Good Hope Road: A Novel (57 page)

That time a month or so ago, over the prophecy. She’d been poring over Eleanor Roosevelt’s newspaper column one afternoon. It was her daily ritual, to read ‘My Day’ – Ellie liked to follow the doings of her famous namesake, secretly picturing herself in her stead. Travelling one day to New York, setting off for Tucson the next, shaking hands here, cutting a ribbon there, giving speeches and saying all these important things . . . She’d been particularly enjoying the column that afternoon – Mrs Roosevelt was describing her recent visit to Vermont, and Ellie was nodding in approval over an account of waffles with maple syrup and sausages, when she exclaimed aloud.

She looked over her glasses at Madeleine. ‘Have you seen this?’

The First Lady had referenced a translation that someone had sent her. It was an ancient French prophecy, made in medieval times:

‘I have seen the terrors of forests and mountains. The unbeliev able has frozen the people. The time has come when Germany will be considered the most belligerent nation of the world.’

Madeleine had pounced on the article. She’d rung her professor father who’d obligingly searched out the entire translation for her, and she highlighted sections of it for Jim to read.

‘It is the time when Germania will be called the most belligerent nation on earth. It is the time when there will spring from its womb the terrible warrior who will undertake war on the world, and whom men under arms will call ‘Anti-Christ’, he who will be damned by mothers in thousands.

‘His arms will be flamboyant, and the helmets of his soldiers be topped by points throwing off lightning, as their hands will carry flaming torches. It will be impossible to list the victims of his cruelties. His winged warriors will be seen, in unbelievable attacks, to rise up to the firmament, there to seize the stars to throw them on towns from one end of the universe to the other and light gigantic fires.’

‘A prophecy?’ Jim said incredulously when Madeleine showed it to him. ‘Is this what the great warmongering front is hanging its hat on, these days?’ He read only a couple of paragraphs before handing it back to her. ‘And where exactly does it say that it is about this war anyway? It talks of spiked helmets – the Germans wore those in the Great War. The war,’ he added mockingly, ‘to end all wars.’

A few heads of thistledown caught a stray draught and wafted higher, through the pink sprawl of the cabbage roses, past the old apple tree, silhouetted against the faded red of the barn. Ellie followed their progress, past the eaves, a brief sighting at the lip of shingle and blue sky, and then they were gone. She continued to shake out the linen, her gaze drifting along the imagined arc of their flight, over the smudge of upland and out to the far, mauve-tinted hills. Her gaze wandered, closer now, over the stubble of pasture and the rolls of newly mown hay. It had been a busy couple of days here on the orchard. What was it the Major used to say?

‘When the thistledown starts to blow, ’tis time for the grass to go.’

Her eyes softened as she remembered, the corners of her mouth lifting. She glanced at the sky again, her hands automatically folding and sorting. Clear and cloudless, with no threat of rain. ‘Still,’ she mused, ‘better Jim brings in the hay. All it takes is a bit of damp and—’

A movement at the end of the drive caught her eye. From this vantage point upstairs, she could clearly make out the man who stood among the foliage. An older man, from the stiffness of his movements. He shifted position again, raising his fists in an improbable boxer feint. Ellie watched in surprise. Whatever was he doing?

Left. Right. Left.

Obadaiah lowered his fists, shaking them out by his side, trying to ease his nervousness. He looked yet again towards the drive that snaked up and away from where he stood. Removing his hat, he fanned himself with it, then jammed it back on his head.

‘Quit being a ninny, Obadaiah Nelson,’ he muttered to himself. ‘You ain’t come all this way only to turn back now.’

He fished the small square of paper from his pocket. This was definitely the place they’d given him directions to in town. He took off his hat once more, set it back on his head. Upper hook, lower jab. He bounced creakily from foot to foot, then, taking a deep breath and squaring his shoulders, he picked up his suitcase, and to Ellie’s consternation, started to walk up the drive.

‘Ellie! Hey, Ellie!’ Young Jimmy shaded his eyes and squinted up at her from the dooryard. ‘Can I have some more pie?’

‘You most certainly may not, young man!’ She hurriedly set aside the linen. ‘That’s quite enough for one morning. Go on now, get your father, quick, we have a visitor.’

She hurried downstairs, eyeing the poker in the fireplace. All this talk of the war, it was doing strange things to folks. Interventionists watching pacifists with suspicion, as rumours of German spies embedded deep within American society spread like poison all through last year. There had been incidents of vandalism, of folks losing their jobs overnight for saying the wrong thing, sometimes not even for that. There were even those who’d barged into their neighbours’ homes, questioning their loyalty and demanding they salute the American flag. Flatlander craziness, with almost none of that going on here in Raydon, still . . .

She was being unduly alarmist, Ellie decided. The stranger was likely just another of those oddballs found occasionally wandering these parts. It was probably a meal he was after, or perhaps he was lost.

She opened the door just as Obadaiah was lifting his hand to the knocker. ‘Yes?’ She looked at him, even more puzzled than before. A man of colour, and certainly not dressed like too many around here. She took in the silk hat on his head, the fit of his clothes – well worn and travel-soiled, but there was no mistaking their expensiveness. A real fancy-pants, this one.

‘Yes?’ she asked again, tartly.

Obadaiah removed his hat. ‘James . . .’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’m lookin’ for James Stonebridge.’

‘Ellie?’ Jim came striding from the orchard, Jimmy scampering alongside.

‘Someone’s here for you,’ she said, as Obadaiah turned around. Jim saw something familiar about him.

The stranger smiled. ‘You be little Jim, I’m guessing? Only, not so little now, are you? No, it your pappy I’m after. Captain James Stonebridge, of the Foreign Legion.’

‘
Major
Stonebridge,’ Ellie corrected at once. ‘He’s passed on.’

Obadaiah’s face went grey, crumpling in shock.

‘I’m sorry,’ she was saying. ‘Three years now since he left us . . .’

Obadaiah looked away, dazed, at the roses sprawling across the dooryard, seeing as in a slow-moving dream, the red-painted barn topped by a wedge of summer sky, the apple trees covered with bloom. With the war on in earnest, it had taken him a while to make it here from Paris. He’d finally managed to get on a boat from France, with multiple changes through Europe until the ship to New York. Picturing in his mind all the while the very vista that lay before him now – this old, graceful house, the rolling orchards, brought alive from the rare reminiscences that James would suddenly share with him, all those years ago. He’d stood at the foot of the driveway for an eternity, imagining just what he and the Yankee would say to one another.

‘Damn fool!’ the Yankee would explode when he laid eyes on him.

‘Who dat?’ he’d counter innocently at once.

‘Who dat who say who dat . . .’ and they’d start to laugh in unison . . .

‘Always was talkin’ ’bout them trees, he was.’ Obadaiah gestured with his hat, trying to smile. ‘Goin’ on and on ’bout graftin’ and hybrids and such.’ He swallowed painfully. ‘I hadn’t heard. The other legionnaires . . . we keep in touch, some of us. Nobody said nothin’.’

‘He didn’t have contact with anyone from the war. Wouldn’t speak about it at all.’ Jim hesitated, puzzled by the stranger and still trying to place where he’d seen him. ‘Won’t you come in?’

‘No . . . no, I should get goin’.’ Obadaiah shook his head, tryin’ to find his bearings. ‘But here. This be . . .
was
his. Yours now by rights, I reckon.’ Reaching inside his jacket, he drew out an old, leatherbound notebook. Dirt and time had ground their way into the brown cover, obliterating some of the gold lettering, but the name inscribed on the spine was still clearly legible.

James Arthur Stonebridge
.

Young Jimmy, who had been observing the proceedings with great interest, poked his head forward.

‘Hello!’

‘Why, hello there, mister. And you are?’

Jimmy stuck his chest out with pride. ‘James Henry Stonebridge,’ he said.

A flare of shocked recognition in Obadaiah’s eyes at the name, and suddenly Jim remembered. The camp at Anacostia. Beside the boxing ring – it had been him, this tall, stooped stranger, standing by the ropes, staring with such intensity at the Major.

‘Anacostia,’ he exclaimed. ‘I saw you at Anacostia. Sir,’ he asked urgently, ‘how did you know my father?’

Obadaiah stood in a trance before the black mirror. It had given him a turn alright to see it there, squatting on the wall. He’d stumbled, his limbs filled with trembling.

Jim noticed. ‘He brought it back with him.’

Obadaiah’s eyes were fixed on the mirror as he nodded. ‘1916.’ His voice shook. ‘Trois Fontaines. A small village, just beside the Front.’

‘Were you—’ Jim began, brimming with questions, when Ellie caught his eye, waving frantically from the kitchen. He frowned impatiently. ‘Excuse me.’

Obadaiah barely noticed him leave. He stepped forward, closer to the mirror. Again that feeling, of floating through slow-running water, of moving through a dream. James gone, so many years lost, but this, the mirror, surviving still, conjured directly from their past. He took another shaky step forward. The room around him seemed to blur about its edges, dissolving into another, older room that took its stead.

The chateau, muffled and silent, swathed in black netting. ‘This here mirror is spooked,’ he declares and James glances at him with that swift, sideways look of amusement. ‘Haints?’ his expression seems to say. ‘There’s no haints in here – it’s a mirror, jackass, that’s all.’

Obadaiah raised a hand to the glass, remembering. A wash of light across the surface of the mirror, the glass seeming to buckle and swell at his touch. A ripple, as on silken black water, shadows stirring towards him.

He only vaguely registered the hushed exchange in the kitchen. ‘What do folks like him eat?’

‘Ellie! The same as folks like us, or any other folks, for that matter.’

A burst of indignant whispering from Ellie. ‘Well, how should I know? There haven’t been many like him around these parts, have there? Although, there was that lot who looked just like him, in the veteran camps up in East Barre . . . Still, I had to ask, didn’t I, or would you rather I served something he wasn’t going to eat?’

Their voices seemed to come from a long way away. Obadaiah stood transfixed before the mirror. It was James he could clearly hear,
James
, and the others, behind him. Karan, Gaillard, the Captain . . . all of them, together, marching in perfect sync. The flag aflutter, the slow roll of drums, and voices, rising in song.

‘
J’avais un camarade, De meilleur il n’en est pas;
Dans la paix et dans la guerre
I once had a comrade
A better friend, there was none.
’

Obadaiah’s eyes filled with tears. James was right, he thought to himself. Yankee James, he was right all along. There never were any ghosts in the black mirror.

‘
In war and in peace
Were we brothers,
Marching with even pace.
’

There was no voodoo magic, neither haints, nor any hexes placed upon it – all it housed were the sorrows of the man looking into it. All that was forsaken, every hollowing regret, all those who had once touched his days and infused them with meaning, all who were gone – these were what a man saw staring back at him, encased in smooth, black glass.

‘
After the war
.’ What was that James used to say? ‘
We’ll drive, from Montana, down, all the way to the ocean. The wind in our faces and salt spray stinging our skin
.’

After the war, he’d say, after the war, holding it out like a promise. After the war, when the world would right itself, after the war, this war to end all wars.

Grief tore into him afresh, a small, inarticulate sound escaping his throat. His hand shook as he raised it, the fingers trembling as he wiped his eyes. When he looked again at the mirror, a face came slowly into view.

A face he remembered well, the same blue eyes, reserved, questioning, the stubborn set of jaw. The gently receding hairline of a man neither young nor yet old, the first lines about his mouth hinting at loss, at the battles, both large and small, that life had thrown his way.

Obadaiah turned around to face Jim.

im sat in the old leather armchair, the journal in his hands. It was late, closer to morning than to the night before, but he was wide awake, mind still racing from the events of the day. He touched the gold lettering on the cover, fingertips lingering over the loops and curlicues of his father’s name.