She set her hand in his, and his fingers closed about it.
“He used to take me fishing,” he said. “And birding. He never shot at birds. He taught me their names and their distinguishing features and their song. He would talk to me about the marvel of flight. How wonderful beyond belief it must be, he used to say, to be able to spread one’s wings and soar into the sky. And to fly hundreds, maybe thousands of miles to a warmer climate for the winter and return for the summer. If one could understand the mystery of a single bird, he told me, one would be very much closer to understanding the mystery of everything. Of the whole universe.”
Reginald Taylor had said that? He had always seemed very prosaic to Clarissa, like a man without any imagination at all.
“He would take me to work with him in the stables and the barns,” he said. “He would take me up on a horse with him when he rode about the farm, checking on the crops or on the sheep and cows. He was very young at the time but very conscientious. Whenour father told him to do something, he did it. He understood things and would explain them to me. More than anything in the world I wanted to be like him. I wanted to be with him. I dreamed of the day when we could work together, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and I would be as strong and as knowledgeable as he. We would live together and work together and be happy together for the rest of our lives, never needing anyone else.”
And this had been Matthew as a very young child? Surely it must have been before the time he and she had struck up a friendship.
“It is strange how some long-forgotten memories can pop into one’s head as if from nowhere,” he said. “I cannot recall how old I was. Five? Six? No more than that. I was sitting at the table with Reggie and our parents. I did not always eat with them. I suppose I was still considered too young. It must have been some sort of special occasion. I can remember feeling that I might burst with happiness. Perhaps I had been helping Reggie and he had praised me and called me quite the little man. It is something I remember him saying more than once. I poured out all my dreams to my family at that table.”
He fell silent for a few moments.
“Many parents could have humored me and laughed and praised me for being so eager to help with the farm work,” he said, continuing. “My parents always prided themselves upon telling the truth, however. My father did not seem to recall or understand what it was to be a young child. He told me quite firmly at that table that there was no question of my remaining at home past the age of eighteen or of ever working alongside my brother on the farm. As the eldest, Reggie would inherit and I would have none of it. I felt the bottom fall out of my world. All my security wassnatched from me. As soon as I grew up, I was going to have to leave my home. I was going to be all alone. Abandoned. Without home or family. Without my beloved brother.”
“Oh,” Clarissa said. “But did no one reassure you that it would not be quite like that at all?” Surely Reginald had. The Reginald Matthew remembered from that time anyway.
“How can one possibly know if what one remembers from that time in one’s life is accurate or not?” he said. “It seems to me, though, that everything changed from that moment on. Reggie did try to reassure me, but our father told him to hold his tongue, and he did.”
“Your mother?” Clarissa asked.
“They always worked as a team, my parents,” he said. “My father had a talk with me in his study the following day—or week or month. I am not sure exactly when, but it was soon after. And he told me the bare truth—the primary virtue by which he lived. He told me it was time to stop following Reggie around like a shadow, getting in his way and slowing him down. He told me it was time to begin my schooling in earnest and learn the things I was going to need to know when I grew up so that after I left home I could have a gentleman’s profession and a respectable income upon which to live. I can remember the terror I felt as he talked, and the panic I felt afterward when I ran to talk to Reggie and he looked at me almost as sternly as our father always looked and told me I must listen to our parents and do as I was told so I could be a proper man when I grew up. I did not realize it at the time, but it is almost certain that our father had had a talk with him too before he spoke to me.”
Clarissa squeezed his hand. She had never quite understood why Matthew had been so very rebellious and badly behaved as aboy. She had understood his frustrations, yes, and the shortcomings of his parents, who had tried to force him into being the person they wanted him to be instead of nurturing him and coaxing him by small degrees toward an adulthood that would suit both him and them.
But she had not known of the blind terror of a little boy who had been told the bald truth of his future when he was far too young to understand it. His home would not remain his home after he grew up, he had been told. The work his brother did would never be his work. What might have been an exciting prospect if he had been allowed to grow up to the gradual realization that his life was going to be his own to plan had been a nightmare to him instead.
“I behaved badly,” Matthew said. “Even when I was old enough to know better. He meant well, my father.”
Meaning well was sometimes no excuse. Nor was telling the truth.
“And my mother always supported him,” he said. “She was a good wife in that way.”
And the world’s worst mother, Clarissa thought viciously.
“Reggie tried to reason with me when I started misbehaving,” he said. “Then he started withdrawing favors. He refused to take me fishing one day when he had promised he would and the weather was perfect and I was out of my bed early and eager to be on our way. I had got all my sums wrong for my tutor the day before, and when my father reprimanded me and sent me to my room without tea to do them again, I drew cheeky-looking squirrels in all the places where the answers were to go.”
Clarissa smiled despite herself.
“You probably remember how poor I was at making creatures look like the ones I intended,” he said. “My father thought I haddrawn a caricature of his face, and when I looked, I had to admit he had a point. I even said so.”
Clarissa winced and then laughed outright.
“Then a bit later Reggie cut all treats,” he said. “He told me he would have nothing more to do with me until I had learned to be obedient to our father and take life seriously. I never called him Reggie after that day. Not until very recently, at least.”
They sat in silence for a while as fields and hedgerows passed outside the carriage windows and clouds scudded by overhead to reveal the occasional glimpse of blue.
“How did this start?” he asked. “How did any of my self-pitying monologues ever start? Why should any of these memories matter after all these years? I have been contented with my life. I have done what I wanted to do. I have earned my living and been a burden to no one. The past is long gone. It is of no significance. I survived it. Reginald survived it. It is best not reopened.”
Except that he was on his way to do just that.
“Do you think we should just turn around and go home?” he said.
“Did you write to tell your brother you were coming?” she asked.
“Yes.” He winced. “Perhaps he has gone away on a full-day excursion.”
“And perhaps not,” she said.
