“But”—I tapped the pencil on the paper—“if Jemmy were to show as type A or type AB—then his father was not homozygous for type O—homozygous means both genes are the same—and you are.” I wrote in the alternatives, to the left of my previous entry.
I saw Roger’s eyes flick toward that “X,” and wondered what had made me write it that way. It wasn’t as though the contender for Jemmy’s paternity could be just anyone, after all. Still, I could not bring myself to write “Bonnet”—perhaps it was simple superstition; perhaps just a desire to keep the thought of the man at a safe distance.
“Bear in mind,” I said, a little apologetically, “that type O is very common, in the population at large.”
Roger grunted, and sat regarding the chart, eyes hooded in thought.
“So,” he said at last. “If he’s type O or type B, he may be mine, but not for sure. If he’s type A or type AB, he’s not mine—for sure.”
One finger rubbed slowly back and forth over the fresh bandage on his hand.
“It’s a very crude test,” I said, swallowing. “I can’t—I mean, there’s always the possibility of a mistake in the test itself.”
He nodded, not looking up.
“You told Bree this?” he asked softly.
“Of course. She said she doesn’t want to know—but that if you did, I was to make the test.”
I saw him swallow, once, and his hand lifted momentarily to the scar across his throat. His eyes were fixed on the scrubbed planks of the floor, hardly blinking.
I turned away, to give him a moment’s privacy, and bent over the microscope. I would have to make a grid, I thought—a counting grid that I could lay across a slide, to help me estimate the relative density of the Plasmodium-infected cells. For the moment, though, a crude eyeball count would have to do.
It occurred to me that now that I had a workable stain, I ought to test the blood of others on the Ridge—those in the household, for starters. Mosquitoes were much rarer in the mountains than near the coast, but there were still plenty, and while Lizzie might be well herself, she was still a sink of potential infection.
“. . . four, five, six . . .” I was counting infected cells under my breath, trying to ignore both Roger on his stool behind me, and the sudden memory that had popped up, unbidden, when I told him Brianna’s blood type.
She had had her tonsils removed at the age of seven. I still recalled the sight of the doctor, frowning at the chart he held—the chart that listed her blood type, and those of both her parents. Frank had been type A, like me. And two type-A parents could not, under any circumstances, produce a type B child.
The doctor had looked up, glancing from me to Frank and back, his face twisted with embarrassment—and his eyes filled with a kind of cold speculation as he looked at me. I might as well have worn a scarlet “A” embroidered on my bosom, I thought—or in this case, a scarlet “B.”
Frank, bless him, had seen the look, and said easily, “My wife was a widow; I adopted Bree as a baby.” The doctor’s face had thawed at once into apologetic reassurance, and Frank had gripped my hand, hard, behind the folds of my skirt. My hand tightened in remembered acknowledgment, squeezing back—and the slide tilted suddenly, leaving me staring into blank and blurry glass.
There was a sound behind me, as Roger stood up. I turned round, and he smiled at me, eyes dark and soft as moss.
“The blood doesn’t matter,” he said quietly. “He’s my son.”
“Yes,” I said, and my own throat felt tight. “I know.”
A loud crack broke the momentary silence, and I looked down, startled. A puff of turkey-feathers drifted past my foot, and Adso, discovered in the act, rushed out of the surgery, the huge fan of a severed wing-joint clutched in his mouth.
“You bloody cat!” I said.
98
CLEVER LAD
A COLD WIND BLEW from the east tonight; Roger could hear the steady whine of it past the mud-chinked wall near his head, and the lash and creak of the wind-tossed trees beyond the house. A sudden gust struck the oiled hide tacked over the window; it bellied in with a crack! and popped loose at one side, the whooshing draft sending papers scudding off the table and bending the candle flame sideways at an alarming angle.
Roger moved the candle hastily out of harm’s way, and pressed the hide flat with the palm of his hand, glancing over his shoulder to see if his wife and son had been awakened by the noise. A kitchen-rag stirred on its nail by the hearth, and the skin of his bodhran thrummed faintly as the draft passed by. A sudden tongue of fire sprang up from the banked hearth, and he saw Brianna stir as the cold air brushed her cheek.
She merely snuggled deeper into the quilts, though, a few loose red hairs glimmering as they lifted in the draft. The trundle where Jemmy now slept was sheltered by the big bed; there was no sound from that corner of the room.
Roger let out the breath he had been holding, and rummaged briefly in the horn dish that held bits of useful rubbish, coming up with a spare tack. He hammered it home with the heel of his hand, muffling the draft to a small, cold seep, then bent to retrieve his fallen papers.
“O will ye let Telfer’s kye gae back?
Or will ye do aught for regard o’ me?”
He repeated the words in his mind as he wiped the half-dried ink from his quill, hearing the words in Kimmie Clellan’s cracked old voice.
It was a song called “Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead”—one of the ancient reiving ballads that went on for dozens of verses, and had dozens of regional variations, all involving the attempts of Telfer, a Borderer, to revenge an attack upon his home by calling upon the help of friends and kin. Roger knew three of the variations, but Clellan had had another—with a completely new subplot involving Telfer’s cousin Willie.
“Or by the faith of my body, quo’ Willie Scott.
I’se ware my dame’s calfskin on thee!”
Kimmie sang to pass the time of an evening by himself, he had told Roger, or to entertain the hosts whose fire he shared. He remembered all the songs of his Scottish youth, and was pleased to sing them as many times as anyone cared to listen, so long as his throat was kept wet enough to float a tune.
The rest of the company at the big house had enjoyed two or three renditions of Clellan’s repertoire, began to yawn and blink through the fourth, and finally had mumbled excuses and staggered glazen-eyed off to bed—en masse—leaving Roger to ply the old man with more whisky and urge him to another repetition, until the words were safely committed to memory.
Memory was a chancy thing, though, subject to random losses and unconscious conjectures that took the place of fact. Much safer to commit important things to paper.
“I winna let the kye gae back,
Neither for thy love, nor yet thy fear . . .”
The quill scratched gently, capturing the words one by one, pinned like fireflies to the page. It was very late, and Roger’s muscles were cramped with chill and long sitting, but he was determined to get all the new verses down, while they were fresh in his mind. Clellan might go off in the morning to be eaten by a bear or killed by falling rocks, but Telfer’s cousin Willie would live on.
“But I will drive Jamie Telfer’s kye,
In spite of every Scot that’s . . .”
The candle made a brief sputtering noise as the flame struck a fault in the wick. The light that fell across the paper shook and wavered, and the letters faded abruptly into shadow as the candle flame shrank from a finger of light to a glowing blue dwarf, like the sudden death of a miniature sun.
Roger dropped his quill, and seized the pottery candlestick with a muffled curse. He blew on the wick, puffing gently, in hopes of reviving the flame.
“But Willie was stricken owre the head,” he murmured to himself, repeating the words between puffs, to keep them fresh. “But Willie was stricken owre the head/And through the knapscap the sword has gane/And Harden grat for very rage/When Willie on the grund lay slain . . . When Willie on the grund lay slain . . .”
A ragged corona of orange rose briefly, feeding on his breath, but then dwindled steadily away despite continued puffing, winking out into a dot of incandescent red that glowed mockingly for a second or two before disappearing altogether, leaving no more than a wisp of white smoke in the half-dark room, and the scent of hot beeswax in his nose.
He repeated the curse, somewhat louder. Brianna stirred in the bed, and he heard the corn shucks squeak as she lifted her head with a noise of groggy inquiry.
“It’s all right,” he said in a hoarse whisper, with an uneasy glance at the trundle in the corner. “The candle’s gone out. Go back to sleep.”
But Willie was stricken owre the head . . .
“Ngm.” A plop and sigh, as her head struck the goose-down pillow again.
Like clockwork, Jemmy’s head rose from his own nest of blankets, his nimbus of fiery fluff silhouetted against the hearth’s dull glow. He made a sound of confused urgency, not quite a cry, and before Roger could stir, Brianna had shot out of bed like a guided missile, snatching the boy from his quilt and fumbling one-handed with his clothing.
“Pot!” she snapped at Roger, poking blindly backward with one bare foot as she grappled with Jemmy’s clothes. “Find the chamber pot! Just a minute, sweetie,” she cooed to Jemmy, in an abrupt change of tone. “Wait juuuuust a minute, now . . .”
Impelled to instant obedience by her tone of urgency, Roger dropped to his knees, sweeping an arm in search through the black hole under the bed.
Willie was stricken owre the head . . . And through the . . . kneecap? nobskull? Overwhelmed by the situation, some remote bastion of memory clung stubbornly to the song, singing in his inner ear. Only the melody, though—the words were fading fast.
“Here!” He found the earthenware pot, accidentally struck the leg of the bed with it—thank Christ, it didn’t break!—and bowled it across the floor to Bree.
She clapped the now-naked Jemmy down onto it with an exclamation of satisfaction, and Roger was left to grope about in the semi-dark for his fallen candle while she murmured encouragements.
“OK, sweetie, yes, that’s right . . .”
Willie was struck about . . . no, stricken . . .
He found the candle, luckily uncracked, and sidled carefully round the drama in progress to kneel and relight the charred wick from the embers of the fire. While he was at it, he poked up the embers and added a fresh stick of wood. The fire revived, illuminating Jemmy, who was making what looked like a very successful effort to go back to sleep, in spite of his position and his mother’s urging.
“Don’t you need to go potty?” she was saying, shaking his shoulder gently.
“Go potty?” Roger said, this curious locution pushing the remnants of the verse from his mind. “What do you mean, go potty?” It was his personal opinion, based on current experience as a father, that small children were born potty, and improved very slowly thereafter. He said as much, causing Brianna to give him a remarkably dirty look.
“What?” she said, in an edgy tone. “What do you mean, they’re born potty?” She had one hand on Jemmy’s shoulder, balancing him, while the other cupped his round little belly, an index finger disappearing into the shadows below to direct his aim.
“Potty,” Roger explained, with a brief circular gesture at his temple in illustration. “You know, barmy. Daft.”
She opened her mouth to say something in reply to this, but Jemmy swayed alarmingly, his head sagging forward.
“No, no!” she said, taking a fresh grip. “Wake up, honey! Wake up and go potty!”
The insidious term had somehow taken up residence in Roger’s mind, and was merrily replacing half the fading words of the verse he had been trying to recapture.
Willie sat upon his pot/The sword to potty gane . . .
He shook his head, as though to dislodge it, but it was too late—the real words had fled. Resigned, he gave it up as a bad job and crouched down next to Brianna to help.
“Wake up, chum. There’s work to be done.” He drew a finger gently under Jemmy’s chin, then blew in his ear, ruffling the silky red tendrils that clung to the child’s temple, still damp with sleep-sweat.
Jemmy’s eyelids cracked in a slit-eyed glower. He looked like a small pink mole, cruelly excavated from its cozy burrow and peering balefully at an inhospitable upper world.
Brianna yawned widely, and shook her head, blinking and scowling in the candlelight.
“Well, if you don’t like ‘go potty,’ what do you say in Scotland, then?” she demanded crabbily.
Roger moved the tickling finger to Jem’s navel.
“Ah . . . I seem to recall a friend asking his wee son if he needed to do a poo,” he offered. Brianna made a rude noise, but Jemmy’s eyelids flickered.
“Poo,” he said dreamily, liking the sound.
“Right, that’s the idea,” Roger said encouragingly. His finger twiddled gently in the slight depression, and Jemmy gave the ghost of a giggle, beginning to wake up.
“Pooooooo,” he said. “Poopoo.”
“Whatever works,” Brianna said, still cross, but resigned. “Go potty, go poo—just get it over with, all right? Mummy wants to go to sleep.”
“Perhaps you should take your finger off of his . . . mmphm?” Roger nodded toward the object in question. “You’ll give the poor lad a complex or something.”
“Fine.” Bree took her hand away with alacrity, and the stubby object sprang back up, pointing directly at Roger over the rim of the pot.
“Hey! Now, just a min—”he began, and got his hand up as a shield just in time.
“Poo,” Jemmy said, beaming in drowsy pleasure.
“Shit!”
“Chit!” Jemmy echoed obligingly.
“Well, that’s not quite—would you stop laughing?” Roger said testily, wiping his hand gingerly on a kitchen rag.
Brianna snorted and gurgled, shaking her head so the straggling locks of hair that had escaped her plait fell down around her face.
“Good boy, Jemmy!” she managed.
Thus encouraged, Jemmy took on an air of inner absorption, scrunched his chin down into his chest, and without further ado, proceeded to Act Two of the evening’s drama.
“Clever lad!” Roger said sincerely.
Brianna glanced at him, momentary surprise interrupting her own applause.
He was surprised himself. He had spoken by reflex, and hearing the words, just for a moment, his voice hadn’t sounded like his own. Very familiar—but not his own. It was like writing the words of Clellan’s song, hearing the old man’s voice, even as his own lips formed the words.
“Aye, that’s clever,” he said, more softly, and patted the little boy gently on his silky head.
He took the pot outside to empty it while Brianna put Jemmy back to bed with kisses and murmurs of admiration. Basic sanitation accomplished, he went to the well to wash his hands before coming back inside to bed.
“Are you through working?” Bree asked drowsily, as he slid into bed beside her. She rolled over and thrust her bottom unceremoniously into his stomach, which he took as a gesture of affection, given the fact that she was about thirty degrees warmer than he was after the sortie outside.
“Aye, for tonight.” He put his arms round her and kissed the back of her ear, the warmth of her body a comfort and delight. She took his chilly hand in hers without comment, folded it, and tucked it snugly beneath her chin, with a small kiss on the knuckle. He stretched slightly, then relaxed, letting his muscles go slack and feeling the tiny movements as their bodies adjusted, shaping to each other. A faint buzzing snore rose from the trundle, where Jemmy slept the sleep of the righteously dry.
Brianna had freshly smoored the fire; it burned with a low, even heat and the sweet scent of hickory, making small occasional pops as the buried flame reached a pocket of resin or a spot of damp. Warmth crept over him, and sleep tiptoed in its wake, drawing a blanket of drowsiness up round his ears, unlocking the tidy cupboards of his mind, and letting all the thoughts and impressions of the day spill out in brightly colored heaps.
Resisting unconsciousness for a last few moments, he poked desultorily among the scattered riches thus revealed, in the faint hope of finding a corner of the Telfer song poking out; some scrap of word or music that would allow him to seize the vanished verses and drag them back into the light of consciousness. It wasn’t the story of the ill-fated Willie that emerged from the rubble, though, but rather a voice. Not his own, and not that of old Kimmie Clellan, either.
Clever lad! it said, in a clear warm contralto, tinged with laughter. Roger jerked.
“Whaju say?” Brianna mumbled, disturbed by the movement.
“Go on—be clever,” he said slowly, echoing the words as they formed in his memory. “That’s what she said.”
“Who?” Brianna turned her head, with a rustle of hair on the pillow.
“My mother.” He put his free hand round her waist, resettling them both. “You asked what they said in Scotland. I’d forgotten, but that’s what she used to say to me. ‘Go on—be clever!’ or ‘Do ye need to be clever?’?”
Bree gave a small grunt of sleepy amusement.
“Well, it’s better than poo,” she said.
They lay quiet for a bit. Then she said, still speaking softly, but with all traces of sleep gone from her voice, “You talk about your dad now and then—but I’ve never heard you mention your mother before.”
He gave a one-shouldered shrug, bringing his knees up against the yielding backs of her thighs.
“I don’t remember a lot about her.”
“How old were you when she died?” Brianna’s hand floated up to rest over his.
“Oh, four, I think, nearly five.”
“Mmm.” She made a small sound of sympathy, and squeezed his hand. She was quiet for a moment, alone in private thought, but he heard her swallow audibly, and felt the slight tension in her shoulders.
“What?”
“Oh . . . nothing.”
“Aye?” He disengaged his hand, used it to lift the heavy plait aside, and gently massaged the nape of her neck. She turned her head away to make it easier, burying her face in the pillow.
“Just—I was just thinking—if I died now, Jemmy’s so young—he wouldn’t remember me at all,” she whispered, words half-muffled.
“Yes, he would.” He spoke in automatic contradiction, wanting to give her reassurance, even knowing that she was likely right.
“You don’t remember, and you were lots older when you lost your mother.”
“Oh . . . I do remember her,” he said slowly, digging the ball of his thumb into the place where her neck joined her shoulder. “Only, it’s just in bits and pieces. Sometimes, when I’m dreaming, or thinking of something else, I get a quick glimpse of her, or some echo of her voice. A few things I recall clearly—like the locket she used to wear round her neck, with her initials on it in wee red stones. Garnets, they were.”
That locket had perhaps saved his life, during his first ill-fated attempt to pass through the stones. He felt the loss of it now and then, like a small thorn buried beneath the surface of the skin, but pushed the feeling aside, telling himself that after all, it was nothing more than a bit of metal.
At the same time, he missed it.
“That’s a thing, Roger.” Her voice held a hint of sharpness. “Do you remember her? I mean—what would Jemmy know about me—about you, for that matter—if all he had left of us was”—she cast about for some suitable object—“was your bodhran and my pocket knife?”
“He’d know his dad was musical, and his mum was bloodthirsty,” Roger said dryly. “Ouch!” He recoiled slightly as her fist came down on his thigh, then set his hands placatingly on her shoulders. “No, really. He’d know a lot about us, and not just from the bits and bobs we’d left behind, though those would help.”
“How?”
“Well . . .” Her shoulders had relaxed again; he could feel the slender edge of her shoulder blade, hard against the skin—she was too thin, he thought. “You studied history for a time, didn’t you? You know how much one can tell from homely objects like dishes and toys.”
“Mmm.” She sounded dubious, but he thought that she simply wanted to be convinced.
“And Jem would know a lot more than that about you, from your drawings,” he pointed out. And a hell of a lot more than a son ought, if he ever read your dream-book, he thought. The sudden impulse to say so, to confess that he himself had read it, trembled on his tongue, but he swallowed it. Beyond simple fear of how she might respond if she discovered his intrusion, was the greater fear that she would cease to write in it, and those small secret glimpses of her mind would be lost to him.
“I guess that’s true,” she said slowly. “I wonder if Jem will draw—or be musical.”
If Stephen Bonnet plays the flute, Roger thought cynically, but choked off that subversive notion, refusing to contemplate it.
“That’s how he’ll know the most of us,” he said instead, resuming his gentle kneading. “He’ll look at himself, aye?”
“Mmm?”
“Well, look at you,” he pointed out. “Everyone who sees you says, ‘You must be Jamie Fraser’s lass!’ And the red hair isn’t the only thing—what about the shooting? And the way you and your mother are about tomatoes . . .”
She smacked her lips reflexively, and giggled when he laughed.
“Yeah, all right, I see,” she said. “Mmm. Why did you have to mention tomatoes? I used the last of the dried ones last week, and it’ll be six months before they’re on again.”
“Sorry,” he said, and kissed the back of her neck in apology.
“I did wonder,” he said, a moment later. “When you found out about Jamie—when we began to look for him—you must have wondered what he was like.” He knew she had; he certainly had. “When you found him—how did he compare? Was he at all like you thought he’d be, from what you knew about him already? Or—from what you knew about yourself?”
That made her laugh again, a little wryly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know.”
“What d’ye mean by that?”
“Well, when you hear things about somebody before you meet them, of course the real person isn’t just like what you heard, or what you imagined. But you don’t forget what you imagined, either; that stays in your mind, and sort of merges with what you find out when you meet them. And then—” She bent her head forward, thinking. “Even if you know somebody first, and then hear things about them later—that kind of affects how you see them, doesn’t it?”
“Aye? Mmm, I suppose so. Do ye mean . . . your other dad? Frank?”
“I suppose I do.” She shifted under his hands, shrugging it away. She didn’t want to talk about Frank Randall, not just now.
“What about your parents, Roger? Do you figure that’s why the Reverend saved all their old stuff in those boxes? So later you could look through it, learn more about them, and sort of add that to your real memories of them?”
“I—yes, I suppose so,” he said uncertainly. “Not that I have any memories of my real dad in any case; he only saw me the once, and I was less than a year old then.”
“But you do remember your mother, don’t you? At least a little bit?”
She sounded slightly anxious; she wanted him to remember. He hesitated, and a thought struck him with a small shock. The truth of it was, he realized, that he never consciously tried to remember his mother. The realization gave him a sudden and unaccustomed feeling of shame.
“She died in the War, didn’t she?” Bree’s hand had taken up his suspended massage, reaching back to gently knead the tightened muscle of his thigh.
“Yes. She—in the Blitz. A bomb.”
“In Scotland? But I thought—”
“No. In London.”
He didn’t want to speak of it. He never had spoken of it. On the rare occasions when memory led in that direction, he veered away. That territory lay behind a closed door, with a large “No Entry” sign that he had never sought to pass. And yet tonight . . . he felt the echo of Bree’s brief anguish at the thought that her son might not recall her. And he felt the same echo, like a faint voice calling, from the woman locked behind that door in his mind. But was it locked, after all?
With a hollow feeling behind his breastbone that might have been dread, he reached out and put his hand on the knob of that closed door. How much did he recall?
“My Gran, my mother’s mum, was English,” he said slowly. “A widow. We went south to live with her in London, when my dad was killed.”
He had not thought of Gran, any more than his mum, in years. But with his speaking, he could smell the rosewater and glycerine lotion his grandmother had used on her hands, the faintly musty smell of her upstairs flat in Tottenham Court Road, crammed with horsehair furniture too large for it, remnants of a previous life that had held a house, a husband, and children.
He took a deep breath. Bree felt it, and pressed her broad firm back encouragingly against his chest. He kissed the back of her neck. So the door did open—just a crack, maybe, but the light of a wintry London afternoon shone through it, lighting up a stack of battered wooden blocks on a threadbare carpet. A woman’s hand was building a tower with them, the faint sun scattering rainbows from a diamond on her hand. His own fingers curled in reflex, seeing that slim hand.
“Mum—my mother—she was small, like Gran. That is, they both seemed big, to me, but I remember . . . I remember seeing her stand on her tiptoes to reach things down from the shelf.”
Things. The tea-caddy, with its cut-glass sugar bowl. The battered kettle, three mismatched mugs. His had had a panda bear on it. A package of biscuits—bright red, with a picture of a parrot . . . My God, he hadn’t seen those kind ever again—did they still make them? No, of course not, not now . . .
He pulled his veering mind firmly back from such distractions.
“I know what she looked like, but mostly from pictures, not from my own memories.” And yet he did have memories, he realized, with a disturbing sensation in the pit of his stomach. He thought “Mum,” and suddenly he didn’t see the photos anymore; he saw the chain of her spectacles, a string of tiny metal beads against the soft curve of a breast, and a pleasant warm smoothness, smelling of soap against his cheek; the cotton fabric of a flowered housedress. Blue flowers. Shaped like trumpets, with curling vines; he could see them clearly.
“What did she look like? Do you look like her at all?”
He shrugged, and Bree shifted, rolling over to face him, her head propped upon her outstretched arm. Her eyes shone in the half-dark, sleepiness overcome by interest.
“A little,” he said slowly. “Her hair was dark, like mine.” Shiny, curly. Lifting in the wind, sprinkled with white grains of sand. He’d sprinkled sand on her head, and she brushed it from her hair, laughing. A beach somewhere?
“The Reverend kept some pictures of her, in his study. One showed her holding me on her lap. I don’t know what we were looking at—but both of us look as though we’re trying hard to keep from laughing. We look a lot alike in that one. I have her mouth, I think—and . . . maybe . . . the shape of her brows.”
For a long time he had felt a tightness in his chest whenever he saw the pictures of his mother. But then it had passed, the pictures lost their meaning and became no more than objects in the casual clutter of the Reverend’s house. Now he saw them clearly once again, and the tightness in his chest was back. He cleared his throat hard, hoping to ease it.
“Need water?” She made to rise, reaching for the jug and cup she kept for him on the stool by the bed, but he shook his head, a hand on her shoulder to stop her.
“It’s all right,” he said, a little gruffly, and cleared his throat again. It felt as tight and painful as it had in the weeks just past the hanging, and his hand involuntarily sought the scar, smoothing the ragged line beneath his jaw with the tip of a finger.
“You know,” he said, seeking at least a momentary diversion, “you should do a self-portrait, next time you go to see your aunt at River Run.”
“What, me?” She sounded startled, though, he thought—perhaps a bit pleased at the idea.
“Sure. You could, I know. And then there’d be . . . well, a permanent record, I mean.” For Jem to remember, in case anything should happen to you. The words floated above them in the dark, striking them both momentarily silent. Damn, and he’d been trying to reassure her.
“I’d like a portrait of you,” he said softly, and reached out a finger to trace the curve of cheek and temple. “So we can look at it when we’re very old, and I can tell ye that you haven’t changed a bit.”
She gave a small snort, but turned her head and kissed his fingers briefly, before rolling onto her back. She stretched, pointing her toes until her joints cracked, then relaxed with a sigh.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
The room was quiet, save for the murmur of the fire and the gentle creak of settling timber. The night was cold, but still; the morning would be foggy—he had felt the damp gathering in the ground when he’d gone outside, breathing from the trees. But it was warm and dry within. Brianna sighed again; he could feel her sinking back toward sleep beside him, could feel it coming for him, too.
The temptation to give in and let it carry him painlessly away was great. But while Brianna’s fears were eased for the moment, he still heard that whisper—“He wouldn’t remember me at all.” But it came now from the other side of the door in his mind.
Yes, I do, Mum, he thought, and shoved it open all the way.
“I was with her,” he said softly. He was on his back, staring up at the pine-beamed ceiling, the joins of the rafters barely visible to his dark-adapted eyes.
“What? With who?” He could hear the lull of sleep in her voice, but curiosity roused her briefly.
“With my mother. And my grandmother. When . . . the bomb.”
He heard her head turn sharply toward him, hearing the strain in his voice, but he looked straight upward into the dark roof-beams, not blinking.
“Do you want to tell me?” Brianna’s hand found his, curled round it, squeezing. He wasn’t sure at all that he did, but he nodded a little, squeezing back.
“Aye. I suppose I must,” he said softly. He sighed deeply, smelling the lingering scents of fried corn-mush and onions that hung in the corners of the cabin. Somewhere in the back of his nose, the imagined scents of hot-air registers and breakfast porridge, wet woolens, and the petrol fumes of lorries woke silent guides through the labyrinth of memory.
“It was at night. The air-raid sirens went. I knew what it was, but it scared the shit out of me every time. There wasn’t time to dress; Mum pulled me out of bed and put my coat on over my pajamas, then we rushed out and down the stairs—there were thirty-six steps, I’d counted them all that day, coming home from the shops—and we hurried to the nearest shelter.”
The nearest shelter for them was the Tube station across the street; grubby white tiles and the flicker of fluorescent lights, the thrilling rush of air somewhere deep below, like the breathing of dragons in nearby caves.
“It was exciting.” He could see the crush of people, hear the shouting of the wardens over the noise of the crowd. “Everything was vibrating; the floors, the walls, the air itself.”
Feet thundered on the wooden treads as streams of refugees poured into the bowels of the earth, down one level to a platform, down another, yet another, burrowing toward safety. It was panic—but an orderly panic.
“The bombs could go through fifty feet of earth—but the lower levels were safe.”
They had reached the bottom of the first stairway, run jostling with a mass of others through a short, white-tiled tunnel to the head of the next. There was a wide space at the head of the stairway, and the crowd pooled in a swirling eddy into it, swelling with the pressure of refugees pouring from the tunnel behind, draining only slowly as a thin stream crowded onto the stair leading down.
“There was a wall round the head of the stair; I could hear Gran worrying that I’d be crushed against it—people were pouring down from the street, pressing from behind.”
He could just see over the wall, standing on his toes, chest pressed against the concrete. Down below, emergency lights shone in interrupted streaks along the walls, striping the milling crowd below. It was late night; most of the people were dressed in whatever they had been able to seize when the siren went, and the light glowed on unexpected flashes of bare flesh and extraordinary garments. One woman sported an extravagant hat, decorated with feathers and fruit, worn atop an ancient overcoat.
He had been watching the crowd below in fascination, trying to see if it was really a whole pheasant on the hat. There was shouting; an air-raid warden in a white helmet with a big black “W,” beckoning madly, trying to hasten the already rushing crowd toward the far end of the platform, making room for those coming off the stair.
“There were children crying, but not me. I wasn’t really afraid at all.” He hadn’t been afraid, because Mum was holding his hand. If she was there, nothing bad could happen.
“There was a big thump nearby. I could see the lights shake. Then there was a noise like something tearing overhead. Everyone looked up and began to scream.”
The crack through the slanted ceiling hadn’t looked particularly frightening; just a thin black line that zigzagged back and forth like a jigsaw snake, following the lines of the tiles. But then it widened suddenly, a gaping maw like a dragon’s mouth, and dirt and tiles began to pour down.
He had long since thawed, and yet every hair on his body rippled now with gooseflesh. His heart pounded against the inside of his chest, and he felt as though the noose had drawn tight about his neck again.
“She let go,” he said, in a strangled whisper. “She let go my hand.”
Brianna’s hand gripped his in both of hers, hard, trying to save the child he’d been.
“She had to,” she said, in an urgent whisper. “Roger, she wouldn’t have let go unless she had to.”
“No.” He shook his head violently. “That’s not what—I mean—wait. Wait a minute, OK?”
He blinked hard, trying to slow his breathing, fitting back the shattered pieces of that night. Confusion, frenzy, pain . . . but what had actually happened? He had kept nothing save an impression of bedlam. But he had lived through it; he must know what had happened—if he could bring himself to live through it again.
Brianna’s hand clutched his, her fingers still squeezing tight enough to stop the blood. He patted her hand, gently, and her grip relaxed a little.
He closed his eyes, and let it happen.
“I didn’t remember at first,” he said at last, quietly. “Or rather, I did—but I remembered what people told me had happened.” He had had no memory of being carried unconscious through the tunnel, and once rescued, he had spent several weeks being shuttled round Aid shelters and foster homes with other orphans, mute with terrified bewilderment.
“I knew my name, of course, and my address, but that didn’t help much under the circumstances. My dad had already gone down—anyway, by the time the Aid people located Gran’s brother—that was the Reverend—and he came to fetch me, they’d pieced together the story of what happened in the shelter.
“It was a miracle that I hadn’t been killed with everyone else on that stair, they told me. They said my mother must somehow have lost hold of me in the panic—I must have been separated from her and carried down the stair by the crowd; that’s how I ended on the lower level, where the roof hadn’t given way.”
Brianna’s hand was still curled over his, protective, but no longer squeezing.
“But now you remember what happened?” she asked quietly.
“I did remember her letting go my hand,” he said. “And so I thought the rest of it was right, too. But it wasn’t.
“She let go my hand,” he said. The words came more easily now; the tightness in his throat and chest was gone. “She let go my hand . . . and then she picked me up. That small woman—she picked me up, and threw me over the wall. Down into the crowd of people on the platform below. I was knocked mostly out by the fall, I think—but I remember the roar as the roof went. No one on the stair survived.”
She pressed her face against his chest, and he felt her take a deep, shuddering breath. He stroked her hair, and his pounding heart began to slow at last.
“It’s all right,” he whispered to her, though his voice was thick and cracked, and the firelight burst in starry blurs through the moisture in his eyes. “We won’t forget. Not Jem, not me. No matter what. We won’t forget.”
He could see his mother’s face, shining clear among the stars.
Clever lad, she said, and smiled.