Chapter 12 #3
“I am glad you had someone,” Millie said simply.
“At the end of it, family is who we have left. All the money in the world—” She stopped, and the pink in her cheeks was no longer the cider, he thought.
“I would give all I have for one dinner with the Papa he was. One evening of him arguing with me about my assertions. All the money in the world does not make up for the fact that those conversations are gone, and I do not know if they are coming back.”
She stopped. Her eyes shut briefly, as she clearly attempted to manage an emotion that had risen closer to the surface than she had intended.
“Thank you,” she said. “For these past days. For the journal. For today.” She gestured at the portfolio on the table between them.
“He will be pleased. When he has a clear moment and I can tell him what we have done, he will be—” She stopped again.
“It will make him happy. Whatever is left of him, it will make him happy.”
The fire settled in the grate. Betty’s sewing moved with a quiet rhythm; she remained occupied while their conversation ebbed and flowed over their respective pasts.
Nicholas considered Millie across the table and thought about a father who had argued about everything and had stopped.
About what it cost a person to pursue a dead man’s journey through a living man’s failing mind.
She was a stubborn, loyal woman who never considered taking the easy path, and he esteemed that conduct more than he could state in words.
The honesty of Millie was a revelation, a character trait that fascinated him to his very core.
They walked home through the bleak streets, Millie with her notebook, Betty several steps behind with the measured discretion she maintained as a matter of professional principle.
Oxford conducted its late afternoon around them: the scholars and students and booksellers and college porters, the light playing on the stone in the hour before dark.
A color Nicholas had not found anywhere else.
One he had forgotten, in the years of all that had intervened, that he had once found beautiful.
He thought about family and about quests and about what it meant to pursue the truth across centuries on the strength of a dead man’s notes and a living man’s declining mind and to do so with integrity, not ambition.
About the mild sort of courage that did not announce itself as courage, because it had never considered the alternative.
He thought about Millie walking beside him, her coat buttoned to her chin and her spectacles at the end of her nose and the scarlet ribbon visible above her collar in the cold air.
He thought about ten days of the name that was not quite his name.
The burden of secrets he had not revealed.
A curl tucked behind an ear in a lamplit study.
The expression on her face that had felt like genuine admiration.
Directed at him, which was unfathomable.
He thought about the vine that had caught his ankle when he was fourteen years old.
The three stories of cold air. The ground arriving with a crash of pain that had ended one version of his life and begun another.
He had spent most of the years since that moment in a kind of suspended state, neither the person he had been before nor the person he might have been, drifting between the two in a manner that the drinking had made bearable and sobriety had made uncomfortable and Millie had, over the past ten days, made something else entirely.
Young. Hopeful. My entire future ahead of me to choose what I want to do with.
The thoughts asserted themselves with the quiet certainty of facts that are true.
He did, indeed, feel young and hopeful, states he had not expected to inhabit again.
The fact that he felt them here, in this city, with this woman walking beside him, was what he intended to hold for as long as it was available to him.
There was a way to tell her without severing what was growing between them. He did not know what it was yet, but he was going to find it, because the alternative was not one he was prepared to accept. He was not, it turned out, prepared to walk away from her.
He had told himself in Cirencester that he was. He had been wrong. He had known he was wrong since Oxford Street, when she had received the recovered journal in both hands and looked at it as though it were the holy relic she had been working toward for the whole of her adult life.
He was going to find the way. It would not be graceful, it would almost certainly not be comfortable, and Millie’s bluntness and his dodgy morals were going to collide without decorum or elegance. But there was a way, and he was going to find it.
In the meantime, he walked beside her in the wintry afternoon.
The Oxford light on the stone. The scarlet ribbon above her collar.
His leg quiet for once as his cane tapped against the stones.
And he was, for the first time since he had fallen from the trellis at fourteen years old, entirely content to be exactly where he was.