The Travellers
Page 38
At the very end of the headland she stopped. Here a huge flat rock almost as large as the cottage had been deposited millennia ago. It dropped like a cliff into the sea and its lower reaches, washed by the waves, were studded with barnacles and gripped by seaweed. Its top surface had been smoothed by the breaking waves of storm seas until it looked polished, with a few hollows like giant thumbprints which always held water.
Kate balanced here, standing upright now, and looked out to sea. In the pocket of her coat there was a five-forint coin, which she carried for comfort. She ran her fingers over it, tracing the faint outline of the heron amongst the reed beds.
When she had arrived at the cottage she had been exhausted, drained of energy and emotion. But Sofia’s revelations had lifted a black burden from her, and she understood now how much it had weighed upon her over the months and years. She felt liberated, light-headed.
‘You are guilty of nothing,’ said Sofia, ‘except risking your life to save my dogs. All this time you have been trying to bear someone else’s responsibility.’
And then she had read that passage from Zsigmond’s diary, reflecting his guilt about the compromises made by his country’s government, about his inherited crime of having been born to wealth and ease. Zsigmond, certainly, had more than appeased that guilt. But he had said more.
What if we could turn aside, walk through the unnoticed door into a hidden garden, and find there the past, ready to be lived again? Willing to be reshaped, fashioned from chaos into harmony and order? If the hurtling train of life could pause at the station, the hands of the clock stop.
If we could have another chance.
Kate, perhaps, had opened such a door, could have another chance.
She breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the sharp, cold, salty air. Once, she had lived closed in by the darkness of her shadowed past. Then remembered guilt had pierced it like a sharp knife, but even as it had cut, it had let in the light. Somewhere out there, a different future might be waiting. She could perceive distances now.
The moon was rising over the sea ahead of her, and as it lifted clear of the waves it laid a silver, trembling path across the water to the foot of the boulder on which she stood. As a child she had always been filled with wonder at the path of moonlight on the sea, and had imagined she could step on to it and walk away from Dunmouth, into those mysterious distances.
Something was moving out there in the water, causing the moonlit path to break and shiver and close again. A seal? No, this was larger, more vigorous. Then as she stared out, half dazzled by the moon, it rose again in a perfect leaping curve. A dolphin. They were rare on this coast, but sometimes a solitary dolphin passed, searching perhaps for its lost companions. It leapt again, the moonlight turning its powerful sides and the cascading water to silver. Then it was gone, slipping away to the open sea.
Kate began to write her letter in her head.
My darling István, when do the herons of Szentmargit fly home from the winter grounds of the Nile?
The wind off the sea was cold on her cheeks, but the coin lay warm in her hand, deep in her pocket.
Look for me when the herons return.
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The Author
Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She read Classics and Mathematics at Oxford, where she married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for an MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.
Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting but also an historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German. The Testament of Mariam marks something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her latest novel, Flood, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators.
Currently she is working on a series set in late sixteenth century London, featuring a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. The first book in the series is The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez.
She now lives on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband (formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee), a cocker spaniel and two Maine Coon cats.
Praise for Ann Swinfen’s Novels
The Anniversary
The Travellers
A Running Tide
The Testament of Mariam
Flood
‘an absorbing and intricate tapestry of family history and private memories … warm, generous, healing and hopeful’
VICTORIA GLENDINNING
‘I very much admired the pace of the story. The changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings’
PENELOPE FITZGERALD
‘I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel … a novel of character … [and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained’
JESSICA MANN, Sunday Telegraph
‘The author … has written a powerful new tale of passion and heartbreak ... What a marvellous storyteller Ann Swinfen is – she has a wonderful ear for dialogue and she brings her characters vividly to life.’
Publishing News
‘Her writing …[paints] an amazingly detailed and vibrant picture of flesh and blood human beings, not only the symbols many of them have become…but real and believable and understandable.’
HELEN BROWN, Courier and Advertiser
‘She writes with passion and the book, her fourth, is shot through with brilliant description and scholarship...[it] is a timely reminder of the harsh realities, and the daily humiliations, of the Roman occupation of First Century Israel. You can almost smell the dust and blood.’
PETER RHODES, Express and Star