The sun glanced off her ring, sparking silver fire and she had a sudden vision of Casey the last morning she had seen him. He had been moving around the kitchen, Isabelle in the crook of his arm, and Conor had been on the floor playing with his trucks. She had been making oatmeal and eggs, Casey tending to the toast and making himself a flask of tea for the day. Their eyes had met for just a moment but between them had passed a bolt of pure contentment. She put her hand to the counter to steady herself. For just a second she felt out of step, as though she had only imagined the last three days and the last two years. Perhaps it was only that a woman’s heart was always so—a piece here with Jamie, a piece always with her children and a piece forever belonging to their father. Over these last two years, she had found a happiness with Jamie which she had only begun to realize. It frightened her a little, as if she stood on the precipice of some strange new land for which she had neither map nor guide.
A knock at the door interrupted her reverie. She tightened the belt on Jamie’s robe and went to answer it. She opened the door and found a woman standing on the doorstep. She was small in stature with red-gold hair and striking dove-grey eyes.
“I…I’m sorry,” she said, “I was told James Kirkpatrick was here.”
Like Vanya, her English was flawless and like Vanya it was heavily accented. Pamela backed away a little, realizing how she must look after spending half the day in bed with Jamie and now wearing nothing more than his robe. The woman’s hair was the same beautiful red-gold as Kolya’s.
“He is,” she said. “May I tell him who is calling?”
“Da,” said the woman, suddenly frostily polite. “You can tell him it’s Violet. His wife.”
She had begun to pack her bags while he was gone, having managed to rebook her flight to Dublin so that she could leave tonight instead of tomorrow. She had called for a car to pick her up to take her to the airport. Probably because she didn’t want to prolong the agony by having him drive her.
“You’re going?” He needed to ask, even though the answer was obvious. He was sitting on the bed. He felt exhausted. The last few hours had been stress of a rather high order. Jamie had come back prepared to face anger or for her to have fled in his absence. He hadn’t expected this white-faced resignation. It made him a little angry, though he knew his anger was misplaced.
“I think it’s best.” She turned to look at him then and he saw that she had been crying. “It’s all right, Jamie,” she said, and he could see that she was forcing a smile. “I know, after all, that this is a Russian tale. I wasn’t expecting a happy ending. I understand you need to see her and this is a shock to you as much as it is to me. I know you loved—love her, and she is, after all, your wife.”
“It’s not entirely coincidence that she is here now,” he said. “I’ve been looking for her, or at least looking for answers, since my return from Russia. I thought one day there might be a phone call or Sergei would arrange a meeting and tell me she was either dead or had been promoted through the ranks of the KGB. I did not think I’d ever see her again.”
“But you’re happy that she is safe, surely?”
“Yes, of course. The rest of my feelings are not so straightforward. And the coincidence seems too great. We’ve had two days, Pamela. Two days out of all the years we have loved one another and suddenly she’s here in Paris at the same time we finally find our way to each other.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, holding the beautiful dress she had worn to the party in her hands. “Will you see that this gets back to Yevgena?”
“Yes,” he said gently and then took the dress from her hands and laid it to the side. “What I mean is just as Yevgena meddled to bring us together I have sensed another hand in my other affairs for some time.”
She nodded and they looked mutely at one another for several moments. The lamp glowed softly in the corner. It was twilight and would soon be full dark, and with the dark she had to go. In the light which remained, he could see the curve of her eyelashes and all the delicate tints of skin and hair, the deep water eyes, with their quiet observance. The soft mouth that asked to be kissed and also held within it a quick humor and wit. The line of jaw and cheekbone, perfect in their lofted fragility. He felt it as though a bell had struck somewhere deep inside, and a shaft of pain accompanied the knowledge, because it went bone-deep, as such knowledge will. He would never love another woman as he did her. It was as if all his life there had been a waiting in his heart, a piece of it put aside, for something and someone he had not known. But now it no longer waited, for it had found what it sought in this woman. She had possession entire of him.
“Julian’s mother?” she asked, putting the last of her clothes into her bag.
“Yes, only hatred such as she seems to bear me would connive at something on this scale. She is still part of the Circus and she can pull strings. She clearly has contacts who owe her favors within the KGB.”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter how it happened,” Pamela said bleakly, “only that it has.”
“I don’t want you to go,” he said, aware that his tone bordered on desperation. Everything was flying apart so quickly, just when it seemed it might actually come together.
She shook her head, lips tight. “I have to go, Jamie, you know that.”
He watched her as she zipped up her bags, her face set and white.
“I wanted more, I wanted everything.” He blurted it out, the pain in his heart too great for subtlety or the kind parting words she needed.
She turned, and he saw that she just barely had a grasp on her emotions. The light had faded further, the lovely little gables across the road lit with lavender blankets of snow and embroidered with casements of gold. Paris in the snow; there was no place more lovely. There was no place more heartbreaking.
“Jamie, you are bound by honor and as old-fashioned as that concept seems to some, it is one of the things I love best about you. We didn’t make any promises to each other.”
“Didn’t we?” he asked. “Was it my imagination, or did things change for us these last few days?”
She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t your imagination. I felt it too. It felt like we might be ready for something more, something permanent. You need time and space to figure this out, though, and to talk to her. She is Kolya’s mother and she is your wife. I do understand that you have commitments beyond this world we’ve lived in for the last few days.”
She came to him then and knelt at his feet and took his hands in hers. She was cold and he longed to pull her into the bed with him and pretend none of this had happened.
“Jamie, I think we should not see each other for a while, and perhaps not even talk. It will only muddle things for you. I want you to have a clear head and for there to be no dividing loyalties. I know you loved her once, and perhaps you could love her again.”
He stroked one hand over her hair. They had begun something these last days, which could not now be undone, but would change their friendship forever. He felt as though he had cheated her, by giving in to something which had been inevitable for so long now. There was no regret in him for what they had done, but there was regret for the damage it might do to her going forward. The damage it might do to him, he thought perhaps he deserved, all things considered.
“Pamela, what are you suggesting exactly?”
“We just stop it, here, leave what we’ve had these last few days, here in this house.” Her eyes were the deep and aching emerald they were when she was trying to hold on to the extremes of emotion.
“No,” he said. “What has begun here has barely been touched; this is the thin end of the infinite ache, Pamela. Do you really believe we can go back to who we were just a few days ago?”
“No,” she said, and her voice broke on a sob, “but we can’t go forward either and that leaves us in no man’s land.”
He gathered her to him and held her. There were things he wanted to say but knew he had no right. Things like—for the rest of my day
s there will be only you and no other. It will not matter in which city I live or what I am doing or who I am with, there will still only be you. There will be nights of infinite skies filled with stars, but if you are not there to see them with me, they will be as dust. There will be poetry and music, but I will be blind and deaf to their seductions if you are not there to see and hear with me.
A bell sounded discreetly from downstairs.
“The car is here. I have to go.”
He nodded, then stood and picked up her bags. He had said what he must and so had she. Words had limited power and could not fix what they now faced. And then at the last moment she turned and put her arms around him and he felt the grace and pain of it, as they were both shackled and torn loose at the same time. She kissed him, hard enough that he could taste her tongue on his, and then she was gone, into the car, vanished like smoke from the fire in which they had burned for days.
And Shelley again, inevitably.
Joy, once lost, is pain.
Chapter Seventy
Lost Things
April 1978
SHE CAME HOME ONE day in late April to find a package on the table for her. It was bound up in beautiful grey paper, and she recognized Jamie’s writing on the label. The return address said Paris. He was still there then. Perhaps he would choose to live there now with his wife and son. He had taken her at her word, and not contacted her since the day in February when she’d left him in Paris, standing on the walk in front of his beautiful house, watching her drive away. Vanya had told her that he’d arranged to have Kolya brought over to France. He’d hired the dependable Pru from Maine as his nanny. Pru had a yearning to see Europe and was probably the best nanny possible for Kolya.
She sat down at the table, tired and feeling a tightness in her throat. She looked over at the children. Conor was turning five in a couple of days, and Isabelle would be three in the summer. When Casey disappeared they had both been babies. He would be a stranger to them now. It hurt like a knife to her heart to realize that he was only a memory to his son, and no more than a notion to his daughter, the hero in a fairy tale, a hero who wasn’t ever coming back to the castle.
She set the package in a cupboard, unable to open it just yet. Vanya must have brought it in with the rest of the mail earlier in the day. Vanya had shown up on her doorstep with a knapsack in hand one day, and announced that he had come to stay. And so she had stood aside and let him come in. It was nice to have his company and help and he had settled in nicely to the area. He was tending bar at the Emerald during the afternoon and evenings, and helping her out at the company in the mornings. It was a wonder there was still a company to tend to, though she suspected that Noah had something to do with that.
Later, after dinner and baths and stories and a short nap in Isabelle’s bed where Pamela fell asleep reading Green Eggs and Ham to her, she went downstairs and took the package out of the cupboard and went to the table with it. She sat with her hand upon it for a moment, wondering what it was that Jamie had sent to her and perhaps more importantly, why. She smoothed her hand over the paper, her memory conjuring his scent, his step, the touch of his skin against her own. She pushed the thoughts away, feeling the prickle of tears behind her eyes. During the day, she told herself all kinds of pragmatic lies, but sometimes like now, she just let the truth rise up through the ashes of the last few months—she missed him horribly, missed his smile, his voice, his touch, she just missed him.
She carefully took the paper off to find two books. It took a few seconds to understand what they were. The first volume was their fairytales—Jamie’s words, her illustrations—beautifully bound in lavender cloth with silver lettering across the front and down the spine. It was a London publishing house, a smaller one which had a reputation for only taking on very few books each year, but doing a marquee job on those that they did publish. She opened it to the table of contents, and found all their stories from that enchanted winter, spring and summer—The Parliament of Owls, Selkie Jane, The Adventures of Bear in the Grim Forest, Trader in Barsoom and of course, the story that had changed everything—The Wastrel Among the Stars. It brought back the time-stopped moments which had existed for all of them: Conor’s healing by the sea, Isabelle and Kolya curled head to toe each night in the bed, Vanya’s endless novels, and the tentative steps she had taken back toward life. And last, the starlit night in Jamie’s arms.
The second volume was, she realized at once, a different matter. It was likely the only copy in existence. For it was private, a world Jamie had created solely for her. It was The Faceless Tarot, bound in dove grey and soft as a kid glove to the touch. It was, she saw in retrospect, a love song which he had sung to her through the months of its creation. Something indestructibly beautiful, made painful now by recent events. But it had been and would remain, a golden filament to which she had first clung and then felt her way forth from the dark, using his words as a guide. She could not regret that, nor anything which had culminated from it, not even the baby which she was now certain she carried.
She opened the book and saw it held a dedication. ‘For Pamela, For always.’
And that was when, after all these long weeks since Paris, she finally cried. Because he had loved her and she loved him, and it was all too horribly late.
Vanya was the first to know about the impending child. He had been overly solicitous of her which had made her wonder if he suspected, and when she threw up in the kitchen sink in front of him, she knew the jig was up. Vanya didn’t say anything, merely set to making tea after handing her a towel.
He sat down at the table with her after the tea was ready. He put a cup in front of her, and she looked up to find a deep sympathy in the amethyst eyes.
“You are pregnant?” he asked, tone soft.
She nodded weakly. There was little use in denying it at this point.
“Have you told him?”
She shook her head. “No, not yet. I know I have to, Vanya. But I feel like I am just adding yet another complication to his life. We haven’t talked since Paris. Well, you know that.”
“He is home now, he got back two days ago,” Vanya said quietly, and she felt a pang of unpleasant surprise. She was completely out of Jamie’s circle now. It was hard to imagine that just a few short months ago they had been like family, they had been lovers.
“You’re going to keep the baby?”
“I…yes,” she said, shocked that Vanya would think otherwise. The thought had not even occurred to her. “It’s Jamie’s baby, I can’t…the thought of…” she took a shaky breath. “No matter how things stand with us, I love him, Vanya. I can’t imagine not having this child now that I know it’s a fact.”
“You are afraid though?”
“Yes, a little and,” she laughed, “for a rather wide variety of reasons. You know that Jamie lost three sons?”
Vanya nodded. “Yes, he does not speak of it willingly, but he was very sick in Russia as you know and one night while he was still feverish and we thought he might die his words were—how to say—rambling about and that was when I found out about his babies.”
“They all died because of something called hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The odds should have been against more than one of his children having the heart defect, and yet all three had it. It’s possible this baby could have it as well. Then again, Julian is healthy and whole.”
“And the other reasons?”
“I’m unwed and I already have two children. I might well be raising all three alone for the rest of my life. If I think about it too much, it overwhelms me. Ireland is, in case you haven’t noticed, a fairly conservative country. Having a baby out of wedlock isn’t unheard of but it’s not an accepted thing either.”
“You will have to tell him, Pamela, complicated or not, he should know.”
She nodded. “I will. Now that I know he’s home, I’ll arrange to see him. Did Violet come back with him?”
Vanya nodded. “Yes.”
“Do you thi
nk he loves her, Vanya?” she asked, not sure she wanted to know or what she wanted the answer to be. Jamie deserved to be loved and to love without reservation, but she had to admit the thought of him with another woman made her feel sick.
“I don’t know,” he said. “He loved her once but it was camp love, which is different because there is little freedom to choose and one snatches at love whenever one can. But he never loved her as he loves you. You must know, Pamela, he has never loved anyone as he does you.”
“I’m not sure that matters at this point,” she said. “But I will tell him as soon as he can manage to see me.”
“Don’t wait too long. He deserves to know as soon as possible.”
“I tell him, and then what, Vanya?”
He reached across the table and took both of her hands in his and smiled. “Then we will just do what people do and wait for this baby to arrive.”
“And after that?” she said, smiling wearily, relieved to have someone other than herself know about the baby.
“Then we love it, my friend, because that is the one thing that is easy.”
Chapter Seventy-one
Lost Things, Part 2
DESPITE AN ATMOSPHERE which would have given a polar bear pause as to the suitability of its climate, Jamie found he was quite relieved to be home. At least here he could close a door and think in relative peace. There was little enough of it to be found once he ventured outside his study doors, however. Judging from the chill in Maggie’s kitchen, he would be lucky if his tea didn’t contain some sort of mild poison. While she had liked both Vanya and Shura from the start, and had become so fond of them both that he’d caught her crying over a pot of soup after Shura’s departure, it appeared she had now found a Russian for whom she did not care.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 83
