In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  She put Isabelle down on the changing table and removed her tiny onesie and diaper. She wiped her down and powdered her. Isabelle was a tactile baby, and of late she loved to be naked whenever possible. The room was warm, and Isabelle was flushed, her cheeks the same shade as the nodding heads of the pink and white peonies out in the garden.

  She breathed in the baby’s scent and the warm air of the afternoon. She realized she was still trembling, still afraid and her mind was whirling, avoiding letting the man’s words sink into her head and heart. She couldn’t allow the seed of doubt to take root, she couldn’t afford it. She was tired of fear and doubt, afraid if she stood still, if she allowed herself to be quiet and think, the abyss of loss might open beneath her feet and send her on a fall that she knew would never have an ending.

  Isabelle burbled at her, happy to be bare-skinned and have her mother’s attention solely for herself for a few minutes. Isabelle kicked her feet up and Pamela caught them in her hands and covered the soft, velvety little soles with kisses. Isabelle shrieked with delight, a beautiful smile spreading wide across her tiny face. Pamela’s heart clenched inside her with the realization of how much Isabelle had grown and changed since Casey had disappeared. The first year of a child’s life was that way, change was so rapid, and trying to hold any moment in your hands to keep was like trying to grasp stardust—when you opened your palms the moment was already past. So many of those moments had come and gone in Casey’s absence.

  “Oh, Isabelle, I miss your daddy,” she said softly, fixing the pins in the baby’s diaper and putting a fresh pink t-shirt on her. She picked her up to carry her downstairs, holding her closely, so that her flesh almost seemed part of her own again. She felt the fear there under the denial and the tales she told herself at three o’clock in the morning during another sleepless night. And so she held their daughter a little tighter, kissing her fiercely, as if she could keep her safe by just loving her hard enough.

  No, you couldn’t grasp stardust, because in the grasping you lost it, but you could hold it carefully for a time, and see it shimmer in your palms before the winds of fate or fortune blew it on its way. She knew this because for a little while, they had done just that.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The Colors of Men

  KATE CAME UPON HER in the garden a few afternoons after the visit from British Intelligence. Pamela heard the motor in the lane above and stood, shading her eyes, the low churn of fear starting immediately in her stomach, until she spied Kate’s delicate outlines against the bright afternoon sun. She hated this; the fear that came with normal day-to-day events, including things as simple as a car pulling into one’s drive.

  Kate walked down the drive, presenting a pretty picture in a dainty sundress the color of cornflowers, a shade that made her eyes even more striking than they normally were. She had a neatly folded quilt over her arm, which she presented to Pamela with her usual no-nonsense air.

  “’Tis for you,” she said. Her tone was brisk but there were two clear streaks of deep pink in her cheeks that told Pamela this moment had meaning to her.

  Pamela took the quilt and unfurled it across the garden gate, careful not to let it crush the delicate tendrils of the sweet peas. It was absolutely beautiful with every shade in it from the softest of shell pinks to a crimson that was almost black. Beautifully constructed rag roses anchored each corner of the quilt. The blocks were made from a variety of materials, from thickly-brushed flannel flocked with tiny rose buds to ruched velvet and bits of satin appliqued onto blocks of blush pink cotton in the form of briar roses which spread out from a thick cane, replete with grass green thorns, pricked with silver thread on their tips. One square held a perfectly rendered vardo, a bright blue flag in the midst of the reds and pinks and greens. She and Casey had conceived Isabelle in such a caravan under a full moon when the tides ran as high as they had for a century, both those of sea and man. There was a silhouette of a mermaid, too, holding a baby to her breast, gazing off to far horizons, pearls scattered through the dark satin scrap that made up her hair. There was a square that held a small, woolly sheep with Paudeen’s dark face which made her laugh out loud. A long streamer of pewter grey silk with black button eyes and filaments of ragged silk made up the haughty beauty that was Phouka. There was a pair of mating doves in the center of the quilt, positioned sitting upon a branch of the briar rose. Another square held corduroy stones, and birds feathered in scraps of taffeta and velvet, representing Conor’s two passions in life.

  It was their life depicted in cloth. It was a work of art, and it never failed to astonish her how Kate created such beauty when she could not see what she was doing.

  “Oh, Kate.” Her words were slightly choked with emotion and she put her hands to her chest, touched beyond measure by the gift.

  Kate shrugged, visibly uncomfortable, the deep pink in her cheeks brightening to red.

  “I’ve never had a good friend like you before. I just wanted to make ye something that would keep ye warm at night. I started it for the both of yez—you an’ Casey. It was meant to represent how love is, how there are thorns amongst the roses an’ yet that only makes the roses that much sweeter. For a long time I thought it best not to give it to ye, but then I felt today that I ought to because I had made it mostly because of our friendship, an’ it was meant to be yers.”

  “It’s absolutely beautiful, Kate, thank you so much. I still can’t fathom how you manage to make quilts. I feel very honored that you’ve made one for me.”

  “Tisn’t as difficult as it might seem. I can see the colors in my head when I’m workin’ on the bits an pieces. Pat does for me what Noah used to do an’ sorts them in their piles, an’ then he tells me what each piece of material looks like as I touch it and then I envision the pattern in my head an’ know where I want to place each piece.”

  “Were you always blind, Kate?” Pamela asked, curious, for Kate seemed to have a fine understanding of color as well as direction and form.

  “No, I could see until I was four an’ then I got sick with a terrible fever an’ I lost my sight by the time all was said an’ done. The doctors have never been able to understand just why it happened. I’m legally blind, but ye know I can see the rough outlines of things. I can’t see detail well, an’ I can’t make out color. I remember it though, I remember it fine. It’s how I see people, too; I see their colors in my head when I meet them.”

  “You do? Like an aura, do you mean?”

  Kate shook her head. “No, not so much, just that people have their own colors. Patrick was a lovely deep an’ clear green the first time we met, despite how irritatin’ he found me.”

  Pamela laughed. “He didn’t find you irritating so much as he was completely addled by you.”

  Kate smiled, her eyes lighting from within. “Aye, well so was I. I came here expectin’ to find yerself an’ the wee man an’ here was this tall, dark man with gentle hands an’ a gentle heart. I was a bit angry when I left, truth be told. I had never been so comfortable in a stranger’s company before. I trusted him immediately and that threw me right off my axis.”

  “And now what colors do you see for him?”

  “‘Tis the same, like a green spring rain or a cool still pond with moss round about its edges. Mind, his greens are just a wee bit more murky with this case he’s workin’ on. No surprise there, though.”

  “No,” Pamela agreed stroking her hand over the quilt and reveling in both its beauty and the thick weight of it. She worried for Pat and Tomas endlessly, and after the years of worry for Casey, she knew all too well how Kate felt.

  “Would ye like to know yer own colors?”

  “I have colors?”

  “Of course ye do, daftie. Why wouldn’t ye?”

  “It’s only I feel a little transparent lately,” she said, “as if I might simply evaporate into the wind one of these days.”

  “Aye, I can see why ye would feel so, but I still see color about ye, though it’s changed since�
��” Kate paused, the pink flares in her cheeks turning almost scarlet.

  “Since Casey disappeared. It’s all right, Kate, you can say it. It’s the reality of the situation.”

  Kate looked at her, the gentian eyes depthless and unfathomable. “Aye, doesn’t make it easier to say an’ certainly not easy for you to hear. Are ye plantin’ rosemary?”

  Pamela took the abrupt change of subject for what it was meant to be, an escape route from speaking of hard things.

  Kate came into the garden then, for like Pamela, she could never resist the opportunity to work with green growing things. Pamela folded the quilt gently, placing it so that neither recalcitrant sheep nor small drool-festooned hands could molest it. She eyed the sky suspiciously. She wanted to finish her herb garden today, and while the sky was currently a blameless and limpid blue with nary a cloud to be seen, she was well enough acquainted with Irish weather to know that could all change in a moment.

  Pamela settled on her knees to resume her planting, Kate beside her sorting through the plants by scent, passing the small pots swiftly beneath her nose, and ordering them thusly.

  “Shall I tell ye yer colors now?” she asked, as she gently squeezed a lemon balm from its nursery pot and took it firmly in hand.

  “Yes,” Pamela said, “I’d like that.”

  She cast an eye toward the shed where she just knew Conor was digging some sort of hole to China. Phouka had almost broken a leg in one of Conor’s ‘tunnels’ last week and she had warned him that all holes must be filled, to which he had rather smartly replied that if it was filled, it wouldn’t be a hole any longer. She had given him what Casey had always referred to as her ‘scorched earth’ look and he had proceeded to meekly fill it back in.

  “Ye’re all soft like lavender shot through with bursts of silver an’ grey, or ye were when Casey was still with ye,” Kate said. “Yer colors are darker now, more indigo at times than lavender, though there’s always a hint of the sea in ye—greens an’ blues, like water reflectin’ the sky.”

  “And Casey—did you see his color, too?”

  “Aye,” Kate said and handed her the nicely separated roots of the lemon balm. “He was like a sunrise, so bright it burned. When the two of ye touched, it turned to something else, it became the color of roses, the deep ones that are given for passion. It’s why I made the quilt in the shades that I did. Those are the colors that are the two of ye together.”

  “Oh, Kate,” she said and hugged her friend.

  Kate squeezed her back and then said, “Away with ye, girl, we’ve plants to attend to.”

  Pamela smiled and took up the lavender pots, touched by Kate’s summation of her and Casey’s aura together. She was curious now about the color of others.

  “What colors are the children?”

  “Well, they’re still just wee, so their colors are a bit more changeable. Conor is like his uncle, lovely greens an’ browns. He’s a child of the earth like his da, no?”

  “He is, or at least,” she sighed, as her son hove into view, grass stuck in his hair and his fresh pants liberally besmeared with mud, “he’s a child of the muck.”

  Kate turned at the sound of Conor and smiled. He ran over, throwing his grubby arms around her and giving her a smacking kiss on her cheek that left a small trace of mud on her fair skin. Kate adored Conor and Isabelle and never minded their exuberant affections. Pamela reached over and brushed the dirt off Kate’s cheek. She sighed; Conor had managed to get dirt on Kate’s lovely cotton frock as well.

  Correctly interpreting Pamela’s sigh, Kate said, “Not to worry, ‘tis only a bit of dirt. I love it.” She pushed away a strand of chestnut hair where it had caught in her lashes. “Livin’ at home, the way things often were…” She looked down at the lavender plant in her hand, fingers stilled in the task of separating the roots. “It was a sterile existence. After I met Pat I started to see another life, an’ then to be taken into yer family without anyone so much as turnin’ a hair over it—well, it’s absolutely lovely.”

  “It is, isn’t it? I think Casey and Pat got their talent for family life from their daddy, he sounds like he was quite a wonderful man. His boys certainly loved him.”

  “Aye, it makes me sad that neither of us will ever know him, beyond the memories.”

  “Yes,” Pamela said. She knew the tension in her voice was audible, especially to one as tuned to nuances of tone as Kate. It was so exactly what she feared for her own children, that their father would be little more than a memory to them, a man made of shadows and stories.

  Kate, in her usual unflappable manner, merely picked up the main thread of their conversation, knowing there were no words to comfort Pamela’s fears.

  “Isabelle’s got this wee pink puff cloud about her, unless she’s mad, then it turns fiery red, rather like her daddy in that aspect.”

  “Oh, aye, she does have Casey’s temper,” Pamela said as Isabelle, having heard her name, looked up from her scrubby array of stuffed animals. She was drooling vigorously on a tatty elephant with pink velveteen ears which Casey had brought home when they had found out they were expecting for the second time. Pamela smiled at her and Isabelle returned it with a gap-toothed grin and an excited wave of her hands. She felt a pang in her heart for how much she loved these wee people of hers. But behind that pang was always the hollow echo of Casey’s absence and what he wasn’t here to witness—Isabelle’s six teeth, Conor’s skinned knee and the fact that last week he had read part of a sentence to her out of one of his books, sounding out each word with careful gravity. She had been so proud of him, and wanted to share the news immediately with the only person it could possibly matter to just as much as it did to her.

  “What about Jamie?” She bent her head to the task of gently breaking the roots a bit before putting the lavender in the small hole she had made for it in the rich black soil.

  “Ah,” Kate’s fine, clear brow wrinkled a little, “Jamie, well he’s more complicated. There’s a lot o’ colors with him, likely ye’ll know that already. Some that are very dark, an’ some that shine so hard ye can hardly keep yer breath around him. I knew he must be a beautiful man, because when he walks into a room where there’s folk that haven’t met him before, there’s always a bit of a gasp an’ then a stunned silence like a swarm of bees that have been heavily smoked.” She smiled and bent to sniff the lavender that she was removing from its pot. “It’s somethin’ more with him, isn’t it? It’s who he is at his core; his soul is a contradiction to itself. It’s beautiful all the same.”

  “It is indeed,” she said. Jamie was the most complex man she knew, and yet at times, he was as easily read as ink on paper. But that was when he let his guard down, which he only did with a select few.

  They worked in companionable silence for a while, planting rosemary and parsley, sage and thyme, Pamela humming Scarborough Fair under her breath, relishing the spiky scent of the rosemary and the dusty warmth of the sage and thyme. There was one person Kate had not mentioned and Pamela wasn’t certain she should ask, but curiosity got the better of her.

  “What about Noah, Kate, what are his colors?”

  Kate looked up beyond the pines and the clouds that were flying in as fast as geese racing across a late autumn sky, and the blue eyes, so like her brother’s, were as those of a seer gazing into distances invisible to most.

  “He only has the one. Black.”

  Kate stayed to lunch and she fed Isabelle while Pamela fixed a sandwich for Conor along with a glass of milk. Duly fed, mouth still rimmed with milk, Conor shot back out into the fair early summer day, followed by a muddy-pawed Finbar. The clouds that had threatened before lunch had raced on to the west like an unspooled skein of dark grey. Conor, like his father before him, was never fazed in the least by a bit of rain.

  Kate was happily situated on the sofa, Rusty the cat curled up at her elbow and Isabelle ensconced on her shoulder fast asleep. Kate made a picture there in her blue dress, her hair loose and tumbling aro
und her shoulders. She looked lovely, and there was a glow about her that Pamela knew was entirely due to Patrick. She used to glow that way herself, once upon a time. She sighed and returned to the freshly dried basket of laundry she was folding.

  She missed it, the anticipation that would set up in her as the day drew down to its close. The knowledge that Casey would arrive home soon, that their household would rearrange its dynamic to include husband and daddy. Even now the thought of it set her fingers to tingling, as if her skin had a memory of its own, separate from the knowledge of her heart. She took a breath, and rubbed her fingers against the small romper she had picked up to fold. She looked out into the side yard; the windows open so that she could hear Conor. She could see him, his cap already abandoned somewhere, and his sweater undone. Like his father, he always ran a bit warm and keeping coats and sweaters on him was a challenge. He was happily playing, building something with a good chunk of the wood pile, and keeping up a running patter with Finbar while he did so.

  “Ye know how I said before about things bein’ sterile when I was livin’ at home. I wouldn’t have ye think that was Noah’s fault.”

  “I wouldn’t think that of him,” she said, still watching her son, her mind only half on the conversation.

  “Ye’ve been spending some time with him of late, no?”