The Touch (11 page)

At some time during the night they transferred to her bed, but Alexander kept on making love to this wonderful, passionate, beautiful woman who was as starved as he.

“Stay here with me,” she pleaded at dawn when he started to put on his clothes.

“I can’t,” he said through his teeth. “This isn’t my fate, it isn’t my destiny. Were I to stay here, it would be Napoleon electing to stay on Elba.”

She didn’t weep or protest, but rose to make him breakfast while he went out to saddle his horse, load his mule. For the first and only time during his American odyssey, the gold had lain forgotten all night under the straw in the barn.

“Destiny,” she said thoughtfully, loading his plate with eggs, bacon, grits. “It’s a funny word. I’ve heard it before, but I didn’t know men could think about it the way you do. If you can, tell me what your destiny is.”

“My destiny is to become great, Honoria. I have to show a narrow, vindictive old Presbyterian minister what he tried to destroy, and prove to him that a man can rise above his birth.” Frowning, he gazed at her rosy face, all aglow from the splendor of the night. “My dear, get yourself four or five big, nasty dogs. You’re a fierce woman, they’ll respect you and do as you tell them. Train them to go for the throat. They’ll be better protection than a shotgun—use it to feed them rabbits, birds, whatever you can find. Then you can live here alone until that husband comes along. He will. He will.”

When he left she stood on the height of her porch to watch him for as long as she could see him; he wondered if she had any idea how massive was the change she had wrought in him. What had been an inchoate ache at his core was now conscious knowledge. She had opened Pandora’s box, Honoria Brown. Yet thanks to the kind of woman she was, he would never go the way so many men did, willing to beggar their pride for the chance to have a woman whenever they could.

His greatest grief at the parting was his awareness that he couldn’t do what he burned to do—leave her with a little bag of gold coins to tide her over if times grew harder. Had he offered, she would have rejected them and thought the worse of him, and had he left them for her to find later, her memories of him would be tainted. All he had been able to give her were firewood, a weedless garden, a well pulley that worked much better now, a sharp axe, and the essence of himself.

I will never see her again. I will never know if I quickened her, I will never find out what her destiny is.

TO ALEXANDER’S horror, New York proved to be a city much like Glasgow or Liverpool in that its teeming hordes were pent up in stinking slums. Where it differed, however, was in the cheerful mood of its poor, convinced that they wouldn’t be at the bottom of the human rubbish heap forever. Some of that was due to the polyglot nature of these people, who hailed from all over Europe and clustered according to nationality. Though their living conditions were appalling, they lacked that awful hopelessness the British poor had aplenty. A poor Englishman or Scot never even dreamed of getting out, of rising up, whereas everyone in New York seemed sure that times would improve.

Or at least this was what he concluded in his very brief progress through the city; he had no intention of being parted from his horse and mule until he walked up the gangway of a ship bound for London. The better class of people who frequented the wide avenues of the commercial area smiled at his appearance, judging him some yokel from plains country, with his buckskins, his weather-beaten steed and that patient, plodding mule.

And so finally he docked in London, another fabulous urban sprawl he had never seen.

“Threadneedle Street,” he told his hackney driver, keeping the tool chest bearing his gold inside the cab with him.

Still wearing his buckskins and his soft, wide-brimmed hat, he hefted the chest into the revered portals of the Bank of England, dumped it on the floor and stood looking around.

Its acolytes would not have dreamed of being rude or even verbally contemptuous to any man who entered their temple precinct, thus Alexander found himself confronted by a clerkly dumpling who smiled at him.

“An American, sir?”

“No, a Scot in need of a bank.”

“Oh, I see.” Sniffing wealth, the clerkly dumpling didn’t make the mistake of palming this peculiar-looking man off on some minion; he bade Alexander be seated until a deputy manager was free to attend to him.

A short time later an Important Personage appeared. “How may I help you, sir?”

“My name’s Alexander Kinross, and I want your bank to hold my bullion for me.” The toe of Alexander’s scuffed boot nudged the chest. “I’ve fifty-five pounds of it.”

Two minions picked up the chest by its handles and lugged it into Mr. Walter Maudling’s office.

“Do you mean to say, Mr. Kinross, that you have physically carried fifty-five pounds of gold from California all the way to London?” asked Mr. Maudling, round-eyed.

“I’ve carried a hundred pounds. My tools are atop the gold.”

“Why not a San Francisco bank, or at least a New York one?”

“Because the Bank of England is the only one I trust. I figure,” said Alexander, unconsciously using the forms of speech of the land he had just quit, “that if the Bank of England goes under, the world will stop spinning. I’m no’ a man who esteems banks, as I have already told you.”

“The Bank of England is highly flattered, sir.”

Hammers, wrenches, files and more esoteric items were strewn all over the floor; Alexander lifted the chest’s false bottom to reveal its dully gleaming contents, eleven little gold bricks.

“I separated it from the amalgam in Coloma,” said Alexander chattily, stacking the bars on the desk and replacing the false bottom and tools. “Will you keep it for me?”

Mr. Maudling blinked. “Keep it? Like that? Don’t you wish to cash it in and earn something on it?”

“No, because while it’s like that it says what it is. I’ve no intention of exchanging it for numbers written on ledger paper, Mr. Maudling, no matter how many noughts follow them. But, as I don’t want to keep on dragging this with me, will you keep it?”

“Of course, of course, Mr. Kinross!”

And that, thought Walter Maudling as he watched the tall, rather catlike figure stride out of the Bank of England, is the oddest client I have ever encountered. Alexander Kinross! A name the Bank of England is going to hear quite often in the years to come, I’d bet the contents of his tool chest on it.

THE FOUR HUNDRED pounds in gold sovereigns that he obtained for his American dollars were not wasted on luxurious hotels or high living, nor did Alexander buy a conforming suit. Instead he bought washable clothes of dungaree and cotton, new flannel underwear, and put up in a Kensington boarding house that offered very good home cooking and clean rooms. He visited the museums, art galleries public and private, the Tower of London and Madame Tussaud’s waxworks; in a private gallery he paid fifty of his precious pounds for a painting by someone named Dante Gabriel Rossetti because the woman in it looked like Honoria Brown. When he presented it to Mr. Maudling for storage in the Bank of England, that gentleman never batted an eyelid; if Alexander Kinross paid fifty pounds for a painting, it was sure to end in being a masterpiece. The work was, besides, quite lovely, lyrically romantic.

Then, after criss-crossing England on trains, heading ever northward, Alexander arrived at the village of Auchterderran in Kinross County, a short distance from Kinross town.

What had really happened and would happen to Alexander Kinross were never imparted to Elizabeth; what she learned was semi-myth. His intention in returning was to obtain the promise of a wife. That he didn’t want to marry just yet was due to his ambition to follow—literally—in the footsteps of Alexander the Great; to retrace the tortuous route the King of Macedonia had taken in his conquests. Not a journey that a young woman would relish, he was sure. So he would marry on his return and take his bride with him to New South Wales. He had her picked out already: she was Uncle James’s eldest daughter, Jean, whom he remembered as if he had last seen her yesterday. An exquisite, precocious ten-year-old who had gazed at him adoringly and told him that she loved him, that she would always love him. Well, that would make her sixteen now—the perfect age. By the time he had done with this new expedition, Jean would be eighteen and old enough to marry.

He rode a hired horse into Kinross on a Sunday afternoon and went to see Uncle James. Who greeted him with distaste.

“You look as shiftless as ever, Alexander,” said James as he led his visitor into the front parlor, then hollered for tea. “I had to pay for your father’s funeral, since you’d disappeared off the face of the map.”

“Thank you for your tact in breaking this news to me, sir,” said Alexander, poker-faced. “How much did it cost?”

“Five pounds I could ill afford.”

Alexander fished in the pocket of his fringed buckskin coat. “Here are six pounds—the extra pound represents interest. Is it long since he died?”

“A year.”

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that old man Murray has followed Duncan to hell?”

“You’re a maggot and a blasphemer, Alexander. You always have been. I thank God that you’re no kin to me.”

“Murray told you that, did he? Or was it Duncan?”

“My brother died with his shame still his own business. Dr. Murray told me at his funeral, said someone had to know.”

At which moment Jean walked into the parlor bearing a tray of tea and cake. Oh, she was beautiful! Grown up exactly as he had imagined, with Honoria Brown’s glassy lashes and aquamarine eyes. But he couldn’t delude himself that Jean even recognized him, let alone remembered that she had said she would always love him. The stare she directed at him was cursory, uninterested, then she pranced out of the room. Well, that was understandable. He had changed a great deal. Best get down to the bargaining.

“I’ve come to ask for Jean’s hand in marriage,” he said.

“I hope you’re joking!”

“Not at all. I’m here in all honor to ask for Jean, though I’m aware she’s not old enough yet. I can wait.”

“You can wait until the worms eat you!” James snapped, eyes flashing.

“Give a Drummond to a bastard? I’d sooner give her to an Anabaptist!”

Somehow he suppressed his anger. “No one knows that story except you, me, and old man Murray, so what does it matter? I’m on my way to being a very rich man.”

“Tosh! Where did you go when you ran off?”

“To Glasgow, where I was apprenticed as a boilermaker.”

“And you think to make a fortune at that?”

“No, I have other strings to my bow,” Alexander began, intending to tell James about the gold. That would shut him up!

But James had had enough. He rose to his feet and stalked to the front door, threw it open dramatically and pointed to the road. “Out you go this minute, Alexander whoever-you-are! You’ll no’ get Jean or any other young Kinross woman! If you try, Dr. Murray and I will pillory you!”

“Then I make you a promise, James Drummond,” said Alexander, biting off his words. “At some time in the future, you’ll be glad to give me one of your daughters in marriage.” He walked down the path, mounted his hired horse and rode away.

Now where did he learn to ride so well, and where did he get his clothes? wondered James, too late.

Elizabeth, five years old, was in the kitchen with Jean and Anne, learning how to make scones. Because Jean neglected to mention the visitor in the parlor, Elizabeth never knew that only one room had separated her from that shiftless boilermaker’s apprentice, her cousin Alexander.

IT HAD BEEN a foolish impulse, Alexander admitted to himself as he nudged the horse to a canter. A little serious thought would have told him what James Drummond would say to his offer, but all he could think about had been immature little Jean’s resemblance to Honoria Brown.

I would have married Honoria Brown, except that I could tell she was wedded to her patch of Indiana earth.

THERE DIDN’T seem any hurry now to make his next fortune; Alexander put his western saddle on a good hack, stowed his belongings in two saddlebags and set off across Europe, seeing the march of history as he rode: gothic cathedrals, half-timbered towns, immense castles, and, when he reached Greece, once-glorious temples felled by the movements of Mother Earth. Still under the sway of the disintegrating Ottomans, Macedonia held more evidence of Islam than of Alexander.

In fact, he realized as he wandered through Turkey, poked about in Issus, followed the line of his namesake’s march south to Egypt, little physically remained of Alexander the Great. Whatever of the world’s ancient history had visibly endured was constructed of massive stone, be it pyramid, ziggurat, sanctuary, or a red sandstone gorge whose very walls had been carved into majestic temples. Babylon was a city of mud brick, its hanging gardens evaporated into the mists of time, giving nothing of Alexander’s death away, or of the life he had lived there.

Slowly the pilgrimage became something else, an insatiable curiosity about Asia rather than an attempt to turn back the clock of the centuries. So he went wherever he fancied, whether Alexander the Great had been there or not. Because he had been told that it couldn’t be done, he rode over the mighty peaks of eastern Turkey to see that, yes, the snow on the mountain flanks was indeed a rich pinkish-red from sand blown all the way from the Sahara desert. What awed him now was the power of Nature’s world, and how humanity had coped with it.

Though the war had been over now for ten years, he deemed it imprudent to visit the Crimea, so he turned eastward over the Caucasus instead, and came down to the Caspian Sea in a Russian outpost named Baku. This was the northern branch of the ancient silk route from China, a bleak and almost rainless place whose tiny capital, also Baku, was a jumble of disintegrating houses stepped on top of each other up a hill. And there he found two wonders. The first was caviar. The second was how the local people ran their Caspian paddle wheelers, their locomotives, their fixed steam engines. For neither trees nor coal were to be found anywhere near Baku.