Page 52 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘I’ve stopped worrying about it,’ he said.

‘Are you sure you shouldn’t start worrying about it again?’

We took Maria’s weight between us as she swung up the steps. She giggled when we lifted her up the last. She was round, in shiny good health, but she was tiny and it wasn’t much more difficult than lifting a real child.

‘We don’t know until it’s ten months too late,’ he pointed out. ‘And then what do you say? I know you’ve been married for years and you’re devoted and you’re desperate for children, but that’s an especially deformed, especially stupid baby, so maybe stop at one, just in case the next one turns out to be a crocodile?’

I laughed and he looked surprised before he smiled too.

‘This is my house,’ Maria reported.

‘Keep the fire lit at the church or the pipes will crack,’ he said to me, before I could offer to come in and help.

‘I will. Night, Maria.’

Her mother met us at the door and asked in an unhappy voice if someone couldn’t come and cook some soup.

‘Night night,’ Maria said, hugging her doll. When she didn’t make any move to turn inside, Raphael towed her in backward by her apron strings. As I set out back to the church I heard them talking through the window. He was telling her how to cut vegetables, and her mother to sit down and be ill properly. I pushed my hand over my face, groggy with tiredness and Inti’s lethal wine and not sure I could have been trusted with a vegetable knife. Maria started to sing a song. It was the nursery rhyme whose words I’d forgotten, the one about the dragon. I hadn’t been able to fit the words to the tune because I’d been trying to do it in English. The Quechua fitted beautifully.

SEVENTEEN

I made some coffee at the church and drank it watching new snow float down outside. The wind spun it and the pollen in great frozen firework undulations between the pines, which creaked and leaned. I hoped Clem was all right. If he managed to keep up a good pace, he could have reached Crucero by now, although the snow must have slowed him down. With any luck, it hadn’t been so bad in the valleys.

Raphael came in with a blast of cold air and stray pollen motes. When I gave him some coffee, he looked at me in the way Navy wives do when their husbands get too much sea in them and start offering guests wine in mugs, but he drank it.

‘What Inti was talking about,’ he said, unprovoked. I turned back, surprised. I had been heating more milk for myself, hovering over the pan because everything boiled so low. ‘My uncle was the priest here seventy years ago. He was the . . . it’s complicated. There were thirty years between him and my mother so it’s odd, but he was my uncle. We look alike, says everyone. He disappeared in the woods. Priests do. We’re the only ones who can cross the border, and no one can cross to find us, so we tend to die out there. There are bears, wolves. That’s all it is.’ He sighed. ‘And people like telling stories. It’s not like there’s a playhouse to go to.’

‘Uh, shame. I was thinking how well you were doing for a hundred and ten.’

Raphael smiled, not wholly, as though it were a new and odd notion, to smile about it, with people who didn’t believe he had been stolen by fairies.

Not wanting to go to bed yet, I sat by the stove sketching a whitewood twig. He put a jug of water down next to it by way of telling me to be careful about sparks, so I put it in the jug for good measure. Opposite me he took out a ball of thread and tied one end of it to a hole bored in the table. He had Don Quixote open in front of him and he turned the page every so often. On to the main string sometimes went smaller strings, as if the main thought were having a side thought, and then sometimes the side strings had ancillary strings too, but not often.

When I moved my sketchbook, the letter in the back fell out. I was about to tuck it back in again when I realised it didn’t belong there any more. It came to me slowly, because it was the first time we had been sitting quietly without a baby or other things to do, and because it had slipped so far from the front of my mind that he was the priest at New Bethlehem. When Caroline had said the letter was for the priest, I’d imagined a tiny old Spaniard in a broad hat.

‘Oh. I forgot,’ I said into the quiet. ‘My grandfather wrote a letter. It’s for your uncle, I think.’ I hesitated. ‘But I said I would deliver it, so if I could just give it to you I can say to my mother that I did.’

‘Let’s see, then.’

I held it out.

He let the knots fall over the edge of the table, where they looked like nothing more literary than a tassel, and scissored the letter between his first two fingers. Having held the seal to the fire to give the wax some flex, he eased it up with the edge of a knife without breaking it.

I watched him unfold the thick paper, much thicker than Charles would ever have bought now. When the stove light seeped through it, there was only a line or so of text, written in the middle and ordinarily sized despite its isolation, but I couldn’t make out what it was. He turned the paper around for me to see.

Raphael

I find that I cannot come myself as I promised, and so I send you my son, who looks very like me, in the hope that he might stand in.

All my love,

Harry

‘Family name?’ I said.

‘What? Oh. Yes.’ He set the letter on his knees and seemed to struggle with something. I was nearly sure it was the idea of asking anything. It was too close to asking for something. ‘What . . . happened to him, do you know? Your grandfather.’

‘He was shot in India somewhere before I was born. I’m sorry, I don’t really know. I think he was caught in one of the rebellions.’