The Treasure of Stonewycke

by Michael Phillips

  “Do you want to make a quick getaway?” she asked somewhat coyly.

  “Oh no,” Hilary chuckled self-consciously. “She looks harmless enough.”

  But as her hand reached the latch, a sudden wave of adolescent nervousness swept over her. Some sixth sense seemed to be warning Hilary that the encounter which lay ahead was to be no ordinary one. Even then she could not have dreamed how momentous it would really be. She opened the door.

  “I see you’ve noticed my Gladstone,” said Hilary as she entered.

  The woman turned her eyes from the painting, rose, and smiled. It was a warm, personable gesture, though there was something disquieting in the lady’s eyes—a kind of intensity that seemed bent on probing Hilary’s depths. She seemed to be trying to integrate the look she had seen in the photographs about the office with Hilary’s actual face which was now before her.

  “It’s quite good,” said the woman, her eyes straying once again—almost reluctant to leave their scrutiny of Hilary’s features—to the painting. “I haven’t heard of the artist, but he has captured a very human quality in the Prime Minister, so rare in most official portraits.”

  She paused and turned back to Hilary. “Do you collect art, or are you only partial to Gladstone?”

  “My budget hardly permits me to collect,” smiled Hilary, “but I splurged on this because I think Gladstone was a great man, a true defender of the common man, one of very few politicians with integrity.” She stepped toward her visitor and held out her hand. “I’m Hilary Edwards.”

  The other woman reached out her gloved hand and took Hilary’s, pressing it rather firmly for a long moment, trembling slightly.

  “I am Lady Joanna MacNeil,” she said.

  “Lady . . . MacNeil,” repeated Hilary thoughtfully, “please . . . be seated.”

  Joanna resumed her seat and Hilary took the chair at her desk.

  “I’ve read your magazine,” said Hilary’s visitor as if making a casual observation. “You must be a woman with strong political convictions.”

  “I’ve never been accused of being a rebel without a cause.”

  “No,” Lady MacNeil chuckled softly, “you seem to have no lack of issues to keep you occupied.” She paused, as if in thought. “I’ve never been very politically minded myself,” she continued, “but I think there are more men of integrity at Whitehall than we give credit for. I know of at least one.”

  “One is a rather small minority,” countered Hilary congenially, her natural defenses put off their guard by this disarmingly pleasant old woman, yet nevertheless responding to political matters in her habitual manner. “But if there is one, I would like to meet him. Perhaps I should interview him for the magazine.”

  “Yes . . .” The woman’s voice faded off a moment and her eyes grew introspective.

  As Hilary observed the change, she had a brief opportunity to study her visitor. The features she noted in the aging Lady MacNeil were fine and delicate. Hilary could tell that in her youth she must have been quite lovely. Her pale skin was creased with many fine lines, and her brown eyes were clear and gentle, but for all her delicacy there was a definite firmness about her chin, a strength, a sense of determination, even forcefulness. Oddly, the look was familiar to Hilary; but as she took an extra moment to analyze it, she was unable to recall where she had seen such an expression before.

  The pause lasted a mere moment, and as quickly as it had come, Lady MacNeil’s eyes became focused once more.

  “But I’m sure you didn’t come here to talk politics,” said Hilary after the brief silence.

  Apparently amused at this notion, the woman chuckled softly, her eyes momentarily growing merry, framed in oft-used crow’s feet.

  “That is quite true,” she replied.

  “How may I help you?”

  Lady MacNeil grew solemn again and drew in a deep breath, seemingly as much to gather courage as oxygen. “I am here on what might be almost a bizarre quest. I realize I have come without an appointment, though I hope you will understand my reasons for this later. Yet my . . . business may take some time.”

  “I happen to have some. Please go on.”

  “For the past several weeks I have been looking for someone,” said Lady MacNeil. “As unusual as it may seem for a person of my age, I hired a detective, and I followed what clues I had. And in the end, my search has led me here.”

  “It must have been a roundabout journey,” said Hilary. “If I didn’t know better I would think you were from the States, yet your accent is a curious mixture of American and Scottish.”

  Lady MacNeil smiled, oddly again. “That is another story. Perhaps one day I will have the opportunity to tell it to you.”

  “Who are you looking for, and how do I fit in?”

  “With your permission, before I answer your questions, I would like to ask a few of you. Just in case I am on the wrong track, so to speak. We don’t want to stir any emotions unnecessarily.”

  She paused, as Hilary nodded for her to continue.

  “Thank you, Miss . . . Miss—Edwards,” she said, speaking the name with apparent difficulty. “First of all, I was curious about your name. The nameplate there on your desk reads J. Hilary Edwards. May I ask what the J stands for?”

  “Joanne—” Hilary answered.

  Hardly noticing the sharp breath drawn in by her guest, Hilary went on. “—or Joan. Apparently I had a slight lisp when I was a child, and my parents were never exactly sure.”

  A clear look of confusion spread over her visitor’s face, but nothing was said, and Hilary continued.

  “Besides, they preferred my middle name, and I suppose I got used to it.”

  “I see,” replied Lady MacNeil, her brow still creased in thought. “And when were you born?”

  Hilary smiled. “I’m afraid that question is not so simple either, but its answer will clear up your confusion about my name as well. You see, I have no idea exactly when I was born. I celebrate my birthday on February 10, the day my parents officially adopted me, but we never knew what the true day should have been. Neither did we know my actual given name for a certainty.”

  “You were adopted, then?” The lady’s voice quivered slightly.

  “Yes. I was a war orphan.”

  “And you know nothing of your real parents?”

  “Nothing.”

  A knot slowly began to form in Hilary’s stomach. “I was orphaned under rather unusual circumstances,” she went on. “It wasn’t so uncommon during wartime, especially in occupied countries. We didn’t have so much of it here in Britain, though we did come in for our share during the bombings. I was somehow separated from my parents and was apparently too young to say where I belonged. I was taken to a shelter, but my family was never located. It was assumed they must have been killed. There had been a German raid, bombings, explosions, but somehow I was spared. Eventually I was adopted.”

  “How—how old were you?”

  “About three.”

  “It must have been difficult for you.”

  “Children have an incredible capacity to adapt,” answered Hilary. “I was at an age before solid memory patterns form. I really don’t remember anything of that time—except for a peculiar dream I sometimes have. I suppose I must have cried a lot for missing my real parents, but I have no clear memories. Whatever grief I must have experienced was soon absorbed by a new life, and . . . well, you know how it is with children—they mold to their surroundings.”

  Lady MacNeil nodded, not without a quick brush of her white handkerchief past one of her eyes.

  “So . . . you have no memory of your real parents?”

  “None.”

  “Have you ever wondered . . . ?”

  “Every adopted child wonders,” said Hilary. “How can you help it?” She paused uneasily, half afraid of where the conversation was leading. “I take it you are leading to something specific?”

  Hilary’s discomfort brought a certain edge to her voice that she immediately
regretted. “I’m sorry to seem impatient,” she said. “I suppose I’m not much used to being on this end of an interview.”

  “It is I who should apologize for being so cryptic.” Lady MacNeil paused. “If you’ll indulge me a bit more, I’d like to relate a story to you.”

  “Do go on,” replied Hilary, folding her clammy hands as calmly and patiently as she could and resting them on the top of her desk.

  “I told you I was on a quest,” continued Lady MacNeil, “and the story of how it came about begins during the war with a young couple. Like so many others at that time they were separated, and while he was on the Continent, she remained in London with their child. The bombing had quieted considerably after the Battle of Britain, and they were relatively safe.

  “But in late 1942 the Germans stepped up the raids, and this young mother of whom I spoke felt she ought to remove herself to a safer haven. Yet she was torn by a very real need to remain in London. The details of her situation do not really pertain to the story at this point. In the end it was decided that the child and her grandmother would return to their family estate in Scotland while the mother joined them later.

  “The irony is that they might have been safer had they remained in London, but only in hindsight are such things visible. For on the way north, the train bearing the child and the grandmother was bombed two hours outside of London. The grandmother had left the child in the care of their nurse while she visited a friend in another car, and it was at that moment, while they were separated, that the explosion occurred.”

  Hilary closed her eyes.

  She had not had the dream for years, yet all at once the very word explosion conjured up a host of nightmarish images in her mind’s eye. She did not even notice that her hands were gripping each other like opposing clamps of a vise, turning her knuckles white.

  “The trivial acts in our lifetimes go largely unnoticed,” Lady MacNeil continued; “that is, until some catastrophe changes everything. You cannot feel guilty or ashamed, for you know there was nothing intrinsically wrong in what you may have done. Yet you know the choice will always haunt the deepest recesses of your heart. This is but scratching the surface of the many soul-searching and agonizing memories and regrets the grandmother had to face in the years following. But in the end, neither the grandmother nor the parents ever saw the child again, for the car she was in received a direct hit from the enemy’s plane, and there seemed no doubt she had been killed.

  “I need not describe their grief. Only their faith in God sustained them in their loss. And only time was able to dull its painful edge, the Lord using their tragedy to draw the young husband and wife closer together than they had ever been previously. They had no more children, for this one birth had been a miracle in itself.

  “As the years passed, their lives managed to go on. That one void, their childlessness, could never be filled; but they nonetheless lived full and happy lives, expending the great love in their hearts in service to others.”

  Lady MacNeil paused. Both she and Hilary, almost in unison, took a deep breath. The time to seek one another’s eyes, however, had not yet come.

  “Fortunately, the story does not end there,” went on Lady MacNeil. “About two years ago, the father of the lost child received a telephone call from someone unknown to him, yet well known to the grandmother, but whom she had not seen in twenty-eight years. When the caller first identified herself as Hannah Whitley, the father had no idea that the name was none other than the nurse who had been with his child on the day of the terrible accident. Indirectly as a result of that call, other people were drawn into the stream of events, which eventually led the grandmother to enlist the help of an investigator, and ultimately fill in many answers she had wondered about for years.

  “After the bombing, Hannah Whitley had lived her own private nightmare, unknown to any of the rest of the family. By some miracle she and the child had been thrown clear on the first moments of the explosion, and had survived what appeared to be certain death, wandering dazed, unnoticed, farther and farther from the train. In the bedlam following the blast, all attention was focused on locating the dead and trying to drag survivors free of the wreckage. Apparently the nurse and the child wandered off into the countryside. Miss Whitley had a severe head injury and was no doubt in shock. In her benumbed state her only thought was to get away from the horrible fires and continuing explosions. They walked for some time, finally ending up at a farmhouse several miles away.

  “There she abandoned the child, though even she could not say why she did such a thing. Perhaps in her fear and confusion, she thought it was the best course of action. The farmer’s wife discovered the child the following morning, sleeping peacefully in a pile of straw, and brought her into the house, cleaned and fed her, but was unable to make out anything from the child’s babbling. In due time they took the child to a shelter in the nearest town, where all attempts to locate her family ended in futility. Eventually she was sent to an orphanage in London.

  “By some coincidence Hannah made her way to the same town, though she arrived long before the child. There her wanderings of the one kind gave way to new and more fearful internal ones. Her injuries finally took their toll. She collapsed in delirium and was hospitalized. She was later shipped to London for more intensive care and some surgery. Hannah’s mind never completely recovered. Nothing could be made of her ravings either before or after going to London. The surgery did not seem to help, and she lapsed into a coma, in which she remained for two years. When she came out of it, her amnesia was so total that it took years for her to begin to reconstruct who she was. It took much longer before she began to remember what had happened that awful day. When finally bits and pieces did return, she was afraid to come forward after so long. She feared she would be blamed by the family for somehow losing the child.

  “She might have remained silent to this day, except that, experiencing a suddenly wave of conscience, as I said, two years ago, Hannah made a halfhearted attempt to contact the child’s father. She lost her courage almost immediately, however, and never did actually talk to the man, only his secretary. After that, Hannah dropped out of sight again, though it now appears other parties concerned may have run across her somehow. In any case, more recently many long-forgotten links to the past seem beginning to come to light.”

  “Why—why did she change her mind? Why was she reluctant to come forward?” asked Hilary in a dry, taut voice, relying on her natural journalistic instincts to force her forward where her emotions were afraid to tread.

  “I can only guess. But the father had become a rather important man in the government,” answered Lady MacNeil, “and I suppose she was intimidated. She was, after all, still suffering from her own measure of guilt in the affair, and to a degree still afraid of what they might think.”

  “What happened then?”

  “The grandmother began her own investigation into the matter.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And, as I said, her path has led here.”

  9

  Confirmation

  A long, heavy silence hung in the air between the two women.

  Hilary glanced around at the glass walls of her office. Outside, the busy pace of her staff continued as usual, though little noise penetrated the soundproof enclosure, making the awkward quiet feel even deeper. This hardly seemed like the right setting for so momentous a meeting.

  She let her gaze fall to her hands, still tightly clasped together on top of her desk. As if suddenly aware of the tension that had come over her body, Hilary let her hands fall apart. She rose and walked to a small table that held an electric coffeepot and all the related necessities.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked in a voice so normal that its sound almost startled her.

  “Thank you,” answered Lady MacNeil, “that would be nice.”

  “Cream or sugar?”

  “Yes, both.”

  Hilary poured out two cups, methodically adding crea
m and sugar to one which she then handed to her guest. Leaving the other black, she picked it up, but remained standing where she was.

  “I suppose I need not ask,” she said after a brief pause, “if you are the grandmother in your story.”

  “I am.”

  “And you think . . . that is, you have come here because—” Hilary stopped, staring into her coffee.

  Joanna looked up, her eyes filled with gentle compassion. “I believe . . .” Her voice quivered and her eyes filled with tears; she could not help but call to mind her own fateful luncheon encounter with Ian Duncan so many years ago, when she had been even younger than Hilary. “I believe,” she went on, “that you are my granddaughter.”

  Joanna had unconsciously edged forward in her chair as if she wanted to go to Hilary, but something seemed to hold her back, and Hilary made no move toward the older woman. She remained rooted to the floor where she stood, staring down into her cup, not knowing whether she wanted to run or cry or scream.

  Hilary sensed that she must reply. But it had to be a sane, rational response. After all, this must be a mistake. The kind old lady had somehow gotten onto the wrong track, Hilary told herself, grasping after straws to relieve her own inner sense of need. She would have to let Lady MacNeil down gently.

  Try as she might, Hilary could get no word out of her mouth.

  Finally Joanna’s lips twitched up into a soft smile. “I’m afraid I could think of no subtler way of putting it,” she said. “I suppose there are no halfway words in which to say such a thing.” She paused and sipped her coffee.

  “You—” Hilary licked her lips, “—you must have the wrong person.”

  “My granddaughter’s given name was Joanna Hilary.”

  “A coincidence,” Hilary replied weakly.

  Joanna said nothing, simply gazing at her with those probing, gentle, liquid eyes.

  “I mean,” Hilary went on in a frayed, defensive tone, “what more proof have you but a string of—well, coincidences?”