Isabel didn’t know she had that in common with every single one of her ancestors. But she did know that one in particular had never truly given up on the man she loved. Her diary was the reason Isabel stood here today.
The lowering sun had begun its kind work of burnishing everything a nostalgic sepia. The crowds of shoppers and tourists click click clicking with their camera phones to capture the storied trees, the picturesque storefronts, the little ancient squat stone church surrounded by a yard crowded with tilting, lovingly tended stones, the pub, the view up the hill to that great brick academy, had thinned to a trickle.
Isabel, at least for the moment, had the trees to herself.
She managed to get her lungs moving in a steady rhythm again. She imagined the trees were as vast below as above, their roots reaching down, down through the earth, little tendrils stretching out to mingle with the roots of the crops that grew here and of the grass the cows and sheep feasted upon, part of everyone who had ever lived here from the time the first Eversea allegedly stole a cow from and was then bludgeoned by a Redmond (or perhaps it was the other way around?) back in 1066. Permanent, known, necessary, beloved.
In other words, the very opposite of Isabel.
Until recently.
It still took her a moment after she opened her eyes in the morning to remember this.
And then sunlight seemed to flood her veins. Followed by a pure swoop of vertigo that was as similar to panic as it was to joy.
And on her iPad now was an image of a family tree that fanned out for seemingly miles in every direction, all those names connected in fine lines, all of those lines connected to her.
Anyone strolling by would see (and they would look—turning heads was something else she had in common with the author of that diary) a petite, slim woman whose blond hair was twisted into (but plotting its escape from) an expert chignon. Her boots and jeans and black leather jacket had a slightly worn, singular quality that made them look expensive. They weren’t. Once, long ago, nice bicycles or brand-name sneakers or families who roared with laughter while they played catch together out in their front lawns had hollowed her out with such yearning it was a wonder she didn’t sound like a woodwind in a breeze.
She had learned not to want. She’d instead acquired a hard layer of watchful inscrutability, roughly the equivalent of the barrel one climbs into before going over Niagara Falls. Which was what basically it had felt like to be shunted from one foster home to another from the time she was eight.
She was nearly thirty now. She was thriving, if not yet precisely prospering, on her own terms. But she still felt uncomfortable owning too many things. Everything she acquired, from her cell phone to her sofa pillows to her thrift store leather jacket to her music collection, was thoughtfully, carefully, chosen and almost tenderly cared for.
One day, maybe, she’d take something for granted.
It was just that she’d lived inside that damned barrel for so long.
She snorted at herself when she realized her hands were trembling, as she really had no patience for ninnies of any kind. She slipped her hand in her jacket pocket and ran her fingers absently over the tiny crystals she’d glued painstaking to her hard phone case one night. Meticulous, painstaking work settled her nerves. They were in the shape of her name.
And then she fished out the phone and impulsively punched in a number.
It was nine in the morning in California.
“I’m having a cup of coffee and reading about that Stephanie Plum girl you told me about, Isabel, sweetie.” Laura answered without preamble. “She certainly makes a lot of poor choices, doesn’t she?”
Isabel laughed. “That’s one way to describe her. Hey, Laura, I’m finally here.”
She called her Laura because “Grandma” still didn’t trip easily off her tongue.
Isabel’s mother, perhaps the most zealous black sheep ever born, had disappeared with Isabel’s feckless unknown father into the wilds of California and sundered all family ties before dying. Isabel’s mother, like Isabel, never did anything by halves.
Neither did Laura. She’d paid someone to put together a family tree, which was how she’d learned of Isabel’s existence, and then she’d tirelessly tracked her to San Francisco. (There were explorers in their bloodline, after all.) That was how Isabel had suddenly acquired aunts and uncles and cousins, all of whom she liked (eventually), and all of whom liked her (eventually), and all of whom were subsequently mighty pissed off when Laura had given Isabel the cherished family heirlooms, the diary and the gold watch.
“She needs them the most,” Laura had told the rest of them, placidly, unmoved by fits of pique at her age. To Isabel she’d said: “Your Great-Great-Great-Aunt Olivia Redmond would have wanted you to have them. You’ll know why when you read her diary.”
Isabel could weather her pissed-off relatives with aplomb. She’d weathered significantly worse.
And she’d never wanted anything more than that diary and that pocket watch.
Because when she’d thumbed open the watch, inside was a miniature of a girl who was virtually her twin, apart from the dark hair.
And the diary, when she read it, had the compelling force of a trebuchet.
Two months, a few internet reservations, and a bewildered boyfriend later, she was in England. Alone.
“I’m so happy you made it safely, Isabel!” Laura’s voice was suddenly faint. She sounded as if she was not only in another time zone, but another dimension. “What is it like? Where are you right now?”
“I’m actually already in Pennyroyal Green. In front of the trees, the ones in Olivia’s diary. They’re the size of an apartment building. They might even be bigger than Mark’s ego. Or his venture capital funding.” Mark was her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Laura had met him. She’d think this was pretty funny.
“Whoop! I didn’t quite hear any of that, Isabel. You’re crackling in and out now. Can you speak up?”
“I’m in PENNYROYAL. GREEN. By the TREES.”
“You’re . . . utting . . . out . . .”
“PENNYROY—”
Alas, the connection was toast.
“Americans,” snorted a woman strolling by. “Always shouting about something.”
She irritably flicked the sleekest sheet of blond hair Isabel had ever seen over her shoulder, so dangerously shiny she could have blinded fighter pilots with it, and Isabel stepped aside lest she be lashed like a lazy peasant.
She bit back a wicked urge to shout an apology after the woman.
Or perhaps she ought to yank her own hair from its chignon and give it a violent retaliatory flick: En guarde! Surely a few of her forebears had dueled?
But her own hair was curly. It would likely merely snap back and hit her in the face. In her experience, surrendering to impulses generally did metaphorically just that. Which was how words like “irrepressible” (the magenta hair episode) and “alarming” (the self-administered tattoo) had ended up in her case file. Neither word was entirely fair or accurate, though she’d thought “irrepressible” was funny because it made her sound like a tap-dancing Broadway musical star: “the Irrepressible Isabel Redmond!”
In truth, incidents like those were a bit like exhaust from an internal combustion engine. The inevitable byproduct of ruthlessly stifling nearly everything she thought and felt. No mean feat, given that she was her mother’s daughter.
She’d figured out by the time she was nine years old that she was to be at the mercy of subjectivity and other people’s adjectives, and she would just have to wait it out.
Her jewelry designs now benefited from her years of ruthless self editing: She transmuted wildness into exquisitely simple shapes, seductive curves, startling materials, sharp points. (All words, coincidentally, Mark had used to describe her.) A number of exclusive boutiques in the Bay Area had begun to sell her work. She was now making enough money to get by without a day job.
The blonde woman tossed a final pretty, quelling frown over her shoulder at Is
abel. She swished her tall, willow-switch slim self up the street, her hair swinging in metronome counterpoint to the little shopping bag swinging from her hand.
An unmistakable bag.
Isabel went still.
Only graphic design nerds (and Isabel was one of them) knew the narrow deep green stripe edged in hair-fine silver was meant to represent the view of the sea as you looked out over the Sussex downs. But everyone knew what those tiny silver letters—P-O-S-T-L-E-T-H-W-A-I-T-E-’-S—kerned across that green line really meant: I am made of money.
Postlethwaite’s fifteen stores worldwide curated the simple, the exquisite, the startling, the confusing (also words Mark had used to describe her), and catapulted artists and designers into stardom.
Olivia had bought the very gold watch now tucked into Iabel’s pocket from the first Mr. Postlethwaite here in Pennyroyal Green.
And even though Isabel was certain she currently couldn’t afford to buy a single thing in there, she intended to convince them to sell her jewelry.
Or her name wasn’t Isabel Redmond.
She wanted to be brave. The way Olivia was brave.
Isabel had read that diary in one marathon sitting, awaking groggily the next morning, eyes sandy, fully intending to text Olivia to see if she was free for lunch. That’s how vivid and familiar and endearing her voice was.
She was stubborn, very funny, self-righteous, fiercely smart, passionate.
A lot like Isabel.
But the differences between them where what bothered Isabel a good deal.
She might have in common with Olivia an urge to leave and the nerve to do it.
But Olivia’s courage to leave everything she knew behind had been rooted in love. For her family. And for Lyon.
Her love for Lyon had all but set the pages of the diary on fire.
Whereas Isabel moved easily because she’d always been unmoored, and because she wanted to leave before she was left.
She wasn’t certain this counted as courage.
She was somehow certain that diary held some secret she needed to know.
Either that, or it had given her yet another reason to leave.
She was suddenly absurdly conscious of her heart knocking hard at her breastbone, like a door-to-door salesman who knows, just knows someone is home.
“Olivia,” she whispered. “I’m here. You walked right on this spot on your wedding day. Remember?”
She felt a little foolish. But only a little.
She didn’t have to edit anymore.
She transferred her phone into her left hand and looked about surreptitiously. She was utterly alone at least for the moment. So she surrendered to an impulse.
She cautiously, gently, laid a hand against the tree. As if feeling for its heartbeat.
She exhaled and closed her eyes. She couldn’t decide whether she felt grounded or dizzied. Perhaps both.
She stood like that for perhaps thirty seconds before a motorcycle roared up the road.
She squeaked and leaped backward.
And her phone shot from her hand like a squeezed bar of soap.
She whirled to watch it sail through the air in what felt like excruciating slow motion, right on schedule to be run over and crushed to bits.
She hunched, as if she herself were about to be crushed, slapped her hands over her eyes, and waited.
The murderous crunch never came.
But over the hammering of her heart, she thought she heard the motorcycle cut its engine.
“You can open them.”
She peeled her hands away from her eyes. Abashed.
A man stood between her and the glare of the lowering sun, which was giving him something of a red halo.
Good God, he was tall. Suddenly she fully understood the meaning of the word “rangy.”
He was holding her phone out to her.
“I saw something leap into the road. Is this yours? I managed not to crush it.”
The voice was amused. Solicitous. Baritone with a lovely scorched velvet edge. She’d once dated a guy who was perpetually hoarse from smoking and enthusiastically shouting “WOOOO!” at rock concerts. This was entirely different. This was something she could imagine whispering in her ear in the dark from the pillow next to hers.
Though of course that lovely rasp could be because he’d sucked in one too many insects while riding his motorcycle.
She saw it leaning on its kickstand behind him. A beautiful machine, somehow both sculptural and savage. A vintage Triumph.
He sounded refined and very English, an odd contrast to his helmet-smashed dark curls, the faint mauve circles of weariness under his eyes, the shadow of a beard, the battered leather jacket that hung gracefully from shoulders that went on for kilometers. He had a sort craggy, Tolkien-hero-on-a-quest face. Not pretty. Quite masculine. Compelling, in that she couldn’t look away from it. Especially his eyes, deep set and very dark, and at the moment, not blinking
She just nodded mutely. Like a “looby,” a word she’d learned from Olivia’s diary.
“Were you aware your phone was suicidal?” he asked gravely. On a hush. When it seemed she would never speak.
She found her voice. “It was an accident. At least that’s what I’ll tell the police.”
He laughed. Thankfully.
Because that had been awfully black humor.
He glanced down at the phone and squinted at the little crystals.
“Isabel . . . Redmond?”
When he lifted his face again it was slowly, wonderingly.
Speculation written all over his features.
It was her first taste of being known.
MALCOLM HAD SLOWED when he saw something fly toward him into the road, but he was only mildly curious. It wouldn’t be the first time something had been chucked at him. Back in his university days he used to rev his motorcycle just before dawn, which was when he left for classes. Until the day his elderly neighbor Mrs. Gilly burst out her door in her bathrobe and hurled what turned out to be one of her prize hyacinth bulbs at him. It must have been the nearest projectile to hand. “I’ve ’ad enough of that bleeding racket ye bleeding useless git!”
It bounced off his helmet.
And he’d hadn’t a clue he was being so obnoxious. But then it almost seemed the job of men that age to be oblivious and self-absorbed, which is why he now spent a good portion of his time setting the bones and stitching the wounds of men that age. Learning the hard way to be other than obnoxious was what built character.
So a tree-fondling woman hurling things at him was scarcely a blip on the radar of Malcolm’s life, when one considered war, medical school, births, deaths, triumphs, failures, women (who counted as triumphs and failures), existential torment, and the granddaughter of a duke, who was expecting him for dinner, and would flay him with scathingly elegant irony if he was late again.
She was worth it, Jemima was.
Most of the time.
He managed not to run over whatever it was that had flown at him and would have been on his way.
But he glanced over his shoulder and saw a petite blonde woman next to the trees.
Her shoulders were hunched.
And she’d covered her eyes with her hands as if her heart had just been broken.
Oh, God.
And so he had to go back.
“The trouble with you, Coburn,” his friend Geoff Hawthorne once said, “is that you always go toward the trouble, instead of away from it.”
If Malcolm had a coat of arms, this is what it would say. In Latin.
Now, however, he was beginning to feel foolish holding out the phone to a strange silent woman.
She at last met his gaze head on.
His breathing hitched as though he’d literally been pierced with a needle.
He frowned, and surely this was unchivalrous, so he arranged his face in carefully neutral planes.
He just hadn’t expected to have his equilibrium roughly jostled by a pair of blue eyes this ev
ening.
He couldn’t remember ever seeing eyes quite that color before. So achingly lovely they made him restless. He felt oddly as though he needed to do something about them.
He got his breath going again. He was hardly callow. He could cope with this.
She had fair hair but her eyelashes were black and she had a disconcertingly direct gaze. Some might say a challenging gaze. She had a compact little body, eloquently curved. Her posture was perhaps too straight. As though she’d spent a lifetime braced for the next stiff wind. She looked, as a matter of fact, like a walking dare.
But the rest of her—the spirals of hair slipping from her chignon, the pale pink curve of her lower lip, the heart-shaped face, were straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. Soft. Even dreamy. A pair of earrings in the purest dewdrop shape glittered in her ears and reflected him in miniature.
Finally her hand crept out, like a creature coaxed from a burrow, and she took the phone.
“Forgive me if this is presumptuous, but are you perhaps one of the Redmonds? Of the Redmonds of Pennyroyal Green? And so many other places now?” he asked.
Her face went slowly luminous. He watched, his breathing hitched again.
Then, like someone in command of a switch, she shut that light off.
Interesting.
“Oh, do you know the Redmonds?” Her accent was American and her casualness was studied. He suspected his answer meant a very good deal to her.
He smiled faintly. “Everyone knows them. They’re legends. You’ve met the trees.” He gestured. “And felt the trees.”
She blushed.
He was immediately sorry he’d said that. He suspected she was the sort who would very much mind blushing.
“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, Hell. 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.
The Legend of Lyon Redmond Page 29