Ashton Park (53 page)

“What news?” he asked. “Banff? Jerusalem? Belfast?”

“It’s from Catherine.”

“Ah. It’s a child on the way, isn’t it?”

“Don’t spoil my surprise.”

“Very well.” Sir William smiled. “Is Albert’s football team making a grand start to the season?”

Lady Elizabeth waved the letter in the air. “Don’t spout nonsense. We have our seventh grandchild. Catherine’s almost two months along.”

“Two months? Ha-ha.” Sir William swung his wife off her feet. “How we’ve been blessed. How we’ve been blessed by the Lord. We really must have a time of worship in the chapel tonight.”

“The child is due in March next year. Late in March or in early April.”

“Excellent. Splendid. That’s the Easter season. How wonderful that would be.”

He put his wife down but kept his arms around her. “The new airfield a going concern. Babies underfoot. Robbie and Shannon back on a three-month furlough in October. Edward and Charlotte and young Owen home for Christmas. The new houses almost up. Such a year. We never saw such a year.”

“Perhaps Mrs. Longstaff will bring out the ice cream for us at dinner tonight.”

“In celebration. Of course she will. There must be lorry loads of it. The household has been away since June.”

“Well, our airmen didn’t come down to Dover with us, my dear. That’s three families. Heaven knows what’s left.”

Sir William headed up the steps into the manor. “I will ask her directly.” Tavy opened the doors. “Good to be home, eh, Tavy?”

“It is. You have news, Sir William?”

“Do you know your Bible, Tavy?”

“The Bible, sir? I should think so, sir.”

“I have my quiver full. Do you take my meaning? My quiver full.”

Tavy watched him stride into the manor and thought a moment. Then he turned to Lady Elizabeth. “Another grandchild, my lady?”

“Indeed, Tavy, indeed. Catherine and Albert.”

“My goodness, ma’arm.” Tavy barked a laugh. “That’s the best news we’ve had out of Ireland all summer.”

“It is, isn’t it? Civil war and the Irish at each other’s throat. It’s desperate. And here we have our Anglo-Irish child. A new life, Tavy. It’s so much better than the killing and the dying.”

“So it is. So it always is. Only sometimes our race does forget, my lady. We forget, to our shame.”

She smiled. “And God reminds us with a baby. Thank you, Tavy. You’re quite the theologian today.”

He smiled back, smoothing his black dress jacket over his frame. “Just the Danforth butler, Lady Elizabeth.”

Emma was standing by the Ribble as it surged past the vicarage in a wide sweep. Sheep were grazing on both sides of the flow, their white vivid against the September green. She was thinking about the Romans who had maintained a garrison in Ribchester for three hundred years. How the soldiers must have missed the climate of home and the women they loved and their families. When they prayed to Jupiter, what did they ask for? The same things Christians and Anglicans asked for? How successful were their prayers?

A year ago when Vic lost her baby I would have said my prayers were quite unsuccessful. Now she has a boy and my brother Edward in Canada has a baby and Kipp and Christelle have their Matthew. And Cath, of all people, Cath is expecting. Here I have been railing against God for months—and against my Anglican minister husband—and God has opened womb after womb. If this were a parable it would be about grace. If it were a sermon I would be Job or Jonah or Mary Magdalene. I deserve nothing really. Yet all these blessings have been poured on my family. Why?

“It’s a lovely evening.”

Emma turned when she heard her husband’s voice. “Thank you for joining me. The Hinchcliffes are still at the vicarage with the children, I take it?”

“Everyone’s getting along fine. They told us to take our time.” He handed her a thick blue shawl. “I thought you might need this.”

“I do.” She tugged it over her shoulders. “Can we walk?”

They went along the bank of the river, both her hands knotted in the shawl as the sun dropped into the fields, Jeremiah walking beside her in a dark suit with the white Church of England collar at his throat. For several minutes she did not speak again until a rolling cloud of starlings made her look up and stop walking.

“Not a care in the world.” She drew the shawl more tightly around her. “I do not know what to make of Victoria’s baby boy. And everyone else’s. If God was looking to punish me—”

“Perhaps He is not.”

“No sermons.”

Jeremiah looked out over the river. “I am not preaching.”

“It wasn’t just the loss of Vic’s first child that put me over the edge. There was the war. There was Ireland. Blood and death and mayhem. How many mothers’ prayers were not answered in Dublin or Belfast today? The constables will show up at the door and say,
Sorry, we’re sorry, but
.”

Jeremiah did not reply.

“I thought about taking the children and leaving. I thought I should suffocate if I had to attend one more church service and smile and smile.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?” she demanded.

“The expressions on your face and your silences made it plain. And you mentioned separating yourself from me and the Church more than once.”

“I ought to have done it. Now I feel even more lost without all my anger.”

“I don’t understand what has been so pent up in you. You always acted as if you had a beautiful life at Ashton Park.”

“I did. But I also slipped the things that didn’t make sense under the carpet—the hurts, the deaths, the prayers that went unanswered. Something about the child’s death set me off. The things I’d stashed away erupted.”

Jeremiah went to put a hand on her shoulder and then pulled it back. She saw the movement but didn’t say anything.

“Now we have the kindness of God again with all the babies.” Emma sighed. “The brightness that comes with them and all the colors of childhood. I don’t know how to bring the two together, the dark and the light.” She bent and picked up a handful of pebbles. “Libby is none too well off because of the babies.”

Jeremiah frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry. She’s not about to burst apart. But she can’t bear children. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong. She and Michael have told no one. Not Mum and Dad and not his parents.”

“I’m sorry, Emma. I am. I may be a minister but I don’t pretend to understand it all. I only know there will always be both—dark and light, wheat and tares. Victoria lost a baby, now she has a second baby, but that doesn’t mean it can’t grow ill or that one of our own boys can’t contract a lethal disease, God forbid. Will you fly apart again when the next bad thing happens?”

“How should I know?”

“Good and evil, Emma. Year in, year out. But underneath it all there is still the love of God. It undergirds our world or there would be no world. There would be nothing left. So take heart at the blessings of infants born to Ashton Park. Thank God if you think of it. But tomorrow one of the people we love could be dead. One of the children could be dead. Yet still the love of God would be underneath it all.”

“That’s what you believe.” The river was shining in the twilight. “Why does there have to be wrong and brokenness at all if God is as much a God of love in this world as you say He is?”

“Why do we have a choice?” Jeremiah looked up at a sky that was darkening rapidly. “And why do some choose hate over kindness? Murder over forgiveness? While others choose love over revenge and mercy over destruction? We’ve landed in a world of decisions, Emma, and we want so badly to make all the right ones. But we don’t always do that, do we? Yet sometimes, it seems, it happens. I believe the grace of God covers all our choices, good or ill.”

“The Holy Bible speaks of judgment.”

“Our courts judge. God judges. I leave it at that.”

Emma folded her arms over her chest, clutching her shawl. “I wish I could live the way you speak. I wish I could live by the grace of God. I wish I could believe all things, even the worst, are covered by this love and that nothing good is lost, nothing fine forgotten, no sacrifice diminished.”

She looked at the sky as he was doing. Small stars began pierce to the dark and it looked to him as if she were counting them.

“I can’t pretend to have thought it out like you, Jeremiah. I don’t see the straight lines. I don’t see them converging in the distance. But I grant you the world isn’t all darkness even if it’s not all light. And God is not always hidden even if He’s often a great riddle to me.”

“As He is to me.”

Jeremiah felt her arm slip through his for the first time in over a year.

“Take me home,” she said. “I want to see our boys. I want to watch them play rough and tumble. I want to kneel beside them at bedtime and ask them to say their prayers. Take me to that.”

“Are you going to let me open my eyes yet?”

“I am not.”

Albert had Catherine firmly by the hand, carefully leading her out the door of their house onto a street wet with rain. People who noticed what was going on stopped to watch.

“Now?” she asked.

“All right.”

“You mean you weren’t going to tell me unless I asked?”

She opened her eyes. In front of her was a car of deep blue with flashes of gold trim. She put one hand to her mouth and the other on her stomach where she was just beginning to show.

“Albert Moore!”

“The young mother needs to ride in comfort. No more trams or cabs.”

“I don’t know how to drive.”

“I’ll teach you. Until then I’m your chauffeur.” He put on a black cap with a visor.

She laughed. “We can’t afford this.”

“Of course we can. Business is booming. Your father agreed it was high time we got one, especially with me being the head man over here.”

“The head man, are you?” She ran a hand over the front of the car. “I think it’s the loveliest motorcar I’ve seen on the streets. Everyone will notice you.”

“Don’t fret.” He put an arm around her and walked her into the street. He opened the passenger door. “The Irish Free State will soon gain the upper hand. All this nonsense will be over. Slide in beside the driver. I’ll take you for a spin. That’s what the Americans say.”

“Oh, no, I’ve got potatoes and carrots ready to go in the pot.”

“Come along, Cath. A half hour of your time. We’ll get out into the country. Take in the good air.”

Albert climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. After ten minutes in traffic he began to steer them past villages and stone fences and long green fields. Dairy cattle grazed in pastures glittering with light as the sun broke free of the cloudbanks. The roadways shone like mirrors. Catherine rolled down her window so she could take in the scent of hay and of the sharp November trees and of air rinsed of dust.

He glanced at her. “So what do you think then?”

She smiled, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes, one hand instinctively resting on her stomach and her baby. “I’m not thinking, Albert Moore. I’m just dreaming now.”