Hero is a Four Letter Word

by J. M. Frey

  “And,” Mr. Coldwell says gently, “We’d have to rent out your father’s apartments.”

  Jen’s fingers go tight on her teacup and she bites her lip hard to keep in the instinctual No!

  “It would make a lovely honeymoon suite,” Mrs. MacDonald agrees, voice low and deferential. It’s a conversation that has to be had, Jennet knows. But that doesn’t mean any of them like having it. “If we made it a bit less …”

  “Like Da’s,” Jennet finishes.

  Mrs. MacDonald quaffs her tea in a single, wincing gulp. “Yes.” She pours more for everyone, warming up what’s left in their cups, and they drink in silence for a moment. “Fresh coat of paint? Something lighter. Get the pipe smoke smell out, and some nice landscapes on the walls. Maybe leave up the family portraits?”

  “No,” Jennet says. “I mean, the rest, I … okay. But the portraits, I want them moved to my sitting room.”

  “I’ll arrange for —” Mr. Coldwell begins, but Jennet shakes her head.

  “I’ll do it.” She lets go of her teacup and balls her fists against her eyes, pushing hard to keep the tears at bay. She’s so damn sick of crying. “It’s my family. I don’t want some workman I don’t know to touch … no, I w-want to do it.”

  “Okay, dear,” Mrs. MacDonald says, a gentle, dry hand cupping the back of Jennet’s head. “Okay. We’ll help you.”

  Over the course of the weekend, they remove all the paintings from the wall that surrounds Jennet’s sitting room fireplace. They patch and paint it with a fresh coat of butter-cream colour that will offset the gilt frames of the portraits nicely. It’s the longest wall in her apartments, the only one not interrupted by windows or doors. The sitting room itself is divided by décor into a library and study corner, the comfy visiting area around the fireplace, and a small private breakfast nook. The main entrance to the apartment is beside the stuffed bookshelves with the squashy reading chair, two tall windows to the right, the fireplace and its wingbacks to the left, the small mahogany dining set ahead, and beyond that the door into Jennet’s bedroom and en suite.

  Jen lines the portraits up in order of age against the wall, trying to determine the best hanging arrangement. The first is an oil painting of a wide, barrel-shaped man with startlingly ginger hair. He is swathed in Selkirk plaid, an almost eye-bleedingly tight pattern of blue and red. He stands behind a solid looking lady-wife, and a dour daughter of about twelve who looks remarkably like Jennet at that age. It’s a large painting of the Laird, Master of Carterhaugh, and family, and it is easily as tall as Jennet. Next to it is a painting in which the young woman, Margaret, all grown. Jennet turns her attention to Margaret’s husband, a puckish young man painted with vividly green eyes and a bit of a cheeky grin. He wears no plaid, only the trousers and jacket of a well-off young man in the late 15th century.

  He has one arm wrapped tight around Margaret’s shoulders, possessive and nearly inappropriate for a formal portrait of the Lady, but Margaret is leaning into his touch, clearly enamored. A small baby boy grins out of the canvas from a froth of white fabric and lace in her lap, and his father’s hand cradles his head lovingly. There was another child in the painting at one point, Jennet knows, but then he was painted out. Her Da had told her it was a common practice of the day when a child died. She can see the darkish smear by the husband’s hip, the place where two different shades of black don’t quite match. Nobody knows what happened to the little boy, which means that he probably died young. She brushes her fingertips over the blotch where the boy’s chubby cheeks would be in apology for his short life, the grief of her father’s passing welling momentarily against the hollow of her throat, and swallows hard.

  Clearly this was a family that adored one another, and it breaks her heart a little more that the boy-child is missing. The surviving boy’s name was Thomas, Jennet knows that, but the father’s name she doesn’t recall ever having learned. A quick peek at the back of the canvas is no help – it’s been papered over by the framers.

  The next painting is Thomas with his own children, a brace of four boys and a young girl cuddling a strangled looking spaniel. The children are dressed as adults, as they did in the day, down to the little powdered wigs. The second eldest boy features in another portrait, in a much more portable size than the family ones, with a young man they say was a great favourite of his among the townspeople. Here they are both about twenty, hands around each other’s waists in a congenial manner, and smiling conspiratorially. Whether the young man was a friend or a lover, no one can be sure, but Jen’s Da had always liked the idea of the two men finding contentment together.

  He would have, considering.

  After that is another two family portraits, one more with a child painted out, and then they give way to muted, black-and-white tin-types, silvery daguerreotypes, sepia-faded photographs, and finally the colour-muted family photo portraits from the twentieth century. There are photographs here of every generation of Carterhaughs for as long as the medium has existed.

  The appalling legacy of children dying in their first decade marches on, and without realizing it, Jen finds her hand splayed over her own, slightly paunchy stomach by the time she reaches the end of the row. She has no siblings, but her father had a sister once. The very young woman is grinning out of a photo taken at some pleasure chalet or other. She looks so very much like Margaret Selkirk that they could be the same person. And Jennet, she’s been told, strongly favours her late aunt Jane.

  It takes four months of good, hard scrubbing, painting, and furniture rearranging, a visit to Edinburgh to meet with a website designer, several long days filling out paperwork and standing in government queues, but eventually the Carterhaugh Manor Bed and Breakfast is open for business. Everyone in Selkirk takes a tromp thought the house, shakes the hand of Lady Carterhaugh and takes a cup of coffee in the dining room the first Saturday, just for curiosity’s sake. When her neighbours ask why Jen decided to follow through with the plans, she says “It’s something to do,” instead of “I don’t know if the living would last.” The latter is the truth, but it’s too honest for polite company.

  Their first customers, three days later, are an American couple come over for a research trip, delighted to be able to stay right where the fairy stories they’re writing about originated. Within an hour Jennet is sick to death of talking about an imagined history and what it all might mean, a headache forming at the crest of their brash, broad voices. She begs out of the conversation by making up a phone call to a friend she’s meant to be making.

  Once she’s ensconced in her apartments, curled in her squashy reading chair, she does indeed call one of her friends in Selkirk.

  “Jennie!” Karen says. “I haven’t heard from you since … well, never you mind that. What’s up? Just want a chat?”

  “Yes. And sorry.”

  “Never you mind. You needed your time. But oh, what you’ve missed.” Jennet spends an hour hearing all about the toddler’s favorite new words (“bloody bugger piss!”) and the teenager’s sky-high mobile phone bills. It feels normal, boring, and it helps Jen find her centre again.

  “Can’t believe you have a teenager,” Jen sighs as Karen winds down.

  “I can’t believe it either. Wasn’t it just last week when we were teenagers?” Karen says, and somewhere in the background something makes a smashing sound. “Oh, for god’s sake!” Karen bawls. “Matthew, that’s it! I’m selling you to your auntie Jennet!”

  Jen laughs. “I don’t want him,” she says when Karen comes back on the line.

  “Need an heir yet, don’t you?” Karen asks, and the question is casual, but the real concern is there.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” Jen says, softly.

  “Okay. Okay, Jen, I know … but it’s been five months since your Da, and you not being … well, with it all …”

  “That’s over, it’s done,” Jen says. “I don’t want to talk about that. I just … it’s too soon, I can’t think about that, okay? And n
ow I’ve got this damned bed and breakfast, all this work, the paperwork, the house is always noisy and I just feel like I can’t get any rest.”

  “Okay, Jennie, okay,” Karen says. “Never you mind then. Hey, come down to ours for dinner this week?”

  “I’d like that,” Jen says.

  “Good, good, I’ll text you when later.” Another smash in the background. “Heaven preserve you Matthew Simmons Junior!” She yells. “I need to ring off. Sure you don’t want to buy him? Even a trade? I’ll take that handsome new gardener of yours, the one I saw wandering down by the woods? Never you mind, gotta go. Mattie —!”

  Karen hands up before Jen can tell her that she hasn’t hired a new gardener.

  Jennet waves off the Americans as Mr. Coldwell drives them into Selkirk for their dinner reservations, then puts on her wellies and her good thick pea coat. It’s early in autumn yet, but it rained that morning and the forest is always damp and chill after a storm. And a pallid frost has been laddering up her spine since the phone call, a sense of apprehension that she just can’t to shake out of her vertebrae.

  She tours the grounds first, and doesn’t see anything out of sorts with the ornamental garden, or the kitchen patch. Mrs. MacDonald, when asked, suggests that the young man Karen saw lurking around the grounds might be the new maid Brandy’s boyfriend, a young musician named Alex. Brandy says Alex hates nature, would never go wandering in the woods if he could help it, and has only ever been up to Carterhaugh to pick her up from work.

  Jen remembers the sound of his motorbike, the voices by the back entrance, the glimpse of riding leather and dark hair sticking out of a helmet. No, he didn’t seem the type to just take a walk through someone else’s property to pass the time.

  Crossing the plain, Jennet avoids stepping on the milk-white scars in the earth that her predecessors had named fairy-circles. Not because she fears them, or even really believes in them, but because it was just respectful. Habit. Her Da had always walked around them, so Jennet does too.

  So too would her heirs if she ever … goddamn it.

  Stepping into Carterhaugh woods is like stepping through a mirror. Or, at least, it is what Jennet thinks Alice must have experienced, how she had imagined it when she’d read Through the Looking Glass. The air is suddenly chillier; the colours are a bit more muted, a bit bluer; the world is lined with silver and diamonds where a good, hearty Scottish mist clings to the ground brush, and dew and moisture sparkle on the flat leaves.

  Her breath plumes between her lips, and a frisson of something else slides across her skin, tries to get up under her cuffs and collar. Her Da had told her so many nursery stories about this place, about what had happened under its canopy in generations gone by, that Jennet genuinely doesn’t know if the feeling of walking through a wall of magic is her own imagination, fed by the tales, or just the change in the microclimate.

  She stops where she always stops, where her father had always stopped – three steps in, on a small mound left by a rotting log, beside an oak tree that has to be at least as old as the Carterhaugh manor house. Perhaps its brothers hold up the beams of the roof above Jennet’s head as she sleeps.

  She lays her right hand on the bark, in the same place that a dozen generations of Carterhaugh residents have done, and that one palm-shaped patch is as smooth and shiny as a well-oiled banister. She closes her eyes, leans against the tree, and tries not to think about how this is the first time she’s been here since her Da was put in the ground.

  That the last person to touch this spot had been David Carter.

  Without thinking too much about it, without giving herself time and space to feel foolish, Jen presses her forehead against the rough bark above the handprint. She kisses the smooth place in the bark, between her own fingers.

  It smells of damp and wood, of skin and salt, of her lavender hand cream and the bacon sarnie she’d had for lunch, of the rich tapestry of forest and the father she’ll never hear fairy stories from again.

  “That’s new,” a voice with a thick burr rumbles somewhere far ahead of her. If the forest could have a voice, then this is what it would sound like. Old, and Scottish almost to the point of being a stereotype, thick and dark. Male. Curious. Complex and fizzy, like raw ginger on the tongue.

  Jen lingers on the tree for a moment more, refusing to have this moment cut short, refusing to allow her observer make her feel foolish. Then she leans back and stands up straight, and peers into the mists.

  When she has found the blotch of shadow that is different from the rest, she rests a hip against the oak tree. The pose mirrors the speaker’s own cocky posture, a deliberate call-out. Jennet smiles calmly, thinly. “You must be my new gardener, then.” She folds her hands across her chest, waiting.

  “Must I?” the voice is rich and amused.

  “That’s what they’re saying in Selkirk, I hear. Funny thing, I don’t recall hiring you.”

  “Nor would you,” the voice agrees.

  “So what are you doing in my forest?”

  A light laugh, like air through branches. “Your forest?”

  “My father left it to me,” Jennet says. “Carterhaugh is mine.”

  “Oh, the echoes of time,” the voice says, and his burr is blurry and wistful.

  “Right, whoever you are, I have a mobile with me. Come out, or I call 999.”

  A repressed snort of laughter. “But that is different.”

  “Seriously, now,” Jennet says, fishes the mobile phone from her coat pocket and lifts it demonstratively. The blue glow cuts through the gloom and lights on the figure, just a few paces away. It is thin, slumped, hands shoved in the kangaroo pocket of a hoodie, and when it looks up from under the hood, green eyes glitter in the light.

  “Oh, Maggie, how bold you’ve grown.”

  “It’s Jennet. Who the hell are you?”

  The figure sweeps a deep and ironic bow. “Liam. Ma’am.”

  “Miss,” Jennet corrects with knee-jerk reflex. “And that’s still no answer to why you’re skulking around in my woods.”

  Liam stands to his full height, pulls back his hood, removes his hands from his pockets, and steps into a slanting shaft of late afternoon sunlight. Motes and pollen dance in the air between them, and his hair sparks gold and straw. Jennet lowers her mobile as he spreads his arms, palm up.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asks.

  “No,” Jennet says.

  He grins. “Good.”

  Jennet presses the 9 button twice. The electronic beep is harsh and flat in the small, mist-battened clearing.

  Liam No-Last-Name laughs. “I’m no threat to you, Mistress Carterhaugh. Nor to your guests. I come for you, only.”

  “Come for me?” Jennet repeats, both eyebrows caterpillering towards her hairline. “And you think that doesn’t sound threatening?”

  “I live down the way,” he says, gesturing vaguely behind him. “I walk the woods often. More now that I’ve clapped eyes on you. I saw you, at the funeral.”

  Jennet sucks in a breath, hands suddenly shaking. “Right, now you’re sounding like a creeper. Just so you’re aware.”

  “I came upon it by accident, I swear,” Liam says, hands now towards her, placating. “And you looked so sad.”

  “I was burying my father!” Jen snarls.

  “Of course,” Liam allows. He looks younger when his smile dissolves, his face relaxing into pity, the lines falling away. Far too young for a man who is now suddenly holding her free hand, a thumb running along the back, soothing and very obviously attempting to be seductive. Succeeding, if she’s honest.

  Right, Jennet reminds herself, this is how missing persons reports begin. But there’s something so entrancing about his touch, the look in his green, green eyes. Something … irresistible.

  His breath is sweet and cool against the back of her hand when he lifts it to his cheek, eyes closed as if the texture of her skin is the most exquisite silk. “And in your bedroom window, such sorrow upon your face when yo
u look to the woods.”

  Right, no. Never mind. The spell is frayed with a sharp slap of worried disgust.

  “You’re a stalker,” Jen says, and it’s meant to be an accusation but it comes out far more weak, like there’s is something … different in his touch. Something calming. Something nearly magical, only there is no such thing as magic.

  She reaches for the self-righteous fire she throws at all the men who think a woman of Jen’s age and marital status are easy prey, but finds it banked into a small coal of absent-minded worry. She has nothing to throw. That’s … wrong.

  “A stalker, no. I am an admirer, and you must admit, I am a polite one,” Liam purrs. “No obnoxious boom boxes, or pebbles thrown at your window. Put away your mobile, Jennet.”

  She swallows hard and pushes her mobile into the back pocket of her jeans, unthinkingly. Then she wonders why she did it. She reaches for it again, perturbed that she did as she was asked so quickly, so neatly, but is distracted when Liam’s grip on her hand shifts. He slides them so that they are palm to palm, fingers folded over the backs of each other’s knuckles, and he pumps her hand in a slow shake.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Lady Carterhaugh,” he whispers. His eyes are gravity wells. As deep and as appealing as Da’s grave.

  “Pleased to make yours, Liam,” she replies, enchanted far too easily by his smooth manners.

  He raises her hand to his mouth, brushes a dry kiss across the back of it. Then, from somewhere behind him, he produces a flower. It is one of the late-blooming wild roses, two blossoms fully blown on a single stem.

  Jennet can’t help it. The spell is broken. She throws back her head and guffaws.

  He stands there, roses upheld, looking equal parts surprised and hurt.