“The ordinary,” I said firmly. “Come on.”
IT WAS ONLY A FEW minutes’ walk to Symonds’ ordinary, and we passed those minutes in total silence. I stole occasional glances at him, though, both to assure myself that he wasn’t a ghost and to assess his current situation.
The latter seemed tolerable; he was decently dressed in a dark gray suit, with clean linen, and if he was not fashionable—I bit my lip at the thought of Tom Christie being fashionable—he was at least not shabby.
Otherwise, he looked very much as I’d last seen him—well, no, I corrected myself. He actually looked much better. I’d last seen him in the extremity of exhausted grief, shredded by the tragedy of his daughter’s death and its subsequent complications. My last sight of him had been on the Cruizer, the British ship on which Governor Martin had taken refuge when he was driven out of the colony, almost two years ago.
At that point, Mr. Christie had declared, first, his intent to confess to the murder of his daughter—of which I was accused—secondly, his love for me, and thirdly, his intent to be executed in my place. All of which made his sudden resurrection not merely surprising but more than slightly awkward.
Adding to the awkwardness was the question as to what—if anything—he knew about the fate of his son, Allan, who had been responsible for Malva Christie’s death. The circumstances were nothing that any father ought to have to hear, and panic gripped me at the thought that I might have to tell him.
I glanced at him again. His face was deeply lined, but he was neither gaunt nor overtly haunted. He wore no wig, though his wiry salt-and-pepper hair was close-clipped as always, matching his neatly trimmed beard. My face tingled, and I barely kept myself from scrubbing my hand across my mouth to erase the feeling. He was clearly disturbed—well, so was I—but had got himself back under control, and opened the door of the ordinary for me with impeccable courtesy. Only the twitch of a muscle beside his left eye betrayed him.
I felt as though my entire body was twitching, but Phaedre, serving in the taproom, glanced at me with no more than mild interest and a cordial nod. Of course, she’d never met Thomas Christie, and while she’d doubtless heard about the scandal following my arrest, she wouldn’t connect the gentleman accompanying me with it.
We found a table by the window in the dining room, and sat down.
“I thought you were dead,” I said abruptly. “What did you mean, you thought I was dead?”
He opened his mouth to answer but was interrupted by Phaedre, who came to serve us, smiling pleasantly.
“I get you something, sir, ma’am? You wanting food? We’ve a nice ham today, roast taters, and Mrs. Symonds’s special mustard ’n raisin sauce to go along of it.”
“No,” Mr. Christie said. “I—just a cup of cider, if ye please.”
“Whisky,” I said. “A lot of it.”
Mr. Christie looked scandalized, but Phaedre only laughed and whisked off, the grace of her movement attracting the quiet admiration of most of the male patrons.
“Ye haven’t changed,” he observed. His eyes traveled over me, intense, taking in every detail of my appearance. “I ought to have known ye by your hair.”
His voice was disapproving, but tinged with a reluctant amusement; he had always been vociferous in his disapproval of my refusal to wear a cap or otherwise restrain my hair. “Wanton,” he’d called it.
“Yes, you should,” I said, reaching up to smooth the hair in question, which was considerably the worse for recent encounters. “You didn’t recognize me ’til I turned round, though, did you? What made you speak to me?”
He hesitated, but then nodded toward my basket, which I’d set on the floor beside my chair.
“I saw that ye had one of my tracts.”
“What?” I said blankly, but looked where he was looking and saw the singed pamphlet on Divine Compassion sticking out from under a cabbage. I reached down and pulled it out, only now noticing the author: by Mr. T. W. Christie, MA, University of Edinburgh.
“What does the ‘W’ stand for?” I asked, laying it down.
He blinked.
“Warren,” he replied rather gruffly. “Where in God’s name did ye come from?”
“My father always claimed he’d found me under a cabbage leaf in the garden,” I replied flippantly. “Or did you mean today? If so—the King’s Arms.”
He was beginning to look a little less shocked, his normal irritation at my lack of womanly decorum drawing his face back into its usual stern lines.
“Don’t be facetious. I was told that ye were dead,” he said, accusingly. “You and your entire family were burnt up in a fire.”
Phaedre, delivering the drinks, glanced at me, eyebrows raised.
“She ain’t looking too crispy round the edges, sir, if you pardon my mention of it.”
“Thank ye for the observation,” he said between his teeth. Phaedre exchanged a glance of amusement with me, and went off again, shaking her head.
“Who told you that?”
“A man named McCreary.”
I must have looked blank, for he added, “from Brownsville. I met him here—in Wilmington, I mean—in late January. He had just come down from the mountain, he said, and told me of the fire. Was there a fire?”
“Well, yes, there was,” I said slowly, wondering whether—and how much—to tell him of the truth of that. Very little, in a public place, I decided. “Maybe it was Mr. McCreary, then, who placed the notice of the fire in the newspaper—but he can’t have.” The original notice had appeared in 1776, Roger had said—nearly a year before the fire.
“I placed it,” Christie said. Now it was my turn to blink.
“You what? When?” I took a good-sized mouthful of whisky, feeling that I needed it more than ever.
“Directly I heard of it. Or—well, no,” he corrected. “A few days thereafter. I … was very much distressed at the news,” he added, lowering his eyes and looking away from me for the first time since we’d sat down.
“Ah. I’m sorry,” I said, lowering my own voice, and feeling rather apologetic—though why I should feel apologetic for not having been burnt up …
He cleared his throat.
“Yes. Well. It, er, seemed to me that some … something should be done. Some formal observance of your—your passing.” He looked up then, gray eyes direct. “I could not abide the thought that you—all of you,” he added, but it was clearly an afterthought, “should simply vanish from the earth, with no formal marking of the—the event.”
He took a deep breath, and a tentative sip of the cider.
“Even if a proper funeral had been held, there would be no point in my returning to Fraser’s Ridge, even if I—well. I could not. So I thought I would at least make a record of the event here. After all,” he added more softly, looking away again, “I could not lay flowers on your grave.”
The whisky had steadied me a bit, but also rasped my throat and made it difficult to talk when hampered by emotion. I reached out and touched his hand briefly, then cleared my throat, finding momentarily neutral ground.
“Your hand,” I said. “How is it?”
He looked up, surprised, but the taut lines of his face relaxed a bit.
“Very well, I thank you. See?” He turned over his right hand, displaying a large Z-shaped scar upon the palm, well healed but still pink.
“Let me see.”
His hand was cold. With an assumption of casualness, I took it in mine, turning it, bending the fingers to assess their flexibility and degree of movement. He was right: it was doing well; the movement was nearly normal.
“I—did the exercises you set me,” he blurted. “I do them every day.”
I looked up to find him regarding me with a sort of anguished solemnity, his cheeks now flushed above his beard, and realized that this ground was not nearly so neutral as I’d thought. Before I could let go his hand, it turned in mine, covering my fingers—not tightly, but sufficiently that I couldn’t free myself without a noticeable effort.
“Your husband.” He stopped dead, having obviously not thought of Jamie at all to this point. “He is alive, too?”
“Er, yes.”
To his credit, he didn’t grimace at this news, but nodded, exhaling.
“I am—glad to hear it.”
He sat in silence for a moment, looking at his undrunk cider. He was still holding my hand. Without looking up, he said in a low voice, “Does he … know? What I—how I—I did not tell him the reason for my confession. Did you?”
“You mean your”—I groped for some suitable way of putting it—“your, um, very gallant feelings toward me? Well, yes, he does; he was very sympathetic toward you. He knowing from experience what it’s like to be in love with me, I mean,” I added tartly.
He almost laughed at that, which gave me an opportunity to extricate my fingers. He did not, I noticed, inform me that he wasn’t in love with me any longer. Oh, dear.
“Well, anyway, we aren’t dead,” I said, clearing my throat again. “What about you? Last time I saw you …”
“Ah.” He looked less than happy, but gathered himself, changing gears, and nodded. “Your rather hasty departure from the Cruizer left Gover nor Martin without an amanuensis. Discovering that I was to some degree literate”—his mouth twisted a little—“and could write a fair hand, thanks to your ministrations, he had me removed from the brig.”
I wasn’t surprised at that. Driven completely out of his colony, Governor Martin was obliged to conduct his business from the tiny captain’s cabin of the British ship on which he had taken refuge. Such business perforce consisted entirely of letters—all of which must be not only composed, drafted, and fair-copied but then reproduced several times each. A copy was required first for the governor’s own official correspondence files, then for each person or entity having some interest in the subject of the letter, and, finally, several additional copies of any letters going to England or Europe must be made, because they would be sent by different ships, in hopes that at least one copy would make it through, should the others be sunk, seized by pirates or privateers, or otherwise lost in transit.
My hand ached at the mere memory of it. The exigencies of bureaucracy in a time before the magic of Xerox had kept me from rotting in a cell; no wonder they had freed Tom Christie from durance vile as well.
“You see?” I said, rather pleased. “If I hadn’t fixed your hand, he’d likely have had you either executed on the spot or at least sent back to shore and immured in some dungeon.”
“I am duly grateful,” he said, with extreme dryness. “I was not, at the time.”
Christie had spent several months as de facto secretary to the governor. In late November, though, a ship had arrived from England, bearing orders to the governor—essentially ordering him to subdue the colony, though offering no troops, armament, or useful suggestions as to how this might be managed—and an official secretary.