Arcadia (58 page)

They have a dull gleam in the light of the fire. They're so smooth and dark they look wet. Rory falls into the black hole and feels the whole universe turn itself inside out.

Iz leans forward to look. She glides a fingertip over them.

“Acorns,” she whispers, as if they're exactly what she was expecting.

“I don't understand what the boy is doing but I take them anyway. Then . . .” She rubs her face, drawing a slow breath. “The sun came over the hills. Suddenly there's light everywhere. I feel like I'm swimming in it. Everything's too bright to look at. The next thing I remember, I'm standing alone again. No boy. But I'm holding these, which he gave me.”

Rory remembers too. How could he not? It was only this morning, or afternoon perhaps. He scooped the acorns out of the fountain and put them in her hand himself.

“Ever since then I carry them. Day and night, all the time. I never take this off except to change the string. Not until now.”

“May I?” Iz says. She's completely fascinated by the acorns. They're just random acorns. Rory could have picked up twigs or leaves, there was all sorts of other stuff in the pool. But Silvia lets Iz take them and turn them over between her fingers, one by one.

“It was you, Rory,” Silvia says. “When I saw you on the island, in those ruins, I recognize you straightaway. Even before you tell me your name. Same face, same age, same size, everything. Even your voice is the same though you spoke to me in Romani then and now in English. Why do you think I told Lino to bring you to us, told you everything about us? Do you think I would say who we are, where we're going, if you are just any English boy on that island?”

Rory's got no answer.

“That first time I meet you, on that road, in Arcadia, I think afterwards you must be like a god.”

Even though he's floating around in the middle of his black hole at the center of an unmoored inside-out universe, that gets through to him.

“Me?” he says.

“You know these things about me. You're just a boy alone but you speak Romani, you say you want to help me. Then the sun rises and”—she raises a hand and flicks the fingers open—“you disappear.”

“But—”

“Then twenty years later I see you on that island where the storm blows me, and you're still a boy, not older, not younger. Was I right, Rory? Are you the god?”

He's blushing madly. She's totally serious. He's never met anyone who does serious like Silvia. You can't possibly miss it.

“She had an acorn with her,” Iz says. “Iggy did.” To his relief, Iz is concentrating equally seriously on something different. She's staring at the little brown pellets as if they might be God too. Perhaps everything is. Perhaps the sodding cat's actually a god. Rory's so far out of his depth he's thinking about standing up and announcing he'll go to bed now, thanks very much, though he suspects that if he tried getting out of his chair he'd fall over. “On my way here from London I met a man who'd known Iggy,” Iz goes on. “He ended up giving it to me, the acorn. He told me it was hers. He told me it was the only thing she cared about.” She looks at Silvia. “You don't know why she'd have carried an acorn with her?”

“She used to call me Little Acorn. Like that, in English. Little Acorn. It's my name, Silvia Ghinda. In Romanian
ghinda
is acorn. I thought that's why the boy gives them to me that day. It's like he's giving me myself.”

“She fled,” Iz says. “That's all I know. She was terrified of something. And of the sun, terrified of the sun. That same man I met, he told me she never went outdoors except at night. She did get back to England somehow. That was ninety-four, it must have been quite soon after she left you. She wouldn't see any of us. She sent us all a letter. The same letter for everyone, I mean, all her family, everyone she knew. I'll never forget the day I read it. She said she'd discovered she was a sinner and her only hope was Jesus's forgiveness. She said she was going into hiding and none of us should look for her or expect to hear from her ever again.”

“Jesus's forgiveness?” Silvia says, incredulous. She takes the acorns back from Iz.

“Yes. She wrote about giving herself into God's protection. I found out later she joined one of those communities. A Christian retreat. Very near here, actually.”

Silvia looks up sharply. “She lived near here?”

“Very near. Just a few miles away, in the days when that meant anything. I can show you on the map if you like.”

“What's it called?” Rory says, though he knows. He's definitely not God, but he does have the strange feeling that the whole of the universe has somehow ended up inside him, instead of the other way around.

“What? The place?”

“That community you were talking about.”

“It was in the grounds of an estate called Trelow.”

“Thought so,” he says, which makes both women look at him with widened eyes. “That's where I found you,” he tells Silvia.

“I don't understand,” Iz says.

“Just now. Earlier on today, I mean. When I came into the Valley and was wandering around. I got to that place. Trelow. I saw the name on the signs. That's where Silvia was when she didn't know who she was. I mean
when
, when she was. She didn't know how old she was; she thought she was a child. She thought she was somewhere else. Then that god showed up and emptied her out completely.” If he knew how to do it he'd explain about giving her the acorns, about how everything she remembers happening ages ago in that place called Arcadia actually happened earlier on today, but there are things words just won't do, apparently. “It was definitely that place,” he goes on, because they both look like they're having a hard time believing him. “There were signs for a community center.”

“She lived here?” Silvia says. “So close to where we are?”

“I didn't find out myself until I was nearly here,” Iz says. “I wasn't looking for her, I was looking for . . . Someone else.” She's kneading her hands against each other. “I even found some things that belonged to her. Something she wrote, though you couldn't read it anymore.”

Silvia has that look on her face which makes Rory suspect she's forgotten there's anyone else in the room. “I found her then,” she whispers.

“She must have been with the community two years or so. I never heard from her. She promised we wouldn't and she meant it. As always.”

“Two years?” Silvia says. “Then what?”

“She got pregnant. I can tell you exactly when that was. It would have been January of 'ninety-six. The Christians obviously didn't approve. She wasn't married or anything. So they made her leave. She . . .” Iz is hunched over herself in her chair now. The mess that's left of her hair hides her face. “She had the baby alone. That's what killed her. In the end, I mean. She had the baby, a boy, and she brought it to . . .”

Rory watches her squeeze her hands between her thighs.

“She died quite soon afterwards, I think,” Iz goes on. “She suffered terribly from the birth.”

“The child?” Silvia says.

“The boy survived,” Iz whispers, with a minute shake of her head, which means something like
I can't say anything more about this or I'll die myself.

“My brother,” Silvia says, with a smile.

Startled, Iz looks up.

“She always called me her daughter. I think she means after we come to England and she adopts me, but she says, No, Silvia, as soon as I took you away we become mother and child.” Silvia turns to Rory. “I didn't tell you the truth. Or Lino, or Per. I don't come all this way to find a magic ring.” Just like the Professor said, Rory thinks. He should have known, really. “I said this because I need men to help me, the world's too dangerous to travel on my own. But always I was only looking for her. For Ygraine. Always, all those years, the only thing I want, it's to find her again. That's why I make a way to leave you and Per and Lino when I know I'm close.”

She stares at him, calmly unapologetic. She's not the sort of person you can imagine being sorry for anything they've done.

“You went all that way looking for someone who's been dead for years?”

“I don't think so.”

“You don't think she's dead?” Iz says. Her voice has gone scratchy with distress.

“Maybe it's that. Or maybe she left something behind that's here still.” She pushes herself across the rug to crouch in front of Iz, arms resting on her knees. “All my life until today,” she says, “I know what lies ahead of me. I know that I find what I am looking for. I can't remember what happened to me after I came in the Valley and now my gift is gone but listen, listen.” She shakes Iz gently but insistently. “I found your sister. Or I found part of her, or what remains from her, whatever she leaves behind. It's true. Maybe I'll never remember now but I know it's the truth. Always, always.”

Iz is shaking her head in despair. “Don't,” she says. “Please don't. She's dead, and her boy's lost. It's all finished. Nothing happens here. Nothing more can happen.”

“Look!” Rory says.

The night sky has filled with stars. Behind the muted reflection of firelight in the three sash windows there's a great chorus of faraway light, like moonlight scattered across the sea except permanent, motionless, and hard, and spread from horizon to horizon. “Look!” he says again, and as the three of them turn to see they hear a sound. It might be falling from the stars themselves it's so beautiful, though it's just one voice, a single pristine carol singing on behalf of the innumerable pinpricks of silence.

The two women stand up. They all go to the window. You can't not go to the window, that's how amazing the stars are. It's like the sky's disappeared entirely and there's absolutely nothing, not a bubble of air, not a mote, not a molecule between the earth they're standing on (if it is even still the earth) and the billion suns in the unthinkable distance.

“Holly,” Iz whispers. “I've never heard her sing like that before.”

A deep scraping noise echoes down the hallway, making them all jump. The old front doors of the house have just been pushed open. As if in confirmation, a trickle of cold air washes in around their ankles. They all look at each other. Only Silvia has the presence of mind to move: she goes out into the corridor. The doors scrape and creak again, opening wider. Iz clutches at Rory's shoulder.

“Oh yeah,” he says, slightly ashamed. He should have mentioned this before. “Rose said something about someone coming. Back. Someone coming back.”

Iz turns a slow look on Rory, the kind of look which feels like it might abolish speech altogether. Silvia calls from the hallway.

“There are people at the door,” she says.

R
ory's never liked watching adults get emotional. His mother cried a lot after Dad and Jake and Scarlet left, and it made him feel terrible, like she expected comfort from him which he didn't know how to give. So as soon as someone notices him again he says he's very tired and is there somewhere he can go to bed?

It's not true, though. He's not tired. That's why he's still awake. The bed feels lumpy and crusty and smells of maybe sawdust or straw, something clean and dry but uncared for. It's enormous. It's high off the floor and so wide he can't reach both sides with his arms out. It's one of those four-poster beds, with curtains to make it into a little room of its own, though he asked Silvia to make sure they wouldn't close. He can still hear noises from downstairs. It sounds like they've calmed down a bit. He's propped up on a big doughy pillow, eyes wide open. Starlight picks out details of a bare wooden room: carved leaves and berries in the mantelpiece, a bowl on the floor, the drooping tail of a rocking horse.

Silvia sounds much louder than the others, or clearer at least. He can't quite hear the words, though. Perhaps she's telling her story all over again.

After a while—a long while, perhaps—he hears footsteps on the gravel in front of the house, outside the window of his room. He climbs across the bed and looks out. The panes of the window are diamonds of cloudy glass in a frame of iron, so it's hard to see, but it looks like the man and Iz are going around the house towards the garden and the woods. They're walking pressed right up against each other, arm in arm. Sometime later (he's still sitting in the window seat, caught in the starlight like a moth) they come back. The man's carrying a big jug, cradling it to his chest in a way which suggests it's heavy. Full of water, perhaps, from the well which cures every illness of body or soul. For the burned woman, then, who could obviously use it. They're about to reach the steps at the front of the house when the angel appears, blotting out a swathe of the sky like an animated hole. It falls to earth beside them and says something to the man. Rory can hear the sound of its voice through the window, though not the words, if they even are words. It's like a saw struggling through a tough branch. The man looks up at the window where Rory's watching.

So Rory goes back to bed.

Another while later the cat appears, hopping onto the bed and prodding its way around the covers until it finds a comfortable niche on top of his legs. By this time the voices downstairs are beginning to go quiet. Some of the others come up the stairs past the open door of his room, candlelight accompanying them. He hears the unmistakable shuffle of the burned woman, and Silvia's confident stride. He wishes Silvia would come in to check on him but she doesn't. He thinks of nights at the Abbey, those times when his mother couldn't or wouldn't look after him at Parson's.
She just needs to be on her own for a bit,
Viola would tell him.
It'll all be all right in the morning.
He doesn't know if he's even in the same world as the Abbey anymore. To them he's probably just another lost person now, gone like everyone else who's not a girl or a woman. They'll have gritted their teeth and told each other, All we can do is carry on, keep working, survive another winter.