Pennyroyal Green: The Legend Of Lyon Redmond Part 46

"You can open them."

She peeled her hands away from her eyes. Abashed.

A man stood between her and the glare of the lowering sun, which was giving him something of a red halo.

Good G.o.d, he was tall. Suddenly she fully understood the meaning of the word "rangy."

He was holding her phone out to her.

"I saw something leap into the road. Is this yours? I managed not to crush it."

The voice was amused. Solicitous. Baritone with a lovely scorched velvet edge. She'd once dated a guy who was perpetually hoa.r.s.e from smoking and enthusiastically shouting "WOOOO!" at rock concerts. This was entirely different. This was something she could imagine whispering in her ear in the dark from the pillow next to hers.

Though of course that lovely rasp could be because he'd sucked in one too many insects while riding his motorcycle.

She saw it leaning on its kickstand behind him. A beautiful machine, somehow both sculptural and savage. A vintage Triumph.

He sounded refined and very English, an odd contrast to his helmet-smashed dark curls, the faint mauve circles of weariness under his eyes, the shadow of a beard, the battered leather jacket that hung gracefully from shoulders that went on for kilometers. He had a sort craggy, Tolkien-hero-on-a-quest face. Not pretty. Quite masculine. Compelling, in that she couldn't look away from it. Especially his eyes, deep set and very dark, and at the moment, not blinking She just nodded mutely. Like a "looby," a word she'd learned from Olivia's diary.

"Were you aware your phone was suicidal?" he asked gravely. On a hush. When it seemed she would never speak.

She found her voice. "It was an accident. At least that's what I'll tell the police."

He laughed. Thankfully.

Because that had been awfully black humor.

He glanced down at the phone and squinted at the little crystals.

"Isabel . . . Redmond?"

When he lifted his face again it was slowly, wonderingly.

Speculation written all over his features.

It was her first taste of being known.

MALCOLM HAD SLOWED when he saw something fly toward him into the road, but he was only mildly curious. It wouldn't be the first time something had been chucked at him. Back in his university days he used to rev his motorcycle just before dawn, which was when he left for cla.s.ses. Until the day his elderly neighbor Mrs. Gilly burst out her door in her bathrobe and hurled what turned out to be one of her prize hyacinth bulbs at him. It must have been the nearest projectile to hand. "I've 'ad enough of that bleeding racket ye bleeding useless git!"

It bounced off his helmet.

And he'd hadn't a clue he was being so obnoxious. But then it almost seemed the job of men that age to be oblivious and self-absorbed, which is why he now spent a good portion of his time setting the bones and st.i.tching the wounds of men that age. Learning the hard way to be other than obnoxious was what built character.

So a tree-fondling woman hurling things at him was scarcely a blip on the radar of Malcolm's life, when one considered war, medical school, births, deaths, triumphs, failures, women (who counted as triumphs and failures), existential torment, and the granddaughter of a duke, who was expecting him for dinner, and would flay him with scathingly elegant irony if he was late again.

She was worth it, Jemima was.

Most of the time.

He managed not to run over whatever it was that had flown at him and would have been on his way.

But he glanced over his shoulder and saw a pet.i.te blonde woman next to the trees.

Her shoulders were hunched.

And she'd covered her eyes with her hands as if her heart had just been broken.

Oh, G.o.d.

And so he had to go back.

"The trouble with you, Coburn," his friend Geoff Hawthorne once said, "is that you always go toward the trouble, instead of away from it."

If Malcolm had a coat of arms, this is what it would say. In Latin.

Now, however, he was beginning to feel foolish holding out the phone to a strange silent woman.

She at last met his gaze head on.

His breathing hitched as though he'd literally been pierced with a needle.

He frowned, and surely this was unchivalrous, so he arranged his face in carefully neutral planes.

He just hadn't expected to have his equilibrium roughly jostled by a pair of blue eyes this evening.

He couldn't remember ever seeing eyes quite that color before. So achingly lovely they made him restless. He felt oddly as though he needed to do something about them.

He got his breath going again. He was hardly callow. He could cope with this.

She had fair hair but her eyelashes were black and she had a disconcertingly direct gaze. Some might say a challenging gaze. She had a compact little body, eloquently curved. Her posture was perhaps too straight. As though she'd spent a lifetime braced for the next stiff wind. She looked, as a matter of fact, like a walking dare.

But the rest of her-the spirals of hair slipping from her chignon, the pale pink curve of her lower lip, the heart-shaped face, were straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. Soft. Even dreamy. A pair of earrings in the purest dewdrop shape glittered in her ears and reflected him in miniature.

Finally her hand crept out, like a creature coaxed from a burrow, and she took the phone.

"Forgive me if this is presumptuous, but are you perhaps one of the Redmonds? Of the Redmonds of Pennyroyal Green? And so many other places now?" he asked.

Her face went slowly luminous. He watched, his breathing hitched again.

Then, like someone in command of a switch, she shut that light off.

Interesting.

"Oh, do you know the Redmonds?" Her accent was American and her casualness was studied. He suspected his answer meant a very good deal to her.

He smiled faintly. "Everyone knows them. They're legends. You've met the trees." He gestured. "And felt the trees."

She blushed.

He was immediately sorry he'd said that. He suspected she was the sort who would very much mind blus.h.i.+ng.

"One wants to touch them," he was careful to add. "It's the closest we get to time travel isn't it? You're American, are you? Is this your first visit to Pennyroyal Green? I'm sorry. So rude of me. I've better manners than that, truly. My name is Malcolm Coburn."

She said nothing. But her face blanked peculiarly.

"Malcolm Coburn . . ." she repeated musingly, at last. "I think you're on my tree!"

On her tree? Oh, h.e.l.l. Through no fault of their own, these ancient oaks attracted all manner of nature loons and cultists and New Ageists and conspiracy theorists. The local police had once arrested a group of Druids for dancing naked around them at midnight.

But then she laughed. A fantastic, abandoned, musical sound, not a mad one.

"I'm so sorry. You should see your expression! I meant . . ." She reached into her purse and deftly extracted an iPad, and swiped at it a few times, then turned it around and tapped. "My family tree." She fanned the image wider with her fingers and then zoomed in on a portion of it.

Which was when he noticed the words on the inside of her index finger. He'd seen that kind of tattoo before, usually on prisoners and gang members and idiot teenage boys, which was how he knew she'd done it to herself with needle and thread. The letters were tiny, neat, and flawlessly proportioned. It had required determination, precision, and near preternatural patience and tolerance for pain.

It said: made you look.

He felt an interesting, not unpleasant little p.r.i.c.kle at the back of his neck.

So. Isabel Redmond was a little dangerous.

It worried him that he liked this.

"And there are Coburns over here," she was saying, scooting the image across the iPad with her finger. "I thought I saw a Malcolm Coburn."

He leaned toward it and whistled low. "Look at what you have here. That is, indeed, my branch, and there I am. We're not really directly related, you and I, but tangentially, as you can see. I'm descended from John Fountain. If you don't mind?" She shook her head, and he dragged his finger lightly up the screen and landed it on John Fountain, son of Elise Fountain, adopted son of Philippe Lavay. "But he was known as Jack back then. One of John Fountain's and Ruby Alexandra's daughters married a Fitzwilliam, whose daughter married a Coburn. Two hundred or so years ago."

He looked up at her again.

"I feel I ought to warn you I'm a bit of a history geek. I know far more about Pennyroyal Green and the families here than you'd ever want to hear. And the Redmonds and Everseas are Pennyroyal Green."

"I actually want to hear everything. I know very little. I only have this tree, and Olivia Eversea's diary-she began keeping it shortly after she was married-and I have this."

She tucked the iPad under her arm and slipped something from her pocket.

It was a gold watch.

He didn't question that she would trust him, a stranger, to look at her gold watch and iPad. She didn't seem at all nave. Somehow he was positive she could handle herself. Possibly she knew Krav Maga or some other exotic and violent martial art.

They looked down at Olivia in a hush.

"She's so pretty," he said, finally. "You look exactly like her."

He froze.

His head went up and he pressed his lips together.

He hadn't meant it to sound like that. He wasn't a flirt. It always felt too much like strategy, which to him had always seemed somewhat dishonest, and who had the time? He certainly didn't. When he wanted something from a woman he had no trouble letting it be known directly. He usually got what he wanted.

"You haven't any romance in you," Jemima had once sighed, draping her long, blond hair over his sweaty chest one evening.

s.e.x, love, and romance were all their own thing, and they only occasionally overlapped. He didn't say that out loud. In part because he could imagine the rousing ensuing argument. He wasn't even certain he knew how to explain it to her.

Isabel Redmond, judging from that wicked light in her eyes, was enjoying his discomfiture.

"I thought I looked like her, too," she said matter-of-factly.

She closed the watch gently on her Aunt Olivia's lovely face and turned it over, tracing the initial on the back with one finger. Absently.

A little silence fell.

"You probably already know this," he told her, "but it's clear to me that 'LAJR' stands for Lyon Arthur James Redmond. Were you aware that he's a legend in these parts?"

"I did know about his initials. I haven't heard about the legend. You're not teasing me?"

Yearning flashed, swift and bright and fleeting over her face.

Intriguing. She didn't want him to know how much it meant to her.

"I'm not, truly," he said gently. "Everyone in Pennyroyal Green still speak of Lyon and Olivia as if it were yesterday. But that's how the English feel about history in general. There's in fact an absolutely beautiful piece of music named for him called 'The Legend of Lyon Redmond.' A folk tune. There's a festival in a few weeks, a group that does a brilliant version of it. Perhaps you'll hear it during your visit."

Her hesitation told him that she knew he was fis.h.i.+ng for how long she'd be staying.

"I love live music. And I've let a flat for next three months. In a charming old building behind Miss Marietta Endicott's Academy . . ." She gestured in the direction..

So she was staying for a while. He knew a surge of intense and wholly irrational relief and triumph that she had decided to tell him.

Speaking of staying, he'd kept very late clinic hours the evening before, and he should probably shave before he saw Jemima this evening. "It's just that it would be so refres.h.i.+ng to see your chin now and again, Malcolm," she'd said last time.

He should leave now.

Isabel slipped the watch back into her pocket and s.h.i.+fted her iPad into her hands again.

"The flat you let is the former Seamus Duggan Memorial Home for Unwed Mothers," he told her. "And Duggan, coincidentally, is the composer of 'The Legend of Lyon Redmond.' There are still Duggans in these parts, too."

She scrutinized him, faintly troubled, faintly hopeful, as if she were ascertaining whether he was teasing her again.

"Truly," he found himself saying firmly. As though it were some kind of promise.

Her face went closed, and she rubbed at her arm abstractedly, then caught herself and gave a short laugh. "It's just . . . I got gooseb.u.mps when you said that. It all seems rather . . ."

"Synchronistic?"

"I was going to say 'right.' Another way of saying synchronistic, I suppose."

Both words made him a little uneasy at the moment. Because everything from the hurtling cell phone up to this moment felt somehow right and synchronistic.

"While you're here, you can see where Olivia and Lyon lived when they were first married."