turned up on Monday, all smiley, and told us you’d regained consciousness, at first I didn’t believe him.”
“That’s what Daniel thought, isn’t it?” I said. I wasn’t sure how I knew this, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind. “He thought I was dead.”
After a moment Rafe sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he did. Right from the start. He thought you’d never made it to hospital.”
Watch your step around that one, Frank had said. Either Daniel was a lot smarter than I wanted to tangle with-that little exchange, before I went out, was starting to worry me again-or he had had reasons of his own for thinking Lexie wasn’t coming back. “Why?” I demanded, doing offended. “I’m not a wimp. It’d take more than one little cut to get rid of me.”
I felt Rafe flinch, a tiny half-hidden twitch. “God only knows,” he said. “He had some bizarro convoluted theory about the cops claiming you were alive to mess with people’s heads-I can’t remember the details, I didn’t want to hear it and he was being cryptic about it anyway.” He shrugged. “Daniel.”
For several reasons, I figured it was time to change the tone of this conversation. “Mmm… conspiracy theories,” I said. “Let’s make him a tinfoil hat, in case the cops start trying to scramble his brain waves.”
I had caught Rafe off guard: before he could help it, he gave a startled snort of laughter. “He does get paranoid, doesn’t he,” he said. “Remember when we found the gas mask? Him giving it that thoughtful look and saying, ‘I wonder if this would be effective against the avian flu?’ ”
I had started giggling as well. “It’ll look gorgeous with the tinfoil hat. He can wear them both into college-”
“We’ll get him a biohazard suit-”
“Abby can needlepoint pretty patterns on it-”
It wasn’t all that funny, but we were both helpless with laughter, like a pair of giddy teenagers. “Oh, God,” Rafe said, wiping his eyes. “You know, the whole thing would probably have been hysterical, if it hadn’t been so Godawful. It was like one of those terrible sub-Ionesco plays that third-years always write: great piles of meat pies popping out of the woodwork and Justin dropping them everywhere, me gagging in the corner, Abby asleep in the bath in her pajamas like some post-modern Ophelia, Daniel surfacing to tell us what Chaucer thought of us all and then disappearing again, your friend Officer Krupke showing up at the door every ten minutes to ask what color M amp;Ms you like best…”
He let out a long, shaky breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Without looking at me, he stretched an arm over and rumpled my hair. “We missed you, silly thing,” he said, almost roughly. “We don’t want to lose you.”
“Well, I’m right here,” I said. “I’m going nowhere.”
I meant it lightly, but in that wide dark garden the words seemed to flutter with a life of their own, skim down the grass and disappear in among the trees. Slowly Rafe’s face turned towards me; the glow from the sitting room was behind him and I couldn’t see his expression, only a faint white glitter of moonlight in his eyes.
“No?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I like it here.”
Rafe’s silhouette moved, briefly, as he nodded. “Good,” he said.
To my utter surprise, he reached out and ran the backs of his fingers, lightly and deliberately, down my cheek. The moonlight caught the tip of a smile.
One of the sitting-room windows shot up and Justin’s head popped out. “What are you two laughing about?”
Rafe’s hand dropped away. “Nothing,” we called back, in unison.
“If you sit out there in the cold you’ll both get earaches. Come look at this.”
They had found an old photo album somewhere: the March family, Daniel’s ancestors, starting in about 1860 with vein-popping corsets and top hats and unamused expressions. I squeezed onto the sofa next to Daniel-close, touching; for a second I almost flinched, till I realized the mike and the phone were on my other side. Rafe sat on the arm beside me, and Justin disappeared into the kitchen and brought out tall glasses of hot port, neatly wrapped in thick soft napkins so we wouldn’t burn our hands. “So you won’t catch your death,” he told me. “You need to take care of yourself. Running around in the freezing cold…”
“Check out the clothes,” Abby said. The album was bound in cracked brown leather and big enough that it took up both her lap and Daniel’s. The photos, tucked into little paper corners, were spotted and browning at the edges. “I want this hat. I think I’m in love with this hat.”
It was an architectural fringed thing, topping off a large lady with a mono-bosom and a fishy stare. “Isn’t that the lampshade in the dining room?” I said. “I’ll get it down for you if you promise to wear it to college tomorrow.”
“Good Lord,” Justin said, perching on the other arm of the sofa and peering over Abby’s shoulder, “they all seem terribly depressed, don’t they? You don’t look a thing like any of them, Daniel.”
“Thank God for small mercies,” Rafe said. He was blowing on his hot port, with his free arm draped across my back; he had apparently forgiven me for whatever it was that I, or Lexie, had done. “I’ve never seen such a goggle-eyed bunch. Maybe they all have thyroid problems, and that’s why they’re depressed.”
“Actually,” Daniel said, “both the protruding eyes and the sombre expressions are characteristic of photographs from that period. I wonder if it had anything to do with the long exposure time. The Victorian camera-” Rafe pretended to have a narcoleptic attack on my shoulder, Justin produced a huge yawn, and Abby and I-I was only a second behind her-stuck our free hands over our ears and started singing.
“All right, all right,” Daniel said, smiling. I had never been this close to him before. He smelled good, cedar and clean wool. “I’m just defending my ancestors. In any case, I think I do look like one of them-where is he? This one here.”
Going by the clothes, the photo had been taken somewhere around a hundred years ago. The guy was younger than Daniel, twenty at most, and standing on the front steps of a younger, brighter Whitethorn House-no ivy on the walls, glossy new paint on the door and the railings, the stone steps sharper-edged and scrubbed pale. There was a resemblance there, all right-he had Daniel’s square jaw and broad forehead, although his looked even broader because the dark hair was slicked back fiercely, and the same straight-cut mouth. But this guy was leaning against the railing with a lazy, dangerous ease that was nothing like Daniel’s tidy, symmetrical poise, and his wide-set eyes had a different look to them, something restless and haunted.
“Wow,” I said. The resemblance, that face passed across a century, was doing strange things to me; I would have envied Daniel, in some unreasonable way, if it hadn’t been for Lexie. “You do look like him.”
“Only less messed up,” Abby said. “That’s not a happy man.”
“But look at the house,” Justin said softly. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It is, yes,” Daniel said, smiling down at it. “It really is. We’ll get there.”
Abby slipped a fingernail under the photo, flicked it out of its corners and turned it over. On the back it said, in watery fountain pen, “William, May 1914.”
“The First World War was coming up,” I said quietly. “Maybe he died in it.”
“Actually,” Daniel said, taking the photo from Abby and examining it more closely, “I don’t think he did. Good heavens. If this is the same William-and it may not be, of course, my family has always been singularly unimaginative when it comes to names-then I’ve heard about him. My father and my aunts mentioned him every now and then, when I was a child. He’s my grandfather’s uncle, I think, although I may have that wrong. William was-well, not a black sheep, exactly; more like a skeleton in the cupboard.”
“Definitely a resemblance,” Rafe said; then, “Ow!” as Abby reached across and swatted his arm.
“He did fight in the war, in fact,” Daniel said, “but he came back, with some kind of infirmity. Nobody ever mentioned what, exactly, which makes me think it may have been psychological rather than physical. There was some scandal-I’m hazy on the details, it was all kept very hush-hush, but he spent a while in some kind of sanatorium, which at the time might well have been a delicate way of saying a lunatic asylum.”
“Maybe he had a passionate affair with Wilfred Owen,” Justin suggested, “in the trenches.” Rafe sighed noisily.
“I got the impression it was more along the lines of a suicide attempt,” said Daniel. “When he got out he
