1 
A Time to Remember

An attractive young woman, by appearance in her midtwenties, stood at the window of a thick stone wall gazing out upon a serene English countryside.

A calm radiated from her posture and bearing which, had an observer been present, might have seemed almost too peaceful for her years. Full waves of light brown hair flowed down onto her shoulders.

Was she what the world would term beautiful? From the look in her eyes at this moment, it would have been difficult to say. It was a compelling face, not because of the attractiveness of its features, but for what lay beneath the surface . . . an expression hinting at mystery.

Who was she? How had she come to be here?

In partial answer to such inquiries, a closer look would have revealed that the eyes bore an aspect of pain, a good deal of it recent. Their expressiveness explained much of what was to be known about her personal history that had come before, as well as what yet lay ahead in the story being written on the pages of her life.

The colors of the rolling terrain of meadows of the Devonshire downs, broken here and there by clumps of trees, were muted by the subdued oranges and pinks of the late afternoon’s sun. It was a landscape she had been intimately familiar with since earliest childhood.

It meant more to her now than she would have thought possible at an earlier season of her life. She once gazed out this same window with far different eyes. But that time was now long past. At last she had begun to apprehend the heritage that was truly hers, and had been all along.

The tower in which she stood rose from the northeast corner of a great country house too old to be called a mansion yet not quite so austere and grey to be comfortable with the term castle. For as long as anyone could remember the place had been known as Heathersleigh Hall. It was an estate of ancient date, whose walls contained many secrets—some of which yet lay awaiting discovery.

Her eyes now fell on the small village of Milverscombe two or three miles in the distance. The thatch and slate roofs were all she could make out from this vantage point of the forty or fifty cottages and homes which housed its population. Several larger buildings rose above the level of these roofs, most visibly the old stone church, and a modern train station.

She now looked toward a small wooded area to the west of the village situated about a third of the way toward it from the Hall. Nothing stood out as so remarkable about the collection of birch and pine trees enclosing a small dell between the slopes of two adjoining hillsides. There were a thousand such places in the southwest of England. But this one was special, and not only because it lay just across the boundary of the estate.

She stood for several long moments as her gaze stretched across the fields. Even as unconscious prayers gathered themselves within her heart, the memory of an afternoon not so very different from this came to focus from out of the past in her mind’s eye.

In the measure of eternity the years since had not really been so many. Yet the day she now recalled had in truth been another lifetime ago.

Her thoughts were interrupted by footsteps echoing from the passage behind her.

“Amanda . . . Amanda, are you up there?” came her sister’s voice up the narrow staircase.

“Yes, Catharine,” she answered softly, half turning behind her. “I’m in the tower.”

Amanda sent one final wistful gaze of poignant memory out the window, then turned into the small room just as Catharine entered through the large oak door that stood open where Amanda had left it a few minutes earlier.

“Hi . . . what are you doing?” said Catharine with a buoyant smile.

“Just coming to terms with a few memories,” said Amanda, returning her smile. “I have a lot to get used to now, things to put right from when I was so mixed up before.”

“I know,” rejoined Catharine, giving Amanda an affectionate hug, “—do you want to be alone? I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“No, it’s all right. I’m through.”

“Would you like to go for a ride? That’s why I was looking for you.”

“Where are you going?” asked Amanda as arm in arm they left the tower and began the descent together.

“I was thinking about riding out to see Grandma Maggie.”

“Yes, I think I would like that,” answered Amanda. “In fact, I was just thinking about her.”

“Good, I was hoping you would—I already asked Hector to saddle both horses.”

————

Another young woman stood at the wood stove of a tiny flat in one of the coastal towns of that far southeastern portion of England known as Cornwall. She was neither old enough nor experienced enough to be as reflective as her Devonshire counterpart. But she stood staring at the sizzling skillet in front of her with eyes that might have been reflective had they anything to think about.

She was but thirteen, and hers had not been an easy life. The struggle merely to survive and make the best of it consumed the days that made up her existence. She did not stop to consider whether she was happy or unhappy, or whether life was a good or an evil thing. Life was simply life. It was hard, but she had never known anything else and did not question it. She was still a child, though hints of changes gradually coming to her body gave evidence that womanhood was not far away.

She stood at the stove watching the small slab of meat that was her father’s breakfast brown over the heat. He had not come home last night, and whenever he must work through the long hours when she had to stay alone, he arrived home in the morning hungry. She did not know what he did, only knew that some of it had to do with ships. What else occupied him at such times, she did not need to know. She knew enough not to ask, knew that the people she sometimes saw with him were bad people, knew enough to realize that when he spoke with them in low tones it was about things they would not want the bobby who sometimes walked their street to hear.

Sully Conlin was a rough man, with rough friends. He laughed with them, swore with them, and drank with them, and sometimes fought with them. She thought ill neither of them nor her father because of it. She was not shocked by what she saw and heard. As much as is possible the crude language and coarse behavior passed over her. She did not know otherwise, and took it as one of the laws of existence that men did such things and that girls like her did their best to take care of them.

That Conlin had once been a sailor he had not exactly told his daughter in so many words, but she knew it from the purple tattoo of anchors and ropes on his burly forearm, from the way he spoke, knew it from his dream of taking her away from Cornwall and showing her the world. He never talked about leaving or going somewhere . . . but always of sailing away.

She knew it too from the fond gleam in his eye whenever he spoke of the sea.

“The sea, Betsy,” he had said many times, especially after hard days of backbreaking labor on the docks, “the sea is our only friend. It may be hard, but the sea is fair, and treats all men the same. It took your mother, and to the sea we will all return in the end. If ever you are lost, find the sea and follow it.”

But whatever he had been, and whatever kind of life he lived, Sully was good to his little girl and treated her gently. He was her father, and she loved him.

Her mother had been dead now many years. All she had to remember her was a small oval photograph that her father kept beside his bed.

Sometimes when he was gone, she would stare at the tiny picture and try to force to the surface from some region deep in her mind an image from her own life, a living memory that moved and spoke, whose voice she might faintly hear in the distance of the past.

But it was no use. She had been aware of the photograph all the days of her life, and there had never been a time when it did not sit at her father’s bedside. Whatever actual memory might at one time have been alive in her brain was now too faded and indistinct to be distinguished from the photograph itself.

Reality from the past and the small brown-faded image had by now blurred into a single hazy image, and she did not know whether she had actually known, or had ever even seen, the woman of the photograph. She knew it was her mother, yet her experience with women was so slight that in a practical way she hardly knew what the word mother meant.

Her father often stared at the photograph too, especially when he came home and was quiet. She knew that at these times he had been involved with the bad men. Such moments brought a look to his face that made her tremble.

“Ah, Elsbet,” he might say, gazing into her face as he cradled her white chin in his great rough palm, “it’s an evil world we live in.”

What could she do but stare back with wide expression, wondering what he meant. Then he would turn, walk heavily to the bed and ease his huge weary frame onto it with a sigh, pick up the photograph while he sunk into reverie. The wife of Sully Conlin’s youthful manhood had been taken from him young. All he now had to remember her by was a tiny fading photograph, and the memory of her eyes that lit the expression of the daughter he had brought into the world with the only woman he had ever loved.

And as he stared at the face now gone, quieting as he gazed upon it, his lips began to move in murmured remembrance.

The watching girl knew he was talking to the woman of the picture, but could make out nothing of what he said. Yet something within her dawning intelligence sensed that at such times the poor man’s heart was smiting him with painful memories, and ached with a deeper loneliness than she could possibly understand.