that ages ago. You trained the household staff, didn’t you?”
“I did, but cavalry was my greatest strength. It was my father who taught me to ride but my uncle who taught me to fight, as soon as I could hold a practice sword. Now that’s ironic, isn’t it? He also insisted we had some firearms to defend the house, but that was before I went to Cambridge – when we were still on good terms.” He seemed to be tracking something towards the mountains too small for me to see. “I increased the arsenal, updated it, and trained the staff. It seemed like the most prudent course of action. My father would have us trust to God’s mercy to protect us, but at that time, I’m afraid, I looked to iron and powder.”
I sat up to look at him. “He protected you in the end, didn’t He?”
“He certainly did, though only He knows why.”
I laid my head on his chest. “That’s OK, you don’t have to have the answers to everything.” I closed my eyes and let the warmth bathe my face, although I would regret it in the evening when I looked at my speckled skin in the mirror. From somewhere far off, a bird of prey pierced the air with its call. “So you were a ‘godly and honest’ man, were you? Otherwise Cromwell wouldn’t have had you in his troop. What I don’t understand is why you were at home in July. Why did you miss the Gainsborough skirmishes?”
He fingered his shoulder where the long line of his silvered scar lay hidden beneath his clothes. “I was wounded at Grantham in May.”
“When Willoughby was routed at Belton?”
“No, later in the day when Cromwell led the charge against the Royalists. I returned home to recover and found my father in ill health and with no one else to manage the estate. Besides, there were quite radical elements within the ranks with which I couldn’t, in all conscience, agree. And I wasn’t the only one. I had a great deal of respect for Cromwell – for his personal conviction, his energy, his attention to detail – but some of those he attracted didn’t have either the education or the balance in their approach to their faith.”
“You mean they were bigoted and intolerant?”
“I wasn’t going to be quite as uncharitable as that, but yes, basically, quite a few of them were, and the war gave them a greater voice than they would have had otherwise. Reform was needed to a degree but the danger was in…”
“… throwing the baby out with the bathwater. From what I’ve seen of your fighting prowess you’ve had lots of practice and if that wasn’t during the Civil War, when was it?”
“Afterwards.”
I gave him one of my best withering looks. “Matthew, I think I had gathered that much.”
“The problem I find with you,” he said, sitting up so that I was obliged to roll away or get a damp patch from the grass on which he had been lying, “is that you are never content with a little information; you want the lot.”
“That’s not true!” I protested.
“And that whatever I tell you, you want to know more. You are never satisfied until you have bled every last drop of information from me.”
“I like to have a complete picture.”
“So, you can understand my reluctance sometimes to give you any information because I never know where it’s going to lead.”
He made light of my obsessive streak, but time and again he drew a veil over his past – whether to obscure it from me or from himself sometimes wasn’t clear. Each time I learned a little more, piecing together the strands of his life until gradually I might weave a picture I could understand. But it was slow, and I impatient, and sometimes I pushed too hard and he baulked like a stubborn horse and had to be coaxed instead.
“Sorry,” I said, standing, brushing my legs free of grass and regretting getting my kneecaps wet as my trousers stuck damply to them. “It’s just that you represent a huge temptation and I’ve always been a teensy-weensy bit impatient…” He raised a sardonic eyebrow. “All right, quite impatient, and I promise that I will try my very best to restrain my curiosity.”
“Really? Expecting you to refrain from asking me questions is like giving an alcoholic a bottle of booze and telling him not to drink it. Talking of which, we must be getting back. Ready for tea?”
We spent the weekend riding, first bareback together, then further afield with me riding a saddled-up Lizzie, whose placid demeanour made Ollie look positively dangerous. We rode beyond the river and into the foothills where once we travelled on snowmobiles. How quickly the land had changed and how I changed with it until I could barely recognize either. It was a weekend spent in the sun and at peace in the knowledge that Monday might bring with it an entirely different turn of events.
CHAPTER
16
Power of Knowledge
Monday.
I had always liked Mondays. When young, Monday usually meant school and a day spent doing what I liked best – studying – and not being at home with Dad. Later, Monday meant lectures and tutorials and time alone with Guy winkling out facts from an obscure document overlooked by p
revious generations. Monday was an invitation to the week to which I looked forward as surely as almost everybody else did to the weekend. But not today.
Today I stood in front of the library with a book in one hand, my bag in the other, and, tucked away where nobody but my conscience could see it, the journal. I looked into the library’s accusing eye and wondered how on earth I could get the journal back without being caught.
Still early, what sleep I’d grasped had been fitful and scant. My eyes felt scratchy and so did I. I had been so preoccupied that morning that I even forgot to put on my ring. My pretext for going to the library – not that I needed one – was to return Guy’s book. I had finished it and it had lain festering under benign others until I could stand it no longer and felt obliged to take it back. “Here goes…” Seeking strength from my resolve, I marched towards the door.
Like the morning of the last day of October on which I had taken the journal – the day Staahl attacked me and everything changed – the library seemed empty and, for a moment, I thought my entrance went unnoticed. The air moved behind me.
“Professor.”
I spun round. “Oh, good morning!” I tried not to look guilty.
The librarian’s patient smile broke the plane of her flat face into brown creases at odds with her tight, smoothed black hair. She had materialized from the lines of shelves, from the very books she tended as guardian of their secrets. “It’s a while since we last saw you here, Professor; have you come to return the book?” The book. Not a book, or the books. Did she know? Had she guessed? Had she, in the rumour of the night while the campus slept, come across the empty box where the journal once lay?
“The book?” I hedged, perspiration gathering beneath my arms and the journal’s thick presence wedge-like against my side. When I moved, it dug into my ribs, nudge, nudge – here I am, here I lie – the thief took me.
Her face continued to smile but her dark eyes betrayed little. “Yes, the book.”
I shifted nervously and something fell to the floor. I looked down – Guy’s book. I hoped my relief wasn’t evident. “Oh, the book – yes, I have.” I bent awkwardly to stop my coat swinging open and revealing what I hid beneath, but the librarian retrieved the book from the floor. She looked at the front, then at the back where Guy stared from the cover.
