The Silver Bough (29 page)

She didn’t think Ronan was a vampire. But she didn’t think he was simply and entirely human, either. The lure of his difference had been tugging at her ever since their gazes first intersected, and now an impatient desire flared up in her.

She went closer to him, so close that they were nearly touching, but still he didn’t move.

“It’s OK,” she said softly. She put her hands on his face and kissed him on the mouth; kissed him so long and passionately that he had to respond.

F
IVE O
’
CLOCK CAME
and went with no sign of Ashley. Kathleen closed the library only a few minutes after the normal time, but then hung around for a good ten minutes, peering through the leaded-glass windows of the Ladies’ Reading Room, expecting to see the girl come galloping along the Esplanade, breathless and horrified to discover that the big front doors were closed. It never happened.

Finally, mentally cursing the breed of tardy and unreliable teenagers, she went out to her car alone. She was awfully disappointed—not so much for herself, she thought, as for Ina McClusky. The old lady would have enjoyed a new young person’s company, the treat of being able to talk about the past to an interested listener.

Ina McClusky lived on the Ob, almost as far as Sandy Point, in the small fisherman’s cottage where she’d grown up. Her family had lived there for generations. She was the first to get a higher education, and she’d brought it back home, getting the librarian’s job in Appleton because of the wartime shortage of men. Kathleen wondered if the reason Ina had never married was that same war, which had killed so many. She thought of the engagement photograph she’d photocopied for Ashley. Ronan Lachlan Wall had come home from the war and, unlike many, he’d prospered. He’d also chosen to marry a woman fifteen years younger than himself and not someone of his own generation like, for example, the still-young librarian. There might have been class issues involved, too. Graeme had told her—before he got obsessed with folklore and geology, back when he was researching social history—that not only did the Ob and the toon keep themselves separate, but fishermen always married women from fishing families; they needed wives who understood their lives and could contribute the skills they’d learned from childhood. Ina had grown up in a fishing family, but she’d priced herself out of that marriage market. And a member of the Wall family wouldn’t marry so far beneath him. He’d be more likely to choose the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, someone who would have brought her own property to the marriage.

Class barriers still existed, they’d just changed along with people’s lifestyles. There were very few fishermen left; their wives, no longer needed to gut the fish or mend the lines, didn’t have to be born to fishermen, only brought up expecting to work hard for little reward. And the people at the top—the celebrities—well, they married other celebrities. Rock stars married actors, or models, or others with equally famous faces; they didn’t fall in love with unknown librarians.

In the nineteenth century there had been a regular ferry link to connect the Ob with the toon, carrying passengers and goods from one shore to the other; but these days, a car could make the journey on the road that curved around the head of the loch in about five minutes. As she parked on the narrow street in front of the bright blue cottage with white trim, Kathleen made a determined effort to put Dave Varney out of her head.

There was a knocker in the shape of a mermaid on the heavily varnished front door—an unusual touch of fantasy for the practical Miss McClusky, she thought, lifting the brass tail.

After a few seconds, the door was opened by a bent, white-haired old woman. Her narrow, sunken-cheeked face lit up. “Kathleen! What a lovely surprise, my dear! Do come in.”

“Hello, Ina. I’ve brought you some new books.”

“Ooh!” Her eyes narrowed still more as her smile grew wider, and she rubbed her hands together. “How nice! I can’t wait. Do you know, I was just wondering what I would read tonight. Please come in. I hope you’ll stay long enough for a cup of tea?”

“Thank you.” She followed her inside, noticing that the old woman seemed to bend even farther forward, her humped back even more prominent than it had been two weeks ago.

“Sit down, dear, and I’ll put the kettle on. Earl Grey, or ordinary?”

“Ordinary, please. My tastes are very common.”

“My friend, when I shared digs in Glasgow, always called it ‘builder’s tea.’”

Kathleen had heard this comment before, but smiled as if it were new, and sank down onto the sturdy old two-seater couch. The room was small and crowded with a lifetime’s accumulation of things, but tidy and dust-free as always. For once there was no fire in the grate, but everything else was exactly as she remembered it, from the china ornaments on every available surface to the television in the corner which wore a lace tablecloth, as if it were a caged bird that had to be kept dark and quiet during the day.

Ina soon returned with a tea tray, and once she’d made sure her guest was comfortable, with a mug of milky tea and a pile of cookies, both chocolate and plain, began to quiz her about the library. Even though she’d retired more than twenty years ago, she still took a keen and somewhat proprietary interest in what went on there. These conversations could be tricky when they touched on decisions made at headquarters, so Kathleen tried to restrict them to book chat and innocuous gossip about people who used the library. Ina particularly enjoyed tales of visiting Americans and Canadians in search of their Appleton roots.

Evading her question about when their library would be catching up to the rest of the country by getting computers, she offered, “We had a young American girl in today, looking for information about her grandmother. I think you might remember her—Euphemia MacFarlane?”

Ina frowned. “You think I knew her?”

“I thought you might remember something about her. She was the Apple Queen in nineteen fifty, and—”

“Phemie! Phemie MacFarlane—I ken who you mean, now. She was the lassie who ran away. But she’s much younger than I am—she was only a schoolgirl last time I saw her.”

“She’s dead now,” Kathleen said gently.

Ina shrugged. “So’s the town, and long before her.” She fixed her eyes on her guest. “She was the Apple Queen. After she left, the crop failed.”

“Oh, but that’s—I mean, she couldn’t be to blame for something like that. That’s what’s known as an act of God, isn’t it? It’s because of the weather, the soil, I don’t know, but—”

“People blamed her.”

“That’s not fair.”

She smiled mirthlessly. “Life isn’t fair—you’re old enough to know that, Kathleen.”

“Do
you
think it was her fault?”

She pursed her lips and set down her mug. “Look at it this way. She was the Apple Queen. If all had gone well, she’d have had all praise for it.”

“And if it hadn’t? Look, we know the apple crop failed.”

“But it would have been all right if she’d stayed.”

Kathleen gulped her tea, wondering how soon she could leave and still be polite. Did Ina believe what she was saying, or was she playing devil’s advocate? She glanced at the faded blue eyes and didn’t say anything.

After a moment, Ina went on. “She was supposed to marry Mr. Wall. That was
her
choice—nobody forced it on her; if she didn’t want him, there were plenty other young maids who did. He was the last of the Walls. He owned the cider mill and the orchards, and there was more—a big house, land, and stocks and savings, I’ve no doubt. One bad harvest didn’t have to mean the end for him, not if he’d stayed. If he’d had his loving wife beside him. But she ran off and he lost the heart to stay. He was gone within a month of her. I don’t know what became of him, but without him the business collapsed like a house of cards, and with it, the town.

“It wasn’t just himself he took away, he took his fortune. It turned out that he’d mortgaged the mill and all his lands, bought his escape at a very high price for the town. Except for that, it could have been very different. One bad harvest didn’t have to mean the end, but there was no way to ride it out. There was nothing to secure a new loan, and there were all his debts to pay.”

“I see,” said Kathleen, taking a long, relieved breath. “So that’s why you blame Phemie MacFarlane. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to blame Mr. Wall? He sounds like the villain of the piece. Maybe Phemie
had
to run away, to save herself.”

“People think too much about themselves. What about helping others? What about saving the community? Phemie was no victim. I always thought they were in it together, and they laid their careful plans, and ran away from here intending to get together somewhere else.”

“Well, they didn’t,” she said firmly. “Phemie MacFarlane married an American, a man called Kaldis. And she would never say anything about where she’d come from. Her son didn’t know he had cousins in Scotland until after her death.”

“And what about Ronan Wall?”

Kathleen set down her empty mug. “I don’t know. He disappeared.” She took a chance. “What was he like?”

Ina flinched. “You ask me? Why do you think I would know anything about him?”

She smiled placatingly. “I thought you knew everyone in the town—all those years in the library.”

“
He
never came in. Not that he was a philistine, mind you, but he didn’t need it. He had the money to buy plenty of books. He took two newspapers, and he had a regular account with a bookseller in Edinburgh, just like his grandfather.”

“His grandfather the architect?”

“That was his only living relative.”

“Did you ever meet him? I mean Alexander Wall.”

“He died when I was a wee lass. And Mr. Lachlan, that was his uncle, he died before I was born, of course; died before the library was built. Now, there was an interesting and learned old gentleman! My mother met him a few times. She used to find things for him on the shore—all the children round about knew that he was a collector who’d pay for any treasures they might find when they were beachcombing.”

Kathleen remembered hearing about Lachlan Wall’s collection of oddities. “What sort of treasures did your mother find?”

The old woman’s face became even more shriveled in thought. “I should be able to tell you…but I can’t rightly call them to mind.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“We could ask her.”

“Who?” Kathleen blinked in confusion.

“Who were we talking about?” Ina rebuked her. “My mother! Would you like to speak to her?”

Kathleen swallowed hard. “I had no idea your mother was…still with us.”

“Certainly my mother is still with us. She’s upstairs. Will I take you to meet her?”

There being no polite way to refuse, she nodded agreement and got to her feet. Even if she’d given birth at a ridiculously early age, Ina’s mother would now be well past one hundred years old, and while that was not absolutely impossible, Kathleen wondered why this was the first she’d heard of her.

She followed Ina’s bent and slowly moving form out of the sitting room, into the narrow hallway, and up a short, steep flight of stairs and wondered how she managed to look after someone even older and more frail than herself. The house seemed too small to accommodate a live-in nurse, but maybe someone came in daily to help.

“Knock knock,” called Ina after pausing to catch her breath at the top of the stairs. “Are you decent, Mother? We have a visitor.”

She heard a frail wisp of a voice reply, although she couldn’t make out the words, then Ina opened a door saying, “Now, Mother, here’s a treat! Someone come to talk to you. Go in, Kathleen, dear, go in.”

The room was small, stale-smelling and murky, the orange-and-yellow curtains drawn across the window letting in only a faint light. There was a lamp beside the bed, but the combination of a heavy, tasseled shade and low-wattage bulb meant it did little to relieve the gloom. She noticed that the lamp shade also bore a thick, furlike coating of grey dust, and in contrast to the careful housekeeping in evidence downstairs, the room was a mess. The floor and bedside table were littered with dirty plates and cutlery, empty cups, used tissues, and crumpled wads of cling film.

Lying in the long, narrow bed, propped up against a stack of lumpy pillows, with a box of tissues and a stack of magazines spilling over beside her, was a little old lady. Her eyes appeared unnaturally large and luminous in her wizened head, reminding Kathleen of a lemur. On her head she wore an old-fashioned, lace-trimmed white cap, tied under her chin, like a baby’s bonnet, and her shoulders and torso were swathed in a number of pastel-colored shawls and scarves: yellow, pink, and blue.