IN THE VILLAGE of Stead, Jane Eyre might easily have just disappeared around the corner, her arm crooked through the hoop of a shopping basket. In the truck still lettered Tenacity, Frank and the boys arrived on a dove-colored afternoon, driving over an arched stone bridge into a half-cobbled village thoroughfare that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be in the nineteenth or twentieth century—there being no question of the twenty-first. As they paused, a green April mist that seemed equal parts liquid and vegetal shimmered in the air, and then, for a minute, rain fell in earnest.
“The people live out in the street,” Ian said.
It seemed that way. Houses and stores bumped up against the thoroughfare, with no front yard or parkway except a scrap of tufty grass tucked behind ancient dry stone walls—their slabs stacked like shrunken books. At the back of buildings that clustered together like a toy village, there were small yards, with play structures, tumbles of wild roses and balls of shrub, that rose up to the curved and clefted hills, where old packhorse tracks and winding lanes slipped through a verdant quilt of new green, a burnished brown, and a child’s Easter purple. Frank couldn’t deny the view’s extravagance, but he worried about the austerity of the splendor. Small beings in small places clung to the side of an indifferent landscape. This was not, he thought, a settling place for those who lacked the kind of work that occupied their hands and hearts.
In front of a bow-fronted bakery that promised cream teas sat a bright red ragtop Packard that might have been eighty years old. It gleamed like the day it was made.
“Now, look at that car,” said Colin, at nine already a gearhead. He shouted aloud when the door of the antique car swung open and Patrick Walsh got out, waving his arms and then pulling off his hat to wave that, too. “Dad! It’s Patrick!” Colin nearly crawled out of the window when Frank explained briefly that the car had been Tura’s father’s, and was now theirs.
“I’ll do anything for that car,” Colin said simply. “I have five years until I’m fourteen.”
“You can’t drive until you’re grown up,” Ian said.
“What could I do, Dad? I can muck stalls every night. I could get all A’s. I’ll do the dishes. I’ll be Ian’s tutor.”
“I read better than you,” Ian said murderously.
Frank pulled Colin back down as both boys swarmed toward Patrick and freedom. “Wait up,” Frank said. “Let’s do this sensibly.” The truck’s rubber tarp was stretched taut over carefully wedged mounds of luggage, and he’d agonized all the way from the airport that at any minute a corner might open and spew their life, from winter socks to electric shavers, in a confetti of trash. What kind of man shipped a not very new or useful truck to England? Where its steering wheel was on the wrong side? And planned to have the steering wheel altered? Well . . . Frank. pulled the truck into what looked like a car park, although there were no signs. “Just let me lock up, and I’ll walk you over.” It was like holding back a team of sled dogs in full cry. Then they were on top of Pat, nearly bowling him over while Frank dug his fingers deep into the declivity of his hip to try to coax out the pain that had taken up lair there on the flight from Chicago.
Since the end of January, Pat had been living at a small guesthouse called Mrs. West’s (“She asks me when I’ll be in at night and do I want hot towels left in the covered bin. I feel like I’m living some old lady’s mystery story . . .”). He’d spent most of his time supervising work on Stone Pastures, sending reports of a new fence and new pipes, of the horses passing through quarantine, finding the vet who would see to them all and be ready to deliver Glory Bee at the end of her pregnancy.
Since they were living in England, and since so much had changed, Patrick had decided that he would not take Glory Bee’s competition further. As he told Frank, he was sick about it, but he was young, a young man, with much to do and see, and he had determined long ago that he would own and raise a colt of Glory Bee’s. To try to ease everyone’s disappointment at the anticlimax, Frank gave his consent to breed Glory Bee sooner rather than later. For some reason, Frank wanted this to happen at Tenacity, where Twelfth Night had been bred, but he wanted to involve Tura’s horses, too. A single vial of chilled sperm from the German owner of Rodin, the Hanoverian stallion that had been Tura and Cedric’s, did the trick. It was Frank’s sentiment about the provenance of the horse that made the choice for him, although Rodin’s status on the 2009 Irish Equestrian Eventing Team and the eight splendid foals to his credit were on the plus side of the ledger as well.
At Stone Pastures, the manager, was similarly taking down the breeding operation. It had dwindled to a slice of its former bounty after the Bellinghams’ death, after Kate sold Tura Farms. Under her direction, the two younger stud horses were sold. The manager wrote to Frank telling him that the remaining stud, Demetrius, was a friend to him and he would like him to spend his later time with the people he comprehended as his family. Perhaps Demetrius had a last foal in him, and what did Frank think was a good price for the horse? Horrified, Frank insisted that the manager have the stallion outright, prompting a blustering telephone exchange. Frank ultimately prevailed, although making Frank feel beholden, as though it was him being given a gift. The manager kept one broodmare as well, supervising the sale of the others to farms around. He insisted that he would help Frank when he and Patrick came out to put the farm to rights. The manager had not lived in the house, although Tura had offered it. He had his own snug place in the village, above the yarn shop his wife owned, and they had only a single child, a daughter of twelve.
Now there was nothing to do but to go.
They would put aside regrets, “and past glories,” Patrick said, at least for the moment. They would make their life quietly and slowly, saving their champions for the future when the crackling current of menace that propelled them was a memory like gunfire from a border town. Transporting a spooky, pregnant young mare also was the very definition of gambling, but something about the hormones surging through her seemed to have solaced Glory Bee, and she crossed the sea in relative serenity, as did Sultana and the aging Bobbie Champion, this time in a proper conveyance.
After the horses were in order, Patrick had hired a very capable, and very pretty, groom, and an assistant, a local boy who came in four times a week, and turned over the daily routines of care and exercise. He set about overseeing droves of sturdy workers who cobbled up sturdy fences that would keep the horses safe without dislodging those old walls of stones wedged and balanced like irregular plates centuries ago, for dry stone walls were held together by nothing but skill and gravity. Tradesmen renovated the water and heating systems. A family crew raised a high barn, as well as a good, solid stable that fed into a riding ring designed deftly to sit half indoors and half out. The cottage that would be Pat’s own home grew steadily up from the ruins of a gamekeeper’s small lodgings just over a rise from the main house: he would have two small bedrooms and a bath up a low staircase and a common room with a dab of a kitchen below. It would be a tidy place soon. The family’s home was another matter.
“However bad you think it is when you get there, guv, it’s not as bad as it was,” Patrick said. “Mrs. Bellingham, she never lied. It was clean as a pin and tucked up tight. Even the windows, what they had, were washed. But the water smelled like it came from a bog and it took all the juice in the house to turn on a light the size of a mushroom.”
“And now?” Frank said, not quite sure he wanted to know.
“Now there’s a fine well, the big fireplace that burns logs is working, and there’s another one with gas up in the big bedroom.” Water filled the new troughs and ten acres were in seed. And yet, Patrick admitted, strong work lay ahead on what he called “the living bits” of the house. “The guy you had draw the downstairs plan, with the half-moon windows and such, he took off, leaving those not finished. A girl in town who’s still at university finished the plans and showed me how to save some energy and space. With a little luck, you can be in style by the time you light the bonfires. And there’s phone and wireless operating in case you have to call for help.”
Patrick referred to the ancient and not-altogether-innocent June rites of midsummer, called, mostly as an excuse for well-aled revels, the Feast of St. John the Baptist. Claudia’s first planned visit would be for a month at the end of May, with Hope, who was coming to stay. Hope had lived with her friend Arabella, to help out with Eden and Marty’s baby—a boy born in February named for both their grandfathers’ middle names—Daniel James Mercy Fisher. If all went well, Frank would go back to the States in September to hear Claudia’s last Hillerand Lecture, this one in Chicago. Before she left Madison for her father’s house in North Carolina, where she would stay for the duration, she kept up a breezy front, cuffing and cuddling the boys and saying, “Now you’re part of me. And we Campo women are tough. We’ll all be fine.” When she and Frank spoke, she described herself as diligent and joyous, staying up late and reading like a single girl, enjoying dinners and day trips with her sisters and relishing her last bit of freedom before coming to what she still called the farm at the end of the world. Later, he would learn that Claudia’s last carefree single days were as much fun for her as a short stint in the Rock County Jail, that the days collapsing to bring her nearer him and the boys were the only thing that smartened her resolve. Without them, Claudia’s emotions skittered around like a colt on ice: she felt foolish for yielding so readily, doubtful for letting her emotions overwhelm her good sense. He would admire her for embroidering the time they spent apart as an idyll and concealing an ambivalence he should have known she would experience even more than he did—for she had so much more to lose. She saw him off teasing and untrammeled, to do what Frank did best—stir his worry into work, until it bled like cream into tea and was scarcely noticeable.
When he arrived in Stead, finally, Frank mentally rubbed his hands together. Patrick had warned him the farm was in rum shape, half hope, half ruin. Frank hoped it was worse. Then there would be more to do, more sweat, more tired muscles—more dreamless nights. Frank wanted to leave for the farm the minute Pat greeted him and the boys.
Before they actually saw that farm, Patrick said he needed to get them some tea. Or did Frank want to go to a pub? Frank could have stood a strong coffee infused with whiskey, but Patrick still didn’t drink, a summit that Patrick seemed to tread tentatively. They settled for a big bag of raisin buns and apples from the store with cups of strong, sweet black tea for him and Frank, the boys’ cups half filled with milk. They carried all of it to a wooden table with a shot umbrella that canted crazily out like a beckoning arm. The local grocer, Harry, seemed to be Patrick’s new best friend. But the boys were restless, and soon after restless came perverse. After consuming the buns in a few sticky chomps, they began to kick the bag around like a soccer ball and, when it was shredded, made a game of jumping on and off the seats of the picnic table, finally knocking over Patrick’s tea. “Settle down!” Frank shouted at them. He had aspirin in his small carry-on bag, but the gnawing in his hip and thigh admonished him even against the thought of going to get it. He kneaded his temples for a moment—surreptitiously, he hoped. But Patrick saw, and stood.
“Are you ready to head out to the new God’s country?” Patrick said. “Follow on. It’s barely two kee from here.” Ian jumped back into the truck, and Patrick, with a flourish, opened the door of the Packard to admit Colin. They drove for just minutes. Then, as if glimpsing something from a recurring dream, Frank recognized Stone Pastures from the road. It was much more imposing than the photos conveyed. The house was primitive in shape, walls straight up and squared off, the ells that ran away from it low and rambling. But it was massive, set back from the road by a circle drive with sentinel yews, with a stone fence a little higher than most flanking an arch for several hundred feet in either direction. They got out and the boys burst through the unlocked front door, using their combined weight to shove it open.
Frank walked slowly through the first floor, satisfied that the rooms were commodious and every corner met neatly the corner beside it.
“When do you want to get started?” Patrick said. “Next week? You’ll want to get the boys enrolled at school.”
“They’re not going the rest of the year,” Frank told him as Colin and Ian silently did a dance of joy. “I’m homeschooling. That is to say, nobody’s homeschooling. Ian’s reading all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and Colin’s got The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
“What about their math? And their citizenship or what have you?” Patrick said.
“They’ll help us measure pieces of wood. That’s math, and they’re good citizens already. They’ll learn history. The truth is, I don’t need one more thing to worry about. I don’t need conferences and bus routes.”
“You could have just left them there with your mum,” Patrick said. “They could have stayed with their friends . . .”
“Tenacity’s being taken apart. And this place is being put together as a home. It seemed best for them to be on the front end instead of saying goodbye. I could be wrong. That wouldn’t be any surprise.”
That night, Frank lay on a mattress, for not all of the bedrooms—how many were there?—had bedsteads yet. He imagined the house, and the farm around and above it, circling like a domestic animal, its heartbeat slowing as it lay down. The stillness against the hills seemed to fall then, benign and absolute. He rested.
The next day, they were no longer tourists, and they unpacked their clothes and toothbrushes.
Because Frank kept forgetting to do a thorough marketing—there must have been a time in his adult life when he’d moved into a place that had no sugar or salt or coffee or butter, but he could not remember it—the boys ate cheese-and-pickle sandwiches from Harry’s shop three times a day. “I’m an addict,” Colin said. “I only ever want cheese-and-pickle sandwiches.” They washed cream buns down with fizzy orange. Neither of them was ever seen without an open bag of crisps. Patrick hitched Bobbie Champion to their mother’s old pony cart and though Colin had never driven, after a few times around the driveway (and substantial encouragement from the horse), they were trotting up and down the road, then up and down the hill tracks. Frank felt as though he could actually see round-bellied Bobbie Champion losing weight. Because the boys read at night before they fell asleep, at least for ten minutes, and helped the pretty groom see to all the stable chores, Frank decided not to notice that they had gone native.
Proud of himself, about a week later, he remembered to make them take baths before the family journeyed to Manchester. From a list provided by Hope and Claudia, they went to good stores, and picked out tables and bed frames and the right kind of appliances. Then the boys caught sight of a pair of bright red down-filled sofas with green accent chairs, each the approximate girth of a humpback whale.
“That’s a bit much,” Patrick said. “Claudia fancies the toff beige stuff.”
“We’ll buy all these throw pillows to soften it up,” Frank said. “There’s a beige pillow right here.”
They purchased ten pillows in colors that the boys thought went very well with red—black and bright blue as well as beige.
“It looks like the bloody circus,” said Patrick.
“They’re very comfortable,” Ian told him. “I can’t wait for them to be in the house. Can we get the fish tank next?”
“No,” Frank and Patrick said together.
Freed again from domestic obligations, the boys ran in and out of the doors, sometimes wearing their dirty parkas or jean jackets or ski hats, just as often not even wearing their shoes, as burly men with hand trucks hefted heavy beds up the stairs and uncrated a double oven, a double refrigerator, and double bathroom sinks, along with miles of colored-glass bathroom countertop that Claudia insisted was the newest and sturdiest thing. “Can we keep the boxes, Dad?” Ian begged.
“No! They’re full of nails!”
Frank later spotted the long plywood fort the boys had built outside from those very boxes, after Pat slipped the deliverymen some cash to flatten the nails. Frank sighed.
Yet, since they were eating fruit twice a day and brushing their teeth at least at night, Frank decided not to care.
When Patrick and Frank set to work on an earnest finishing of the remodeling, the boys drove the pony cart up and down, dropping in on neighbors who would either be charmed or hate them, depending on the local character.
Frank sighed.
One day, a woman who went six feet and two twenty easily showed up at the gate. “I’m Grace Gerrick,” she said, with a grip that nearly brought Frank to his knees. Frank regarded the amazon warily until she said, “I’m great friends with your Colin and your Ian, and I’ve brought you some bits because they’ve said they haven’t a mother.”
Colin’s voice in Frank’s head explained, I didn’t say we didn’t have a mother. I said we didn’t have our mother here yet. Frank smiled and thanked Grace Gerrick, who said her sons would help out if Frank liked. The bits included four meat pies, two fruit pies, two quarts of home-canned peaches, and Mrs. Gerrick’s specialty, homemade ketchup.
“When everyone else in the county thinks you guys are orphans and outlaws, we’ll remember that Mrs. Gerrick said you have perfect manners,” Frank told the boys. They were eating the pies from flattened pizza boxes using plastic forks from Curry Corner. No one had the nerve to unpack the crates of Hope’s pearl-colored wedding china, twenty place settings that had endured fifty-one Thanksgivings and Christmases without a single chip.
The remodeling went forward. Feeling like a laird, Frank helped a chimney sweep rout the nest of what he said must have been the unusual roost of a great gray owl. Patrick and Frank seven-times-sealed the thick planked floors, and concentrated on the upstairs.
Back came the plumbers, to parcel off one of the five bedrooms into a smaller sleeping space and a third big bathroom. There were no closets at all, but in his rambles Patrick had come across a contractor tearing down an old house for a new one twice its size and scored eight roughhewn armoires the man was discarding. These they bolted to the walls. Both of them puzzled over a small, doorless depression in the wall near the chimney, kettle-shaped, about eight feet deep and eight feet wide, until Patrick figured that this had once been the house chapel, and the worn plaster niches in the walls must once have been shrines. Frank decided that this would serve as his office—for the luck of the lapsed Irish Catholic. From the back wall of that office, a tiny iron stairway ascended to a trapdoor and a flat porch on the roof that reminded Frank of the deck on Julia Madrigal’s house. Up there, a person could see the whole countryside laid out like a child’s farm set, the river valleys, the distant shrouded hills, and far off, the winking canals of the Pennine watershed.
A couple of wet weeks kept Ian and Colin bundled up and indoors. The children consented to do their reading only after Frank thundered at them that they would end up ignorant laughingstocks among the much-brighter British children (“It’s not true, Dad. You just think they’re smarter because they have accents,” said Colin). Later the same day, the boys unpacked their own building equipment. They constructed a Lego metropolis, comprising many styles and time periods, along sixteen feet of shelving in their room. It ranged from a medieval marketplace complete with spitted pigs to the Lego Star Wars Death Star ship. Chronological history evidently did not preclude Princess Leia from shopping for pears in the twelfth century or flying back to her own digs in a modern American medevac helicopter.
Then, that bored them as well.
Finally, the days began to come up windy and fair, and the boys ran out to explore the old farm buildings, finding handmade wooden pegs burned black in some ancient fire, a drinking tankard pounded out of metal, a gigantic old sleigh in better shape than the shack it stood up in, and enough spearheads to start their own museum. Now able to hitch Bobbie Champion up without help from any adult, they went collecting farther afield, dutifully wearing helmets, and they brought back everything—an iron box containing medals from World War I, a piece of rock with real prehistoric figures cut on it, the handle of an old sword, seashells from a place that had seen no sea in millennia, a crushed hawk’s nest, and a crumbling shredded leather bag green with age and with some kind of broken earthenware vessel inside it. Each night, they displayed their booty while Frank and Patrick murmured their stunned appreciation.
The boys now introduced themselves to neighbors from farther away. They ended up well fed.
Beyond the amiable Gerricks lived a German couple with a girl Ian’s age, as well as the Lashes and the Shepsons. Ian and Colin first had to go miles to turn the cart around in the village square, as they weren’t allowed to cross the road without an adult. However, it didn’t take them long to find adults so taken with the two little boys in the cart that they would stand in the road to stop traffic for them. Directly across was another American—a man writing a novel, and his girlfriend—and next to them, a married couple, husband and wife just seventeen years old with a newborn baby girl.
Frank was glad that he could consider them safe—at least according to the shopkeeper Harry—to explore even the next town beyond Stead. To his relief, he thought that they would never get bored with exploring. To his amazement, they did.
One night at dinner, Ian said, “We should build something ourselves on this house.”
“We need a fire escape,” Colin said. “There is no back door.”
“Right you are, mate,” said Patrick. Frank conceded the point.
This being heavy work, they recruited the help of Grace Gerrick’s massive twenty-year-old twin sons, who said such a thing could be built with nothing but what was right at hand in the field. The Gerrick boys were six five and six eight, making their mother and their older brothers look dainty. Starting with a wide base beneath the boys’ bedroom window, they made their own dry stone wall from field remnants, a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle they knocked into eternal fit with rock hammers. After not too many hours, they had a pyramid with indentations at irregular intervals. On each of these indentations, they fitted lozenge-shaped paving stones, hoisting the midlevel stones with a makeshift pulley hung from the bucket of the Gerricks’ huge John Deere tractor, the twins lowering the last two from the bedroom window with straps fashioned of old horse tack. From the fields, the staircase looked like some sort of artful chimney, but Colin could swing his feet out the bedroom window and be safely on the ground within seconds. It became his favorite place to depart for his morning run. The first run he had ever taken was with Claudia, but he’d kept it up and found the activity soothing and strengthening. These days and nights, he grew serious about it, going out at least three times a week if not more. Cautious about hypothermia, Frank made sure he had a flexible bottle of hot tea in his little backpack.
“Run with me, Dad,” Colin urged, nudging Frank, who had fallen asleep with his napkin in his lap, a plate of rice and beans and bread untouched before him. “If you ran, maybe your leg would get better.”
“My leg can’t ever get better,” Frank said. “I’m lucky I still have it attached to my body. You think I’m lazy?”
“I think you’re a little fat but not that much. And I don’t see why you won’t try.”
Frank laughed. He had worked hard in his life, but never so hard as this, and was feeling pretty much like the architect of the domestic world. But a father who couldn’t run was something a kid simply didn’t choose to see. How had Frank lived forty and more years of life without ever knowing . . . anything . . . and figured himself a real student of human nature? In human years, Frank calculated that he’d come home from Australia at about twenty-six, and had grown into his true age like a plant in time-lapse photography over the course of a couple of seasons.
“I want to be able to run,” he said, lying. “Maybe I’ll try someday. Right now all I want to do is get this joint ready for Grandma coming home and Mom’s visit.”
All of Hope’s things were installed in the suite of rooms to the left of the entrance to the main house, along with a shiny new black desk and a sleek maroon sofa to match the old maroon chair from the kitchen at Tenacity. Even the dishes were gingerly placed in a china cabinet. For Hope and Claudia, there would have to be flowers in jugs everywhere. There would have to be new sheets for those new beds, and shiny kettle made right here in West Yorkshire.
Finally, the women of the house made their entrance.
Hope had mailed her clothing. She filled her suitcases with American schoolbooks, peanut butter, maple syrup, chocolate chips, and Frank’s Hot Sauce, which Eden and Frank had grown up calling “No Relation.” One of Claudia’s silly, heavy leather suitcases was packed plump with presents—vapor guns, giant sketchbooks and tempura paints in sticks, e-readers with games, and new running shoes (“They’re called trainers,” Colin said, and Claudia replied, “I know. I speak British.”).
With Colin proudly driving the pony cart, the boys took their new mother and grandmother—new to them and new to the neighborhood—to meet every single shop owner in Stead, including the postal clerk. They visited every neighbor they’d met, and Claudia brought each one a card with her name and a small wrapped wedge of Wisconsin cheese. A few days later, they were buried in pork pies and shepherd’s pies and currant buns and scones—more than any family of six—counting Patrick—could ever have consumed. The groom and local workers toiling away at the barn and house were delighted. They spoke gently of “the missus.” Claudia praised them lavishly in turn, especially in awe of the gleaming countertops, the well-measured risers on the stairs, the artful fire escape. Hope crooned over the kitchen.
Like a boy of eighteen impressing his mom and his girl, Frank felt the ego strokes literally drawing him up in bravura straight-spined pride. He delighted in simply driving to Stead and sharing a coffee with Claudia in the morning. Life had never seemed so perfectly measured and tender, like an aspic to be slowly consumed. One morning, just as it grew light, he heard a horse come down over the closest arm of the miles-long outcropping called Whitsunday Crag, against which this part of the county nestled, like a kitten against a recumbent cat. It was Claudia, astride Sultana.
“Where were you?”
“I wanted to see the dawn from up there,” she told him. “It’s such an old beauty. It doesn’t care if we’re here or not.”
“Fortunately, it seems that most of the people do.”
They did. Lavishly. Some of the older women, Hope’s age, remembered Tura from her girlhood, when Tura wanted to “read” for veterinary medicine and her gruff old father wanted to herd her into marriage. They remembered riding Tura’s horses up to picnics by the waterfall and trudging all together to the school building that was now the village arts center.
Walking with Ian, Claudia met the author’s wife-to-be, a doctor who had been a biathlete in the 2010 Winter Olympics. One night, when she and Frank joined them for pasta with leeks and peas, they said that they had rented the house for a year, but often thought they might never leave. In Stead, Claudia spent several hours with Harry’s wife. Their older daughter had Down syndrome and had begun to exhibit violent behavior as she entered her thirties. She visited the small psychiatric hospital called Hope of the Moor, where she might one day hope to find a job. On the two weekends, they went to York and took the train to Edinburgh.
Then the month was over, and it was time for Claudia to prepare for her fourth lecture.
At the airport, Colin clung to her, begging her not to leave. She clung to him also.
“This was a terrible mistake,” she said to Frank. “I need to be here. I need to be with my family.”
“It’s only two more months,” Frank said. “And I’ll come in September.”
“Remember how tough you said you were?” Colin reminded her, although drops hung on his lashes. “Just like me?”
“Lots of tough women are done in by a handsome guy,” said Claudia, taking Colin’s chin in one of her hands.
Then, one late afternoon six weeks or so later, Frank came down from the barn to find a taxi in the driveway. The wedge in his throat dissolved at the sight of the full set of Claudia’s old, unwheeled caramel leather luggage sitting on the steps. Then Claudia got out, filling the cabbie’s hands with pounds sterling.
“I’m home!” she said. “I’m home to stay!”
When the cab left, without a word, Frank picked her up and carried her over the threshold, in his best imitation of a bridegroom. He kissed her, and he didn’t ask why.
By the time Ian finished his riding lesson with Patrick, and Colin came in from his run, a small lorry had arrived, and the owners brought in the few things Claudia had decided to keep. Beyond her clothing and her medical books, there was an antique writing desk that family legend said had belonged to Louisa May Alcott’s sister Abigail, her pillow-topped space-foam mattress, her grotesque multiplicity of pillows, and trunks filled with all those dozens of paper-thin embroidered quilts. There was also a huge box with what looked like dozens of rods and armatures that fit into canvas loops. It was called a Kelso Speedster.
Claudia asked the boys to put the contraption together.
“This is for good, then,” Frank finally said. “And you’re fine.”
“It is,” Claudia told him. “And I am.”
“The lectures . . .”
“Were wonderful,” she said. “I’m going to finish the last two next year. I met with the committee after it became clear that I needed a dispensation for medical reasons, as I kept having the persistent wish to barf all over the podium. In fact, I have that persistent wish still.”
“Medical reasons.”
“Ordinary ones,” she said with a smile.
“Are you expecting, Claudia?”
“I am,” Claudia said. “Hooray!”
Frank gasped, as elated, frightened, thrilled, and disbelieving as any father-to-be.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Are you okay? Is the baby okay?” He put his arms around her, leaving a full six inches between their bodies, gently hugging her shoulders.
“Frank!” Claudia tugged him into a close embrace. “You know better. I could probably bounce down a black-diamond ski run and not have a miscarriage at this point. You went through this before.” A minor note plucked, distantly. Natalie. So far? So early? So soon? As she recognized her gaffe, she compressed her lips and turned to the children, who had set out the dozen bags of screws and bolts and the lengths of aluminum pipe on the floor around them. “How about that, boys? What do you think of another girl around here? A little bitty one?” she said. Ian and Colin smiled politely. “Just three months, and all systems are go, despite my very advanced age.”
Ian patted her flat belly. He said, “You’ll be like Glory Bee. She’s having a baby, too!”
“As soon as I can quit throwing up, I’ll eat more than she does,” Claudia said. “I dream in scones now.”
Vaguely annoyed, Colin said, “You really are having a baby. This thing is a baby stroller! It’s not a scooter.”
“Alas, not everything is for you,” Claudia told him. “But I saw these Razor scooters in New York that have motors. I think there might be a couple of them stashed in the truck with the rest of my stuff. And maybe if you’re very good—”
“Are you sure it’s a girl?” Ian asked.
“I am sure it’s a girl,” Claudia replied. There was no way of knowing.
“Well, I want to name her Guinevere,” said Ian.
Frank and Claudia stared at him.
“What? It’s a nice name,” Ian told them, trying to see if he could fit in the seat of the Kelso Speedster and propel it with his feet.
Life turned another page.
Frank asked which of the rooms Claudia wanted for a nursery, and she told him none, thank you, the baby would sleep in their room until she was ready to sleep in a bed. “There’s never been a proven case of SIDS for a child sleeping in bed with the parents. All those stories about people who rolled over on their babies and suffocated them, well, either those people were drunk or they suffocated the baby on purpose. I don’t approve of cribs. Maybe a little cradle for naps.”
“Okay, then,” Frank said, and went back to working on the new barn.
A few weeks later, they went to the Keighley Clinic for an ultrasound. Not having been to a doctor in the area, Frank expected something quaint and thatched, out of James Herriot, but the clinic was all cliffed verges of granite and glass, with vertiginous floor-to-ceiling windows in the examining rooms.
“Guinevere appears to be Arthur,” Claudia said as the incontrovertible image swam into view under the ultrasound technician’s expert pressure. The technician gave them pictures, but she let Frank hold them. She let Frank make the next appointment and spun the door, and was gone. When he caught up with her outside, Claudia was sitting on an ornate wrought-iron bench, sobbing. Thinking himself wise and prescient, Frank veered slightly away to an outdoor stall, where he purchased a big cup of tea with extra sugar and a plain biscuit for Claudia. It always worked in BBC movies. By the time he got there, however, she was nearly inconsolable, shaking—way past the cup-of-tea-dear stage.
“Sweetheart!” Frank sat down, spilling the tea all over his knee.
“I needed that tea!” she wailed. Frank practically ran, hobbling, back to get another, this one with a lid.
When he returned, he said softly, “Claudia, are you in pain?”
“No!”
“Do you not want the baby? Are you so disappointed? That you had to give up the honor of the Hillerand . . .”
“Of course not, Frank!”
What was wrong with her? She tried to take small swallows of the tea, but only cried harder. Finally, Frank hit on it.
“You wanted a girl. Claudia, I’m so sorry. That’s it.”
“I did want a girl!”
“But there’ll be another time. We don’t need to stop at three. The baby is healthy and, Claudia, I’m so happy . . .”
Her face swollen, she glanced up at him for the first time since they’d left the echoing clinic lobby. “Are you? Are you really happy? Do you mind?”
“Mind?”
“It’s all so sad and broken. You can still love him, even though your first baby was a boy, and he died?”
Frank set the tea on the bench and used his fingers to brush back the sweaty curls from Claudia’s cheeks. The day was shirtsleeve warm and bright as a shout, and all around them, there seemed to gather a sudden flash mob of parents strolling with children in push chairs and prams, curly-headed blond babies, babies with hair dark and straight as feathers, babies with a comic red frill sticking out of a cap. He could reach back, into the fastnesses of the dark, and wish he could hold the babe that was swept away before he could see the sky, but to let that shadow stand between them and the sun now would be a betrayal. He would betray Claudia, and, Frank now realized, himself, and everyone standing on the sturdy bridge they had built between them, trusting the soundness of the structure, of the future. “Claudia,” he said. “I can see why you wonder. But I love our boys, even though my first son died. And I love the baby. I’ll love our little girl, someday, even if she’s a boy, too. And if we have another child, and she’s a boy, too. That will also be fine. I’m in . . . I’m in awe.”
She hugged his neck then, uncharacteristically yielding, letting herself be pulled close to him, his arms around her shoulders, her occasional catch of breath a sough against his chest.
“Awe,” she said. “That is the word. I’ve never been pregnant. Not even a scare. I can’t believe how enormous this is. He’s just so real to me. He’s a person.”
On the way back, as promised, Frank phoned Hope. Then he and Claudia lingered for an hour over a big lunch of red curry and pad thai—Claudia noting that since her life roiled with ironies, this was the least nauseated she’d felt in weeks. When they pulled into the drive at Stone Pastures, the boys ran out. Hope trailed behind them and sat in the shade of the old chestnut, where Pat had built a wide plank seat encircling the trunk. Behind the boys’ backs, she gestured to her son and daughter-in-law, little warning motions that included placing two fingers across her lips.
“You didn’t really want a girl, Cloudy, did you?” Ian said. “They’re not as good. You already have us and you know how to be a boy’s mom.”
“They’ve made you something,” Hope added then, motioning Claudia and Frank to a large tray set down on the outdoor wooden trestle table where they sometimes ate their dinner.
The cookies were the pastry embodiment of paper dolls—the man huge, the woman curvaceous with frosting hair as luxuriant as a mermaid’s. The mother’s snow woman’s arms wrapped around a baby with golden balls for eyes and chocolate hair, a baby made in exactly the shape of a figure eight. Then there was a tall woman with a dab of white frosting for hair, and the children, three identical-sized vanilla males.
“These are great. These are stellar,” said Frank, and Claudia was off again on another rolling breaker of tears.
Frank said, “But who is that third boy? That one is you, there’s Collie, and then Arthur . . .”
Claudia said, “I want to point out that we’re not really naming him Arthur.”
“That one is Patrick, of course,” Colin said.
Crimson with suppressed mirth, Hope headed for the car. She had an appointment for tea at the nicer of the two small restaurants in Stead. Just a couple of weeks after Hope had visited the local Anglican church, the two-years-widowed priest, a few years younger, asked her to go to a local string quartet concert. Frank persisted in calling this a date. Hope persisted in telling him that he would have to think of other ways to get her to move out. One night, Colin told all of them that in service of the Packard that would soon be his own, he had decided to become an auto mechanic. He added, “Ian will just be a farmer. So there’s no reason we have to go back to school at all.”
All the adults, Patrick included, disabused them of that fact, and as September came and the weather at night occasionally swept the hills like a stiff broom, they took the bus to the consolidated school in Wherry. Colin joined the football team, part of the school’s structure even for fifth formers, and when he was found to be just as certainly an ace by British standards as he’d been in the United States, his dance card filled with suppers at friends’ houses and football matches. “It’s in my blood,” he told Frank solemnly.
“It’s not in my blood,” Ian said happily. “I hate games. I just like horses and TV.” His best friend, an Indian boy named Sanjay, brought a different tin of homemade cookies every time he came to play. They ate two dozen, every time, and still their ankles and wrists were as delicate as links of a lady’s fine chain, their ribs little xylophones, their knees belled out at the bottom of their flute-sized thighs.
Claudia began working part-time at Hope of the Moor, the plan to take up full-time duties a couple of months after the baby arrived. Although at first she assumed an air of slightly aggrieved sacrifice, Claudia quickly grew to love the power that came simply with listening to her neighbors’ travails—William’s drink, Janet’s spells of sadness, everyone’s fear that Alex’s attachment to the boy he met at the public school was more than a friendship. The questions that could only be answered by wait, accept, or walk away helped Claudia pick apart her own web of options. An academic, trained in nuance, she felt comforted, as the fall lengthened, knowing that she, too, could only wait, accept, or walk away. As it had done with Glory Bee, pregnancy relaxed her fierce grip on perfection. The bigger Arthur grew, the less eager Claudia became about having another go right away. She spoke of how it might be to adopt a little girl from Ethiopia, as a school friend of hers had just done. Frank reminded her how legally shifty they were, and would be until they were dead, or at least grandparents, and suggested it would be better to make a little girl from things they had lying around the house. Claudia protested. The older she was, the likelier she would gain thirty pounds and lose three teeth, Claudia told him. Frank promised her dentures and a girdle.
One night, he stood outside his own door and listened to gales of fifties music gusting out as far as the road and beyond. Hope was teaching Claudia the jive, and Colin was teaching Ian. They had done it, Frank thought, not daring to speak it aloud. They had come safe home.