Honeyville

  ‘But not in the Union’s hands. Don’t you see? The company guards had them! The general’s men! When Inez and I went out to Ludlow – you remember? The day we arrived in Trinidad? It was the company guards who were holding them … Colt-Browning, automatic rifles. “Potato diggers”, she used to call them. I forget why … Inez could have told you. Something about the mechanism made them unusual. But the rifles were unusual. That’s the point. Inez had made a study of them. She knew them. And she identified them that afternoon. We were in the middle of negotiating with one of the guards. She was trying to get a bunch of us reporters into the ruined camp. She was being her delightful self, and I reckoned, the way the guard was melting, we were as good as in. Suddenly, she stopped dead. He was holding one of the rifles … And she knew it. It was as if she had seen a ghost. She simply stopped talking. She couldn’t take her eyes off the damn gun.’

  ‘How do you know that was what stopped her?’ I ask him. ‘She might have suddenly simply found the horror of the camp too unbearable, the smell and the smoke and the bodies being brought out … What makes you so sure it was—’

  ‘Because she told me.’

  ‘That the guns had been stolen?’

  ‘What? No! Not right then. A couple of days later. She told me the gun he was holding had been taken from her cellar, and it was why she had fallen silent. That she recognized it.’

  ‘And you believed her?’ I ask. I turn to Xavier but he is buried in the letter again, scowling over the words as if they might yet offer up an answer. ‘Xavier, are you listening to this?’

  ‘Of course,’ he mutters. ‘And it’s a good question. Given my sister’s somewhat fanciful approach to life … Why did you believe her?’

  ‘Because of the way she stopped mid-sentence. As I say, she looked as if she had seen a ghost. If you had seen the change in her, you wouldn’t have been in any doubt either.’

  ‘And did you get the impression – when she saw the guard holding the gun, was she already aware that the arsenal had been stolen from her cellar? Or had she been under the impression, as we have been, all this time, that it had simply been removed by the Union to a safer hiding place?’

  ‘She said she had no idea it had been stolen,’ says Max. He is silent for a long time. Finally, he says, ‘But I didn’t believe her. I think she knew very well that the weaponry had been stolen, and I think she knew by whom. And I think that those same guns were then almost certainly turned on the very people she thought she was fighting for … It’s not something any of us would much want to confront, is it? … I suspect that she couldn’t allow herself to confront it either. She couldn’t accept it. She couldn’t bear it. So she raced around like a dervish, keeping herself busy, righting wrongs, fighting the cause, burying her head in the sand. I think she—’

  Xavier gasps. He’s not listening.

  ‘No, I think it makes sense,’ Max glances at Xavier, and continues more emphatically. ‘She was in love with O’Neill. He was going to New York. He had some kind of job, he said. I don’t remember what, but maybe he was leaving the Union, maybe he wasn’t. From what I understood, he was never anything more than a brute-for-hire, who just happened to have been hired by the Union side. But Inez was in love with O’Neill. She wanted to believe the best of him. Added to which – leaving aside her own stubbornly unacknowledged fears about him, she knew that no one would have allowed her to leave town with him. It would have been out of the question. Her aunt and uncle – your aunt and uncle of course,’ he says, nodding to Xavier, ‘would have cut off her money supply. They would never have forgiven her.’ He stops, shrugs. ‘At any rate, that’s what she told me.’

  But Xavier still isn’t listening. He is hunched over the damn letter, pulling on his eyeglasses, holding Inez’s bloodstained letter up to the sunlight. And then slowly, softly, he begins to laugh. ‘… Dora!’he whispers. ‘Darling Dora, how long have we carried this ludicrous letter around with us? How many times, between us, have we gazed at this darned thing? How could we not have seen? It’s so damnably … so utterly, wonderfully, gloriously like Inez …’

  ‘What?’ I ask him. ‘For heaven’s sake – what is so gloriously like Inez that we haven’t seen these twenty years?’

  ‘Oh my sister,’ he says. And he is half laughing, half crying. ‘God, how I miss that girl. Look!’

  He is still holding the letter up to the light. His finger is pointing to the top right-hand corner of the sheet. There is a dark smudge of old, brown blood. And behind it, what looks like a faint ink mark. A scribble of some sort. Max and I crane forward to see it more closely.

  ‘Is it an F?’ asks Max doubtfully.

  ‘It is an F!’ cries Xavier. ‘A single, solitary F at the top of the page … Come on, Dora! Don’t you remember? You must remember! For a while, it was almost the only thing she would talk about. The swordstick … And the little gun purse … and that idiotic device for listening to people in the room next door, which never worked. Don’t you remember she tested it on us?’

  ‘And the invisible ink!’ I shout. ‘An F! It’s an F! Xavier – we are fools! How can we have been so stupid?’ I throw my arms around him, and we hold each other, both of us half laughing and half crying, unwilling to let each other go.

  ‘When you’ve quite finished,’ Max says, sounding put out, ‘you might be kind enough to remember that I too am sitting here …’

  We giggle like a pair of children, and apologize.

  Max continues, ‘Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to explain what in hell you are talking about? An F? An F stands for what?’

  40

  ‘F stands for FIRE!’ Xavier and I cry at once.

  ‘Listen,’ I say to Max. ‘There are two types of invisible ink.’

  ‘There is “Organic”,’ Xavier says, ‘And—’

  ‘Sympathetic,’ I continue. ‘Did Inez not tell you this? She must have told you! How could you have spent more than an hour in her company without the subject coming up? Well, I suppose by the time you arrived, everything had become so much more serious. Cody was already dead. And Ludlow … In any case the invisible ink came with the rest of the junk she ordered from the detective store. There was the invisible ink hidden in a bottle of hair tonic, but that was the chemical type. “Sympathetic”, as Xavier calls it … Are you sure that’s right, Xavie? Not synthetic? I always thought it was synthetic.’

  ‘Definitely sympathetic,’ Xavier says.

  Max waves it aside.

  ‘The point is,’ I continue, ‘we are lucky there isn’t an “S” up there in the blood … It’s not an S, is it? It’s definitely an F.’

  The men look again. We agree that yes, the mark we have missed for all these years, is indeed an F.

  ‘If it were an S, we would need to locate the “re-agent”, which would have been made specifically for this particular invisible ink. And, honestly, after so many years, Gosh only knows where we would find it …’

  ‘Organic invisible ink, on the other hand,’ Xavier continues, ‘alters the fibres of the paper it is written on, making the fibres burn at a lower temperature than the rest of the paper.’

  ‘I see …’ Max says, though for such a clever man, he seems to be taking a while to catch on.

  ‘Which means we only have to hold this paper to a source of heat – a lighter, for example, for the message written beneath it to become clear.’ Xavier giggles, a nervous giggle, because God only knows what we are about to uncover. ‘You will see,’ he says to Max, ‘that Inez taught her students well. I could remember all that nonsense as if she had told us yesterday.’

  We all laugh. It’s not terribly funny. But we are nervous suddenly. And we have drunk too much.

  ‘First,’ says Xavier, ‘I think we should order some more martinis. To steady the nerves. Are we agreed?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Max and I say together.

  ‘And perhaps we could ask for a lamp or something … A source of heat. Ah, waiter!’

  The waiter is h
appy to oblige with the martinis, but he can’t provide a lamp. There is a problem with electric leads, he says. They don’t extend as far as the poolside.

  Never mind. Max has a lighter in his pocket. We discuss whether it’s a sensible option to use a naked flame, and decide that it is. There is no breeze to speak of. And the lighter gives a steady flame. But the truth is, our curiosity overwhelms us. Her message has been hidden for twenty years, and now we cannot wait another moment to uncover it.

  It is decided that Xavier, having arrived later and therefore having drunk less than either of us, has the steadiest hand. He takes the letter from the table, the lighter from Max, and as he sets the flame beneath the paper, we fall silent.

  Nothing happens.

  ‘You need to put the flame a little closer,’ Max says. ‘A bit higher …’

  ‘Be careful,’ I say. ‘Not too close.’

  Xavier ignores us. We are standing behind him, craning over it.

  ‘It’s not working,’ says Max. ‘There’s nothing there … ’

  … But there is something there. In the gaps between the lines of the original letter, a script appears, and it is as clear as if it had been written yesterday. The handwriting is cramped, smaller and much neater than on the letter above.

  The three of us wait, hardly daring to breath, as the first few words appear.

  Darling Max,

  I suppose that if you are reading this …

  I breathe in. Feel a chill crawl over my skin. Time retracts. It is her voice, her hand. She is alive again. Max and I squeeze closer to the paper, jostle one another for a better view, and Max accidentally knocks Xavier’s shoulder. I suggest we stand back and let him get on with it, block by block, paragraph by paragraph. As each paragraph reveals itself, Xavier can lay the paper down, and we will read it together.

  It’s not feasible, of course. We don’t have a fraction of the patience. We need to see the words as they appear. And the writing is minuscule. So we crouch towards the paper, as close as we can without falling over. Xavier reads each line as the heat from his lighter reveals it:

  I will either be standing right beside you … laughing at what a silly … dramatic fool I have been … and feeling thoroughly ashamed of myself (although terribly proud of this fabulous ink … Has it really worked?) or, well, I don’t suppose you ever will see this letter—

  ‘She manages to be verbose, even from beyond the grave,’ Xavier mutters. But the letter sounds so like her. It’s as if she is right there with us by the sunny poolside, chattering away from a place and time the rest of us left behind long ago.

  … since I don’t think you listen to a word I ever tell you – although I have told you about the F and the invisible ink …

  ‘She never told me,’ Max says.

  ‘I’ll bet she did tell you,’ says Xavier. ‘But she talked nineteen to the dozen, Max. Lest we forget. You can hardly be blamed for not listening to every word.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘Please, Xavier, carry on.’

  Max, if some harm should come to me this afternoon, as I fear it might, and if you happen to remember all the nonsense I talk … and if you or someone else should come upon this letter, as I intend, in the pocket of my skirt … If you do ever find this message and I am gone from – Max, if I am dead, it is because I have fallen in love with a villain, and I deserve it.

  *

  Xavier stops. He places the letter on the table and kills the lighter flame.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I cry. ‘Xavier, don’t stop!’

  He says, ‘My arm is aching.’ He means his heart, of course. ‘I need a break. Wait a moment will you? Just a minute.’

  Max fidgets. ‘Want me to take over?’ he asks.

  ‘No … thank you,’ Xavier adds.

  ‘I should’ve said something,’ Max says. ‘I always suspected. But you can’t help who you fall in love with, can you? None of us can.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I ask him. It’s not really a question. Once again, I picture Lawrence’s face as he stood in the hall at Plum Street, the tears running down his cheeks. ‘This is all nonsense! Inez told me she was in love with you!’

  ‘So you keep saying,’ Max says. ‘And as I keep explaining, she was not. Xavier, shall you keep at the task? Or would you rather Dora or I continue? This midway pause is rather hard to bear.’

  Xavier shakes his head. ‘Why don’t you both sit down,’ he says. ‘Perhaps if I can finish off quietly – would it be all right with you? And then once it’s done and we have it all, then we can read it together. The whole thing. Can we do it that way? It might be easier on us.’

  I think Max and I both want to argue, but Xavier looks ashen under his handsome, sun-kissed skin; and out of all of us – of course – he has the greater claim on grief. She was his sister, his only living relative. The same thoughts occur to Max, I assume. We are being tactless. Too demanding. We both pull back at once.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ Max says.

  ‘No, no, not at all,’ Xavier replies. ‘I’m being feeble. It’s so long ago, after all. Dora, forgive me. I know how much you loved her. The last thing I want is …’ He leaves the sentence unfinished. He gulps back the remainder of his martini in a single swallow, beckons the waiter for another, and picks up the lighter again.

  Max and I return to our places and wait. Xavier’s fingers are shaking, and I rest a hand on his leg, beneath the table. It seems to help a little. After a while, Max looks up at the blue sky and says:

  ‘It’s hot.’

  ‘So it is,’ I say.

  Another long silence. Max taps and fiddles, says rather irritably: ‘I’d like to light a cigarette but I suppose I can’t. While you are doing that with the lighter. How are you getting along?’

  Xavier doesn’t reply.

  ‘Lawrence loved her, you know,’ I say. ‘You said it yourself, Max. If you had seen him that day, after he had taken her to the mortuary … He was weeping.’

  ‘Yes, I believe he loved her,’ says Max. ‘No matter what else happened.’

  ‘And I suppose he wept after Cody died, too – did he?’ Xavier mumbles.

  ‘I’m sure he did,’ I reply, and I turn, the better to send him my cold air, but he is bent over the paper, not looking at me. He is about three-quarters of the way down now, and from what I can see the writing is getting smaller. He hunches closer to his work.

  ‘The print is getting fainter down here,’ he says. ‘It’s harder to read.’

  ‘Maybe it needs more heat,’ says Max. ‘Are you certain I can’t help?’

  ‘I’m doing fine,’ Xavier assures him, but as he speaks the flame dances; it’s just a second – a half-second – the flame pulls at the bottom corner of the sheet and the smoke darkens.

  ‘Watch out!’ Max and I shout at once. We both leap to our feet, Max knocking both our chairs to the floor. ‘Xavier!’ I yell at him. ‘Pull the lighter away!’ He has already done it, but the flame has taken. He throws the paper onto the table top, and the three of us fumble for something to put it out. Max picks up his martini glass.

  ‘No! The ink!’ I cry. ‘Watch out for the ink. Don’t …’

  Xavier has bent his body over the table; he has laid both hands onto the flame and he keeps them there. I can see the pain in his face and I can’t bear it. Without thinking, I push at him, away from its source, and unbalance him. He staggers backwards, leaving the smouldering letter where it is.

  The flame has died now, but it has taken something with it. We gaze down in silence. From the place where the lighter burned through, to the bottom corner of the sheet, nothing of the letter remains.

  ‘… What do you suppose?’ Max says at last. ‘How much have we lost?’

  ‘Not so much,’ Xavier replies hopefully. ‘The last quarter, maybe? But the writing was getting so small.’

  ‘Well. What does it say?’ I ask. ‘For heaven’s sake, read it to us. At least read what we have.’

  He shakes his he
ad. ‘Why don’t you read it yourself? I think it might be better.’ And then, in a burst of anguish, ‘The son of a bitch killed her. He killed her. How about that?’

  I don’t say anything, and he doesn’t wait for my response. ‘I’m going to take a walk,’ he announces.

  ‘But you’re coming back?’ I don’t want him to leave. I need him to be with me.

  ‘Sure. I’m coming back.’ But then he doesn’t move. ‘Well go on!’ he says. ‘Read the damn thing!’

  Max picks it up. Little pieces of ash leave a floating trail behind it. He hands what remains of the burned sheet to me. And so we sit, the three of us, side by side in the sunshine, and – twenty years too late – we read from the beginning.

  Darling Max,

  I suppose that if you are reading this I will either be standing right beside you, laughing at what a silly, dramatic fool I have been and feeling thoroughly ashamed of myself (although terribly proud of this fabulous ink. Has it really worked?) or, well, I don’t suppose you ever will see this letter, since I don’t believe you listen to a word I ever tell you – although I have told you about the F and the invisible ink.

  Max, if some harm should come to me this afternoon, as I fear it might, and if you happen to remember all the nonsense I talk, and if you or someone else should come upon this letter, as I intend, in the pocket of my skirt … If you do ever find this message and I am gone from – Max, if I am dead, it is because I have fallen in love with a villain, and I deserve it.

  Cody tried to warn me. He told me Lawrence was passing information to the other side but I wouldn’t listen. And – of course – there was the potato digger at Ludlow and then, after Cody was shot, his poor Mama said to me the very thing I most dreaded. I won’t believe it. I mustn’t believe it. But Max, I watched him last night when he thought I was sleeping, and he was counting out great fistfuls of dollars. He is not the man he pretends to be. And yet, god knows why, I still love him!