Epilogue

October 2015

Pennyroyal Green

IT WASN’T UNTIL HER head grew light that Isabel realized she’d stopped breathing.

Nothing in her wild imaginings—and her imagination was quite the playground—had prepared her for the reality of the legendary oaks. They were so vast they nearly created their own atmosphere. Perhaps they were now like a great pin in a map, the only thing that kept the soft green folds of the Sussex downs from curling up at the edges and flapping away in a stiff wind.

The thought seemed almost heretically whimsical, in light of their majesty.

But then she’d always struggled with awe. It felt like a form of surrender.

And she’d always struggled with surrendering, period.

Isabel didn’t know she had that in common with every single one of her ancestors. But she did know that one in particular had never truly given up on the man she loved. Her diary was the reason Isabel stood here today.

The lowering sun had begun its kind work of burnishing everything a nostalgic sepia. The crowds of shoppers and tourists click click clicking with their camera phones to capture the storied trees, the picturesque storefronts, the little ancient squat stone church surrounded by a yard crowded with tilting, lovingly tended stones, the pub, the view up the hill to that great brick academy, had thinned to a trickle.

Isabel, at least for the moment, had the trees to herself.

She managed to get her lungs moving in a steady rhythm again. She imagined the trees were as vast below as above, their roots reaching down, down through the earth, little tendrils stretching out to mingle with the roots of the crops that grew here and of the grass the cows and sheep feasted upon, part of everyone who had ever lived here from the time the first Eversea allegedly stole a cow from and was then bludgeoned by a Redmond (or perhaps it was the other way around?) back in 1066. Permanent, known, necessary, beloved.

In other words, the very opposite of Isabel.

Until recently.

It still took her a moment after she opened her eyes in the morning to remember this.

And then sunlight seemed to flood her veins. Followed by a pure swoop of vertigo that was as similar to panic as it was to joy.

And on her iPad now was an image of a family tree that fanned out for seemingly miles in every direction, all those names connected in fine lines, all of those lines connected to her.

Anyone strolling by would see (and they would look—turning heads was something else she had in common with the author of that diary) a petite, slim woman whose blond hair was twisted into (but plotting its escape from) an expert chignon. Her boots and jeans and black leather jacket had a slightly worn, singular quality that made them look expensive. They weren’t. Once, long ago, nice bicycles or brand-name sneakers or families who roared with laughter while they played catch together out in their front lawns had hollowed her out with such yearning it was a wonder she didn’t sound like a woodwind in a breeze.

She had learned not to want. She’d instead acquired a hard layer of watchful inscrutability, roughly the equivalent of the barrel one climbs into before going over Niagara Falls. Which was what basically it had felt like to be shunted from one foster home to another from the time she was eight.

She was nearly thirty now. She was thriving, if not yet precisely prospering, on her own terms. But she still felt uncomfortable owning too many things. Everything she acquired, from her cell phone to her sofa pillows to her thrift store leather jacket to her music collection, was thoughtfully, carefully, chosen and almost tenderly cared for.

One day, maybe, she’d take something for granted.

It was just that she’d lived inside that damned barrel for so long.

She snorted at herself when she realized her hands were trembling, as she really had no patience for ninnies of any kind. She slipped her hand in her jacket pocket and ran her fingers absently over the tiny crystals she’d glued painstaking to her hard phone case one night. Meticulous, painstaking work settled her nerves. They were in the shape of her name.

And then she fished out the phone and impulsively punched in a number.

It was nine in the morning in California.

“I’m having a cup of coffee and reading about that Stephanie Plum girl you told me about, Isabel, sweetie.” Laura answered without preamble. “She certainly makes a lot of poor choices, doesn’t she?”

Isabel laughed. “That’s one way to describe her. Hey, Laura, I’m finally here.”

She called her Laura because “Grandma” still didn’t trip easily off her tongue.

Isabel’s mother, perhaps the most zealous black sheep ever born, had disappeared with Isabel’s feckless unknown father into the wilds of California and sundered all family ties before dying. Isabel’s mother, like Isabel, never did anything by halves.

Neither did Laura. She’d paid someone to put together a family tree, which was how she’d learned of Isabel’s existence, and then she’d tirelessly tracked her to San Francisco. (There were explorers in their bloodline, after all.) That was how Isabel had suddenly acquired aunts and uncles and cousins, all of whom she liked (eventually), and all of whom liked her (eventually), and all of whom were subsequently mighty pissed off when Laura had given Isabel the cherished family heirlooms, the diary and the gold watch.

“She needs them the most,” Laura had told the rest of them, placidly, unmoved by fits of pique at her age. To Isabel she’d said: “Your Great-Great-Great-Aunt Olivia Redmond would have wanted you to have them. You’ll know why when you read her diary.”

Isabel could weather her pissed-off relatives with aplomb. She’d weathered significantly worse.

And she’d never wanted anything more than that diary and that pocket watch.

Because when she’d thumbed open the watch, inside was a miniature of a girl who was virtually her twin, apart from the dark hair.

And the diary, when she read it, had the compelling force of a trebuchet.

Two months, a few internet reservations, and a bewildered boyfriend later, she was in England. Alone.

“I’m so happy you made it safely, Isabel!” Laura’s voice was suddenly faint. She sounded as if she was not only in another time zone, but another dimension. “What is it like? Where are you right now?”

“I’m actually already in Pennyroyal Green. In front of the trees, the ones in Olivia’s diary. They’re the size of an apartment building. They might even be bigger than Mark’s ego. Or his venture capital funding.” Mark was her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Laura had met him. She’d think this was pretty funny.

“Whoop! I didn’t quite hear any of that, Isabel. You’re crackling in and out now. Can you speak up?”

“I’m in PENNYROYAL. GREEN. By the TREES.”

“You’re . . . utting . . . out . . .”

“PENNYROY—”

Alas, the connection was toast.

“Americans,” snorted a woman strolling by. “Always shouting about something.”

She irritably flicked the sleekest sheet of blond hair Isabel had ever seen over her shoulder, so dangerously shiny she could have blinded fighter pilots with it, and Isabel stepped aside lest she be lashed like a lazy peasant.

She bit back a wicked urge to shout an apology after the woman.

Or perhaps she ought to yank her own hair from its chignon and give it a violent retaliatory flick: En guarde! Surely a few of her forebears had dueled?

But her own hair was curly. It would likely merely snap back and hit her in the face. In her experience, surrendering to impulses generally did metaphorically just that. Which was how words like “irrepressible” (the magenta hair episode) and “alarming” (the self-administered tattoo) had ended up in her case file. Neither word was entirely fair or accurate, though she’d thought “irrepressible” was funny because it made her sound like a tap-dancing Broadway musical star: “the Irrepressible Isabel Redmond!”

In truth, incidents like those were a bit like exhaust from an internal combustion engine. The inevitable byproduct of ruthlessly stifling nearly everything she thought and felt. No mean feat, given that she was her mother’s daughter.

She’d figured out by the time she was nine years old that she was to be at the mercy of subjectivity and other people’s adjectives, and she would just have to wait it out.

Her jewelry designs now benefited from her years of ruthless self editing: She transmuted wildness into exquisitely simple shapes, seductive curves, startling materials, sharp points. (All words, coincidentally, Mark had used to describe her.) A number of exclusive boutiques in the Bay Area had begun to sell her work. She was now making enough money to get by without a day job.

The blonde woman tossed a final pretty, quelling frown over her shoulder at Isabel. She swished her tall, willow-switch slim self up the street, her hair swinging in metronome counterpoint to the little shopping bag swinging from her hand.

An unmistakable bag.

Isabel went still.

Only graphic design nerds (and Isabel was one of them) knew the narrow deep green stripe edged in hair-fine silver was meant to represent the view of the sea as you looked out over the Sussex downs. But everyone knew what those tiny silver letters—P-O-S-T-L-E-T-H-W-A-I-T-E-’-S—kerned across that green line really meant: I am made of money.

Postlethwaite’s fifteen stores worldwide curated the simple, the exquisite, the startling, the confusing (also words Mark had used to describe her), and catapulted artists and designers into stardom.

Olivia had bought the very gold watch now tucked into Iabel’s pocket from the first Mr. Postlethwaite here in Pennyroyal Green.

And even though Isabel was certain she currently couldn’t afford to buy a single thing in there, she intended to convince them to sell her jewelry.

Or her name wasn’t Isabel Redmond.

She wanted to be brave. The way Olivia was brave.

Isabel had read that diary in one marathon sitting, awaking groggily the next morning, eyes sandy, fully intending to text Olivia to see if she was free for lunch. That’s how vivid and familiar and endearing her voice was.

She was stubborn, very funny, self-righteous, fiercely smart, passionate.

A lot like Isabel.

But the differences between them where what bothered Isabel a good deal.

She might have in common with Olivia an urge to leave and the nerve to do it.

But Olivia’s courage to leave everything she knew behind had been rooted in love. For her family. And for Lyon.

Her love for Lyon had all but set the pages of the diary on fire.

Whereas Isabel moved easily because she’d always been unmoored, and because she wanted to leave before she was left.

She wasn’t certain this counted as courage.

She was somehow certain that diary held some secret she needed to know.

Either that, or it had given her yet another reason to leave.

She was suddenly absurdly conscious of her heart knocking hard at her breastbone, like a door-to-door salesman who knows, just knows someone is home.

“Olivia,” she whispered. “I’m here. You walked right on this spot on your wedding day. Remember?”

She felt a little foolish. But only a little.

She didn’t have to edit anymore.

She transferred her phone into her left hand and looked about surreptitiously. She was utterly alone at least for the moment. So she surrendered to an impulse.

She cautiously, gently, laid a hand against the tree. As if feeling for its heartbeat.

She exhaled and closed her eyes. She couldn’t decide whether she felt grounded or dizzied. Perhaps both.

She stood like that for perhaps thirty seconds before a motorcycle roared up the road.

She squeaked and leaped backward.

And her phone shot from her hand like a squeezed bar of soap.

She whirled to watch it sail through the air in what felt like excruciating slow motion, right on schedule to be run over and crushed to bits.

She hunched, as if she herself were about to be crushed, slapped her hands over her eyes, and waited.

The murderous crunch never came.

But over the hammering of her heart, she thought she heard the motorcycle cut its engine.

“You can open them.”

She peeled her hands away from her eyes. Abashed.

A man stood between her and the glare of the lowering sun, which was giving him something of a red halo.

Good God, he was tall. Suddenly she fully understood the meaning of the word “rangy.”

He was holding her phone out to her.

“I saw something leap into the road. Is this yours? I managed not to crush it.”

The voice was amused. Solicitous. Baritone with a lovely scorched velvet edge. She’d once dated a guy who was perpetually hoarse from smoking and enthusiastically shouting “WOOOO!” at rock concerts. This was entirely different. This was something she could imagine whispering in her ear in the dark from the pillow next to hers.

Though of course that lovely rasp could be because he’d sucked in one too many insects while riding his motorcycle.

She saw it leaning on its kickstand behind him. A beautiful machine, somehow both sculptural and savage. A vintage Triumph.

He sounded refined and very English, an odd contrast to his helmet-smashed dark curls, the faint mauve circles of weariness under his eyes, the shadow of a beard, the battered leather jacket that hung gracefully from shoulders that went on for kilometers. He had a sort craggy, Tolkien-hero-on-a-quest face. Not pretty. Quite masculine. Compelling, in that she couldn’t look away from it. Especially his eyes, deep set and very dark, and at the moment, not blinking

She just nodded mutely. Like a “looby,” a word she’d learned from Olivia’s diary.

“Were you aware your phone was suicidal?” he asked gravely. On a hush. When it seemed she would never speak.

She found her voice. “It was an accident. At least that’s what I’ll tell the police.”

He laughed. Thankfully.

Because that had been awfully black humor.

He glanced down at the phone and squinted at the little crystals.

“Isabel . . . Redmond?”

When he lifted his face again it was slowly, wonderingly.

Speculation written all over his features.

It was her first taste of being known.

MALCOLM HAD SLOWED when he saw something fly toward him into the road, but he was only mildly curious. It wouldn’t be the first time something had been chucked at him. Back in his university days he used to rev his motorcycle just before dawn, which was when he left for classes. Until the day his elderly neighbor Mrs. Gilly burst out her door in her bathrobe and hurled what turned out to be one of her prize hyacinth bulbs at him. It must have been the nearest projectile to hand. “I’ve ’ad enough of that bleeding racket ye bleeding useless git!”

It bounced off his helmet.

And he’d hadn’t a clue he was being so obnoxious. But then it almost seemed the job of men that age to be oblivious and self-absorbed, which is why he now spent a good portion of his time setting the bones and stitching the wounds of men that age. Learning the hard way to be other than obnoxious was what built character.

So a tree-fondling woman hurling things at him was scarcely a blip on the radar of Malcolm’s life, when one considered war, medical school, births, deaths, triumphs, failures, women (who counted as triumphs and failures), existential torment, and the granddaughter of a duke, who was expecting him for dinner, and would flay him with scathingly elegant irony if he was late again.

She was worth it, Jemima was.

Most of the time.

He managed not to run over whatever it was that had flown at him and would have been on his way.

But he glanced over his shoulder and saw a petite blonde woman next to the trees.

Her shoulders were hunched.

And she’d covered her eyes with her hands as if her heart had just been broken.

Oh, God.

And so he had to go back.

“The trouble with you, Coburn,” his friend Geoff Hawthorne once said, “is that you always go toward the trouble, instead of away from it.”

If Malcolm had a coat of arms, this is what it would say. In Latin.

Now, however, he was beginning to feel foolish holding out the phone to a strange silent woman.

She at last met his gaze head on.

His breathing hitched as though he’d literally been pierced with a needle.

He frowned, and surely this was unchivalrous, so he arranged his face in carefully neutral planes.

He just hadn’t expected to have his equilibrium roughly jostled by a pair of blue eyes this evening.

He couldn’t remember ever seeing eyes quite that color before. So achingly lovely they made him restless. He felt oddly as though he needed to do something about them.

He got his breath going again. He was hardly callow. He could cope with this.

She had fair hair but her eyelashes were black and she had a disconcertingly direct gaze. Some might say a challenging gaze. She had a compact little body, eloquently curved. Her posture was perhaps too straight. As though she’d spent a lifetime braced for the next stiff wind. She looked, as a matter of fact, like a walking dare.

But the rest of her—the spirals of hair slipping from her chignon, the pale pink curve of her lower lip, the heart-shaped face, were straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. Soft. Even dreamy. A pair of earrings in the purest dewdrop shape glittered in her ears and reflected him in miniature.

Finally her hand crept out, like a creature coaxed from a burrow, and she took the phone.

“Forgive me if this is presumptuous, but are you perhaps one of the Redmonds? Of the Redmonds of Pennyroyal Green? And so many other places now?” he asked.

Her face went slowly luminous. He watched, his breathing hitched again.

Then, like someone in command of a switch, she shut that light off.

Interesting.

“Oh, do you know the Redmonds?” Her accent was American and her casualness was studied. He suspected his answer meant a very good deal to her.

He smiled faintly. “Everyone knows them. They’re legends. You’ve met the trees.” He gestured. “And felt the trees.”

She blushed.

He was immediately sorry he’d said that. He suspected she was the sort who would very much mind blushing.

“One wants to touch them,” he was careful to add. “It’s the closest we get to time travel isn’t it? You’re American, are you? Is this your first visit to Pennyroyal Green? I’m sorry. So rude of me. I’ve better manners than that, truly. My name is Malcolm Coburn.”

She said nothing. But her face blanked peculiarly.

“Malcolm Coburn . . .” she repeated musingly, at last. “I think you’re on my tree!”

On her tree? Oh, Hell. Through no fault of their own, these ancient oaks attracted all manner of nature loons and cultists and New Ageists and conspiracy theorists. The local police had once arrested a group of Druids for dancing naked around them at midnight.

But then she laughed. A fantastic, abandoned, musical sound, not a mad one.

“I’m so sorry. You should see your expression! I meant . . .” She reached into her purse and deftly extracted an iPad, and swiped at it a few times, then turned it around and tapped. “My family tree.” She fanned the image wider with her fingers and then zoomed in on a portion of it.

Which was when he noticed the words on the inside of her index finger. He’d seen that kind of tattoo before, usually on prisoners and gang members and idiot teenage boys, which was how he knew she’d done it to herself with needle and thread. The letters were tiny, neat, and flawlessly proportioned. It had required determination, precision, and near preternatural patience and tolerance for pain.

It said: made you look.

He felt an interesting, not unpleasant little prickle at the back of his neck.

So. Isabel Redmond was a little dangerous.

It worried him that he liked this.

“And there are Coburns over here,” she was saying, scooting the image across the iPad with her finger. “I thought I saw a Malcolm Coburn.”

He leaned toward it and whistled low. “Look at what you have here. That is, indeed, my branch, and there I am. We’re not really directly related, you and I, but tangentially, as you can see. I’m descended from John Fountain. If you don’t mind?” She shook her head, and he dragged his finger lightly up the screen and landed it on John Fountain, son of Elise Fountain, adopted son of Philippe Lavay. “But he was known as Jack back then. One of John Fountain’s and Ruby Alexandra’s daughters married a Fitzwilliam, whose daughter married a Coburn. Two hundred or so years ago.”

He looked up at her again.

“I feel I ought to warn you I’m a bit of a history geek. I know far more about Pennyroyal Green and the families here than you’d ever want to hear. And the Redmonds and Everseas are Pennyroyal Green.”

“I actually want to hear everything. I know very little. I only have this tree, and Olivia Eversea’s diary—she began keeping it shortly after she was married—and I have this.”

She tucked the iPad under her arm and slipped something from her pocket.

It was a gold watch.

He didn’t question that she would trust him, a stranger, to look at her gold watch and iPad. She didn’t seem at all naïve. Somehow he was positive she could handle herself. Possibly she knew Krav Maga or some other exotic and violent martial art.

They looked down at Olivia in a hush.

“She’s so pretty,” he said, finally. “You look exactly like her.”

He froze.

His head went up and he pressed his lips together.

He hadn’t meant it to sound like that. He wasn’t a flirt. It always felt too much like strategy, which to him had always seemed somewhat dishonest, and who had the time? He certainly didn’t. When he wanted something from a woman he had no trouble letting it be known directly. He usually got what he wanted.

“You haven’t any romance in you,” Jemima had once sighed, draping her long, blond hair over his sweaty chest one evening.

Sex, love, and romance were all their own thing, and they only occasionally overlapped. He didn’t say that out loud. In part because he could imagine the rousing ensuing argument. He wasn’t even certain he knew how to explain it to her.

Isabel Redmond, judging from that wicked light in her eyes, was enjoying his discomfiture.

“I thought I looked like her, too,” she said matter-of-factly.

She closed the watch gently on her Aunt Olivia’s lovely face and turned it over, tracing the initial on the back with one finger. Absently.

A little silence fell.

“You probably already know this,” he told her, “but it’s clear to me that ‘LAJR’ stands for Lyon Arthur James Redmond. Were you aware that he’s a legend in these parts?”

“I did know about his initials. I haven’t heard about the legend. You’re not teasing me?”

Yearning flashed, swift and bright and fleeting over her face.

Intriguing. She didn’t want him to know how much it meant to her.

“I’m not, truly,” he said gently. “Everyone in Pennyroyal Green still speak of Lyon and Olivia as if it were yesterday. But that’s how the English feel about history in general. There’s in fact an absolutely beautiful piece of music named for him called ‘The Legend of Lyon Redmond.’ A folk tune. There’s a festival in a few weeks, a group that does a brilliant version of it. Perhaps you’ll hear it during your visit.”

Her hesitation told him that she knew he was fishing for how long she’d be staying.

“I love live music. And I’ve let a flat for next three months. In a charming old building behind Miss Marietta Endicott’s Academy . . .” She gestured in the direction..

So she was staying for a while. He knew a surge of intense and wholly irrational relief and triumph that she had decided to tell him.

Speaking of staying, he’d kept very late clinic hours the evening before, and he should probably shave before he saw Jemima this evening. “It’s just that it would be so refreshing to see your chin now and again, Malcolm,” she’d said last time.

He should leave now.

Isabel slipped the watch back into her pocket and shifted her iPad into her hands again.

“The flat you let is the former Seamus Duggan Memorial Home for Unwed Mothers,” he told her. “And Duggan, coincidentally, is the composer of ‘The Legend of Lyon Redmond.’ There are still Duggans in these parts, too.”

She scrutinized him, faintly troubled, faintly hopeful, as if she were ascertaining whether he was teasing her again.

“Truly,” he found himself saying firmly. As though it were some kind of promise.

Her face went closed, and she rubbed at her arm abstractedly, then caught herself and gave a short laugh. “It’s just . . . I got goosebumps when you said that. It all seems rather . . .”

“Synchronistic?”

“I was going to say ‘right.’ Another way of saying synchronistic, I suppose.”

Both words made him a little uneasy at the moment. Because everything from the hurtling cell phone up to this moment felt somehow right and synchronistic.

“While you’re here, you can see where Olivia and Lyon lived when they were first married.”

“I plan to. I plan to visit every place she mentioned. In her diary she writes about living between England and Cadiz. Their first child was born in England. They had five of them, three boys and—but maybe you know all of this?”

“I don’t know it from Olivia’s perspective. And it’s fascinating. What do you know?”

She glowed gorgeously, delighted to have something to share. “Well, Olivia wanted to see the world, and Lyon wanted to show it to her. They went on to Louisiana—Lyon had had a plantation there and it was really prospering—and then they moved on to New York when her brother Ian and his wife Titania settled there. That’s where they lived during the civil war. She writes about her brothers and sisters coming to visit. I saw a statue of my Great-Great-Great-Uncle Jonathan in London.” She gave a short wondering laugh.

“Jonathan Redmond is one of my heroes. His wife was remarkable, too. They transformed the lives of poor children and helped transform manufacturing in this country. We learned about him in school.”

“I touched him, too,” she confessed, gesturing at the tree she’d just felt. “I patted his brass thigh.”

Malcolm had a sudden inconvenient image of her hand on his own thigh.

Which briefly erased his ability to speak.

“So many brave people in my family, I’ve discovered.” She said this shyly, and almost, carefully, searching his face again, perhaps worried about offending him in case his family was riddled with cowards. He found this amusing and unaccountably touching. “Olivia and Lyon were both involved in the abolitionist movement in America.”

“They were remarkable, Olivia and Lyon Redmond. But there probably isn’t an ordinary person on the whole of your family tree. For instance . . .” His finger landed on Lyon’s brother, Miles Redmond. “Are you familiar with Redmond Worldwide?”

“The GPS and travel people?”

“The very same. They were radar and aviation pioneers, too, back in the early days of flight. Stop me if you already know all of this.”

“I know some things, but please tell me anything you’d like.”

“Miles Redmond—Lyon’s younger brother—was a renowned explorer and naturalist. His series on the South Seas is still read today. My own copy is nearly worn threadbare. I read the devil out of it when I was younger. Still have it.”

“Books like that are precious,” she said firmly.

“What kinds of books do you like to read?” he tried, casually. He suddenly very much wanted to know.

“I’d like to read Miles Redmond’s books.”

Indicating that she’d reveal things about herself selectively and on her own terms, thank you very much.

A peculiar blend of amusement and irritation surged through him.

She didn’t realize how very, very determined he could be.

“I’m sure you can find a set in Tingle’s Bookshop,” he said smoothly. “Which is . . .” he pivoted, then pointed up the street. “. . . right over there. You won’t need GPS to find it. Miles did make it to Lacao one more time. But he remained in England when his wife Cynthia became pregnant with their first child. They had four sons, and a daughter, as you can see.” He tapped each name gently. “It seemed his destiny was to continue to help the rest of the world see the world. One of them in particular was rather notorious. . . .” he touched a name. “Augustine Redmond.”

“A little notoriety strengthens the bloodline, from what I understand.”

“If you’re basing strength on scoundrels, then you’ll be delighted to know your blood is strong indeed.”

Gratifyingly, she laughed.

“Redmond Worldwide has branched out into mountaineering equipment, travel gear—nearly everything travel related. Their headquarters are in London, but they have offices around the world.”

“They sponsored an Everest climb a few years ago, didn’t they? And weren’t they in the America’s Cup last year?”

Ah. So she read the newspapers, at the very least. Perhaps business journals.

“Yes. And they’ve recently partnered with Cole-Eversea for high-performance outdoor wear. Later in life Colin Eversea, Olivia’s brother, and a Mr. Gideon Cole founded Cole-Eversea textiles after successfully breeding a sheep with the softest, most durable wool. The business has been in the family—your family—ever since. Colin Eversea and his wife Madeline had children later in life, four of them. Two boys, two girls, all rascals save one, or so I’m given to understand. One of their descendants heads the company.”

“I found my Cole-Eversea sweater in a thrift store.” She plucked at the tissue-fine cashmere cardigan she wore open beneath her jacket. “Otherwise I never would have been able to afford it.”

He froze.

He’d caught a glimpse of something on her breasts when she’d plucked at her sweater.

He jerked his head up and all but glared at her.

“Are you . . . are you wearing a McLusky t-shirt?” He could barely get the words out.

“I . . . ah . . . Yes.” She said this carefully. Startled.

“The band. McLusky.” He said this abruptly.

“Is there . . . another McLusky?”

“I fuc . . . that is, I love McLusky.” He said this almost accusingly.

McLusky was difficult to love, too. Noisy, obnoxious, visceral, clever, obscure. He couldn’t think of anyone who remembered them.

Let alone a woman.

There ensued a fraught little silence.

She narrowed her eyes. Studying him in a way that meant: Prove it.

“I’m fearful I’m fearful I’m fearful of flying and flying is fearful of me,” he quoted softly, like a soldier repeating a password to a sentry.

There was a short silence.

“Well.” She said cryptically. Imbuing that word with a dozen shades of meaning.

He imagined describing her to his friend Geoff Hawthorne later: “She wore cashmere over McLusky.”

An interesting moment zinged between them.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked suddenly.

“I’m a doctor.”

She blinked. “Doctors, in my experience, usually lead with ‘I’m a doctor.’”

He gave a short laugh. “I have a practice, a clinic, in the Sneath Building down the hill—you may have passed it on your way up. I’ve a partner, Finn O’Flaherty. A lot of local patients. We even do occasional house calls.”

That was all he said. It was his turn to be circumspect.

She just nodded, taking this in. She didn’t do what a few too many women did when they learned he was a doctor: fawn. He didn’t know why they did that. Apart from the money, doctors often made terrible partners, for so many reasons. The ghastly long and unpredictable hours, for one.

He definitely wasn’t the sort of doctor Jemima wanted him to be.

And he was as immovable as the bloody trees in front of him when it came to those reasons for doing what he did.

He looked abruptly down at her iPad again. “Ah . . . now as for the notorious. . . . you’ll enjoy hearing about Ruby Alexandra, the daughter of Violet Redmond and the Earl of Ardmay. There are two famous portraits of her—or rather, one famous, one infamous—one at the Duke of Falconbridge’s residence, and the other still hangs in Alder House. You can see that one for yourself whilst you’re here. She was a spectacular beauty and scandal seemed to dog her. She married her best friend, ultimately. A boy she’d grown up with. John Fountain. My forebearer. He was adopted by Philippe Lavay, but he’d been born a bastard. Hardly a suitable match for the daughter of an earl, particularly back then. He sailed off to make his fortune. He did, and then some. You’ll find quite a few buildings named for him around England. I understand it was quite the Wuthering Heights story of their day, with a much better ending.”

“Every good story should have a little drama.”

Hmmm. He wasn’t certain he agreed. He also wasn’t certain drama was something anyone could avoid. Destiny was like a tiger trap. Sometimes you just fell into the pit.

“Speaking of the Duke of Falconbridge. . . .” She dropped her finger on Alexander Moncrieffe, bound to Genevieve Eversea. “What do you know about him?”

He knew that the current duke’s granddaughter was expecting him for dinner, and would be disappointed he hadn’t shaved.

But he didn’t say it aloud. The omission felt like a lie. He didn’t like himself for it, and he didn’t understand it. There would be time to mull that later.

“Well, you are indeed indirectly related to the current duke. Let’s see . . . Ah, Lord Anthony Argosy married the Duke and Duchess of Falconbridge’s middle daughter, Grace. Nearly twenty years apart in age when that happened—his first marriage was not a success—and her parents weren’t thrilled about this match. But the union proved spectacularly happy, and quite bountiful, as you can see.”

He pointed to the abundance of girls and boys fanning out from Argosy’s and Grace’s little branch of the tree tree.

“Oh, good,” she murmured. “It’s always a relief when people go on to be happy.”

Some peculiar emotion—it felt like anger—sizzled faintly on the periphery of his awareness. Who made you unhappy, Miss Redmond? He wanted to know. He suddenly wanted vengeance for her.

“I could close my eyes and drop a finger nearly anywhere here on this tree and we’d have a fascinating story. Explorers, actors, politicians, tycoons, soldiers, surgeons, rock stars, body guards . . . were you aware that Colin Eversea’s oldest son founded a private investigation firm? It’s huge now. Trains and employs bodyguards and the like . . . so if you’re ever a visiting dignitary, or married to one, you can call upon them.”

He’d dropped the word “married” into that sentence strategically.

From her brief crooked smile, she knew he was fishing.

And she didn’t volunteer any information.

Fair enough.

“And here’s an interesting Eversea . . . see, Clive Dunkirk? Drummer in the 70’s band Heliotrope?”

“I bought all of Heliotrope’s records at a thrift store one day,” she said idly.

She looked up sharply when she noticed he’d fallen abruptly silent.

“You love Heliotrope, too, don’t you?” she asked. Sounding almost resigned.

“I’m a fan,” he said, noncommittally.

He passionately loved Heliotrope. Thunderous, complex, frightening, epic. And loud. Everything he’d been inside when he was younger, and he supposed, in some form or another, still was.

She hiked her eyebrows as if she knew the truth.

“You love visceral music,” he hazarded a moment later. As if diagnosing her.

“I love visceral everything,” she said instantly.

This sounded like a challenge.

Perhaps even an invitation.

Their eyes locked for an assessing moment, and then he dropped his again, uncertain, in truth, what to do about that.

He wasn’t often nonplussed.

“Ah . . . and here’s an infamous Eversea. Evangeline Moon.”

“Evangeline Moon was an Eversea? The actress from the 30s?”

He was very much enjoying watching her face light up when he told her things. Malcolm dragged his finger up along the family tree and stopped it at Adam Sylvaine, then skated it down as he spoke. “She was born Eve Anna Talbot. Eve became a family name, beginning with Evie Duggan, who was married to Pennyroyal Green’s vicar, Adam Sylvaine. The current vicar is a Sylvaine, by the way. But Adam was a contemporary of your Aunt Olivia, her cousin. Anyway, Reverend Sylvaine and Evie Duggan had four children. Long before that there was a rumor Evie Duggan killed her first husband, who was an earl. Which was likely nonsense. A few hundred years later, Evangeline Moon was born in poverty in San Francisco. She inherited both Evie Duggan’s looks and the scandal-prone DNA.”

“I knew she was from San Francisco. But Gabriel Graham was her true love,” Isabel said firmly. “I had such a crush on him when I was younger. I was riveted by his movies. I couldn’t believe anyone that charismatic had ever existed.”

Malcolm was so suddenly irrationally jealous of the long-dead, effortlessly cool Gabriel Graham that his finger jerked like a record scratch up to another part of her family tree.

“Now Genevieve Eversea, Olivia’s sister, married the Duke of Falconbridge. Their direct descendants still abound in England, all of Europe, really. You may even see them in town while you’re here. Unless you blink, because the future duke is usually a blur in that Maserati.”

“Do you know him well, then?”

He pressed his lips together. “He thinks I’m a Plebian. His brothers and sister are more tolerable.”

He could imagine Jemima’s reaction to being called “tolerable.”

Isabel was studying him, a faint furrow between her brows.

It was perilously close to sunset. He should have left ten minutes ago.

A bird sang a glorious snatch of song, and Isabel tipped her head back to see if she could find the singer in the tree.

“Do you see something carved there? It looks like an ‘I’ and maybe an ‘S.’”

The lowering sun had indeed struck new angles and illuminated hidden nooks. And there it was.

He tipped his own head back. “I think you’re right. I-S. I’ve never noticed it before. As though someone was trying to carve ‘Isabel.’

She drew in a long, audible breath.

And exhaled a shuddery one.

And suddenly, abruptly, she slipped her iPad back into her bag and folded her hands in front of her.

“I’m sorry,” he said instantly. “Is all this history a bit much?”

“No . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m happy, actually.” She glanced up at him quickly, then smiled swiftly, but the smile was wobbly. “That was my happy face, honestly. It’s just. That I . . . I didn’t really know my parents, so . . .”

This sentence trailed into nothingness as she pretended to be distracted by rummage through her handbag.

“Ah,” he said instantly, neutrally, a universe of understanding in that syllable.

Isabel looked up at him again. He had doctor’s eyes. A way of looking into you that implied you may as well tell him your secrets, because he knew them anyway.

She was certain plenty of women and patients had volunteered their secrets to him.

He wasn’t going to find her quite as forthcoming.

She looked forward to his efforts, however.

The silence stretched a bit. She’d created an awkward moment and she regretted it.

He didn’t really need to know a thing about her in order for her to enjoy him, and she’d been so caught up in the momentum of the conversation she’d tripped on her own conversational thread.

“The reason I practice medicine in Pennyroyal Green . . .” he ventured. “. . . . where I was born . . . Sometimes I think it has a bit to do with Jack Fountain, who never knew his own father. Maybe a need to belong, to feel connected to something, is in my DNA.”

She knew why he’d said it: so that she would recognize that her own untold story, however dark or difficult, was simply part of centuries of human experience.

She was very unaccustomed to insightful men.

She wasn’t certain how much she liked it

“I wonder if someone might even stand beneath these trees a hundred years from now and tell the story of Isabel Redmond to someone else,” she mused.

He gave a short laugh. “Given your bloodline, it almost seems inevitable. And a hundred years is like yesterday here in England. For example, Isaiah Redmond, Lyon’s father, died later in life under mysterious circumstances. There’s a faction here in England that maintains to this day that Jacob Eversea—Olivia’s father—killed him.”

“No!” she was perversely thrilled.

“Nothing was ever proven, of course. Nothing ever seems to be proved when it comes to the Everseas. They traditionally get away with everything, or so legend has it.”

She smiled at him slowly. She loved knowing roguish blood flowed in her veins. And that her history contained mysteries.

“To this day, there’s still a bit of tension between the Everseas and Redmonds,” he added idly. “I thought I should warn you. In case you encountered a bit of tension during your visit.”

She smiled slightly. She knew precisely why he’d said that.

They allowed the word “tension” to simmer there in silence.

“Thank you,” she said finally.

When he smiled slightly a dimple winked briefly at the corner of his mouth. That dimple was more perfect than anything Postlethwaite’s had ever stocked.

“My old school chum, Geoff Hawthorne, owns the Pig & Thistle, just a bit up the road,” he said. “They have a splendid antique Rowlandson print of Lyon Redmond simmering in a pot presided over by two cannibals. If you’re hungry.”

She laughed, and then he laughed at himself when he realized how that had sounded.

“Sounds wonderful,” she told him.

“Don’t worry. I’m fairly certain there aren’t any cannibals in your bloodline. Though Miles Redmond was nearly eaten by one.”

He nudged up the kickstand of his motorcycle with the toe of a well-worn boot. He walked the bike gently, as though it were a beloved pet. She approved.

She fell into silent stride next to him.

“Speaking of rogues,” he said suddenly, “did you know your Great-Great-Great-Uncle Colin Eversea escaped from the gallows?”

“No!”

“Oh, yes. There’s even a song about him,” Malcolm said. “And you wouldn’t believe the number of verses it has now.”

THE END