By the time we returned to the house, the warmth of the day was getting to us all. The afternoon was unsettled and humid, and the clouds were gathering overhead, promising an early evening thunder shower. Until it came to bring relief, the warmth would continue to be uncomfortable. We gathered in the dining room where the heavy lace curtains were either keeping the heat out, or keeping it in: there was no way to tell. The softly whirring ceiling fans did nothing except to move the warm air gently around the room. Alice brought a large jug of iced lemonade, which tasted wonderful, and Aunt Meg arranged us around the dining table. I noticed a heavy black file folder on the table. She waited for some time before beginning. She smiled.
‘I’m afraid I must begin with a confession. I told you that I was eighty-five years old. That’s what I tell everyone. But now it’s time for me to ’fess up: that’s not exactly accurate.’
Sam laughed.
‘I’d heard various rumours within the family,’ she replied. ‘Anything between seventy and a hundred. My dad’s bet was somewhere around ninety.’
‘It’s silly, really,’ Aunt Meg said. ‘I should probably tell everyone the truth, but I don’t want everyone thinking I’m senile, and it’s none of their business anyway.’
‘Believe me, Aunt Meg,’ Powalski said, ‘there is not a chance that anyone will think of you as senile.’
‘Thank you, Mr Powalski. But when you get to my age and your memory isn’t what it was, you start to worry about things like that. I’m actually ninety-four. My birthday was last month.’
There were some intakes of breath around the table.
‘I believed eighty-five every time you said it,’ Powalski replied. ‘I didn’t doubt it for a minute.’
‘Are you kidding? I would have believed sixty-five,’ Sam smiled.
Aunt Meg gave her a brief smile in return.
‘Well, that’s very nice of you, my dear. But in fact, I am ninety-four, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve invited you here now. I can’t go on forever, and I’m determined that I’m not going to die without telling you what I’m about to tell you. I’ve put it off for as long as I can, because I wanted to make sure I passed it on to folks I can trust. But now the time has come. Kiah, push that file over to me, would you?’
I got up and moved the file so that it was directly in front of her.
‘I want to show you a document,’ she began. She opened the file and carefully extracted something wrapped in a beige cloth of some kind and tied at its center with red ribbon, fastened meticulously in a clean, tight bow. ‘But first, if you’ll indulge me, I want to give you something of a history lesson. I know it’s rather presumptuous of me, but it’s not the kind of history lesson they teach you in school.’
She did not unwrap the document immediately, but sat with her right hand resting gently on it.
‘It’s easy to think of Jacob’s day as being very remote in time from today,’ she said. ‘That’s why we worry so much about whether we can ever know what went on back then, about whether we can find documents from that time so long ago. But actually, Jacob’s time isn’t remote at all; it’s very close. What if I told you that the document I’m going to show you was written in 1813, a year after Jacob’s death; but that I was given this document by a woman who was given it by the woman who wrote it, a woman who was close to Jacob himself?’
I have to admit I was taken aback. I’m sure my jaw dropped, and looking around, I saw that everyone was having the same reaction. Sam was rather obviously trying to do the arithmetic in her head while doing her best not to let anyone see the tell-tale movements of her fingers. Powalski was smiling and frowning at the same time; if he was calculating, you couldn’t tell. Arlene was staring at Aunt Meg, her eyebrows raised. My mind wasn’t even letting me calculate yet. I hadn’t got past the point of finding it hard to believe.
‘Let me save you all the trouble,’ Aunt Meg smiled. ‘I was born in 1928. I was eighteen years old when I was given this document in 1946. It was given to me by a woman called Joan Harrison. Harrison was her married name. She was born Joan van Eyck, and she was descended from Jacob’s brother Samuel. Joan was born in 1868, so she was seventy-eight in 1946 when she gave it to me. She died two years later. Joan was given the document in 1878, when she was only ten years old. She got it from a woman called Isabel Hardwick, who had known Jacob and had looked after him in his old age. Isabel was twenty-four in 1812 when Jacob died. She was born in 1788, so she was ninety when she gave the document to Joan. She died in 1880.’
Despite the oppressive warmth of the afternoon, I had suddenly got very cold. I wrapped my arms around me as tightly as I could, but I was shivering and sweating at the same time. I was also staring straight ahead, and I am sure the others had noticed. I hadn’t fully recovered from the experience of standing in the graveyard in which I had stood in my dream. Now I was hearing that the woman I had seen there, and whose name I had somehow known to be Isabel, had existed, and had left us a document from the period. I was rubbing my arms, but I couldn’t get warm again, and my mind seemed to have been numbed.
‘Aunt Meg, that’s amazing,’ I heard Sam say. ‘All that time, and yet it’s connected by the lives of just three women.’
‘One of whom is still very much alive,’ Powalski added.
‘It makes Jacob’s time seem so close,’ Sam said. ‘You can almost reach out and touch it.’
‘Yes,’ Aunt Megan said. ‘Time shrinks when you think of it in terms of the human life span, doesn’t it? It makes us see history a little differently. It makes us see that it wasn’t so long ago, and the people of those days weren’t so different from us.’
I somehow recovered enough to force my mouth open.
‘Did you say the woman who knew Jacob was called Isabel?’ I asked.
Aunt Meg looked at me closely. I’m sure she must have noticed the goose bumps on my arms.
‘Isabel Hardwick,’ she replied.
She looked around the table at all of us in turn.
‘This will probably make more sense once you know what’s in the document, but you should know that Joan entrusted it to me on the express condition that I show it to no one until I was sure that it was the right person. She told me that Isabel had entrusted it to her on the same condition.’
‘The right person?’ Powalski asked.
‘Yes. Isabel meant a person who was not only committed to seeking justice for Jacob, but also had the means to get that justice for him. If Joan didn’t find the right person in her lifetime, she was to pass it on to the most reliable person she could find, with the same instructions: to keep it safe until the right person came along. Despite all our dealings with congressmen, Joan never had confidence that she had found the right person. So she passed it on to me. I guessed she judged that I would take good care of it.’
‘She couldn’t have made a better choice,’ Sam said. ‘But… Aunt Meg, that must mean that you and Joan are the only two people who have seen the document since Isabel wrote it.’
‘Yes,’ Aunt Meg replied. ‘But now I’m making the decision Isabel and Joan never got to make. I’m passing it on to you, Sam, and I’m doing this because I believe you are the right person, and because with Kiah, Arlene, and Mr Powalski to help you, I believe that at last, you have a chance to do what Isabel intended us to do.’
There was a silence. Then Sam walked over to Aunt Meg, knelt by her side and put her head in Aunt Meg’s lap. She was crying softly. Aunt Meg quietly stroked her hair and we all allowed some time to pass, listening to the fans as they continued to whir languidly through the humid air. Eventually, Aunt Meg looked across at me.
‘Kiah, why don’t you read it aloud for us, so we don’t all have to crowd round trying to read over someone’s shoulder?’
I slowly reached out and took the file, untied the red ribbon, and carefully pushed the beige cloth aside to reveal the document. It consisted of six pages of parchment, with a few yellowish-brown markings at the edges of the pages, but generally in remarkably good condition. The document was written in black ink. The handwriting was small, and to my mind in a feminine hand, neat enough, albeit scrawling and blotchy in places, indicating the use of a quill pen. It was easily legible. I took a few deep breaths, and to my relief, I felt the suggestion of warming blood beginning to move again through my body.