Chapter Seventeen Chapter Seventeen IT IS STILL SNOWING WHEN SHE SETS OUT AT FIRST LIGHT. HE didn’t come to call despite the gunshots that, for all she knows, no one heard but him and her.
She carries the gun, breech broken, chambers loaded. She has a box of twelve shells in her pocket.
Now he knows I have a gun.
She can see perhaps thirty feet in front of her.
There is almost no wind. It is colder so the snow is drier than it was last night. Not so heavy to walk in but more slippery underfoot.
She forsakes the path in favour of the beach rocks, which are bare for the tide has just gone out.
The gun under her right arm, her cane in her left hand, her progress is slow and loud, the wet rocks clattering beneath her feet.
Several times, as the rocks slide out from under her, she manages to keep from falling by planting the cane and leaning her chest on the back of her hand.
These might be just some of the usual daybreak sounds on Loreburn, these clattering rocks, the cries of far-off, unseen gulls, the token shoreward shrugs of a tide in slow retreat.
She stops at the bottom of Loreburn Hill and looks up. She can see only the first row of houses. Their snow-covered roofs make them look less old, almost lived in.
She looks over her shoulder. Even if he heard the shots, Patrick might not be able to navigate to Loreburn in this weather.
She brushes away the snow that has gathered on the gun. She is tempted to fire a shot to see if, despite being wet, the gun will work, but thinks better of it. She begins to make her way among the houses.
The going is much easier on the road. The snow, knee-deep, is light enough that she can almost scuff through it.
She knows that, as she cannot see the church, no one watching from the church can see her, but she feels certain she is being watched by someone just far enough away to be obscured by the snow, someone on the road ahead of her who leaves no footprints, looks back over his shoulder now and then to make sure she hasn’t lost the way, someone impatient at her plodding pace, who could have gone straight up the hill if he wanted to, taking the shortcuts the horses take.
She winds her way up the hill, her heart pounding as much from exhaustion as from fear.
At each turn in the road, she looks up, hoping to see the church, dreading being seen from it.
She has the feeling that, despite its boarded-up windows and doors, every house she passes is occupied, as if her trek up the hill is a re-enactment of something that happened at daybreak in Loreburn years ago while the residents were sleeping, something that caused the place to be deserted.
At last, when she reaches the point of no longer caring that she will be visible from the church, she makes out the middle spire, the empty belfry, the ragged nooselike piece of rope. She stops to catch her breath, then moves on.
The pieces of wood that covered the church door have been pried free and lie partially buried in the snow at the foot of the steps. The grey but otherwise intact doors are outspread like wings, each one kept open by a stone.
The church looks as if it is ready to receive the Sunday-morning worshippers of Loreburn. She has no idea what day of the week it is.
She would not be surprised to be overtaken by other churchgoers, preceded up the steps by the six or seven families who comprise the population, Samuel Loreburn’s solemn congregation, come to hear their patriarch perform a service of his own devising and deliver a sermon of stern admonishment.
She cannot see beyond the dark doorway. It is as if a ceremony for which it is necessary that the church be dark is taking place inside.
She closes the breech of the shotgun. It clicks shut loudly, loud enough, she is certain, for whomever is inside the church to hear.
As best she can, she raises the gun with one arm and fumbles about until she finds the trigger with her finger.
She slowly makes her way up the snow-covered wooden steps, which creak beneath her feet.
How odd, to be ascending the steps of a church armed with a gun. Again she feels as though she is re-enacting some scene from long ago, something which made the continued habitation of Loreburn unthinkable.
When she reaches the top of the steps she drops her cane and holds the shotgun with both hands, pressing the stock against her shoulder, her arms quivering from the weight.
At first, the darkness in the church seems absolute. She fears that, any second, someone will come lurching from it and carry her with them back down the steps before she has a chance to use the gun.
She is by no means certain that, whatever happens, she will pull the trigger.
At first, it looks like someone has drawn oblongs on the walls with white, incandescent paint, but then she realizes that these are the boarded-up windows, their perimeters traced with light from outside.
As her eyes further adjust, she sees two rows of pews separated by a narrow aisle that leads to an elevated altar that is bare aside from a small pulpit on the right.
On the back wall of the altar is a large plain wooden cross.
At the sound of the striking of a match from within the pulpit, she aims the gun.
“Merely lighting the lamp,” a voice from within the pulpit says. The voice that she heard years ago from behind the curtain of the window of the house on Patrick Street. And before that too. Where?
“I have taken sanctuary in a consecrated church,” the voice says as the light of the lamp flares up, illuminating the area around and above the pulpit. “You are welcome to join me if you wish.”
Twenty-five years. Not since she was still a child have they spoken to each other. A child who had two children and was roaming through the streets at night in search of something on which a universal prohibition had been placed, craving what it was illegal for anyone to buy or sell, let alone a child.
Their transactions had seemed strange to her but surely stranger still to him. Talking through a curtain to a girl who’d never seen him. Taking money from her in exchange for a kind of moonshine called callabogus. Waiting for her in the dark behind that curtain and that window.
After a certain number of nights, he would have recognized her footsteps. And the clinking of her cane. Here she comes.
Sitting there while she stood outside the window in the cold, appraising her, assessing her. He let her stand out there for hours while he scrutinized every inch of her, noted the way she held herself.
Something in his own life had made him decide that the time had come to intervene in hers. The birth of her children.
It is hard to imagine the setting in which the terms, the limits of this intervention were devised. The site of his ruminations. That book-crammed flat in Lower Manhattan. Two thousand miles away from her he plotted his intervention as would a kidnapper the abduction of a stranger. All so he could talk to her on Patrick Street.
“Come out where I can see you,” she shouts, her voice as shrill as a girl’s.
“Yes,” the voice says. “Where you can see me. How eager you must be to see me after all this time.”
“Come out,” she shouts again.
She sees two massive hands grip the opposite sides of the rail of the pulpit. A figure raises itself slowly from within. It seems that it will never stop rising, but when it does it sways unsteadily.
“Such an absurd little church,” the voice says. “A church for children. A place for them to play at saying service. Not a Catholic church until just recently when I made it one. I was preparing for morning Mass when you arrived.”
Now she can see his face. That of an old man, it doesn’t match the tone of the letters.
Short, close-cropped grey hair. Forehead a mass of liver spots and wrinkles. A wide mouth whose lower lip sags in what might be the after-effect of a stroke. Blue eyes?
“May I descend all three steps?” he says, smiling.
“Stay put,” she says.
“I have a chalice in my hand,” he says. “Merely a chalice.”
“Put it down.”
“It is hardly a weapon, Miss Fielding. There is nothing in it but some wine.”
He descends the pulpit.
“Take the lantern,” she says, “and set it on the floor.”
He complies, then stands up straight, still elevated on the altar, the chalice in both hands in front of him. He is dressed in black. Black jacket and soutane, black slacks, black shoes. A white collar at his throat.
“Well. You have seen me. Just a man, after all. And not the one I was when we first met. Why are you afraid of me?”
“What do you want? What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here, Miss Fielding? A woman alone, living like a hermit on an island in the winter. Loreburn. Population: one. Until recently.”
She says nothing as she watches him place the chalice on the floor in the halo of the lantern light.
She can now see well enough to make out the plumes of frost that issue from his mouth when he breathes or speaks. She glances at the pulpit and sees that inside it lies a sleeping bag, a canteen and a khaki knapsack.
She tries to imagine him being taken to Loreburn and left here without supplies on the eve of winter. He will not last many more nights in this church now that the real cold has set in. Which means that she will have to take him back to Patrick’s house.
His clothes do not look as though he wore them while making his way from the church to Patrick’s house and back again. In fact, they look, except for a few creases and wrinkles, almost new.
His shoes, which are not suited for walking on Loreburn in the snow, gleam as if they have recently been polished. The lamplight flickers in them.
There must be other clothes in that knapsack. The ones he is wearing he must have brought for this occasion. Their meeting. And whatever else he has in mind.
Still standing on the church floor, two steps below the altar, she cannot guess his height, but it seems inconceivable that it is less than seven feet.
“You look ridiculous, Miss Fielding, with that shotgun in your hands. A woman in a church aiming a shotgun at an old man. I believe you think that all of Loreburn is yours and I am but an interloper who must be forced to leave.”
“How did you get here? Is there a boat? Is someone waiting for you somewhere?”
“A delegate, you mean? No. There has been but one. Now I am alone. Like you.”
She lowers the barrel of the gun, the better to look him in the eye.
He is off the altar and has one hand on the barrel of the gun before she can even think about the trigger.
He is almost behind her when the gun discharges. It falls from her hands, but he keeps his one hand on the barrel, with the other grabs the stock, then breaks the gun in half across his knee as though it is the toy of some misbehaving child.
He throws both halves aside, then clutches the hand that gripped the barrel, which, judging by his expression, must have burnt him badly though he did not cry out in pain.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You might have hurt yourself with it.”
“Did you burn yourself?”
“I haven’t touched a gun in more than twenty years. Not since the war.”
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t help but think I might need it.”
“Sit down,” he says, pointing at the steps that lead up to the altar.
She all but falls onto the steps, and supporting herself on her hands, leans back to look up at him.
“Are you all right?” he says. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“What in God’s name do you want?” she says, gasping out the words, remembering the ease with which he snapped the gun.
He sits, then kneels in the front pew, hands clasped as he rests on his forearms.
“I told you in a letter long ago,” he said. “My daemon is memory. It has always been.”
“No point changing daemons in midstream.”
“There it is at last. That famous sarcasm. Better you draw on your courage now than on your wit.”
“You think you have courage.”
“I have done courageous things. But also others of which I am ashamed. As you have. But you are still young. And I am old.”
“I shouldn’t have insulted you. But can you blame me for being scared?”
“I suppose not. Here I am, dressed as the priest I used to be—”
“How is it that no one ever spoke of your visits to St. John’s? That no one ever remarked at the sudden appearance and disappearance of a stranger of your height? Why were there never rumours of the sort that my father would have seized upon?”
“The answer, Miss Fielding, is so simple. I once told you that the one physical trait that could not be disguised was height. A statement that you left unchallenged.”
“I still—”
“Miss Fielding, each time I debarked from a vessel in St. John’s, I did so in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets, a wheelchair pushed by my delegate, whom I pretended was my son.”
A wheelchair.
“I liked wearing my disguise. People said all kinds of things in front of me, spoke as if I wasn’t there. You’d think that old and crippled in a wheelchair I could hear no voice except my own.
“On the ship that brought you back home from New York the first time, I passed you in the hallway in my wheelchair. You had read my letter by this time. You smiled at me. A very kind thing given your circumstances. ‘You have a lovely smile,’ I said. You thanked me and moved on.”
“I knew that I had heard your voice somewhere.”
“On the Bonavista we travelled by train from St. John’s in a private berth. Me in my wheelchair when we appeared in public. We rented a summer house where I stayed while my delegate, disguised as a hobo, rode the Bonavista back and forth for weeks. He often walked past your shack at night on his way from one depot to the next. On the day of the storm, when the trains stopped running and the nearest depot was closed, we drove by trolley down the Bonavista. We stopped beside your shack in which I told my delegate to wait when, after looking through the windows, he said that it was empty. I wanted him to be there in case you returned before I did. Had you done so he would have nailed his hat to the outside of the door. A signal to me to knock four times, then wait until he let me in. The point was to make sure that you were, shall we say, asleep, before I came inside. Chloroform. But it never came to that.”
“Why was it so important to you that we never meet?”
“I worried, Miss Fielding, though you may doubt it, that I might, by revealing everything to you or to others, destroy you and your children. When we first spoke you were so young but already so troubled. Already drinking to excess. And then there was Dr. Fielding. Imagine what he would have done if you or someone else made him aware of my existence. And imagine the effect that would have had on your children.”
“I have no idea what you want. What you have ever wanted from me.”
“I think you do.”
“My mother’s account of your courtship differs somewhat from yours.”
“Yes. I believe that she convinced herself that what she wrote to me and what she told David was true. I would not have thought that self-delusion so absolute was possible. But which one of us do you believe?”
“I don’t know what to believe. Did she leave me because you somehow forced her to?”
“No. She could have chosen to stay. She chose to leave. She foresaw the consequences of both choices. She chose against loyalty and love. As she did with me. And our child.”
“I have no way of knowing if that’s true.”
“Have I ever lied to you, Miss Fielding?”
“As I said, I have no way of knowing.”
“Did your mother ever lie to you? Do you think she ever lied to Dr. Fielding?”
“Two very different questions.”
“Whose answers are the same. Let me make it simpler for you. Name one person to whom you are sure that your mother did not tell, shall we say, a significant lie. Her parents? Her fellow sisters at the convent? Her two husbands? Your children? You?”
“Considering her circumstances—”
“What you call her circumstances proceeded from a lie. A false pledge. A broken pact. Even before she met me, your mother’s life was a series of betrayals and abandonments. I think her parents, if they were still alive, would agree with me, don’t you? She renounced them for the convent. But kept her trust fund just in case. To swear an oath, to pledge oneself for all eternity to something or someone is all very well, but best hold something in reserve lest that oath or pledge should need to be revoked.”
“She was young—”
“I, too, was young, Miss Fielding. Do you really believe that, if not for me, your mother would have kept her convent vows? Remained a nun?”
“My mother and my children are strangers to me.”
“I did not take your mother by force from the convent. To that cottage on Cape Cod. In that cottage on Cape Cod. I have proof that I hoped it would not be necessary to show you, that my child, my first child, was not the issue of an evil act committed by its father. Proof that your mother lied about me to your son.”
“The proof that you spoke of in your letter to David? Half of one page was torn out.”
“By him. Not me. He did it for your sake. To spare you. I can assure you that he knew the truth. All of it. As you soon will.
“When David found the correspondence between your mother and me and confronted his mother about it, she told him that I blackmailed her into leaving you with Dr. Fielding, threatened in a letter to take your life unless she abandoned you. More lies. I proved as much to him by sending him some of the letters that she wrote me.”
“You still have not proven anything to me.”
“I met with David once, wearing my disguise, and showed him this.”
He takes from the inside pocket of his jacket the sort of box in which a ring might be displayed, a small, black, velvet-covered box whose silver clasps and hinges gleam. He holds it up between his thumb and forefinger as a person with a smaller hand might do with the ring itself, the better to allow someone to admire it.
“It once held an engagement ring,” he says. “I spent everything I had. She wore it for two weeks before the morning she crept from bed while I was sleeping. She left the ring on her pillow. Beneath the ring, held in place by it, she left a note. Which I put in this box after I threw the ring away.”
“You showed this to David?”
“I should not have. But—yes. I did.”
He holds the box at arm’s length, offers it as though for her inspection.
“Take it,” he says.
She rises from the altar, takes the box from him, holds it between thumb and forefinger in mimicry of him. It looks so delicate, so fragile that, handled any other way, it might crumble into pieces.
“Open it,” he says.
She places it on the palm of her other, outstretched hand. It looks new, fresh from some display case, the velvet unblemished, unfaded, the metal without so much as a trace of rust.
The opposing clasps slide almost silently apart. She feels as though she is opening a miniature casket or crypt, an impression that is heightened by the gleaming white upholstery inside. Tucked beneath the loop by which the ring is held in place is a tiny scroll of paper that, despite its age, looks well preserved.
Placing the box on the nearest pew she removes and unscrolls the note. The paper crackles like parchment but does not break.
Her mother’s handwriting. She recognizes it instantly.
She reads the words aloud, unmindful of what their effect on him may be:
Thomas: I have made a grave mistake. I must break off our engagement. As I am undeserving of it, I will not ask for your forgiveness. I do not love you and must return to my true home. Goodbye.
“Her true home,” he says, his voice quavering. “Not the convent, which was but the first part of her grave mistake. Her true home. Her old life.”
“She falsely accused you of raping her.”
“Yes.”
Fingers trembling, she rescrolls the note and replaces it in the box, which snaps loudly when she closes it.
“Keep it,” he says. “I want you to have it.”
She puts it in the pocket that contains her empty flask.
“My mother—”
“I travelled to St. John’s when I heard from my delegate that your mother was married. I arranged to meet your mother in the boarding house where I was staying. As always, my ‘disguise’ was a wheelchair. My story, our story, was that I was an aged, crippled relative of hers visiting from Boston who was not staying with her because it would have been too difficult for me to navigate the many stairways of her house. This was what she told Dr. Fielding who several times came with her to see me.
“‘Why have you followed me here,’ she said when we were alone. ‘What do you want from me?’
“‘Until recently I wasn’t sure,’ I said.
“’And now?
“‘Restitution. Of a sort. An eye for an eye. A child for a child.’
“‘I will not have a child just so you can take it from me or destroy it.’
“‘I did not say I meant to take it from you or destroy it. The latter is, for me at least, unthinkable. As is the former, though for different reasons. My plans are—not compatible with raising children.’
“‘Then in what sense would my child be restitution?’”
“‘I would, with your cooperation, follow its progress. You would write to me about it. Consult with me regarding certain matters. I would send you money stipulating how it should be spent. The child and I need never meet. It need never know of my existence. Dr. Fielding need never know.’
“‘I would go mad living like that,’ your mother said. ‘Knowing that that man of yours was always watching, as I’m sure he would be. I would never stop wondering what you had in mind and when you would alter the terms of your agreement.’
“‘I do not see what choice you have. Dr. Fielding—’”
“‘Has yet to share my bed and now he never will.’
“‘Another vow of chastity.’
“‘That I will keep this time.’
“‘Even though I could destroy you and your entire family.’
“‘I will pay any price to protect my family except the one you’ve named,’ she said. ‘I would not subject a child to that.’
“Oh what a blunder I had made, Miss Fielding. I realized too late that I had been a fool, that I should have waited, should not have made her aware of my presence in St. John’s, should not have approached her until she was expecting a child.
“She smiled as if she could read my thoughts.
“‘You speak,’ I said, ‘of what you would not subject a child to. YOU—’”
“I stopped when I saw that she was still smiling.
“I could neither conceal nor control my rage. I then did, Miss Fielding, what I did not do on Cape Cod. She did not resist, not in the least. She merely submitted. As if she had long ago resigned herself to the idea that one day this would be the form of my revenge. As if her false accusation had been a kind of prophecy. I apologized afterward, told her that it had never been my intention. Miss Fielding, I assure you that it happened only once.”
She raises her cane high in the air but cannot bring herself to strike him with it, though she imagines what it would be like to bring that ornamental knob down on his skull.
“In all those letters you wrote to me,” she says, “you made it sound as if you had come to see the folly of revenge. As though you were on the verge of making peace with your past.”
“I have relapsed many times. I did not speak of my relapses in my letters because I wanted to impress you. Win your approval, even your affection. But I have lately come to wonder if I truly lapsed when I gave in to the urge to be magnanimous, to espouse a way of life that I was merely imitating.”
“What did you do after you raped my mother?”
“Though she discontinued her visits I did not leave St. John’s. I believe she thought that the score between us had been settled, but it did not seem so to me. I feared that she might try to leave the city but my delegate told me that she rarely left her house.
“I was about to contact her to demand that she come to see me when she arrived of her own accord one afternoon while I was napping.
“‘I am pregnant,’ she said the instant she closed the door behind her. ‘With what can only be your child.’
“‘Dr. Fielding—’”
“‘Knows that I am pregnant with someone else’s child. As much as he will ever know unless you tell him more.’
“‘He will divorce you?’”
“‘He is primarily concerned about his reputation, which a divorce, especially one so soon, would tarnish. If I were to subsequently have a child, it would make certain things clear to everyone. He would look like a cuckolded fool. His main fear is that I will leave him.’
“‘Will you?’”
“‘No.’
“‘I don’t believe you. It would be a grave mistake to do with this child what you did—’”
“‘I intend to have this child.’
“So we waited, Miss Fielding. Until she began to show to the point that not even the largest, most loose-fitting clothes could conceal her pregnancy, we met twice a week, the four of us sometimes. Politely making conversation, Dr. Fielding doing most of the talking while I pretended to drowse, nodding off while my delegate, who introduced himself to Dr. Fielding as my son, sat there in silence. When there were just the two of us, we spoke very little. She not at all except to answer my questions. I asked her how she was feeling. Asked her if her doctor had detected any problems or complications.
“I asked her if she remembered conversations we had had in my confessional or in the cottage on Cape Cod. ‘Yes’ was all she ever said. Did she remember the plans we made, the way the seashore looked in winter? She nodded. She remembered everything but contributed no memories of her own. I recounted every detail of our courtship and elopement. Yes, she said every few minutes while I spoke. It got so that even when I didn’t ask if she remembered she said yes, nodding reflectively it seemed.
“We sat there in that room, Miss Fielding, the two of us and you. I noticed how her body changed from week to week, month to month. Once I put my hand on her belly and felt you kick inside her womb.
“‘Are you going to take this child from me?’ she said.
“Countless times I told her no, but she was not convinced. She seemed almost resigned to losing it. You.
“One day I told her: ‘You have let it live longer than you did our nameless child. It is now older than that one ever was.’ She said nothing.
“I asked her which she was hoping for, a boy or a girl. She didn’t answer. Perhaps because I had not told her what I was hoping for and she was fearful of what I would say or do if her hope clashed with mine.
“‘I’m hoping for a girl,’ I said.
“‘What if it’s a boy?’ she said.
“I shrugged.
“‘I will have no more children after this one,’ she said.
“‘Your husband—’”
“‘Is what he seems to be. He will reconcile himself to anything I do or do not do.’
“A week after the baby came, she took it—you—to see me. I poured a cup of water on your head and baptized you ‘Sheilagh.’ The name I chose for you.”
She still holds the cane aloft, now with both hands, and again feels and resists the urge to strike him with it. She could kill him if she wanted to.
“My God, I never knew my mother. And now it is too late.” She cannot speak further. She trembles so much she almost drops her cane, almost falls forward. Tears that quickly cool stream down her face, fall from her chin like drops of sweat. A shudder like the ones she felt while giving birth courses through her. Her chest heaves as she fights to catch her breath.
She now knows what David knew when he saw her in St. John’s. She looks at the old man who has not once looked at her since he began his story. With those massive hands that must have held her mother down as easily as most men could a child she was baptized. By those hands she was held while her mother watched and might already have been contemplating her escape. She bore the name that he chose for her. Her mother kissed her on the cheek while she was sleeping. And years later took two children from the child that she abandoned.
In spite of everything she could have stayed. Or could she have? A child for a child.
She is sobbing now, sobbing and coughing as she did on her worst days in the San when it seemed that she had lost for good the knack of drawing breath and felt certain she would die.
She doubles over, fearful with each cough that she will spray the floor with blood, that her illness has returned. He looks away from her. He kneels there in the pew as if he thinks she would rather he ignore her than come to her assistance or otherwise acknowledge her distress. Or else he is ashamed that a daughter of his would let him see her lose control.
Bent over from the waist, both hands on the knob of her cane as she looks up at him, she tries to speak, her throat souring with bile.
She stands over him, her cane upraised. He does not flinch or even look at her. She says, “If not for you—”
“Yes. If not for me. If not for her. That is how it goes. Not just with you and her but with everyone. There is no end to it. Nor can anyone remember how it all began.”
“What do you want from me?” she says. “For God’s sake, will you tell me what you want?”
She looks at him. His shoulders are stooped, hunched like hers. There is the same high forehead, the same jaw for which she searched Dr. Fielding’s face and her mother’s face in vain. His eyes are blue, sky blue like hers. And in them, still strong despite his age, is that unrelenting something that she has seen in hers that prevents anyone from locking eyes with her for long.
She is the blending of two other natures, but feels that she is no one’s child but his.
“My hands, Miss Fielding, are shaking from the cold. Shaking, as they say Judge Prowse’s did for years before he died. Isn’t it strange, the silence of an empty church? I left the doors open for you in case I was asleep when you arrived. I sat all night on the floor, my back against the bottom step of six that lead up to the altar. The chalice was on the floor beside me, brimful with water that by morning had partly frozen.
“Last night, as I imagined what meeting you would be like, I felt like some expectant father to whom a motherless child would soon be born.
“I wish I could have bullied your disease the way I bullied men like Mr. Prowse. It was often said that you had perished in that place. I felt such relief each time I was told that you were still alive. But I saved you on the Bonavista. The second and last time I held you in my arms. You said ‘thank you’ and then complained that you were thirsty. Lady Lazarus in your upright tomb of snow.
“What strange places I have been because of you, Miss Fielding. Though none stranger than this little church. But I should not have mocked it. When I was a child I loved it when the church was empty but for me, as this one was last night. On winter nights worshippers who would otherwise have spent the night alone came out to hear the priest recite the Stations of the Cross.
“‘Death closes all.’ But I have been thinking lately that perhaps death does not close all. Something like my old faith has returned to me. I am very curious, Miss Fielding, to know. But I will not hasten my death one moment to gain that knowledge. There will be no reckoning. No judgment. No punishment and no reward. But there may be something. Something more appealing than any of those things. To exist in a state of forgiveness. To feel neither guilt nor regret nor a craving for revenge.
“I could not resist intervening in David’s life. I never felt so vengeful as I did when my delegate died and I was left alone. David was terrified by what he read and by what I told him. Ashamed of his mother and himself. Confused. It must have seemed to him that his whole world had been overthrown.
“Your mother wrote to me before she died and said that she wished she could forgive me. She said she knew that by withholding her forgiveness she was ‘imperilling’ her soul. Was this faith or fear? She must have thought her God to be as gullible as Dr. Fielding. She did not think to ask me to forgive her. I would have done so. And asked for her forgiveness. Her true forgiveness.”
“In what sense was I twice-fathered?”
“By me. And by my delegate. We called you his ‘charge.’ But also his daughter. He asked, and I gave him my permission, to adopt you.”
“What is it that you want from me?”
“Now that I can no longer watch over you, I have come to ask for your forgiveness. But also something else. Far more important.”
“David,” she says.
“Who if not for me might still be alive. Might have chosen a path that would not have led him to a battlefield in Europe.”
“Just as he might not have done so if I had raised him. Or told him when he came to St. John’s what he already knew. Four words. ‘I am your mother.’ How he must have longed to hear them.”
“It is not to secure a place in heaven that I have chosen you as my confessor. I will not kneel before a priest who serves a God as vengeful as I once was.
“This is my final confession. And in a way my first. My other child is here, Miss Fielding. My daughter or my son. Your brother or your sister.
“I wrote to you in my first letter of three crimes, three sins for which I would one day ask your forgiveness. Do you know what they are?”
“No.”
“They are: the death of your unborn brother or sister, which if not for my stupidity and negligence would have been prevented; the death of your son—It was out of sheer spite that I told him the truth. Why should it have mattered to me if a child that was not even hers and whom I had never met believed that I had raped her or by threats against your life forced her to leave you. My third crime I committed against you. Miss Fielding, the girl and woman that you would have been had your mother not abandoned you. Every time she looked at you she thought of how you got your name and also of the child that she destroyed.”
“My mother was guilty of the same three crimes, if that is what they were. Even more directly so than you.”
“And died unforgiven for them. Unforgiven by you, by David and herself. I am not asking you to save my soul, Miss Fielding. I am merely asking your forgiveness. My contrition is sincere. I expect no reward for it. I ask for your forgiveness. Which must also be sincere.”
“How will you judge its sincerity?”
“I will hear it in your voice.”
“What if I refuse? What if I doubt my own sincerity? Or the sincerity of your contrition?”
He shakes, then bows his head. His back is hunched, his huge form slouches over the pew that has not been occupied in fifty years. Out of the pulpit from which Samuel Loreburn has not preached in fifty years, he rose a few minutes ago.
“You should be asking for my gratitude, not my forgiveness. You saved my life, more than once.”
“I want only your forgiveness. The only woman that I ever loved is dead. The Faith I thought I’d lost has been restored to me. I will not stop you if you try to leave. With or without your forgiveness and your blessing, I will die. But I am in every sense responsible for you. I did not know that it would end like this. I merely knew that it would end. It was not only for forgiveness I came. I did not want to die alone. Unloved. Never seen by you.”
“You wait so long to come out of the shadows—”
“I am a father asking forgiveness from his daughter.”
“You are a father who cannot bring himself to say his daughter’s name. The name you gave her.”
“Will you not forgive me?”
“Why do you speak of dying?”
“Because I am dying, Miss Fielding. I have been taking nitroglycerine tablets for my heart for years. I brought only enough to get me here. I have none left. And very little time. I leave what little I have to you. The flat full of books in Manhattan. In my pockets you will find enough money to transport me back to the place where I was born.”
She walks to the pew in which he kneels again and pulls his head against her stomach.
“Father,” she says. Tears flow freely down her cheeks. She runs her fingers through his white hair that is so thick and soft it might be that of the man he was when they first met. He, too, begins to cry, his great head quivering against her body, his eyes closed. “Father, I forgive you.”
He bows his head and with one palsied hand he blesses her and then himself. Kisses his thumb and forefinger and with his thumb against his forehead draws a cross. The cross on which the God that he did not believe in was crucified. He clasps his hands and sits back in the pew with a sigh like someone who has been on his feet for days.
“You spoke of something more important than forgiving you.”
“Yes. Forgiving your mother.”
“How can I do that?”
“You will never be at peace until you do.”
“I can’t promise it. Not yet. Some day, perhaps.”
“Mother meet your daughter,” he says. “Daughter meet your mother.”
It seems he is about to speak further, but his head falls forward.
It sounds as though he is sleeping deeply. A final breath trails into silence.
There is nothing I can do but wait for Patrick.
It is mid-morning. The snow has stopped. It crunches beneath my feet, reminding me of the first night I waited to be noticed in St. John’s, a mere girl who could not face the day without a drink, stamping out the butts of cigarettes and coughing, hoping to be heard. Back when my cane was but an ornament.
I start down the hill and manage quite well. Only where the road turns is the slope so steep that I have to fight to keep my balance.
Several times, I stop to look down.
The houses seem both festive and forlorn. All of Loreburn seems revived by the freshly fallen snow. As if the place has just been built and will soon be lived in by newcomers who, when they take the shutters down and look out across the bay, will long for home.
I picture a priest-led procession coming up the hill, stopping at each house for the blessing of the rooms.
The clouds are in so close I can’t see the gulls but hear them on the headlands to the east, shrieking, conferring raucously it seems, assessing what might be the first ever such catastrophe of snow.
There is still no wind. Were there people in the houses, columns of smoke would rise straight up from the chimneys.
There is no sign of the pack, who I suspect will stay put until their prey have no choice but to stir from their winter hiding places.
But the horses, seeming unfazed by the storm, walk from the gap in the woods in single file, their manes white with frost. Somewhere in the woods the ground is bare.
The sway-backed white mare is among them, looking the same as always. It would seem that she was not lost nor sick nor hurt. Maybe for the others, her being inexplicably absent for a while is commonplace.
I watch the horses make their usual way between the houses, forgoing the road. Each one of them snorting twin plumes of frost, they part when they near me but do not run. They scale the hill obliquely, heading northwest, seemingly unmindful of the church and its new resident to whom I attribute the distress they showed when I saw them last.
Even if I lived on Loreburn all my life I feel the horses would never acknowledge me except as a harmless and easily avoidable obstacle whose location varies unaccountably from day to day.
I decide to wait a while near the shore in case Patrick’s boat comes into view. Six gunshots I fired in the air last night. My shoulder feels as though it has been punched repeatedly—either I didn’t notice it before or the pain has just begun.
It’s getting colder now that the snow has stopped. It will be colder still when the wind goes round to the west and the sun comes out.
I turn and face the water again, the sea that takes its colour from the sky.
I’m in the house when, just before sunset, Patrick knocks on the door.
The snow continued to fall in Quinton long after it stopped in Loreburn. He did not hear the gunshots, but came because he was worried about how I would fare in the storm.
The next day we leave Loreburn, by which time I have told Patrick a version of my story and have pried loose most of his.
We stayed up all night in the kitchen, talking.
Irene is his sister, not his wife. The children are hers. Her husband is overseas, still writing letters, still reading what she writes and soon to come back home.
“There’s a woman down the shore. We’re engaged. No one knows. I told her I had to wait until Gus got home from the war. Or else Irene would put her foot down. Tell me that her and the young ones don’t need my help. Tell me to go and get married. We won’t live here all year long. Just in the summer when the fishing’s not too bad.”
He stared at the flame in the lantern on the table.
I told him that my Provider was a distant relative from away. For once I was glad Patrick was a man of few words.
The light begins to fade. The sky is clear. The stars are out before the sun goes down.
I sit in the stern, Mr. and Mrs. Trunk, now empty, flat on the deck behind me, my cane across my lap, looking back at Loreburn. Patrick steers, his eyes on the light that comes and goes from Quinton, the light that Irene flashes just for us.
I have never seen Loreburn from the water at this time of day. From a certain distance, you can easily imagine that the lights of early evening will soon appear, windows lantern-lit from the row of houses above the beach to the one below the church. And the same lights later going out one by one until the town is dark.
They will ask me who he was when I get back to St. John’s, why he followed me to Loreburn. Will they be suspicious when they hear how tall he was? The rumours we invented and tormented Dr. Fielding with were true. It may take a Forgery or two to shut them up.