Part 46 (2/2)
”One wants to touch them,” he was careful to add. ”It's the closest we get to time travel isn't it? You're American, are you? Is this your first visit to Pennyroyal Green? I'm sorry. So rude of me. I've better manners than that, truly. My name is Malcolm Coburn.”
She said nothing. But her face blanked peculiarly.
”Malcolm Coburn . . .” she repeated musingly, at last. ”I think you're on my tree!”
On her tree? Oh, h.e.l.l. Through no fault of their own, these ancient oaks attracted all manner of nature loons and cultists and New Ageists and conspiracy theorists. The local police had once arrested a group of Druids for dancing naked around them at midnight.
But then she laughed. A fantastic, abandoned, musical sound, not a mad one.
”I'm so sorry. You should see your expression! I meant . . .” She reached into her purse and deftly extracted an iPad, and swiped at it a few times, then turned it around and tapped. ”My family tree.” She fanned the image wider with her fingers and then zoomed in on a portion of it.
Which was when he noticed the words on the inside of her index finger. He'd seen that kind of tattoo before, usually on prisoners and gang members and idiot teenage boys, which was how he knew she'd done it to herself with needle and thread. The letters were tiny, neat, and flawlessly proportioned. It had required determination, precision, and near preternatural patience and tolerance for pain.
It said: made you look.
He felt an interesting, not unpleasant little p.r.i.c.kle at the back of his neck.
So. Isabel Redmond was a little dangerous.
It worried him that he liked this.
”And there are Coburns over here,” she was saying, scooting the image across the iPad with her finger. ”I thought I saw a Malcolm Coburn.”
He leaned toward it and whistled low. ”Look at what you have here. That is, indeed, my branch, and there I am. We're not really directly related, you and I, but tangentially, as you can see. I'm descended from John Fountain. If you don't mind?” She shook her head, and he dragged his finger lightly up the screen and landed it on John Fountain, son of Elise Fountain, adopted son of Philippe Lavay. ”But he was known as Jack back then. One of John Fountain's and Ruby Alexandra's daughters married a Fitzwilliam, whose daughter married a Coburn. Two hundred or so years ago.”
He looked up at her again.
”I feel I ought to warn you I'm a bit of a history geek. I know far more about Pennyroyal Green and the families here than you'd ever want to hear. And the Redmonds and Everseas are Pennyroyal Green.”
”I actually want to hear everything. I know very little. I only have this tree, and Olivia Eversea's diary-she began keeping it shortly after she was married-and I have this.”
She tucked the iPad under her arm and slipped something from her pocket.
It was a gold watch.
He didn't question that she would trust him, a stranger, to look at her gold watch and iPad. She didn't seem at all nave. Somehow he was positive she could handle herself. Possibly she knew Krav Maga or some other exotic and violent martial art.
They looked down at Olivia in a hush.
”She's so pretty,” he said, finally. ”You look exactly like her.”
He froze.
His head went up and he pressed his lips together.
He hadn't meant it to sound like that. He wasn't a flirt. It always felt too much like strategy, which to him had always seemed somewhat dishonest, and who had the time? He certainly didn't. When he wanted something from a woman he had no trouble letting it be known directly. He usually got what he wanted.
”You haven't any romance in you,” Jemima had once sighed, draping her long, blond hair over his sweaty chest one evening.
s.e.x, love, and romance were all their own thing, and they only occasionally overlapped. He didn't say that out loud. In part because he could imagine the rousing ensuing argument. He wasn't even certain he knew how to explain it to her.
Isabel Redmond, judging from that wicked light in her eyes, was enjoying his discomfiture.
”I thought I looked like her, too,” she said matter-of-factly.
She closed the watch gently on her Aunt Olivia's lovely face and turned it over, tracing the initial on the back with one finger. Absently.
A little silence fell.
”You probably already know this,” he told her, ”but it's clear to me that 'LAJR' stands for Lyon Arthur James Redmond. Were you aware that he's a legend in these parts?”
”I did know about his initials. I haven't heard about the legend. You're not teasing me?”
Yearning flashed, swift and bright and fleeting over her face.
Intriguing. She didn't want him to know how much it meant to her.
”I'm not, truly,” he said gently. ”Everyone in Pennyroyal Green still speak of Lyon and Olivia as if it were yesterday. But that's how the English feel about history in general. There's in fact an absolutely beautiful piece of music named for him called 'The Legend of Lyon Redmond.' A folk tune. There's a festival in a few weeks, a group that does a brilliant version of it. Perhaps you'll hear it during your visit.”
Her hesitation told him that she knew he was fis.h.i.+ng for how long she'd be staying.
”I love live music. And I've let a flat for next three months. In a charming old building behind Miss Marietta Endicott's Academy . . .” She gestured in the direction..
So she was staying for a while. He knew a surge of intense and wholly irrational relief and triumph that she had decided to tell him.
Speaking of staying, he'd kept very late clinic hours the evening before, and he should probably shave before he saw Jemima this evening. ”It's just that it would be so refres.h.i.+ng to see your chin now and again, Malcolm,” she'd said last time.
He should leave now.
Isabel slipped the watch back into her pocket and s.h.i.+fted her iPad into her hands again.
”The flat you let is the former Seamus Duggan Memorial Home for Unwed Mothers,” he told her. ”And Duggan, coincidentally, is the composer of 'The Legend of Lyon Redmond.' There are still Duggans in these parts, too.”
She scrutinized him, faintly troubled, faintly hopeful, as if she were ascertaining whether he was teasing her again.
”Truly,” he found himself saying firmly. As though it were some kind of promise.
Her face went closed, and she rubbed at her arm abstractedly, then caught herself and gave a short laugh. ”It's just . . . I got gooseb.u.mps when you said that. It all seems rather . . .”
”Synchronistic?”
”I was going to say 'right.' Another way of saying synchronistic, I suppose.”
Both words made him a little uneasy at the moment. Because everything from the hurtling cell phone up to this moment felt somehow right and synchronistic.
”While you're here, you can see where Olivia and Lyon lived when they were first married.”
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