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“There are whole books written about it, but the basic idea is that salvation’s not just the result of our choice—God acts first. Extending the invitation, ye might say, and giving us an opportunity to respond. But we’ve still got free choice. And really,” he added quickly, “the only thing that’s not optional—to be a Presbyterian—is a belief in Jesus Christ. I’ve still got that.”
“Good,” she said. “But to be a minister … ?”
“Yeah, probably. And—well, here.” He reached abruptly into his pocket and handed her the folded photocopy.
“I thought I’d best not steal the book,” he said, trying for levity. “In case I do decide to be minister, I mean. Bad example for the flock.”
“Ho-ho,” she said absently, reading. She looked up, one eyebrow quirked.
“It’s different, isn’t it?” he said, the breathless feeling back beneath his diaphragm.
“It’s …” Her eyes shot back to the document, and a frown creased her brow. She looked up at him a moment later, pale and swallowing. “Different. The date’s different.”
He felt a slight easing of the tension that had wound him up for the last twenty-four hours. He wasn’t losing his mind, then. He put out a hand, and she gave him back the copy of the clipping from the Wilmington Gazette—the death notice for the Frasers of the Ridge.
“It’s only the date,” he said, ru
She’d pressed against him, to read it over again. Once, and twice, and once more for good measure, before she nodded.
“Only the date,” she said, and he heard the same breathlessness in her voice. “It … changed.”
“Good,” he said, his voice sounding queer and gruff. “When I started wondering … I had to go and see, before I talked to you about it. Just to check—because the clipping I’d seen in a book, that couldn’t be right.”
She nodded, still a little pale.
“If I … if I went back to the archive in Boston where I found that newspaper—would it have changed, too, do you think?”
“Yeah, I do.”
She was silent for a long moment, looking at the paper in his hand. Then she looked at him, intent.
“You said, when you started wondering. What made you start wondering?”
“Your mother.”
IT HAD BEEN a couple of months before they left the Ridge. Unable to sleep one night, he’d gone out into the woods and, roaming restlessly to and fro, had encountered Claire, kneeling in a hollow full of white flowers, their shapes like a mist around her.
He’d just sat down then and watched her at her gathering, as she broke stems and stripped leaves into her basket. She wasn’t touching the flowers, he saw, but pulling up something that grew beneath them.
“You need to gather these at night,” she remarked to him after a little. “Preferably at the dark of the moon.”
“I shouldn’t have expected—” he began, but broke off abruptly.
She laughed, a small fizzing sound of amusement.
“You wouldn’t have expected that I should put stock in such superstitions?” she asked. “Wait, young Roger. When you’ve lived as long as I, you may begin to regard superstitions yourself. As for this one …” Her hand moved, a pale blur in the darkness, and broke a stem with a soft, juicy snap. A pungent aroma suddenly filled the air, sharp and plangent through the softer aroma of the flowers.
“Insects come and lay their eggs on the leaves of some plants, do you see? The plants secrete certain rather strong-smelling substances in order to repel the bugs, and the concentration of these substances is highest when the need is greatest. As it happens, those insecticidal substances happen also to have quite powerful medicinal properties, and the chief thing that troubles this particular sort of plant”—she brushed a feathery stem under his nose, fresh and damp—“is the larvae of moths.”
“Ergo, it has more of the substance late at night, because that’s when the caterpillars feed?”
“Got it.” The stem was withdrawn, the plant thrust into her bag with a rustle of muslin, and her head bent as she felt about for more. “And some plants are fertilized by moths. Those, of course …”
“Bloom at night.”
“Most plants, though, are troubled by daylight insects, and so they begin to secrete their useful compounds at dawn; the concentration rises as the day waxes—but then, when the sun gets too hot, some of the oils will begin to vaporize from the leaves, and the plant will stop producing them. So most of the very aromatic plants, you pick in late morning. And so the shamans and the herbalists tell their apprentices to take one plant in the dark of the moon and another at midday—thus making it a superstition, hmm?” Her voice was rather dry, but still amused.
Roger sat back on his heels, watching her grope about. Now that his eyes were accustomed, he could make out her shape with ease, though the details of her face were still hidden.
She worked for a time, and then sat back on her heels and stretched; he heard the creak of her back.
“I saw him once, you know.” Her voice was muffled; she had turned away from him, probing under the drooping branches of a rhododendron.
“Saw him? Who?”
“The King.” She found something; he heard the rustle of leaves as she tugged at it, and the snap of the breaking stem.
“He came to Pembroke Hospital, to visit the soldiers there. He came and spoke separately to us—the nurses and doctors. He was a quiet man, very dignified, but warm in his ma
“Mmphm.” Was it the onset of war, he wondered, making her recall such things?
“A journalist asked the Queen if she would be taking her children and evacuating to the country—so many were, you know.”
“I know.” Roger saw suddenly in his mind’s eye a pair of children: a boy and a girl, thin-faced and silent, huddling near each other beside a familiar hearth. “We had two of them—at our house in Inverness. How odd, I hadn’t remembered them at all until just now.”
She wasn’t paying attention, though.
“She said—and I may not have the quote exactly right, but this is the gist of it—‘Well, the children can’t leave me, and I can’t leave the King—and of course the king won’t leave.’ When was your father killed, Roger?”
Whatever he’d been expecting her to say, it wasn’t that. For an instant, the question seemed so incongruous as not to be comprehensible.
“What?” But he had heard her, and shaking his head to dispel a feeling of surreality, he answered, “October 1941. I’m not sure I remember the exact date—no, I do, the Reverend had it written on his genealogy. The thirty-first of October, 1941. Why?” “Why in God’s name,” he wanted to say, but he’d been trying to control the impulse toward casual blasphemy. He choked off the stronger impulse to escape into random thought and repeated, very calmly, “Why?”
“You said he’d been shot down in Germany, didn’t you?”
“Over the Cha
“Who told you? Do you remember?”
“The Reverend, I suppose. Or I suppose it might have been my mother.” The sense of unreality was wearing off, and he was begi
“Probably not. When we first met you—Frank and I, in Inverness—the Reverend said then that your father had been shot down over the Cha
“Yes? Well …” So what? was unspoken, but she plainly picked it up, for there was a small snort of not-quite laughter from the rhododendrons.