“No.” Arthur met her gaze, his expression shifting to one of understanding. “It doesn’t.”
Isobel’s brows came together, and she cocked her head, curious at the sudden tightness in his jaw.
“Was anyone hurt?” Arthur asked.
Isobel could still hear her father’s bellow of pain when he’d snapped his branches clean off, just to get out the window in time. “We’re okay now.”
Arthur’s face was the picture of grief. Of course. This had been his home too, for a time. There was always more to a house than brick and mortar and stone. Hope lived there too.
“We’ll dig out what we can,” she said. “Or start anew…” Isobel trailed off when she noted Arthur running his palm down the steep gable. He didn’t wear gloves, and a thick layer of moss had grown over the roof tiles. It didn’t shrivel back at his touch.
She cocked her head. “What are you doing?”
“Where are my mother’s ashes?”
Isobel didn’t like where this was going. “They’re in Eva’s room,” she hedged. “But it’s not safe to go in. The roof could collapse.”
“I need those ashes, Iz.”
The weight in his voice took Isobel back to when she’d lost her own mother. “She’s at rest, under there,” she said softly.
“Actually,” he murmured, “she’s not.”
Isobel’s nose wrinkled. “What do you mean?”
But Arthur was already circling the cottage, quiet as the kitten he and Eva had insisted on bringing back with them in the helicopter. Isobel glanced back toward the Walker farmhouse. They’d left the rescue sleeping on a soft rug in a ray of sunlight in the den.
“Here?” Arthur asked, pointing to Eva’s partially buried bedroom window.
“That’s the one,” she admitted.
This was a bad idea.
Butterflies and honeybees stirred the air overhead as Arthur ran a hand along the lichen-covered sill, his eyebrows drawing together in contemplation. Though the window was still open from their earlier escape, it was now so deeply buried that the chances of his fitting through the slot seemed slim.
As Arthur bent to study the opening, his knees pressed into the earth and tiny green blades of grass pushed through the soil. Isobel drew in a sharp breath. Was ithimdoing that?
He drew back. “Help me dig?”
Isobel laughed. When she saw he was serious, the sound went flat. Make that two for two on bad ideas. “Oh. I, um, don’t think that’s the best idea, Fairy.”
“Please.” He stared at her, eyes pleading. Isobel was struck suddenly by how well the expression matched that of a very sad puppy.
She sighed. “Who can say no to that face? Go. There are shovels in the greenhouse.” Her sister’s sanctuary had somehow survived the earth’s shaking, its glass walls miraculously intact.
Arthur popped to his feet and dashed off in the direction she indicated, and soon the sounds of rifling metal and wood met Isobel’s ear. He returned holding a garden hoe in one hand, a shovel in the other. He passed the latter to her.
They dug as one, widening the opening until it was sufficiently large for Arthur to squeeze his body through.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” Isobel said uneasily as he disappeared out of her line of view into the bedroom within. When she heard the sound of books being lifted and discarded as he searched, Isobel got down on her hands and knees, craning for a better view of the dimly lit room. She could just see Arthur’s silhouette, but the angle strained her neck.
“Watch the floor,” she called out. “It might not hold.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Isobel’s chest tightened. Why had she agreed to this? They could have waited until they had more help, more equipment, more—
“Found it!” Arthur’s silhouette lifted an arm in triumph.
Isobel sighed and sat up, cricking her back from side to side to make it pop. A door slammed in the near distance, and she looked up in time to see her sister stomping toward them through the rows of pear trees in the pink sundress Isobel had brought to the hospital for her to change into.
“You might want to hurry,” Isobel said as the storm of Eva’semotions flooded the grass at her feet in furious thistles. “Someone is here to see you.”
