Then Echo, to her surprise and chagrin, just lost it, letting loose a flood of tears, sinking to her knees beside her mother, laying her head in Rosemay's lap as she had when she was a child. Rosemay stroked her with an unsteady hand, smiling.
Behind them John Ransome appeared in the hallway. Rosemay saw his reflection on a window pane.
She turned her head slowly to acknowledge him. Julia, oblivious, was turning the pages of her gossip weekly.
The expression in Rosemay's eyes was more of a challenge than a welcome to Ransome. Her hands came together protectively over Echo. Then she prayerfully bowed her head.
Peter double-parked in the street and was running up the stairs of Echo's building when he met Julia coming down with her Save the Trees shopping bag.
'They're a half hour gone, Peter. I was just on my way to do the marketing.'
Peter shook his head angrily. 'I only got off a half hour ago! Why couldn't she wait for me, what was the big rush?'
'Would you mind sittin' with Rosemay while I'm out? Because it's goin' down hard for her, Peter.'
He found Rosemay in the kitchen, a mug of cold tea between her hands. He put the kettle on again, fetched a mug for himself and sat down wearily with Rosemay. He took one of her hands in his.
'A year. A year until she's home again. Peter, I only let her do this because I was afraid—'
'It's okay. I'll be comin' around myself, two, three times a week, see how you are,'
'—not afraid for myself,' Rosemay said, finishing her thought. 'Afraid of what my illness could do to you and Echo.'
They looked at each other wordlessly until the kettle on the stove began whistling.
'Listen, we're gonna get through this,' Peter said, grim around the mouth.
Rosemay's head drooped slowly, as if she hadn't the strength to hold it up any longer.
'He came, and took her away. Like the old days of lordship, you see. A privilege of those who ruled.'
Echo didn't see much of Kincairn Island that night when they arrived. The seven-mile ferry trip left her so sick and sore from heaving she couldn't fully straighten up once they docked at the fishermen's quay. There were few lights in the clutter of a town occupying a small cove. A steady wind stung her ears on the short ride cross island by Land Rover to the house facing two thousand miles of open ocean.
A sleeping pill knocked her out for eight hours.
At first light the cry of gulls and waves booming on the rocks a hundred feet below her bedroom windows woke her up. She had a hot shower in the recently updated bathroom. Some eyedrops got the red out. By then she thought she could handle a cup of black coffee. Outside her room she found a flight of stairs to the first-floor rear of the house. Kitchen noises below. John Ransome was an early riser; she heard him talking to someone.
The kitchen also had gone through a recent renovation. But the architect hadn't disturbed quaint and mostly charming old features: a hearth for baking in one corner, hand-hewn oak beams overhead.
'Good morning,' John Ransome said. 'Looks as if you got your color back.'
'I think I owe you an apology,' Echo mumbled.
'For getting sick on the ferry? Everybody does until they get used to it. The fumes from that old diesel banger are partly to blame. How about breakfast? Ciera just baked a batch of her cinnamon scones.'
'Coffeecoffeecoffee,' Echo pleaded.
Ciera was a woman in her sixties, olive-skinned, with tragic dark eyes. She brought the coffeepot to the table.
'Good morning,' Echo said to her. 'I'm Echo.'
The woman cocked her head as if she hadn't heard correctly.
'It's just a—a nickname. I was baptized Mary Catherine.'
'I like Mary Catherine,' Ransome said. He was smiling. 'So why don't we call you by your baptismal name while you're here.'
'Okay,' Echo said, with a glance at him. It wasn't a big thing; nicknames were childish anyway. But she felt a slight psychic disturbance. As if, in banishing 'Echo,' he had begun to invent the person whom he really wanted to paint, and to live within a relationship that he firmly controlled.
The rocky path to the Kincairn lighthouse, where Ransome had his studio, took them three hundred yards through scruffy stunted hemlock and blueberry barrens, across lichen-gilded rock, thin earth, and frost- heaves. At intervals the path wended close to the high-tide line. Too close for Echo's peace of mind, although she tried not to appear nervous. Kincairn Island, about eight and a half crooked miles by three miles wide with a high, forested spine, was only a granitic pebble confronting a mighty ocean, blue on this October morning beneath a lightly cobwebbed sky.
'The light is fantastic,' she said to Ransome.
'That's why I'm here, in preference to Cascais or Corfu for instance. Clear winter mornings are the best.
The town is on the leeside of the island facing Penobscot. There's a Catholic church, by the way, that the diocese will probably close soon, or Unitarian for those who prefer Religion Lite.'
'Who else lives here?' Echo asked, blinking salt spume from her eyelashes. The tide was in, wind from the southeast.
