I made some coffee at the church and drank it watching new snow float down outside. The wind spun it and the pollen in great frozen firework undulations between the pines, which creaked and leaned. I hoped Clem was all right. If he managed to keep up a good pace, he could have reached Crucero by now, although the snow must have slowed him down. With any luck, it hadn’t been so bad in the valleys.
Raphael came in with a blast of cold air and stray pollen motes. When I gave him some coffee, he looked at me in the way Navy wives do when their husbands get too much sea in them and start offering guests wine in mugs, but he drank it.
‘What Inti was talking about,’ he said, unprovoked. I turned back, surprised. I had been heating more milk for myself, hovering over the pan because everything boiled so low. ‘My uncle was the priest here seventy years ago. He was the . . . it’s complicated. There were thirty years between him and my mother so it’s odd, but he was my uncle. We look alike, says everyone. He disappeared in the woods. Priests do. We’re the only ones who can cross the border, and no one can cross to find us, so we tend to die out there. There are bears, wolves. That’s all it is.’ He sighed. ‘And people like telling stories. It’s not like there’s a playhouse to go to.’
‘Uh, shame. I was thinking how well you were doing for a hundred and ten.’
Raphael smiled, not wholly, as though it were a new and odd notion, to smile about it, with people who didn’t believe he had been stolen by fairies.
Not wanting to go to bed yet, I sat by the stove sketching a whitewood twig. He put a jug of water down next to it by way of telling me to be careful about sparks, so I put it in the jug for good measure. Opposite me he took out a ball of thread and tied one end of it to a hole bored in the table. He had Don Quixote open in front of him and he turned the page every so often. On to the main string sometimes went smaller strings, as if the main thought were having a side thought, and then sometimes the side strings had ancillary strings too, but not often.
When I moved my sketchbook, the letter in the back fell out. I was about to tuck it back in again when I realised it didn’t belong there any more. It came to me slowly, because it was the first time we had been sitting quietly without a baby or other things to do, and because it had slipped so far from the front of my mind that he was the priest at New Bethlehem. When Caroline had said the letter was for the priest, I’d imagined a tiny old Spaniard in a broad hat.
‘Oh. I forgot,’ I said into the quiet. ‘My grandfather wrote a letter. It’s for your uncle, I think.’ I hesitated. ‘But I said I would deliver it, so if I could just give it to you I can say to my mother that I did.’
‘Let’s see, then.’
I held it out.
He let the knots fall over the edge of the table, where they looked like nothing more literary than a tassel, and scissored the letter between his first two fingers. Having held the seal to the fire to give the wax some flex, he eased it up with the edge of a knife without breaking it.
I watched him unfold the thick paper, much thicker than Charles would ever have bought now. When the stove light seeped through it, there was only a line or so of text, written in the middle and ordinarily sized despite its isolation, but I couldn’t make out what it was. He turned the paper around for me to see.
Raphael
I find that I cannot come myself as I promised, and so I send you my son, who looks very like me, in the hope that he might stand in.
All my love,
Harry
‘Family name?’ I said.
‘What? Oh. Yes.’ He set the letter on his knees and seemed to struggle with something. I was nearly sure it was the idea of asking anything. It was too close to asking for something. ‘What . . . happened to him, do you know? Your grandfather.’
‘He was shot in India somewhere before I was born. I’m sorry, I don’t really know. I think he was caught in one of the rebellions.’
His shoulders stiffened as though that was a horrible thing to hear. I had been going to guess at dates, but I stopped, uncomfortable and suddenly not sure if the friends of older relatives here had an importance they didn’t to me. He didn’t explain why he was interested and only sat looking down at the letter for long enough to have read it twice more. Instead of throwing it in the fire, he folded it up again along its old lines and then once more, to make it small enough, and put it into his breast pocket.
‘Is it important?’ I said. ‘I could find out what happened to him exactly, when I get back.’
‘No. None of my business, sorry.’ He flicked open his book again and wound up a pollen lamp to sit on the opposite page, then the new one, the one made from the clocks I’d bought, to hold like a torch. The clockwork was loud in the quiet. His sight must have been bad, because on a white page the two lamps together were almost too strong.
‘I’ll go to bed,’ I concluded, too tired to think in a straight line any more, never mind around intergenerational connections across the Atlantic. There was no need for any more hot water, but he put another log on the fire.
I pulled the chapel door to behind me but not shut, because the latch was rusty. Through the glass pipe that came up just beside the frame, a little translucent salamander glided by on the current, smiling, then disappeared into the dark further along the wall where the pipes were only a gleam. In the kitchen, Raphael was leaning forward, watching the fire with his wrists hanging from his knees. Where I was standing to change into my night things, as close to the pipes as I could get without burning myself, I could still see him, just through the half-inch gap between the door and the wall. He took out the letter again and I thought he would burn it, but he only sat holding it open. Abruptly he held it wide of himself. I didn’t understand until he set it down and pressed his hand over his mouth so that he could cry without making any sound. I tipped the door open, just enough to make it creak. It made him jump. I put my hand out to say I hadn’t meant it to.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Aren’t you going to bed?’
‘Not now, no.’ I went back to sit with him, then put my arm across him when he tried to get up. ‘If you say you’re going out for firewood or something I’ll follow you, so don’t, my leg hurts and I still can’t breathe properly.’
He looked like he might argue, but didn’t. I leaned both hands on the hook of my cane.
‘Have you been to India?’ he asked after a while. The grit and the broken stones in his voice were gone. He sounded much younger. The fire clicked.
‘I have. I used to live there. I was an opium smuggler.’
‘You were a what? I thought you were in the Navy?’
‘I grew up in the Navy. But the family have always been gardeners and I was sharked quite young by the East India Company and their expeditionary arm. But India, yes. For about a year. I used to oversee a poppy plantation and then take the opium to China. It’s nice there. Hot, but nice.’
‘Is it common, then, to . . .’
‘To live in India, very. Part of the Empire. Everyone speaks English, so it’s an easy place to live.’ I hadn’t meant to say any more, but he scanned the cinders for something else to ask, so I tried to sift through some memories of it. ‘Most people go in through Malabar. Which is . . . the army garrison, so every second white man is in a red coat. It’s bloody odd, it feels like being on a battlefield, but there’s no fighting there now. And there are lovely guesthouses and hotels everywhere, for all the East India Company clerks. It’s rich, because everyone from abroad spends their money there. I think it’s the best place I’ve ever lived. The first week, before I moved north, I had to wait for my manager at a hotel, and there was a swimming pool. In the room. And they had a tame tiger in the foyer. It was a sort of joke on new people. Everyone thinks it’s a rug and then it sits up and answers to Gregory.’
He smiled. ‘Is there such a thing as a tame tiger?’
‘Tame or stupid, I don’t know. It liked it when guests gave it wool to play with. And then if it got used to you, you’d open your door in the morning and outside would be a hug from an unexpected tiger.’ I paused, feeling strange, because I’d never told anyone about it. There had been no one to tell. Charles hated that I’d left the Navy and wouldn’t hear a word about the EIC, and Clem and Minna knew it all already, because they had travelled even as children and had no sense of the exotic, only the less worn-out. ‘I’ve forgotten a lot. If you go somewhere . . . very different to home, even for a long time, the memory feels like a dream when you get back. But the general impression is hot and flowers everywhere.’
In the time I’d been talking, his breath had evened out again but there was, like the stacks, a brittleness in him and a glass core. I didn’t ask him again what was wrong. It was none of my business. He twisted his wrist to move the cross on his rosary out of the way, then pushed his abused fingers together, slowly. I didn’t think he was praying.
‘All right?’ I said, even though I knew he wasn’t.
‘Mm. See you in the morning.’