Despite his preoccupation, he heard the small note of desolation in her voice, and reached for her hand, disregarding the fact that she still held a plant in it.
“I’ll tell her,” he said softly. “I’ll tell her everything. Don’t ever think we’d let the kids forget you.”
She squeezed his hand, hard, and the fragrant white flowers spilled over the darkness of her skirt.
“Thank you,” she whispered. He heard her sniff a little, and she wiped the back of her other hand swiftly across her eyes.
“Thanks,” she said again, more strongly, and straightened herself. “It is important. To remember. If I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Tell me … what?”
Her hands, small and hard and smelling of medicine, wrapped his.
“I don’t know what happened to your father,” she said. “But it wasn’t what they told you.”
“I WAS THERE, ROGER,” she repeated, patient. “I read the papers—I nursed airmen; I talked to them. I saw the planes. Spitfires were small, light planes, meant for defense. They never crossed the Channel; they hadn’t the range to go from England into Europe and back, though they were used there later.”
“But …” Whatever argument he’d meant to make—blown off course, miscalculation—faded. The hairs had risen on his forearms without his noticing.
“Of course, things happen,” she said, as though able to read his thoughts. “Accounts get garbled, too, over time and distance. Whoever told your mother might have been mistaken; she might have said something that the Reverend misconstrued. All those things are possible. But during the War, I had letters from Frank—he wrote as often as he could, up until they recruited him into MI6. After that, I often wouldn’t hear anything for months. But just before that, he wrote to me, and mentioned—just as casual chat, you know—that he’d run into something strange in the reports he was handling. A Spitfire had gone down, crashed—not shot down, they thought it must have been an engine failure—in Northumbria, and while it hadn’t burned, for a wonder—there was no sign of the pilot. None. And he did mention the name of the pilot, because he thought Jeremiah rather an appropriately doomed sort of name.”
“Jerry,” Roger said, his lips feeling numb. “My mother always called him Jerry.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “And there are circles of standing stones scattered all over Northumbria.”
“Near where the plane—”
“I don’t know. “ He saw the slight movement as she shrugged, helpless.
He closed his eyes and breathed deep, the air thick with the scent from the broken stems.
“And you’re telling me now because we’re going back,” he said, very calmly.
“I’ve been arguing with myself for weeks,” she said, sounding apologetic. “It was only a month or so ago that I remembered. I don’t often think about the—my—past, but what with everything …” She waved a hand, encompassing their imminent departure and the intense discussions surrounding it. “I was just thinking of the War—I wonder if anyone who was in it ever thinks of it without a capital ‘W’—and telling Jamie about it.”
It was Jamie who had asked her about Frank. Wanted to know what role he had played in the war.
“He’s curious about Frank,” she said abruptly.
“I would be, too, under the circumstances,” Roger had replied dryly. “Was Frank not curious about him?”
That seemed to unsettle her, and she’d not replied directly but had pulled the conversation firmly back on track—if you could use such a word for such a conversation, he thought.
“Anyway,” she said, “it was that that reminded me of Frank’s letters. And I was trying to recall the things he’d written me about, when suddenly I remembered that one phrase—about Jeremiah being a name with a certain doom about it.” He heard her sigh.
“I wasn’t sure … but I talked to Jamie, and he said I should tell you. He says he thinks you’ve a right to know—and that you’d do the right thing with the knowledge.”
“I’m flattered,” he said. More like flattened.
“SO THAT’S IT.” The evening stars had begun to come out, faint over the mountains. Not as brilliant as the stars had been on the Ridge, where the mountain night came down like black velvet. They’d come back to the house by now, but lingered in the dooryard, talking.
“I’d thought about it, now and again: how does the time-traveling fit into God’s plan? Can things be changed? Ought they be changed? Your parents—they tried to change history, tried damned hard, and couldn’t do it. I’d thought that was all there was to it—and from a Presbyterian point of view.” He let a little humor show in his voice. “It was a comfort, almost, to think that it couldn’t change. It shouldn’t be able to be changed. Ye know: God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world sort of thing.”
“But.” Bree was holding the folded photocopy; she waved it at a passing moth, a tiny white blur.
“But,” he agreed. “Proof that things can be changed.”
“I talked to Mama a little bit about it,” Bree said, after a moment’s thought. “She laughed.”
“Did she?” Roger said dryly, and got the breath of a laugh from Bree in answer.
“Not like she thought it was funny,” she assured him. “I’d asked her if she thought it was possible for a traveler to change things, change the future, and she told me it was, obviously—because she changed the future every time she kept someone from dying who would have died if she hadn’t been there. Some of them went on to have children they wouldn’t have had, and who knew what those children would do, that they wouldn’t have done if they hadn’t … and that was when she laughed and said it was a good thing Catholics believed in Mystery and didn’t insist on trying to figure out exactly how God worked, like Protestants do.”
“Well, I don’t know that I’d say—oh, was she talking about me?”
“Probably. I didn’t ask.”
Now it was his turn to laugh, though it hurt his throat to do it.
“Proof,” she said thoughtfully. She was sitting on the bench near the front door, folding the photocopy in long, nervously deft fingers. “I don’t know. Is it proof?”
“Maybe not up to your rigorous engineering standards,” he said. “But I do remember—and so do you. If it was only me, then, yeah, I’d think it was just my mind going. But I’ve got a little more faith in your mental processes. Are you making a paper airplane out of that?”
“No, it’s—whoa. Mandy.” She was up and moving before he’d quite registered the wail from the nursery upstairs, and had vanished into the house a moment later, leaving him to lock up below. They didn’t usually bother locking the doors—no one did, in the Highlands—but tonight …
His heart rate surged as a long gray shadow shot out across the path in front of him. Then dropped as he smiled. Wee Adso, out for a prowl. A neighbor boy had come round with a basket of kittens a few months before, looking for homes for them, and Bree had taken the gray one, a green-eyed ringer for her mother’s cat, and given it the same name. If they got a watchdog, would they name it Rollo? he wondered.
“Chat a Mhinister …” he said. The minister’s cat is a hunting cat.
“Good hunting, then,” he added to the tail disappearing under the hydrangea bush, and bent to retrieve the half-folded paper from the path where Brianna had dropped it.
No, it wasn’t a paper airplane. What was it? A paper hat? No telling, and he tucked it into his shirt pocket and went in.
He found Bree and Mandy in the front parlor, in front of a freshly made fire. Mandy, comforted and given milk, had half-dozed off again already in Bree’s arms; she blinked sleepily at him, sucking on a thumb.
“Aye, what’s the trouble, then, a leannan?” he asked her softly, pushing tumbled curls out of her eyes.
“Bad dream,” Bree said, her voice carefully casual. “A naughty thing outside, trying to get in her window.”
He and Brianna had been sitting below that very window at the time, but he glanced reflexively at the window beside him, which reflected only the domestic scene of which he was a part. The man in the glass looked wary, shoulders hunched in readiness to lunge at something. He got up and drew the curtains.
“Here,” he said abruptly, sitting down and reaching for Mandy. She came into his arms with the slow amiability of a tree sloth, sticking her wet thumb in his ear in the process.
Bree went to fetch them cups of cocoa, returning with a rattle of crockery, the scent of hot milk and chocolate, and the look of someone who’s been thinking what to say about a difficult matter.
“Did you … I mean, given the nature of the, er, difficulty … did you maybe think of asking God?” she said, diffident. “Directly?”
“Yeah, I did think of that,” he assured her, torn between annoyance and amusement at the question. “And yes, I did ask—a number of times. Especially on the way to Oxford. Where I found that.” He nodded at the bit of paper. “What is it, by the way? The shape, I mean.”
“Oh.” She picked it up and made the last few folds, quick and sure, then held it out on the palm of her hand. He frowned at it for a moment, then realized what it was. A Chinese fortune-teller, kids called them; there were four pockets showing, and you put your fingers in them and could open the thing in different combinations as questions were asked, so as to show the different answers—Yes, No, Sometimes, Always—written on the flaps inside.
“Very appropriate,” he said.
They fell silent for a moment, drinking cocoa in a silence that balanced precariously on the edge of question.
“The Westminster Confession also says, God alone is Lord of the conscience. I’ll make my peace with it,” he said quietly, at last, “or I won’t. I said to Dr. Weatherspoon that it seemed a bit odd, having an assistant choirmaster who couldn’t sing—he just smiled and said he was wanting me to take the job so as to keep me in the fold while I thought things over, as he put it. Probably afraid I’d jump ship else, and go over to Rome,” he added, as a feeble joke.
“That’s good,” she said softly, not looking up from the depths of the cocoa she wasn’t drinking.
More silence. And the shade of Jerry MacKenzie, RAF, came and sat down by the fire in his fleece-lined leather flight jacket, watching the play of light in his granddaughter’s ink-black hair.
“So you—” He could hear the little pop as her tongue parted from her dry mouth. “You’re going to look? See if you can find out where your father went? Where he might … be?”
Where he might be. Here, there, then, now? His heart gave a sudden convulsive lurch, thinking of the tramp who’d stayed in the broch. God … no. It couldn’t be. No reason to think it, none. Only wanting.