The Moon Always Rising

by Alice C. Early

  The black ribbon distracted her momentarily from noticing that the two most valuable portraits—those of her great and great-great grandfathers painted by Arthur Melville—were missing and the others had been rearranged, baring dark patches on the paneling. “Mary, what happened to the Melvilles?” she called.

  “Mr. Harald sent them to London,” Mary called back. “An exhibition, he said.”

  After the funeral mass in the family chapel, the line of people queuing to pay their respects snaked out the Great Hall door, and although the enormous fireplace was blazing, chilly eddies swirled around Els’s feet. She felt she was growing heavier with each whispered condolence and sorrowful glance. Ambrose Timmons, minus the expected delegation of bank higher-ups, inched toward her, and when he took her hand he whispered, “We need to talk as soon as we can get a little privacy. You’ve read the news, I presume?”

  “Not since Thursday,” Els whispered back. “Nor even bothered with the telly.”

  “I’ll explain later,” Timmons said. “The chairman sent his condolences.” He bowed and withdrew.

  Els closed the door behind the last guests and went to the dining room, where Mary was clearing away the buffet. Candles guttered onto the damask banquet cloth. Mary put some sandwiches and a lemon tart on a plate and handed it to Els.

  “Ye’ve eaten nu’in all day,” she said. “Mr. Timmons is in the study.”

  When she closed the study door, Timmons rose from his chair by the fire. She set her plate on the desk and went to the trolley holding Harald’s collection of single malt scotches.

  “We’ve both earned a drink, Mr. Timmons.” She poured Laphroaig into Edinburgh Crystal tumblers and handed him one.

  She’d first tasted the peaty scotch in hunting camp when she was fifteen, after shooting the day’s largest roebuck. Harald had passed around a flask, and Robbie, the gamekeeper, had handed it to her just like the rest of the men.

  Timmons raised his glass and toasted Harald’s life before reclaiming his seat.

  Els retrieved her plate of food from the desk and settled into the other chair by the fire. Timmons gazed into his drink. “The bank has crashed.”

  She looked at him. “Standard Heb goes back almost to Stonehenge. I read a few days ago about some trading blip. Didn’t sound too serious.”

  “Perhaps it wouldn’t have been if the guy who started it all had fessed up,” he said. “It’s almost a rerun of Leeson’s nightmare at Barings.”

  While she stared into the fire, the plate of sandwiches untouched in her lap, he explained that a rogue trader named Quartermain in the New York office had taken a disastrously losing position, then tried to hide it and work himself out. Everything had spiraled out of control. The bank didn’t yet know the full extent of its losses.

  A log shifted in the fire. She took a second’s pleasure in having quit before her job imploded, but the victory was Pyrrhic. She was ruined, her investments obliterated. For years she’d been required to take a large portion of her earnings as deferred compensation in the form of Standard Heb stock, now worthless.

  Timmons appeared to sense her absorption of this news. “It’s even worse than that,” he said. “Your father, against my recommendation, got into some schemes that weren’t on—real estate in India and such. His judgment was faltering, as you know. Until he died, I had no idea what he’d done on the side. He used Cairnoch House as collateral for one particularly dodgy deal with a Russian energy baron named Smirnov or something, and that guy was in my office yesterday threatening to foreclose. He’s salivating over the estate as a hunting lodge. It may have been his plan from the beginning to bilk your father out of it.”

  “How much did Father owe this Mr. Vodka?”

  “Enough so that even if you sold it on the open market—money pits aren’t exactly the rage these days—Cairnoch might fetch only enough to cover his debts with a hundred or so left for you. If we’re lucky.”

  “I should have taken over everything sooner.”

  Timmons’s little smile showed a career’s worth of patience for the hindsight of his clients. “Sell what remains of the valuable items separately,” he said. “And make your best deal with the Russian.”

  A new thought hit her. “Mum’s as dependent on the income as I.”

  “She should be the last of your worries,” Timmons said, and explained that Harald had long ago set up an adequate but not overly generous trust. “She’s been living with a man for years,” he said. “A retired doctor, Rinaldo Acquarone. They’re quite comfortable.”

  “Do you have her address?” “

  I’ll send it, but I’m sure you’ll find it here somewhere,” Timmons said, and stood up. “I’ve left you some paperwork. Once I’ve cleared out my office tomorrow, I’m at your disposal.”

  “Ever loyal,” she said. She felt a wash of sympathy for this careful, precise man who’d shepherded the family fortunes for decades.

  He shrugged. “Maizie’s been on me to retire. She’s a saver, she is. We’ll get by.”

  She saw his lie, and knew what a blow the loss of his lifelong employer was, not to mention the loss of her father, his friend and biggest client.

  “I’ll need your help, Mr. Timmons,” she said. “

  That’s a comfort, actually,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

  CHAPTER 16

  Els poured two more fingers of scotch and went to the partners’ desk, the Laird’s seat of power through the generations, where Timmons had left a stack of files. She dropped into the desk chair and stared at the pink ears and corkscrew horns of the kudu shot by her great-grandfather, contemplating the fact that her tenure as Laird would be the shortest ever.

  The top file contained a sales slip from Christie’s for £120,000 for the Melville portraits of her forebears. She’d always prized the one of her great-grandfather got up in “full Prince Charlie,” with the tartan and heirloom sporran and sgian dubh. She discovered that one Maxwell Tierney had purchased Auld George for his private armory collection and had him shipped to Kansas City. On it went—pieces of silver she’d never seen, paintings she barely remembered by artists she recognized, carpets that might have been rolled in the attic for generations. Her father’s attempts to stick his finger in the dike of debt. She wondered if he’d already liquidated the best of the best, leaving her so little of value that it would be more trouble to sell the rest than to let it go to the Russian.

  The file marked Smirnikoff contained Mr. Vodka’s offer on RussOil letterhead for Cairnoch House, furnished, in exchange for Harald’s obligations. She imagined him, stout as a fireplug and a heavy smoker, sitting at this desk, and hated the idea of his loutish friends drinking here under the kudu’s glassy gaze.

  At the bottom of the pile was a yellowed file marked “G. Borelli.” She opened it with trepidation as if her mother might waft out, genie style, from inside. Besides the details of the trust, there were letters from an Italian psychiatrist attesting to her mother’s improved mental state and requesting that Eleanora be allowed to travel to Italy during her school holiday.

  “Eleanora,” Els said aloud, stringing out the syllables. She struggled for any recollection of her mother’s saying her name and found none.

  Eleanora was twelve now, the letters said, surely old enough to make the journey alone, and her mother pined to know her daughter before she was fully a woman. There was a carbon of a two-line letter from Timmons in reply stating that Harald denied the request. And later a letter from the same psychiatrist saying Harald’s withholding of their child had caused his patient so serious a setback that she was once again in an institution. At the back of the file was a note in curlicue handwriting she imagined to be her mother’s, pleading with Harald to assure their daughter of her constant affection and mentioning the enclosure of “this year’s birthday painting.”

  In the thirty-one years since her mother’s departure, Els had never received a single acknowledgment of her birthday, Christmas, or any achievement.r />
  An unmarked key was taped to the inside of the file. Els tried it in every door, cupboard, and drawer in the study. Thinking the key must fit something private of Harald’s, she went to his bedroom suite—a place she’d rarely visited, and never alone.

  In his dressing room, she fingered the ranks of jackets, suits, and shirts. The drawers of his huge mahogany dresser weren’t locked. She picked up his hairbrush, auburn and silver hairs trapped in its bristles, and the bay rum scent he wore hit her like a punch. She avoided her reflection in his full-length mirror. To its left, he’d hung a gilt-framed Constable depicting a bucolic scene with sheep, so evocative of the life at Cairnoch that she couldn’t bear the idea that the Russian might get it. To its right was a keyhole in the paneling.

  The key fit. Behind the panel was a shallow cupboard crammed with envelopes and packages in brown wrappings that smelled of dust and old paper with a hint of perfume. She pulled out a flat envelope addressed to her with an Ischia postmark. Inside was a page of colored pencil sketches of animals—rabbit, fox, squirrel, stag—with names printed in English and Italian. Where the signature would have been was a drawing of a gardenia, tiny as a shirt button, white with a red tear.

  She spread the cupboard’s contents onto Harald’s bed. Flat as a letter or chunky as a book, all were unopened, addressed to her, and mailed from Ischia on 15 Ottobre, one for each year, designed to arrive in time for her 6 November birthday. The date stamps began in 1967 and ended in 1990, the year she left Scotland for Harvard Business School. She hugged herself and paced the room, atilt that a pillar of her life—the conviction that her mother wanted no contact with her—had crumbled into a lie.

  As if celebrating each birthday for the first time, she opened the envelopes one by one. Inside those from the early years, she found cartoons and illustrations fit for a child; as the years progressed, the art gradually became darker and more sophisticated and abstract, shifting from pencil and watercolor to oil and acrylic. The works were dated on the back, but only the one from 1979 had a title, Self-portrait, and it was so powerful it felt almost violent. Each bore the weeping gardenia signature.

  When she went to close the cupboard and take away the Constable, she found a creased black-and-white snapshot on the floor. Harald in a dark suit and her mother holding an infant, standing with a priest on the steps of the Cairnoch chapel. The infant, in a heavily embroidered gown, was wrapped in the clan tartan, which was secured by the family Luckenbooth brooch. Harald and the priest smiled at the camera. Her mother gazed into the middle distance, her expression blank. On the back in the same curlicue script was 4 December, 1966. Els’s christening.

  She sifted through the contents of Harald’s drawers. The fond memories summoned by his keepsakes, favorite ties, and medals couldn’t compete with her churning well of sadness, her mourning of the father she thought she’d had as much as the one he was turning out to be.

  She woke on Harald’s bed, wrapped in his coverlet. The birthday gifts were stacked on the chair with the snapshot on top. Such had been her exhaustion that she had no recollection of placing them there, or of lying down or at what wee hour sleep might have claimed her.

  Woozy and disoriented, she took the collection to her own room. When she splashed water onto her face, her red-rimmed eyes made her wonder if she’d wept in her sleep, though she’d been unable to weep while awake. She removed her funeral frock, pulled on jeans, a jumper, and her old hiking boots, and felt girded for the effort of that day, and those to come.

  In the milky gray light of early morning, Mary Partridge was shoveling ashes from the Great Hall fireplace. The room smelled of fresh bacon and spent fire. “Had a good night, did ye?” she asked.

  “Slept like a bairn,” Els said.

  “Ye must be starvin’, barely touching a bite since I don’t know when,” Mary said.

  The winter sun streamed through the conservatory’s palm branches, casting their shadows onto the limestone floor. Els sat at the wrought iron breakfast table and gazed upward, stirred by a glimpse of blue sky between the fronds; it rekindled the memory she’d had in Nevis.

  Mary wheeled in a trolley loaded with enough breakfast for six people—orange juice, melon, porridge, oat cakes, eggs, bacon, bangers, mushrooms, black pudding, toast, and marmalade. The smells of childhood Sunday mornings made Els tear up, and when she saw this, Mary stopped in the middle of pouring tea and made a sympathetic tsking sound.

  “Join me,” Els said.

  Mary finished pouring and set down the pot, but didn’t move.

  “I can’t bear to eat alone.” Els had intended it as a statement, but it came out as a plea.

  Mary sat stiffly and accepted a cup of tea but declined to eat. While they chatted about the village news, Els tried to make herself eat slowly, as she had in the Resort kitchen under Eulia’s scrutiny, and managed to consume at least enough for two. As the sun climbed, the plants in the conservatory breathed out their fragrances and Els caught a whiff of the gardenia, now grown as tall as she in its enormous cachepot painted with koi. Legend was the plant had been a gift from Harald to her mother when she was born.

  “Tell me about Mum,” Els said.

  “I heard she loved this room—spent a lot of time here, painting and just sitting. Reminded her of home.”

  It dawned on Els that her mother, though a banned subject of family conversation, had likely fanned gossip among the staff. She might have satisfied her curiosity had she only asked the right people.

  “I was told she doted on that plant,” Mary was saying, “but she could hardly take it along when she left, hurrying off as she did and the weather bitter at the time. Burtie’d have neglected the poor thing to death, but I loved its scent and I’d see to it whenever I was here.”

  “Why did she rush away?” Els asked.

  Mary’s gaze was still on the gardenia. “I’d only be repeating rumor,” she said. “Me mum said we weren’t ever to speak of it.”

  “Did Mum sing?”

  “Once at that last Christmas. I was almost seven. I remember the lovely cakes. She had a pretty voice—deep-like and strong. Me mum said she was in her cups to sing that way, but I enjoyed it.”

  “Was she kind to you?”

  “She yelled at everyone when she was in that mood, but never at Mum, nor me especially.” Mary shifted on her chair and looked at Els. “We all think ye’ll make a fine Laird.”

  Els rearranged the silverware on her plate. “I’m grateful for your confidence,” she said, but as she contemplated the ancestral flatware and thought of the unavoidable sale of the estate, her face fell. Mary squeezed her hand, excused herself, and clacked away toward the kitchen.

  Shredded from making hundreds of decisions every day, dealing with appraisers and auction houses, negotiating with Mr. Vodka’s solicitor over the meaning of “furnished,” bucking up the few staff who would remain, and bidding farewell with tears and stipends to those who would not, Els spent every evening in the study drinking scotch and staring into the fire. That afternoon, a month after Harald’s death, she’d signed the sale documents for Cairnoch, and the finality of it clanged through her. In all her business deals, she’d given little consideration to the fate of the workers once the owners took their money and ran, just as she would do now. She felt the mourning numbness leaving her and sadness sneaking into its place, like blood returning to a tingling limb. Tears, long held in check, began to flow.

  She’d propped her mother’s self-portrait on the study mantel. Under its deranged eye, she pulled out Cairnoch stationery, thought better of that, and switched to a legal pad.

  Dear Mum, she began, then sat for a half hour, at a loss for words, while she finished her scotch. She poured another, balled up the tear-splotched page, and started again:

  After Father died, I found that he had hidden your birthday messages, drawings, and paintings from me. I always believed you’ d never wanted to communicate with me. All my life I’ve felt rejected by you, and wondered what I di
d to drive you away.

  Now that I realize you tried to be in touch with me all those years, I’m mourning not just the loss of Father but the connection you and I might have had that was denied both of us. I would have jumped to visit you during school holidays, and I even secretly learned some Italian in case the opportunity was ever presented.

  Because nobody would speak to me about you, I know almost nothing. I hope we can meet, or at least correspond. I’ve had to sell Cairnoch and will be moving far away. I expect to be somewhat settled by Christmas. Please write to me c/o Mr. Timmons. He’ll see that I get anything you send, and I promise to reply.

  Your daughter,

  Eleanora

  She addressed the letter and left it on the entry hall table for Mary Partridge to post from the village. Though she imagined all sorts of replies, she braced herself for the possibility that there might be none at all.

  Early on her last morning at Cairnoch, Els pulled on her hiking clothes and went to find Ajax. She found him lying on his tartan bed next to the AGA stove, looking despondent. At her approach, he heaved himself to his feet and leaned against her thigh, his stubby tail wagging.

  “Can yi still make it up the Crag, boy?” she said. The dog barked and limped through the keeping room and out the scullery door, but he found his stride in the court and soon was leading her up the path through the heather and outcroppings.

  Snow dusted the ground and the air was frigid, but she was determined to make this pilgrimage, and she needed Ajax’s company as much as she’d needed Ariel’s after Mallo died.

  They stopped at the bothy, now looking well tended and recently used, and she took the tin cup she and Mallo had shared from the shelf. Standing in the open door, she watched her breath trail outwards—all the memories of that place escaping into the ether—then latched the door. She walked to the stream, dipped in the cup, and sipped, then held the rest for Ajax. When he was finished, she stuffed the cup into the pocket of her parka.