Away by Jane Urquhart

Author:Jane Urquhart [Urquhart, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical, Adult, Romance
ISBN: 9781551994239
Publisher: Emblem Editions
Published: 1993-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

“Her eyes,” Exodus said, now, to Brian, “glittered a little with amusement when she asked this.”

Brian’s own eyes were shining with tears but he nodded, remembering his wife’s sudden, delicate displays of humour.

“I finally answered her,” said Exodus Crow. “I said that I believed her, because I did.”

Brian began to move around the cabin lighting lamp after lamp, pulling lanterns and candles out of cupboards and down from shelves and lighting them too. He wanted a sudden brilliance to fill the room, to clarify what the tall man was telling him. “But I am her husband,” he said, a taper burning in his hand.

Exodus agreed that this was the case and that the two children, who had pulled their chairs close to the table, were her children. “And they still are,” he said. “In this world. She was from an island in the other world. And I was her friend. The one from the water was not of this world. He was her spirit-guide.”

“I taught her to read.” Brian looked instinctively towards a pile of books at the other end of the table.

“I know, and you taught her about distant lands. She told me. And she told me that you knew that she had been, as they say on the island you came from, ‘away.’ But because you did not believe this, you could not see when she went away again.”

“To live in the lake,” said Eileen.

“To live beside the lake,” corrected Exodus. “Perhaps now she lives in the lake.”

Brian lit the last coal-oil lamp. “Had she chosen to come back … I loved her.” He paused. “But she didn’t come back,” he said.

“There is this fierce love in all of us for that which we cannot fully own,” said Exodus.

The interior of the cabin was so bright now that Eileen’s eye-lashes shone and several miniature candles were visible, reflected in her eyes. Beyond the walls, the light from the cabin windows moved across the snow, onto the face of the frozen woman. Then, as the night grew more agitated, and as snow lifted from the ground like large skeins of silk, her face darkened, and shone, like a beacon on a distant shore.

“The whole world is an island,” said Exodus, “and all who live in it are island dwellers – walkers on surfaces, floaters on water, Standers on mountains. No one is ever in anything until they have been touched by what she was touched by.”

“I wanted to be a poet,” said Brian, “but there was nothing in it, my poetry.”

“She had songs that she had made for the water-spirit from the otherworld island and they were pleasing,” Exodus addressed Liam, now, respectfully, as if he were a man of the same age. “She sang them with a good voice.”

“I haven’t heard my wife’s voice for seven years. Why didn’t you make her come back?”

Exodus turned to Brian. “After I had seen her the first time I dreamt I saw a golden fish who sang in words I did not recognize and I knew what I should do.

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