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 ta
king 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.
Chapter Eighteen
THOUGH THE TENDENCY OF EVERYTHING OPPOSES OUR DEPARTURE, we depart. The wind, the tide, the waves that brought us here almost bear us back, but we make it to the Narrows, then turn east.
I face forward again just in time to see a flash of light from Quinton, the first of many that should it start to snow again will lead us home.
Back to my life, now, back to my boarding house on Cochrane Street. My corner windows.
I’ll go out walking, if it’s not too cold and my legs are up to it. I’ll stop where there’s no wind and look up at the sky the way I did the night I met my Provider.
I am returning to a war that I have never really left.
No lights allowed after sunset. You must not strike a match outdoors. Or indoors until the blackout curtains have been drawn.
The city at night will be as dark as Loreburn. And almost as silent.
Every house dark, as if the city’s inhabitants, like Loreburn’s, left one day after boarding up their doors and windows, having played out to its failure some colonial experiment.
The enemy is at the gates.
Nothing will be more unnerving than a foggy day when we can’t see the enemy or a moonlit night when the enemy can see us.
Ladies’ Lookout. On Signal Hill, women with binoculars will scan the sea for submarines. They will talk of the white flag of surrender that was made from someone’s shirt.
Rumours of Germans commandeering houses on the outskirts of the city. Do not hesitate to ask a stranger for credentials.
I will have to make my way in the dark, navigate from memory and use my cane as the blind use theirs.
I was several times, before I came to Loreburn, escorted home by men on night patrol who at last resigned themselves to my recalcitrance and merely warned me not to smoke.
“It
’s only Fielding,” they whispered to each other, turning away when I mock saluted with my cane. I will still compose my column while I walk, but not out loud.
It will be hard to keep my mind from wandering, hard not to think of David on nights when I walk where we walked, stop where we did, which I know I shouldn’t do but will.
David. One in a million. A million sons pulled from their mothers’ arms by a million others hunting phantoms of revenge.
How easy it is to believe that on this planet every soul is rank with malice. Yet also how untrue.
While the nations of the earth contrive their grievances that only war can solve, and their best minds, when the war is over, scour the Record for enemies and scapegoats on whom the next war will be blamed, there will be some who live as Patrick does, and as David did. As my Provider and his delegate sometimes did, holed up in their book-lined trench, thinking of another time, another war.
Here, on this island, the last advance of history began. The first beachhead of the last great expedition of humankind. The staging ground for the invasion of two continents. And perhaps their re-invasion.
Words of war in a time of war.
But on this eastmost edge to which they came from western Europe five hundred years ago to give it what they must have known was one last try, it seems possible that some version of the great experiment might still succeed.
The clouds close in again. I can hear but cannot see the colony of gulls. I can hear the horn at Quinton but cannot see the light. There is nothing in the world but water, a patch of it the size of a pond on which it seems we make no progress. Not even by looking at the water can you tell that we are moving.
Wakes that will never fade lead back to the ports from which the last invasion force was launched. It is not for recent crimes but for those of his ancestors that the enemy must be repaid.
His ancestors, our ancestors. For all sides are descended from the enemy.
A thousand westward wars have led to this one. Armies contend for what their forebears have a thousand times contended and will again when this war is forgotten.
Unless this war is the one that ends all worlds.
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