The door swung open again, this time revealing Charlotte, who had obediently removed her boots. In her striped socks and pink mac, she ran straight to Gemma and climbed into her lap. She wrapped her arms round Gemma’s neck in a fierce hug, as she did whenever they had been separated for more than a few minutes. But when she looked up, she was beaming, her face flushed and her eyes sparkling. Gemma thought she had never seen the child look happier.
“I jumped biggest,” Charlotte announced.
“Did not,” said Toby. At his grand age, he considered himself superior in all ways.
Duncan came into the kitchen. Tall, tousled, and as red-cheeked from the cold as the children, he looked quite as damp as Toby, if a bit cleaner. Glancing out the window, Gemma saw that the rain was coming down harder than ever.
“You, sport,” Duncan said severely to Toby, “are incorrigible.” Pointing at the muddy boot prints on the floor, he pulled some towels from the kitchen roll and handed them over. “Apologize to Auntie Winnie and mop up. And then”—looking almost as impish as Toby, he grinned at Gemma and abandoned his policeman voice—“Dad’s ordered us all outside, rain or not. He’s stage-managing at his most annoyingly coy, and he’s roped in Jack and Kit. Knowing Dad, I shudder to think.” He rolled his eyes for emphasis, and Gemma couldn’t help but smile. She had adored Duncan’s dad from the moment she’d met him, but Hugh Kincaid was not always the most practical of souls.
“He says he has a surprise for us,” Duncan went on. “And that we are absolutely, positively, going to love it. I think we’d better go see what he’s done.”
The rain came in waves that spattered against the windows of the converted boatshed like buckshot.
Kieran Connolly clenched his jaw, trying to ignore the sound, but the rumble of thunder over Henley made him shudder. It was just rain, he told himself, and he would be fine. Just fine, and the shed had withstood worse.
It was one of several such structures scrunched between the summer cottages on the small islands that dotted the Thames between Henley and Marsh Lock. Built of wood siding on a concrete pad, it had not been meant for human habitation, but it suited Kieran well enough. The single space provided him with a workshop, a camp bed, a woodstove, a primus, and a primitive toilet and shower. There was nothing more he needed—although he suspected that if Finn had been given his choice, he’d have preferred someplace that allowed him a run in the park without having to motor from island to shore in the little skiff Kieran kept tied up at his small floating dock.
Not that Finn couldn’t have swum the distance. A Labrador retriever, he was bred to it, but Kieran had taught him not to go in the water without permission. Otherwise, Kieran wouldn’t have been able to leave him when he rowed, as he did every morning, or he’d be sculling up and down the Thames with a big black dog paddling in his wake.
Almost every morning, Kieran amended, when the thunder rumbled again. He didn’t go out in storms. The boatshed shook in another gust and the windows rattled in concert. He jerked involuntarily, pain searing his hand. Glancing down, he saw a spot of blood on the fine sandpaper he’d been using to smooth a fiberglass patch on the old Aylings double he had upside down on trestles. He’d sanded his own damned knuckles. Shit. His hands were shaking again.
Finn whined and pushed his blunt snout against Kieran’s knee. The thunder cracked again and the shed vibrated like a kettledrum. Or an artillery barrage.
“It’s just rain, boy.” Kieran heard the tremor in his voice and grimaced in disgust. Some reassurance he was, sweating and quaking like a leaf. Pathetic. Making an effort to steady his hand, he folded the sandpaper and set it on his worktable.
But even if he could make his hand obey, he had no command over his knees. When they threatened to buckle, he staggered two steps to the wall and slid down with his back against it. He felt as if the very air were a massive weight, pressing him down, squeezing his lungs. Finn nuzzled him and climbed half into his lap, and as he wrapped his arms round the dog, he couldn’t tell which of them whimpered. “Sorry, boy, sorry,” he whispered. “It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay. It’s just a little rain.”
He repeated to himself the rational explanation for his physical distress.
The army doctors had told him that, as if he hadn’t known it himself. They’d also told him that he’d been heavily concussed, and that he’d suffered some loss of hearing. “Not enough,” he said aloud, and cackled a little wildly at his own humor. Finn licked his chin and Kieran hugged him harder. “It will pass,” he whispered, meaning to reassure them both.
The room reeled, bringing a wave of nausea so intense he had to swallow against it. That, too, was related to his middle ear, or so they’d told him. An inconvenience, they’d said. He slid a little farther down the wall, and Finn shifted the rest of his eighty-pound weight into his lap.
So inconvenient, along with the shakes and the sweats and the screaming in his sleep, that they’d discharged him.
He’d rowed at Henley in his teens, crewing for a London club. To a kid from Tottenham who’d stumbled across the Lea Rowing Club quite by accident, Henley had seemed like paradise.
It was just him and his dad, then. His mum had scarpered when he was a baby, but it was not something his dad ever talked about. They’d lived in a terraced street that had hung on to respectability by a thread, his dad repairing and building furniture in the shop below the flat. Kieran, white and Irish in a part of north London where that made him a minority, had been well on his way to life as a petty thug.
Kieran stroked Finn’s warm muzzle and closed his eyes, trying to use the memory to quell the panic, the way the army therapist had taught him.
It had been hot, that long ago Saturday in June, just after his fourteenth birthday. He’d stolen a bike on a dare, ridden it in a wild, heart-hammering escape through the streets of Tottenham to the path that ran down along the River Lea. And then, with the trail clear behind him, his legs burning and the sun beating down on his head, he’d seen the single shells on the water.
The sound of the storm faded from his consciousness as the memory drew him in.
He’d stopped, gazing at the water, all thought of pursuit and punishment gone in an instant. The boats were stillness in motion, graceful as dragonflies, skimming the surface of the mercury-gleaming river, and the sight had gripped and squeezed something inside him that he hadn’t known existed.
All that afternoon, he’d watched, and in the dimness of the evening, he’d pedaled slowly back to Tottenham and returned the bike, ignoring the taunts of his mates. The next Saturday he’d gone back to the river, drawn by something he couldn’t articulate, a longing that until then had only teased the feathery edges of his imagination.
Another Saturday, and another. He learned that the boat place was called the Lea Rowing Club. He began to name the boats; singles, doubles, pairs, quads, fours, and the eights—if the singles had made him think of dragonflies, the eights were giant insects, moving in a rhythm that seemed both alien and familiar and that made him think of the pictures of Roman galleys he’d seen in school history books.
And they talked to him, the oarsmen, when they noticed him hanging about. He was tall, even then. Awkward, scrawny, black-haired, pale-skinned even at summer’s height—all in all, not a very prepossessing specimen. But although he hadn’t realized it then, his inches had made him rowing material, and they’d been assessing his potential.
After a bit, they’d let him help load the boats onto the trailers or lift them back onto the trestles that waited in the boatyard like cradles. One day a man tossed him a cloth and nodded at a dripping single. “Wipe it down, if you want,” he’d said. Other days, it was a wrench to adjust the rigging, oil for the seat runners, filler for the dents in the fiberglass.
By that August, he’d become the club dogsbody, his mates forgotten, his dull terraced street subsumed by the river. He learned that the burly-shouldered man who gave him chores was a coach. And when one day the coach had looked him levelly in the eyes and handed him a pair of oars, the world had opened like an oyster, and Kieran Connolly had seen that he might be something other than a poor Irish kid with no future.
The Lea—and rowing—had given him that. His coach had encouraged him to join the army. He could row, Coach said, and get an education, too. And so he had done, training as a medic, rowing in eights and fours, and
