Arthur rose and began gathering plates. “I won't be a moment.”
Brian settled deeper into his chair and stared around him. The ceilings in these back downstairs rooms were lower, the rooms more cramped. Gladys had explained that this rear section had once been the servants' quarters and contained the oldest portions of the house. The kitchen certainly looked it, with a flagstone floor sculpted by feet until it rippled with the tides of centuries. The entire apartment sighed with weary overuse and a lack of care. The whitewashed room where he sat was stained by water and time, the floor so scored that the last flecks of varnish peeled from the scarred wood. Brian tried to tell himself that it didn't matter, it wasn't really his.
Even so, when Arthur reappeared, Brian's voice grated with frustration and helplessness. “I just don't see how Heather could have let Castle Keep get so run-down.”
“Yes, well, there you are.” Arthur set down the cheese board and eased into his chair. “Heather was a dear woman. Her husband, Alex, was one of my closest friends. When I retired, Gladys and I experienced a number of financial setbacks, most especially a brother-in-law who needed psychiatric care.”
“Call a spade a ruddy spade, dear.” Gladys walked in and set down the plates and turned back to the kitchen, saying over her shoulder, “My brother was an alcoholic and a spendthrift. The only reason he didn't perish in prison was because of my Arthur's generosity.”
“When I came out of the force, we were skinned. Dead broke,” Arthur continued. “Don't know what we would have done if Heather had not offered us this flat.”
“Starved on the street,” Gladys called from the kitchen. “Begged pence from passersby.”
Arthur waved it all aside. “You asked how Heather could have allowed the place to fall into such disrepair. The answer is simple. When Alex died, she went a bit mad.”
Gladys returned bearing a steaming pie so large it seemed ready to lift itself from the pan. “Alex was a dashing figure of a man. And such a charmer. He could draw a chuckle from a cadaver.”
“Heather just fell to pieces,” Arthur continued. “We were stationed in Kenya when it happened, but her letters were eulogies that would break your heart to read. When we came back on leave, well, we found a shattered spirit.”
“A hollow gourd.” Gladys placed a slice dripping sugar and berries onto a plate and set it in front of Brian. “I simply don't know what would have happened if your Sarah had not appeared on the scene.”
“Heather would not have survived,” Arthur responded. “It is quite that simple.”
“Do go ahead and start, dear. It's not as good when it grows cold.”
Brian took a bite, and exclaimed, “This is incredible.”
Gladys beamed as she placed a plate in front of her husband. “Yes, well, I do make a rather good pudding, if I say so myself.”
“After Sarah arrived, Heather's letters went through a dramatic shift,” Arthur said between bites. “Day and night, really. In the space of one year she went from a shroud seeking the tomb to a woman with a reason to live.”
“Still, she never did see to the estate after Alex passed,” Gladys said. “The only work she had done was to paint the walls of Sarah's room. Alex was the one who loved this place. He was passionate about it. Heather lived here because her family had been here for generations; I don't suppose she really cared one way or the other very much. But not Alex. He adored Castle Keep.”
“An estate like this requires work all the time. Manors are funnels into which one is always pouring money. A year without work and they begin to wear. Twenty years, and . . . ,” Arthur waved his fork about the room. “You see the result.”
Gladys peered tightly across the table. “Perhaps you'd rather we not speak of your departed wife.”
“No, it's all right,” Brian said, immensely glad it was the truth. “Sarah talked so much about Castle Keep, I feel like I know its every nook and cranny.”
“Oh, I very much doubt that,” Gladys replied. “This is a house that dearly loves its secrets and its mysteries. The foundations are over a thousand years old, laid by monks who established a monastery at the ford of the river Thames.”
“Rumors and unfounded suppositions,” Arthur scoffed.
“It's not and you know it.” Turning back to Brian, Gladys continued, “That's why William the Conqueror chose this ford to cross the river and build his castle, because the monks had located a market village here in the Dark Ages. He needed supplies for his armies, and a spiritual anchor for his life.”
“There's never been any documented proof of that,” Arthur countered. “And the theories are hotly disputed.”
“Well, be that as it may, this house is full of spaces and secrets it shares with no one,” Gladys replied. “I know that for a fact, and so do you. The old place has been built on and added to so often no one has any idea what it contains. Why, Alex himself hired an architect to come in and draw up plans, and the poor man almost had a seizure trying to fit the interior within the exterior. The measurements simply would not add up.”
But Brian remained caught by memories all his own and the ease with which they arose in this ancient chamber. He tasted the words before he spoke them and found a sense of rightness there. As though here in this place he was protected. Safe and welcome to share a part of what he had carried all the way around the world. And sought to run from as well.
“The last couple of months before Sarah died, we talked about how it would be when she was gone.” Brian stopped there, only mildly aware that the room had gone utterly still, as though his words had sucked out space within which the couple could move. He was too focused on his own internal state, too satisfied to find a rightness in speaking of these secrets he had never shared with anyone. “I didn't really want to, but Sarah said it would help her face what was coming if she knew she could have a little hand in planning my future.”
A ripple in the window's drapes caught his attention, as though a gentle spirit had passed and drawn one invisible hand along the printed fabric. He continued, “I knew what Sarah was doing. She wanted to force me to look beyond the moment and what we both knew by then was coming. I had always wanted to travel but never really had the time. So we spent hours plotting a course. The plan was for me to come here to Knightsbridge and use the manor as a base, then travel on, going to all the cities she had read about and dreamed of going with meâVenice, Zurich, Cairo, Paris, dozens of places.”
He took a deep breath, pressing his heart back into a semblance of proper shape. “After the funeral I took off all right. But I couldn't bear the thought of going here or anyplace else that held memories of Sarah. I traveled in the exact opposite direction. Flew across America, hopped a plane to Hawaii, and from there on across the Pacific.”
Gladys asked from across the table, “Did you have children, dear?”
“No.” Another pain there, which was not why he smiled. No, his mouth was lifted by the fact that the irony did not hurt him as it once had, but rather allowed him to feel just how sheltered he was here by the night and the manor. Why this was the case did not matter so much, not now. For the moment it was enough to be able to lift the borders of time and peer into things that once had hurt like blades scouring the surface of his heart. “We wanted to, but we couldn't. It was actually when we went for a diagnosis that the doctors learned my Sarah had leukemia.”
It was not the old couple who murmured, but the room and the manor itself. As though the centuries had granted the walls an ability to share in human sorrow. Brian continued, finding a vague pleasure in the fact that he could speak in a voice calm and steady. “Sarah talked to Heather on the phone all the time, every day if she could. It was her way of dealing with her favorite relative being deathly ill and her not being there.”
“Heather missed Sarah terribly,” Gladys murmured. “It hurt her so not to be with Sarah in her own hour of need.”
Brian nodded acceptance, not willing to move further than the simple motion from his own recollections. “Sarah's parents did not have a happy marriage. They divorced when she was nine, and her mother remarried a man who didn't have time for Sarah or any other child. Sarah's Aunt Heather and the summers she spent here were what really gave her a reason to live and a love for life.”
Arthur offered softly, “Heather always referred to Sarah as the child she had long dreamed of but never deserved.”
Suddenly Brian had to rise. Not from sorrow, but rather because his wife was too close just then to share with anyone else. He stood by the table and mouthed words he could scarcely hear. “I can't thank you enough for a lovely evening.”
The older couple's eyes were filled with the act of silently sharing. “You really must feel free to return anytime, dear,” Gladys said.
Brian said his good-byes, left the apartment, and climbed the stairs. To his relief, the upper chambers did not rattle with loneliness or pain or the dust of all that was lost and gone forever. For the moment at least, he was able to look back without bitterness, anger, or lamentation. As he prepared for bed and felt the house creak and sigh companionably, Brian knew it was safe to remember. And to move on.
T
HAT
F
RIDAY MORNING,
B
RIAN AWOKE TO A VAGUE SENSE OF
fear. He lay in the gray light of an unfinished dawn, pinned there by the hollow dread that he was returning to the bad old days. Other mornings crowded about him, reminding him of the hard times back when he would awake to the empty knowledge that his life was over and gone. That he would walk through another day alone and without purpose or direction or even a sense of life.
And yet, this morning's fear seemed fashioned from something else. Brian lay upon his pallet and tried to put a name to what was so new it would have been easier just to assume it had come from the previous night's dinner conversation. He almost wanted to think that he was trapped once more in the painfully familiar, but it was not so. He knew this without understanding why or what he faced.
Two years of habits took over, and he rolled from his little bed, dressed, and took his coffee out to meet the day at riverside. All the while, he felt a tremendous pressure within, as though he were being blown up tighter and tighter. His mind returned to the previous night: the dinner and his confession. He expected to feel remorse, or at least unease, over having been so open with strangers. But that was not the case. Nor was his fear based upon having exposed his wounds to the raw light of inspection. Brian felt the same pressure in his chest as the night before, but pressure from what he could not tell.
Then he heard the footsteps swishing through the grass behind him and even before he turned, he understood. Not what was behind his fear or his internal pressures; no, that would have been asking far too much of a newborn day. But at least he knew what he needed to do now.
Cecilia had always been an early-morning person. While still very young she had learned to push the chair over to the kitchen counter, climb up and pull out the bowl and the cereal, and make her own breakfast. Throughout school she had loved to rise before the world was reshaped and revel in hours that were hers and hers alone. So it was that she stood by her kitchen window, rinsing out her breakfast dishes, when Brian came out the manor's front door. He was dressed as before, wearing layers that almost masked his sleek strength. Her hands froze in the process of drying a plate as she watched him walk around the manor's corner and disappear in the direction of the river.
Before she could think things through and come up with reasons to remain where she was, Cecilia was moving. She poured another half cup of coffee, slipped into what she called her garden clothes, picked up the book she had been reading when she had fallen asleep, and headed out.
Twice she almost halted and turned back. The farther she walked down the elm-lined lane, the louder became her internal objections. The loss of her beloved Rose Cottage, the man's two-year absence, the apology she knew she owed him; this and a new vague unease left her regretting her impulsive action. Even so, it was somehow easier to continue than to go back.
When she was halfway across the back garden, Brian turned around. And there in the gladness of his smile and the way he raised his cup to her in easy greeting, Cecilia found a rightness in her coming after all.
Once more she found herself startled by the clearness of his gray gaze, as though life had washed away all but the very essence from his eyes. His features were even, granted a stark edge by his leanness and his tan. He was both young and old, his years overtaken by experience, his age no longer measured by time alone. He turned back to the river and the eastern horizon without saying a word.
Cecilia smiled in reply, recognizing another spirit shaped by too many days in solitude to ever feel the need for vacant speech. She walked over and seated herself, then looked up toward the dawn.
The day arrived as gentle as birdsong, as soft as the river's whispered journey. A predawn veil remained cast over the sky, softening and spreading the light. The colors rose in gradual crescendo, from rose to palest yellow to the gold of heaven's crown.
Only when the sun finally appeared and the veil was cast aside to reveal the new day, did Brian finally speak. “For the first six months or so after Sarah left me, I couldn't even name the places I visited while I was still there. It really didn't matter, because most of the time I couldn't see beyond the burdens I was carrying.”
Cecilia was shocked to realize Brian spoke of the days following his wife's funeral. She turned slowly toward him, astonished by the way he had gone from utter silence to deepest confession. Yet what surprised her most was her own internal reaction. For by speaking in this way, it felt as though he were not exposing his innermost self, but rather her own.