Gather the Bones by Alison Stuart

Author:Alison Stuart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyrical Press, Inc.
Published: 2012-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Paul poured himself a whiskey and walked over to the window. He propped himself on the wide windowsill. In the glorious summer evening the view across the village and the church was mesmeric and he wondered if his silent, ghostly companion had sought this view as a solace to his own troubled soul.

Paul looked up half-expecting to see Robert standing sentinel beside him but he was quite alone.

He hadn’t told Helen that the spirit of Robert Morrow had begun to haunt him when his uncle had given him Robert Morrow’s copy of Homer’s Illiad in the original Greek for a twelfth birthday present. From that day, he had seen glimpses of a man in the library but it was only when he had returned to Holdston after the war and taken over the main apartment that Robert had become an almost permanent fixture at the window. Watching and waiting.

Now he knew why Robert kept his vigil. He waited for his Suzanna to come home. There had been times on his own long road to recovery when it had seemed easier just to let it all go, close his eyes and never come back, but at those times he had begun to sense a silent, watching, presence. A shared pain between two men that reached out beyond the restrictions of time. Robert Morrow had become his companion on the journey. He reached across and picked up his copy of the Illiad from the table. Opening the battered cover, he read the inscription. “To my darling husband, Christmas 1805, SJM.” Suzanna’s gift to her soldier husband.

He had carried the battered leather volume with him through the blood and mud of the trenches, using the long, idle hours to translate it, a soldier’s translation of that other bloody conflict. From the penciled marks in the margins, Robert had undertaken a similar exercise one hundred years earlier. He had also recorded the dates and details of his own campaign on the Spanish Peninsula in the back pages. Paul had added his own war to Robert’s and the connection that reached out through blood and battle had been forged.

He frowned and drained his whiskey. Robert hadn’t survived the dreadful battle of Badajoz. Robert had taken his own life, as much a victim of that war as if he had died on the battlefield. A quick, familiar rap on the door brought him back to the present and he turned as Evelyn entered. He slid off the windowsill and greeted his aunt.

“You look tired, Paul,” Evelyn remarked. “I thought the trip to London may be too much for you. Is your leg bothering you?”

He gave her an exasperated glare. “For God’s sake, Evelyn, I’m not an invalid.”

Evelyn met his angry eyes with hurt in her own and he felt a stab of guilt at snapping at her. “I’m fine, but thank you for your concern,” he added.

“How was Angela’s exhibition?” she asked.

“A triumph,” Paul replied, unable to disguise the brittleness in his tone as he remembered the paintings she had not shown.

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