‘If you had opened my letter,’ he said, his face breaking into a smile, ‘you would have found that that was my suggestion, too. I would like you to come with me to London, to meet a friend of mine there. And I would like you to bring Fitz.’
Clare said nothing.
‘Of course, if you think it’s best, we can go to the police on the way, and tell them about the threat to your son –’
‘Fitz isn’t my son,’ said Clare. The words were not ones Fitz had ever heard her use; they seemed to spring out of her, unbidden and unlicensed. Her back had gone rigid. From under the green cardigan she was wearing, Fitz could see the sharp edges of her shoulder blades and the hard, round knucklings of her spine. She had slapped the full length of the brush down on the wooden surface of the table; it was hardly less rigid than the tendons in her hand. He saw every individual strand of her thick hair. He saw the minute quiver in her ankle where it suspended the heel of her right foot above the floor. He saw everything about her, about the room – the light – the prints framed on the walls – the books stacked on sagging shelves – the scuffed table – the chipped grandeur of the huge window – the dirt and mould that, try as she might, Clare could never quite scour from the latch – he saw nothing less than everything. Everything. What he would not have given to have seen more, to have heard less.
‘She left him with me. His mother.’
She.
‘I see,’ said Ned More, softly.
Left him.
‘No, you don’t,’ said Clare. ‘I might as well be his mother. She gave him to me. I was just a student. My own mother had just died. They showed up on my doorstep.’
‘His mother?’
‘She left him with me.’
Ned was holding her, but from where he stood Fitz could see well enough, though he could not see her eyes, that they refused to be held.
‘His mother?’ Ned repeated softly.
‘I think she was his mother. She left him.’
She. She. Left.
‘It’s just – I’ve always half expected someone would come for him. Waiting for that knock on the door. The letter in the post.’ Clare suddenly seemed to slump, or to uncoil; all the tautness left her, and her hands dropped to her sides. Almost in a whisper, she added, ‘I think he’s always half expected it, too.’
Fitz put all these words into his thoughts in just the way that Clare tidied up his room at night, before he slept. He could picture her closing each of the drawers of his little chest, one by one, until the room felt entirely clean again.
‘And now, look, here you are,’ said Clare.
There was a flash of wings, and a large, heavy bird settled in the side garden; after only an instant it let out a huge and piercing shriek. For the second time that afternoon, Ned More jolted, and cracked his head into the hanging sash above him. On this occasion there was neither embarrassment nor good humour. He simply crumpled on to the sill.
Clare jumped to her feet, knocking over her chair, and rushed forward to help him. She took another cloth napkin and poured water from the vase to dampen it, then held it to his head.
‘I’m grateful,’ he said, his words muffled by his arm. Fitz thought he was biting his shirtsleeve.
Clare dabbed at his head with the wet cloth, letting the cool water ooze on to his hair until it began to trickle down the nape of his neck. Then she put the cloth by.
It seemed like an age that they stood like that: Ned folded over the sill, Clare staring down at him without seeing him at all, and Fitz, alone in the empty hallway, reduced to little more than a crack in the door.
‘You’d better come in,’ Clare said.
It shouldn’t have, but it caught Fitz by surprise. Surprised to find that his legs moved when he willed it, he almost tripped over his own feet, stumbled, and caught himself silently on the wall. There hardly seemed any point in doubling back to the kitchen door, but he did it anyway; and when Clare turned into the hallway, he tried to make it seem as if he had just walked in.
For her part, she looked the same as always.
Fitz’s heart fortressed.
‘That was quick,’ she said, looking him up and down.
Fitz’s face smiled brightly, as bright as the green light that fell on one side of the hedge in the friary garden, a green light that was gold, as golden, or more, than gold.
‘You still have the book, you rascal.’ Clare pursed her lips theatrically at him, as if she were deciding whether or not to scold him. Her eyes weren’t up to the ruse, though, and she let it pass. She looked away. ‘Now come and help me with this chest.’
Together they dragged the chest of drawers away from the door, gouging the dark wooden floor despite Fitz’s best efforts to lift it. When the front door swung open at last in the still-rising wind, Ned More was standing behind it, holding the wet cloth up to the back of his slightly unsteady head. They got him seated in the armchair in the front room and – partly because there was a new chill beneath the massing clouds, and partly because he had nothing else to do – Fitz made a fire in the stove while Clare put on some tea. He knew just how to do it so that the paper would light the kindling, the kindling the logs, and every last piece of combustible material would flame, glow and ember, consumed into ash. He worked methodically. The silence suited them, but when the fire began to draw and crackle without heat, Fitz distracted Ned with stories about Shapur the Great, one of the
