Day's Patience

by A. W. Exley

  Grayson pushed his plate away and drained his coffee. “For whatever reason, Verity never told Dawn of her heritage or the identity of her real father. Perhaps the apple tree holds the answers to our questions.”

  “Or it might simply be an ordinary apple tree with nothing to tell,” Marjory pointed out.

  “That at least is one question we can answer today.” Lettie was invigorated to have a course of action and something to do rather than being buffeted by whatever winds blew from Byron and Grayson.

  The four of them piled into the gig, the men up front and two women at the back, and Samuel took the reins. As they trotted along the road toward the coast, Marjory caught Lettie’s attention and then inclined her head at Grayson. A question glimmered in her green gaze.

  Lettie blew out a sigh, but there was nothing she could say with both the men listening.

  “Not now,” she whispered to Marjory.

  The other woman raised her eyebrows but then nodded.

  They came to the fork in the road, and Samuel directed the horse back inland. Soon he pulled the horse to a halt, looped the reins around the brake, and then jumped down. He held out a hand to Marjory and then Lettie, helping each of them down in turn.

  “Have you come to see Old Charlie again?” the young boy from their previous visit yelled out from his perch in the old oak tree. “He said you wouldn’t be able to stay away.”

  “Did he now?” Lettie called back. No doubt Old Charlie had spun quite a tale for the younger children about her visit. She was surprised the child didn’t congratulate her on being engaged to him.

  “I’ll go see him later.” She winked and the children all burst into laughter. That would give them enough advance warning to get themselves into position to spy on Charlie’s garden shed.

  The small group turned their attention to the former Uxbridge family cottage. It sat quietly on its plot with no sign of life within. The most recent residents had moved out not too long before. The house had sat empty for only a few months, not years. Traces of former care could be seen in the vegetables going to seed in the garden and the fruit trees that were pruned the previous winter.

  On their first visit, Lettie hadn’t paid too much attention to the house, as there wasn’t much an empty place could tell and their goal had been to find the former neighbours. As Samuel led the way around to the backyard, they discovered their simple investigation had become slightly more complex.

  The residents who came after Dawn’s mother had taken the idea planted along with the apple tree and run with it. A small orchard occupied the yard with a range of fruit trees, all heavy with the summer bounty. Fat-bellied sparrows sat in the boughs, drunk off the fruit.

  “At least they are fruiting, that will narrow it down,” Lettie muttered. She could tell an apple from a plum, but in winter one naked tree looked much like another.

  Four apple trees were lined up along the fence that bordered the house where Ellen used to live. Spent daffodils nodded underneath, the blooms long gone and the seed bud about to ripen and spill on the ground.

  Grayson plucked a deep red apple from a branch and took a bite. “Which tree is Dawn’s one?”

  How did you tell which tree was planted when? Twelve years had passed since Verity dug the earth and placed the first tree in the ground. The passage of time and regular pruning meant all four looked of similar size, with no one tree obviously older or taller than the others.

  “Perhaps this is something better left to Samuel.” Lettie indicated the old Warder.

  He knelt on the ground and placed both hands, palms down, on the grass. His arms shifted to granite, looking like stone markers rising from the earth. He closed his eyes as he touched his element and sought the answer that might reside below their feet.

  “You think Verity buried something?” Grayson asked as he crunched on the apple.

  “Yes.” It was a hunch. Why plant an apple tree, or was the type of tree irrelevant? “An apple tree makes no sense, unless there is some hidden meaning only Dawn knows. But what if the tree is simply a marker for something else, perhaps an aide-mémoire that might reveal Verity’s history?”

  “What would Verity bury in the roots of a tree just hours before the family disappeared with no forwarding address?” Grayson murmured as they watched the gargoyle work.

  What indeed? Lettie just hoped that if Verity had buried anything, it advanced their knowledge of events. It might even be whatever concealed her from notice by the local Soarers. It was hardly likely to be a laundry bill.

  Samuel moved along the ground, his hands sweeping through the grass around the base of each tree. At times it seemed he had forgotten what he was doing, as the gargoyle turned to a statue and didn’t even seem to breathe.

  “Here,” he said after nearly an hour. “There is something here that isn’t root, rock, or soil.”

  He patted the base of tree number three in the row of possible candidates to be Dawn’s special apple tree.

  “Can you summon it to the surface?” Lettie asked. She could retrieve items tossed in the lake by asking the water to surge underneath it, just like she had propelled herself from the well.

  “Yes. The roots have grown around it over the years and are holding it tight, but I should be able to wriggle it free.” This time the shift went further up his arms, and his hands sank into the earth as though he washed in a bowl of water.

  A tremble rumbled through Lettie’s feet as Samuel shifted rocks and soil beneath them. Deeper and deeper he sank into the overgrown grass, until he was up past his granite elbows. There was little to see apart from the disappearing gargoyle. The Warder made only the odd grunt as though he strained at something, and vibrations ran up through the soles of their shoes.

  After long minutes had ticked past, Samuel made a triumphant noise and hauled himself back out of the soil. He pulled a small object from the earth, clutched between monstrous, clawed stone hands. The pink tinge returned to his body as the shift back to human flowed down his arms to the tips of his claws. Then he brushed loose soil off the object.

  “What is it?” Lettie stepped closer along with Marjory and Grayson.

  Samuel tapped the rectangular object. It made a metallic ding. “I’d say a tin box.”

  At only six inches long, four inches wide, and two inches deep, it almost disappeared in Samuel’s large hands.

  Lettie ran a hand over the top and summoned water with her fingertips. As she touched the box, she cleaned off the surface. The metal was dull with age but revealed a pattern embossed into tin. A repeating motif of a burning feather, like the fiery plumage of a phoenix.

  “The Soarer symbol,” Lettie hissed and snatched her hand back as though the box itself was aflame and burned her skin.

  “Soarers? Our mystery deepens. Are you going to open it?” Grayson moved closer to her, his warmth pressing into her suddenly chilled flesh.

  “What was Verity tangled in?” she whispered.

  The small box had a lock, long filled up with soil. The lid refused to budge when Lettie flicked it with a fingernail. “Locked. Do you mind, Samuel?”

  The Warder turned the box around and squinted with one eye at the tiny lock. He grunted, shifted one finger to stone, and prised the lid free with brute force. Then he turned it back around to face Lettie.

  She glanced at the small group gathered around her: Samuel, Grayson, and Marjory. All waited to see what was within. All of them hoped for, at long last, answers. Lettie took a deep breath and opened the lid. The hinges were rusty and protested the action after the tin’s long interment. But it yielded to her.

  Inside were yellowed papers. One attracted her attention, the seal still intact and a single word written on the front: Dawn.

  Marjory sucked in a breath. “Her mother did leave her something. Perhaps it is the answers we seek?”

  “But it’s not for us.” Lettie put the sealed letter back in the tin, pulled out two of the open letters, and scanned a few lines. Then she opened the o
ther one in her hand. Having seen enough, she carefully folded the letters back up and deposited them in the nest with the others. Then she closed the lid and laid a hand on top.

  “What is it?” Grayson asked, a frown on his face.

  Lettie only read a little, but what she read was an outpouring of love at the separation from a mate and then the absolute desolation of being parted by death. “They are letters from someone called Zadoc to Verity, and from the language used, I believe that is Dawn’s father.”

  Marjory stared at the small box. “At long last we are getting somewhere.”

  “Or we’ve dug up more questions,” Grayson said, his frown gone.

  “These aren’t for our eyes. We need Dawn here, and it is for her to decide how much she shares.” Lettie turned to Samuel. “It’s time to summon Jasper.”

  They walked in silence back to the gig. Lettie held the box close while she tried to understand how her new friend could have Soarers as her parents. How was it Dawn was not touched by their traits of selfishness, greed, and lack of empathy for the community around them? Perhaps Dawn’s inherent goodness showed there might be hope for other Soarers.

  There probably wasn’t a lot of hope for Byron Ocram, though. Byron had said Soarers preferred practical matches over the mates chosen by the Cor-vitis seed. Yet even in the little she saw of the letter between Verity and Zadoc, the love between the two practically leapt off the page.

  What else had they always believed about Soarers that might prove to be untrue?

  “What about Old Charlie?” Marjory asked as they gathered around the horse.

  Lettie had forgotten her promise to the other children to visit him. Drat.

  She placed the tin box in Samuel’s hands. “Look after this, please. I won’t be long.”

  Then she headed along the road to the neatly tended home where Old Charlie lived. Today he was working in the vegetable patch, not hammering little boats in his shed. As he hoed weeds between the rows, he traded tall stories with the children sitting on the slope behind the property.

  “I’m telling you, she wanted me. A man knows these things.” Charlie knocked at a lump of compacted soil he had dug up.

  “Oh, yeah,” the tree climber said. He waved to Lettie as she neared. “What would you say to her, if you ever saw that lady again?”

  Charlie gave up on the clod and leaned on the hoe. “I’d say … dry your tears, ’cause Charlie is a rolling stone and not the sort to gather moss. No woman is going to tie me down. You’ll just have to make the little taste you had last a lifetime.”

  The children snorted and elbowed each other.

  Lettie had meanwhile quietly snuck up on the lad and was now standing right behind him.

  “Oh, Charlie. I had hoped to advance our acquaintance, but I see now that it would be futile.” Lettie pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and dabbed at her eyes.

  Charlie dropped his hoe and spun. “My lady—” was all he managed to stutter. He blanched whiter than a leek stem as the blood drained from his face.

  Lettie stepped closer. “I shall cherish our short time together and will treasure your little dinghy always.”

  “His little dinghy? Is that what you call it?” the tree climber yelled out and then fell over backwards laughing.

  Lettie took Charlie’s face in her hands, leaned in, and kissed his wet lips. It was a brief kiss and she most definitely kept her teeth clenched. She counted to five in her head and then let him go.

  Charlie’s face went from blanched leek to boiled beetroot. His mouth opened and closed, but he seemed to have lost the power of speech.

  She heaved a dramatic sigh and clutched the handkerchief to her breast. “If only we had met in a different time and a different place. But I understand that this must be farewell, Charlie.”

  Lettie wept into the handkerchief and walked away while the children on the bank hooted in laughter.

  Back at the roadside, she found Grayson watching the entire exchange.

  His brows were drawn close together, and his moustache seemed to have a grim set about it. “Let me guess, another man you kiss, but it means nothing because he is merely a friend?”

  Lettie whirled on him and hissed, “I will kiss whomever I want. Don’t you dare judge me with your Victorian moralising.”

  His brows shot up. “Victorian moralising?”

  Lettie poked her handkerchief back into a pocket. “I read the newspapers. You Victorian men with your double standards. Expecting wives to stay shut in your houses while you wine and dine your mistresses. You cover up table legs but frequent halls with half-naked dancers. You call a woman a whore because she kisses more than one man, but if a man does it he is slapped on the back and congratulated by his peers.”

  From what she had seen, Lettie didn’t like the men of this era. They were tightly wound and stuffy. Like an old, mouldering house, they needed all the windows flung open and a jolly good airing.

  “Good grief, Lettie. I would never call you that. Frankly, I wouldn’t care less how many men you kissed, or took to your bed even, if only I didn’t feel anything for you!” The doctor threw his hands up in the air and then stalked off to the gig.

  “Oh,” Lettie said to the empty space where the doctor had stood. Then she reconsidered his words. He still hadn’t said if he cared for her as a brother does a sister or as something else. She could imagine Jasper having a few choice words to say about whom she had kissed lately, but that didn’t mean he had romantic feelings. Only overprotective, brotherly ones.

  “I am a dog chasing my tail and going round and round in circles,” she muttered as she walked back to the others.

  20

  In the back of the gig, Marjory shot unspoken questions to Lettie, who stewed in her own turmoil soup. On Lettie’s lap sat the battered box Samuel had pulled from the roots of the apple tree. With a fingertip, she traced the fiery feathers that drifted over the lid.

  What did it all mean—was Verity a Soarer, Dawn’s true father, or both of them?

  At the Warder’s house, Lettie handed over the box into Samuel’s safe keeping. He promised it would be stored away until Jasper arrived. The handy thing about gargoyles was they didn’t need safes. They could simply insert something precious into the middle of a boulder.

  Samuel excused himself to secure the box, and then he would commune with one of his watchers and send it to Jasper. The time had come to solicit the Lord Warder’s help. There was little more they could do until they had his steady counsel, and Dawn should know what they had found.

  Marjory looped her arm through Lettie’s and steered her toward the front door. “We’re off for a walk. You menfolk can cope without us for an hour or two.

  “While you gather your thoughts, I’ll just start talking,” Marjory said. Once out the gate, they headed right and away from the ocean. They walked toward the tall trees and cool, forested areas.

  Lettie smiled. Her former nurse was exactly what she needed. It was odd when she considered she was four times Marjory’s age. Yet a certain wisdom seemed to only come with grey hair and wrinkles, not years spent walking the Earth.

  Marjory kicked a stone and watched it scuttle along the road in front of them like a large bug. “I think the good doctor might need his noggin banged against Samuel’s chest.”

  “Why is that?” Lettie didn’t see how that would help the situation.

  Marjory smiled and the young woman she once was sparkled in her eyes. “Might knock some sense into him to hit his head on a stone wall.”

  “I’m not sure that the fault is his. What if it is me?” The more Lettie thought about it, the more convinced she was that she had misinterpreted events. But even if Grayson did indeed desire her, what could she offer?

  Marjory tugged on her arm. “My dear, Doctor Grayson Day has been infatuated with you since he laid eyes on you. However, it would have been unconscionable to make advances while you were under his care. Not to mention that Ava’s tiny minion was worming its way
through your head, and we were all terribly worried about you.”

  There was something Lettie could understand. Grayson was too good a doctor to place a patient in a difficult situation. For years, he saw her as the mad woman in the tower. She had only been her normal self for a matter of weeks. He might not believe it was a permanent change. What if he could never see her as anything else?

  “I have never doubted that he cares for me, but at worst he sees me as a mad woman, or at best as a sister.” Lettie scratched at her palm through the kid leather of her glove. Whenever she thought of Grayson, she itched where her body reminded her of the lost Cor-vitis seed. Somewhere in the world was her true mate, and the doctor could only ever be second best.

  Would he accept a battered heart? If she were honest with herself, he deserved so much more. He should be the one true love for a woman who would give him everything she was. If Lettie were a woman of noble character, she would let him go to find such a love. But the selfish part of her wanted to keep him all to herself.

  Marjory snorted in laughter. “If brothers looked at their sisters the way he looks at you, they would all end up in jail. Such thoughts as are written all over his face are against the law between siblings. If you are a God-fearing person, there is also fiery damnation to consider for casting covetous glances at your sister. I should have objected before we left Alysblud. I suspected that casting you two as siblings might raise eyebrows. We should have called you husband and wife and been done with it.”

  How would events have unfolded if the villagers thought them married? People would have expected displays of affection between them and would have assumed she shared his bed. It also would have made it impossible to get close to Byron Ocram. Or would it? He did say he preferred married women, that husbands cared less than brothers.

  “People have short memories. If need be we can construct a plausible reason for the masquerade.” If it came to that. How much longer would they be in Whiterock? She had only days before Byron would expect his answer, and then her hand would be forced.