Archive of Our Own

It began gloriously. They stood on the docks and hugged the children, who clambered and scrambled around them begging for all the usual things while pretending they wanted nothing at all.

'You don't have to bring us anything back,' said Anthony, his smile broadening to show his dimples. Ken tried and failed not to laugh. Jims said, 'We'll be fine. Absolutely fine.'

Rilla knew they would, too. Jims was so confident standing there on the dock. He had one arm around Sissy and another around impish Anthony. Little Cherubs. Whatever had made Cassandra Hargreave think…Rilla shook her head. The mischief was done, had been years ago. Jims said again, 'We'll be absolutely fine.' Rilla dabbed at her eyes anyway, and when Ken ribbed her about it, blamed it on the wind, which was blustery and chill so close to the water.

Then the world was sliding away from them as the boat eased forward. Onwards to England, and then to Europe. They hadn't been there since…Rilla made it their honeymoon, little Jims rucked up at Ingelside under Susan's watchful eye. How Susan had ranted! The horror! The scandal! And the final insult – the move afterwards to Toronto! But Susan Baker was dead now, and Rilla was leaving the cherubs in the hands of Jims. How time would move on! Rilla shook her head again, red hair unravelling its pins in the breeze. They had been catapulted into another era and no denying it.

'What am I?' said Ken, nudging her gently, 'chopped liver?'

'Never,' said Rilla. Once it might have hit too close to home, a joke like that. Now they could laugh about it easily, the gulls wheeling and screaming overhead.

'What do we bet they do first?' asked Ken.

'A good Presbyterian never bets,' said Rilla in her best impression of Susan Baker, complete with incredulous sniff.

'Suppose for sake of argument you were a bad Presbyterian?'

Rilla gave another sniff and tried unsuccessfully to recapture the tendrils of escaped hair whipping around her face.

'Well,' said Ken, undeterred, 'it can't be betting if it's a guessing game. Do they A) run straight to the corner store for sweets, B) recruit the Grant children for a round of hockey, or C) go straight to the museum?'

'D,' said Rilla. 'None of the above. They're going to call on Persis for tea and sympathy and I don't know why you'd pretend to think anything else.'

Ken graciously conceded defeat and took over the Sisyphean labours with the pins. He did this with such stupidity that Rilla was forced to conclude it was deliberate, and her hair ended more undone than it had begun. They would have a lovely holiday.

They docked in Southampton, and from there broke the long trip up to the capital in Bath. The train that ferried them thence was slow, lugubrious and inevitably delayed. There was a quirk of the British rail system, Ken theorised, that prevented trains operating without delay, but they had just arrived and could be gracious about it. They sat in their compartment, which was snug and private, and played round after round of backgammon on a smart leather travel set Ken had bought in anticipation of exactly such a scenario.

'Though now,' he said with a wink, 'you've got me worried we're contravening church law. It's probably gambling, too.'

'Almost certainly,' said Rilla. 'But we might as well be hung for sheep as for lambs.'

When they finally arrived at Bath it was that rarity of an English sunny day. They folded away the backgammon, made arrangements about the luggage, and then, armed with special issue stamps from the post office for Anthony (you needn't bring us anything back) and a loaf of bread, they picked their way through the bisected town, indulging the ducks and listening to the trembling, rustling aspens. The stamps were both Coronation and Jubilee variety, and the sun turned the river from green to blue to glassy in mere heartbeats. They walked along the river and it was a relief to be standing after all that time on the train. Rilla stretched luxuriantly in the sun and scattered crumbs to gleeful ducks; she considered their first English afternoon a roaring success.

Ken had an old army friend at Bath, and he was only too happy to put up 'The Captain and his wife,' as he put it, so when the sky grew cloudy and the shadows long, they picked their way across the crescent and through the city to the house of Graham Rotheram and his wife. It was snugly ensconced on Laura Place, more flat than house, and no garden to speak of – not at all like the green Toronto lawns.

Inside was comfortable, with sizeable windows to admit of the rare sunlight, and a fireplace hugged by inglenooks. Rilla loved it at once. Mrs Rotherham – 'Call me Fanny, dear' – made them tea in delicate bone china, and they took it in the sitting room with the gas trimmed and a fire burning, while children, cats and dogs more tumbled than paraded through the room. A sleek black feline specimen stuck her nose in the milk jug and was soundly shooed for her trouble, and Rilla thought of the St George St indulgence of Hera, and shook her head; Persis Ford would have got the cat a saucer for its trouble. To say nothing of Maple Street's Elektra – oh, Madrun might grumble about her but it was an established fact she was worse than anyone else for keeping their feline deity in titbits. Rilla caught Ken's eye and saw that he was thinking the same thing. They laughed and not because Graham was feeding finger sandwiches to a romping dog, who thereafter settled down at his feet and made his eyes as wide and pleading as was caninely possible. Rilla made a mental note to tell Jem about this, confident he would thereafter take it upon himself to make up the difference to a stocky Dog Tuesday. She was thinking this when Ken leaned over and whispered in her ear, 'Mops has been seriously hard done by these last few years.'

'Poor Mops,' said Rilla. 'We must owe her years of finger sandwiches. We'll make it up to her on return. Supposing Elektra allows it.'

'Which she won't,' said Ken with a grin, and they were off laughing again.

More than once their hosts apologised for the chaos, but Rilla shook her head and Ken too; Maple St had its own version of exactly this, Cherubs, Grants and pets all jumbled haphazardly together.

They went as a party the following day down to the Abbey, and paid the extra to climb to the roof, from which vantage point they looked out over the city. They came down and took tea in the pump room of the baths as had been, Rilla lingering to pick up postcards for her mother and sister.

'Persuasion is Nan's favourite, of course,' she said, 'but mine was always Northanger. I have quite a lot of sympathy for Catherine persisting until poor Henry saw no choice but to capitulate and marry her.'

'Now that's not fair,' said Ken. 'I was more than a willing participant. Only other things would keep getting in the way.'

'I thought I'd never forgive Susan Baker and her spankings,' said Rilla, whereat Ken laughed so hard he choked, and Rilla found herself suddenly having to explain this most mortifying of anecdotes to their hosts. But what had been deadly and injurious at 15 was now only good comedy. Rilla spread jam across another bun and vowed to never do anything so awful to her own children.

'Oh, I don't know,' said Fanny as they drifted into the Roman Baths, 'what are we for if not to torment our children?'

Rilla thought of all those runs in extremis to St George St and thought perhaps the Cherubs had precipitately had their share of tormenting. She didn't say so; she tilted her head to catch the strains of a public performer who was playing something obliquely classical on the violin.

Graham said carelessly, 'Ever thinking of coming over here, Ford? We've got decent papers, you know.'

Ken snorted. He shook his head and said, 'Chance would be a fine thing! It was all I could do to get Rilla and the children up to Toronto – and even that was a near miss. I really thought,' he said as he wrapped an arm around Rilla's waist, 'that Susan Baker would intervene.'

'Madrun might like it,' said Rilla. 'Closer to home and all that.'

'Has Madrun actually got family in Wales anymore?' asked Ken, and Rilla had to admit she had no idea where her housekeeper's family was these days.

Coming back to the house they stopped by a shop displaying the notorious Bath glass, Rilla lingering lovingly over a pair of mottled cats. They stood one looking east and the other west, clear but for where they were shot through with little ripples of blue.

'I think you'd better have them,' said Ken. 'We've never been a dog house, or not until Gertrude decided we were, so Gog and Magog would look utterly ridiculous on Maple St. Jacob and Esau, though…'and he grinned and nodded at the cats.

'Nonsense,' said Rilla. 'They're Artemis and Apollo. The Toronto cats are always Greek; you know this.'

'Oh, well,' said Ken, 'in that case, surely they're Eros and Anteros.'

'Now that's asking for trouble. Ploutos and Philomelos, possibly.'

'Because, of course,' said Ken, while the shopkeeper watched, perplexed, 'we're in desperate need of agricultural lares. Peleas and Neleus?'

'No,' said Rilla. 'At least one of them was doomed, but I forget which one. Iphagenia and Chrysothemis.'

'And they weren't doomed?' said Ken, eyes crinkling.

'Ah, but they go with Elektra,' said Rilla.

'Of course,' said Ken. 'As you so often are, Rilla-my-Rilla, you have got it exactly right. Iphagenia and Chrysothemis it is. ' Ken duly paid the shopkeeper his fee and out of the corner of her eye Rilla caught Graham half gesture approval at this declaration.

Of course, the others were mutually perplexed, so then they had to explain about Hera, Elektra and the other various cats of their acquaintance to the Rotherams, who nodded politely but were patently baffled. No matter, Rilla thought as she entrusted her paper-sheathed burdens to her handbag, we know perfectly well what we're on about.

They took afternoon tea at the place that had invented the Sally Lun Bun. It was a funny, dark place with tiny windows and long tables, half-buried from view. Rilla missed the entrance for looking until Fanny alerted her to their destination. Graham ordered tea and Sally Lun buns all round, and Ken whistled a maddeningly catchy tune all the while. Graham filled in the words; Oh, the eggs and the ham and the strawberry jam, the rollicking rollicking bun, and the gay Sally Lun…so that nearby diners looked over curious.

'Ken,' said Rilla, but unconcernedly. They were on holiday; they knew none of these people. Let them think what they liked.

'Jem's fault,' Ken said. 'He was singing it all Christmas.'

'So you thought – what, six months later? – you'd pick up where he left off?'

Ken shrugged. 'Seven months, and the buns made me think of it.'

'Well think of something else,' said Rilla, but ineffectually as the men turned it into a round. It was madcap, vaguely flat and it made Rilla miss Anthony worse than ever, but she wouldn't have changed it for anything.

Only then did they go up to the glad, mad riot of London. It should have been a clear run but the train ahead of theirs was behind schedule so they were late. Ken's pet theory about the inevitability of delays was, as ever, holding up. They were well over the regulation eleven minutes late that stipulated one could have one's fare returned, but they couldn't face the bother of trying to claim it back.

'Though we could,' said Ken as they exited Paddington station for the still busier crush of the underground. Liam would want the ticket stubs for his scrapbook, though, and anyway, the mere thought of the paperwork gave Rilla fits. And as Rilla said as they let the first, overcrowded train pass them by on the narrow Paddington platform, they were in no rush.

They went out dancing that first evening, lured in by the harried strain of Which is the rooster, which is the hen.

'We danced to this at our wedding, remember?' said Rilla.

'Of course I do,' said Ken. He twirled her under his arm and through the door to the hall. It smelled not unpleasantly of good food and people overwarm but well-contented.

'How could I forget?' he said, and because Rilla had no answer they danced on. The yellow of chiffon her gown grew golden in the dim interior, butterfly sleeves whispering as she moved, the body of the dress skimming warm and water-delicate under Ken's hands; it was easy for him to lean down and kiss the dimpled dent of her mouth. The music changed gear, slowed and grew somnolent, and still they danced, his cufflinks flashing silver in the lamplight, the amber of her ear-drops answering. There was really no need for talking.

They haunted Charring Cross with eyes peeled for gifts for their mothers, and then leisurely perused Covent Garden Market for Persis and Cass, ditto. They did better here because there was a wealth of interesting, even exotic things in evidence. In the evening Rilla dawned a deep green silk sheath that fitted her like a glove, low at the back and high ad the front, and they went to the opera.

'I thought the war put you off that colour?' said Ken, seeing it.

'Only in hats,' said Rilla with an expert toss of her head. But then she fastened a gold bracelet inlaid with the cherubs' birthstones over her evening gloves and beamed, which spoiled the effect rather.

The opera was Tristan und Isolde, Kirsten Flagstad's soprano spinning Isolde's Liebestod endlessly onwards. She made it look easy, twenty minutes of relentlessly athletic singing. But for having watched Anthony up close, Rilla supposed she might have thought it was easy. She took all this in the music, the convoluted machinations of the plot, the Irish maiden by a Cornish prow, but dimly, as if mentally taking notes for as and when they got to Ireland. Not that they did, in the event. Not that trip.

Still, Rilla thought, looking by turns between the score and bejewelled Flagstad, she had felt a version of that once. She supposed they all had. Hadn't she at the height of the war, vowed to live or die for love? Love of Ken of course, but it was more than that – the world had come into it, her little gem of a glistering green, idyllic Island. Jims too – Rilla would never forget the moment she had woken in the dead of the night to a crying war baby and known that she loved him. In the half-light of the theatre she saw the Jims-stone winking on her arm, and touched a gloved hand to Ken's cheek, felt at her fingertips an old scar. It was a testament to the fact that he was still there and no one need die after all.

They ate late afterwards, and then, finding somewhere still open, danced still later. Rilla found and bought her obligatory thimble for the city, because it was small, and easily packed. She bought a second for Madrun, who had got her collecting them in the first place. They went on to Canterbury and then to Dover, these things passing in a blur, because there were only so many churches and their architecture Rilla felt anyone could reasonably take in, and anyway, the landmarks weren't really the point. Perhaps her mother would have lingered to quote Keats over the smell of incense, or waxed rhapsodic about Chaucer, but Rilla had lost patience with him, all those extra Es and long esses. They were a menace to anyone with a lisp and that she would tie to. Ken teased her shamelessly for it, until she poked and prodded and found that he had retained little of his own brush with that literary Great.

'But not because of the spelling,' he said wickedly. 'Too damn moralistic, that's all.'

Rilla laughed, because he wasn't wrong, and never cared which of their travelling companions took notice. She leaned her head against his shoulder, smiling and breathed in his familiar smell of polish, sandalwood, and English air. He would usually smell of ink, but he had been too long away from the paper for that by now. No, thought Rilla as the train jaunted forward, landmarks were not the point at all. Not this trip. Better than that was this oasis of a holiday, no cherubs or cats, or anyone else to consider. She sent letters home – wish you were here– and meant it. But the adoration Jims and the younger children shared was mutual, and she had a hunch any longing for parental influence would be assuaged by the stamps on the letters. So she closed her eyes and fell asleep with Ken for a pillow and was incandescently contented.

At Dover they caught up with still more of Ken's army friends and went in a group to France. They wandered cobbled streets and lamented – Rilla and the other women anyway – how treacherous they were in heels. The landscape was as idyllic as the paintings made it look, and they could have looked at those paintings, Rilla supposed, but the weather was lovely and the real thing was before them, verdant and sweet smelling, so they stuck to the wynds, closes and massy green fields with their wildflowers, only occasionally succumbing sublimity of Gothic architecture. It smelled of damp stone, and sometimes of incense, and on the whole the consensus was strongly in favour of the earthy richness of the fields, the zing and zest of the rampant wildflowers, the drying hay. Walter, Rilla felt, would have approved.

They went to Vimy on purpose to see the monument, and were speechless at the sight of it. It was a cool day for the season, but not cold, little breezes dancing and rippling across the hills, and it was hard to decide how much was weather and how much was ghosts. They stood looking up at the great marble memorial and decided it was probably both at once.

Rilla had heard the artist had meant the face of the torch-bearing youth to be featureless and undistinguished, so that he would be every soldier all at once. But individuality had got into him anyway, and Rilla found, as the wind raised gooseflesh across her neck and her shoes pinched her feet in protest, that she was glad.

'What was it they said about Vimy?' asked Ken, but he knew, of course he knew.

'The way Nan tells it,' said Rilla, reminiscently, 'Shirley came up to Swallowgate, this was her college rental, and said something like They're saying no one else could do it –that the British tried, and the French, that apparently we don't know a lost cause when we see one.'

Laughter from the others, but softly, gently, nothing more than stray snatches of sound on the dancing breeze. Somewhere over the horizon a church bell tolled and they picked their way back towards mundanity. It was hard after the individuality of the boy in the monument, his white marbled face looking out at them from the stone. Remember. The clock startled the swallows and they began to sing. It was a sad, forlorn carol, the perfect Requiescat in pacem to close the day.

After that the group broke up; Rilla and Ken had an appointment with Katherine Brooke of Anne Blythe's Summerside days, who had long since settled here, and who, on hearing they were coming, demanded a visitation. She met them at the gate to a grey stone flat full of espaliered flowers and trailing ivy. She gestured them into the garden with its espaliers and sat them at a round marble-topped table whose patinaed and interwoven legs bespoke a history much older than the flat. The chairs too were coiled and wrought-iron, but comfortably angled out of the sun, which was a sanguinary globular glory. It spilled across the garden walls, crimsoning the worn grey stone and making the espaliered flowers blush. Thus ensconced, Katherine fed them on finely fried fish, so soft it fell apart on the fork, and a salad that had clearly been grown in that garden with its espaliers and creeping ivy. It smelled of smoke, of fire and the fresh, cool air of the evening. Rilla nibbled at it and thought of her mother all the while, how much she would have loved this. It occurred now to Rilla to wonder if Katherine had been in France all those years ago when Mother had toured it, and thought it was possible. So Mother would know all about it then, the creeping ivy, espaliered flowers and the wonderfully rendered fish that smelled of fire and air and even of the far off sea all at once. Rilla thought all this, and all the while Katherine Brooke went on feeding them and taking the temperature of current affairs, demanding to know why they were going on to Germany.

'You're coming at entirely the wrong time, of course,' she said staunchly.

'And what would be the right one?' asked Rilla.

'Years ago' said Katherine as a platter of petit-fours made their round. They were the compliment to an elaborate tea service whose pattern Rilla made a mental note of. It would be worth tracking down for Leslie Ford's pleasure in it.

"Tell me about that girl of your sister's that scarpered. Has she turned up yet?'

'Miri?' said Rilla as Ken nibbled fussily at what looked like a miniature quince tartlet.

'Has she rucked up yet? Why they haven't dragged her home by the ear, I don't know.'

Rilla laughed outright. 'You've never tried talking reason with Nan, have you?' she said.

'No,' said Katherine. She said it distractedly, because by then she was feeding scraps to the massy Alsatian lying amicably at her feet. It seemed positively lavish, feeding the scraps of such a delicate, ornamented meal to a dog, but there it was.

'Well,' said Rilla, 'mules have more give to them. And maybe,' with a thought of the day James Anderson and his young English bride came up the walk to Ingleside, arms linked, 'maybe she thought that to love Miri, really love her, meant letting her go her way and trusting she'd find her way home. Jims did, after all.'

'That's your mother in you,' said Katherine. 'Too wise by half. Extremely irritating. I don't promise I agree - I don't - but I'm hard pressed to argue.'

In Rome Rilla and Ken threw a coin in the old fountain, not looking, and Ken said unabashed, 'Worked before, didn't it? We're back.' Rilla tried not to think of Katherine Brook and her politics, and when another return might be likely. The square was awash in lamplight, and somewhere, someone was playing something liquid and silky; the sound floated gauzily out an open window and washed over the slumbering square. She let Ken kiss her throat there in the wash of lamplight, the white, gauzy moonlight, and then her mouth. She laughed as he took her arms in his and positioned them ballroom-style, the easier to waltz around the fountain Trevi, laughter light, fine and gauzy as the moonlight, as warm as the lamplight

They laughed over the impressive grille of the hotel lift and compared it to the St George St contraption. Purely for the fun of it, they raced each other up the storeys, Ken taking the stairs while Rilla rode the lift. She won, and he said 'Point to the Hotel Luccarno lift. We'll have to tell Hal back at St George St.'

'Except we don't know anything about lifts or how they work,' said Rilla. 'That's Jims and Sissy. What would we say?'

Ken shrugged, elaborately, carelessly. 'We'd say this one works and the St George St one does not.'

They ate fruit in the garden, golden spheres of peaches that were sweeter than anything Rilla had tasted, glossy, glistering apricot and an embarrassment of oranges. They walked, hands clasped through the ruins.

'I sprained an ankle here once,' Ken said, and pointed towards some tumbled column or other in the Forum.

'Really?' said Rilla, 'that particular column?'

'I'll stop your mouth,' said Ken with a devilish twinkle to his eyes, and Rilla knew enough of Shakespeare to let him win that round.

They travelled on to Venice. Venice with its canals and old-world gondolas, its masks and tangle of bridges. It hurt to see it, at first, that place Walter had dreamed about so fantastically as a boy. Once it had been to Rilla the fairy city of her heart ; now it was hard not to look up at the houses and imagine which would have best suited Walter's fantasy of the place. Or else she'd catch him reclining casually over the Bridge of Sighs, pen in hand, lightly sketching a poem. Or had Walter caught poems? Conjured them? Rilla felt with a jolt that she had lost this once-pertinent detail.

He was in the boats too, lying, arms akimbo in a moonlit gondola, hands trailing through the water so that it rippled and warped.

Ken had also loved Walter, though, and that helped. He laughed when Rilla needed him to and was silent when occasion warranted, so that little by little Walter receded from the holiday, becoming only a whisper in Rilla's mind. He smiled approvingly over the cameos Ken bought her. They were a burnt orange colour that by rights should have fought her hair, but wound up looking elegant anyway. Kene bought the set, earrings, brooch, ring, and then, spotting one, a royal green piece with a positively godly cat sitting Egyptian-God style in rigid splendour, bought that too. The cat's feet were elegantly gathered together, tail snug around said feet as it sat, ramrod straight, immortalised in shell. It was the very image of Elektra in one of her unholy indignations.

'Something for you to give Sissy,' Ken said as he fastened the brooch at her throat. 'That's part of the story of us.' Rilla kissed his ear and thought Yes, someday Sissy will wear them like a queen. Supposing Sissy could be bothered, which was, frankly, up for debate.

'Well, Sissy's daughters then,' said Ken sending a deliciously shivery feeling through Rilla.

Walter was there too as they walked San Marco Square, and hovering just behind her shoulder when later she took out Julian and Maddalo and read it to herself. Walter had loved it, but Rilla couldn't get to grips with it, and Walter would have smiled patiently and tried to explain it, were he there. Instead, she and Ken swapped, he taking over the poetry, her the letters.

'Dear Lord,' Ken said at the midway, 'what made the man think we needed over 300 lines of heroic couplets?'

'There's 617 lines,' said Rilla, who had stopped reading at 200 and skimmed the marginal markings to gauge the length instead.

'Of couplets? Darling, there can't be! Where's the missing line?'

'I really wouldn't know,' said Rilla. 'Find it for me, will you?'

'It probably got fed up and stormed off in a huff,' said Ken. After that they were laughing too much to take it seriously, and after that otherwise preoccupied, anyway. The letters went neglected, Shelley quite forgotten. After all, Rilla would reflect later, snug against Ken's chest, there were only so many heroic couplets a person could reasonably be expected to read in the first place.

They took to travelling he river, for which Rilla's relief because as she said, the gondola at least spared her heels and saved her shoes. She rubbed diligently at her soles and the soft places between her toes while Ken tried and filed to steer them something other than drunkenly down the waterway. Ken laughed riotously at that, but then he snapped a photo of her there on the water with her back to the receding cathedral, one hand tracing idle circles in the canal. He laughed still harder when Rilla produced Julian and Maddalo to read aloud as they went. Walter would have thought it the Height of Romance, but this had become their private joke. Part of The Story of Us, as Ken had put it. Rilla held it aloft, arms extended, straw-hatted head thrown dramatically back, just as Walter would have done, and if Ken had snapped the photo then, it might have been one for the ages, full of poise and he waited until she had caught his eye, and forever after she was immortalised laughing raucously over Shelly.

They went out to see the famed Murano glass, and spotting a little glass Dachshund in one of the shops, bought it expressly for Larkrise. It was part of a pair, and even though Tuesday was a solo Dachshund, Rilla thought Larkrise could do worse than a Gog and Magog in Venetian Glass with elongated spines and noses to match their resident idol. Jem would adore them, and Faith would laugh.

'Don't forget a thimble,' said Ken. 'You'll never get another one like this anywhere.'

Rilla batted at him with a parasol, but playfully. He wasn't wrong. The little glass thimble joined with the Dachshunds in her handbag.

They were in Vienna when the note came. It was late, because Jims had wrongly sent it first to their address in France. Sissy Ill Stop In Good Hands Stop All Under Control Stop Will Let You Know Soonest If Any Change Stop.

Rilla read it, blinked and read it again. Did not believe it. She handed it to Ken, who also read it, blinked and read it again. They stood there in the lobby of the hotel, incredulous. Sissy ill? The thing was impossible.

'Should we go back?' Rilla heard herself ask. She heard this as from very far away, her voice weirdly disembodied in the echoey hotel lobby with its potted plants and cedar oil scent. Beside her Ken was thinking it through; she watched him do it. The possibilities and options sliding on and off his face as he thought of, and dismissed them.

'No,' he said at last. 'Jims doesn't seem worried…and it's Sissy. You know as well as I do that he'd be the first to panic if anything really serious were happening.'

'Yes,' said Rilla, 'but I raised him, remember? All through a war when I insisted I was going to be a heroine, and refused to not be one on nothing more than sheer principle. It's entirely possible he's decided to stick the thing out as long as he possibly can in case he's over-reacting, or something changes.'

Ken considered this, too, there in the lobby which smelled of cedar oil and was decorated in potted plants. There was a joke to be had about parsing her double negative but he didn't make it.

'If that's what Jims was doing,' said Ken at last, 'he wouldn't have sent the telegram at all.'

Rilla, who had faced many Jims-related crises armed with nothing more than Morgan and sheer stubbornness and never admitted to anyone that these were inadequate when dealing with a problematic infant, thought this was sensible.

So they bought Viennese stamps for Anthony, and another pair of thimbles for the hoard Rilla was cultivating for herself and Madrun. They sat down to good tea in a decent café while a musician played on a grand piano. The music was indeterminate, but the tarte Rilla nibbled at was rich with chocolate and good pastry. It was easy with Ken's hand folded over hers and the smell of the chocolate blending seamlessly with the music, to think Ken was right after all. Sissy would be fine; Jims would manage it swimmingly.

They went to the opera; it was Elizabeth Schumann this time singing Strauss. Rosenkavalier. She sang Sophie with her atmospheric high notes to Lehman's Marschallin, and even Rilla could see that the thing was glorious, that Cass and Anthony both would have loved it. And while the words eluded her, the story was patently funny, and the waltzes were sumptuous. The final trio was at least as sacred as any English Evensong they had caught; Walter would have thought this, Rilla knew. She wore a creamy silk shot through with rosettes and violets – the grown up extrapolation of that harbour light dress all those years ago. It hugged her close and shimmered to her ankles, finely pleated near the hem so that crinkled it like a shell and made her feel like the ascending Venus. She donned elbow-length gloves like armor and thought almost longingly how her young self would have thought them the height of sophistication.

Afterwards, the thought Sissy and her unwellness intruded again, but there was no news from Jims waiting for them, nor any the following morning. So she walked with Ken through well-groomed gardens and nodded in passing at the busts of composers for her mother. She saw St Stephen's and lingered over the candles, but did not actually light one; it would have upset Susan, and anyway, somehow their dead were more than just Walter now. Now there was Susan, too, and that poor withered baby of Di's, snatched by polio.

That brought thoughts of Sissy back, but there was no word, and it was easy as they sat on the lawn by the butterfly house, to believe all was well. The sun was high, the grass lustrously green; Rilla braided absent-minded flower garlands and stained her gloves because it was what Sissy would have done. They took tea somewhere with no piano, but the tea was still hot, the attendant Viennese Whirl bursting with cream and jam, the biscuit sandwiching it light and crumbly.

They returned to word from Jims. Sissy In Hospital Stop Grandad Says Polio Stop Come Direct Stop. Rilla looked at the date, saw that there had been no confusion over the address this time, and shivered. The Viennese Whirl began to curdle in her stomach. So Sissy had got polio. Leslie and Persis had written that was rampant in Toronto. But Sissy couldn't have it, because Jims had had the sense to take her out of the city, had taken her to the Island. To Rainbow Valley. But that was simplistic, childish thinking, because hadn't the War come even to Rainbow Valley? Rilla was not aware of Ken taking the telegram until suddenly she wasn't holding it any more. She stood there, gloved hands empty and posed as if they were not, smelling the cedar oil of the hotel and the greenery of the potted plants and her grass stains.

'Right,' said Ken. 'I'll go arrange travel. Can you see to the cases?'

Rilla thought about clutching his arm, of insisting he stay because if he was there then there was someone else who understood the impossibility that Sissy should be ill. But that was inefficient and they must get back directly. Jims had said so. That meant Ken sorting the travel and her tending to the cases. Rilla waved him off.

In England again the sun had remembered its quarrel with that green and pleasant land, so it was grey and sere on this second pass through. The rain made the pavement slippery, but there was no time to duck into tearooms or linger laughingly over shop displays.

They succumbed only once, outside a Southampton bookshop. The rain was streaming off the shop awnings, sliding off umbrellas onto unsuspecting shoes. It even dampened Rilla's skirt at the knees, a great darkling blotch spreading blackly across what had once been crisply starched and ironed blue dimity. Rilla pulled the arms of her cardigan close against the chill of it unsuccessfully, and then Ken saw the bookshop. They weren't to be on the boat for easily another two hours by his estimation. So Ken took Rilla's arm and led her into the nearest indoors, which was warm, gently steaming and wherein were tables upon tables of a little green-trimmed book. They'd been seeing it everywhere since returning to England. The blue-black mountain range of the cover had become positively ubiquitous. Now, with departure imminent, Ken broke the spine with a satisfying crack, and together they inhaled the smell of new book, so sacred to their respective families. It began In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit. Ken grinned widely. Rilla opened her mouth to ask what a Hobbit was, and then found as Ken read on, that it didn't matter.

'The children will love it,' said Ken. 'I could read it to them before bed. Like in the old days.'

'Not without me, you can't,' said Rilla.

They bought a second copy for the Ingleside children, since it was reasonable odds they'd run across them when they finally arrived at their destination. Rilla thought of Hector and Miss Abby, and knew they and Dulce would love this book as keenly as her own children.

'So will Mandy,' said Ken.

'Well, we can't leave out Kingsport if we include Mandy,' said Rilla. They came away with five copies of Tolkien's The Hobbit, and kept one close through the boatride home. They took turns reading from the copy whose spine Ken had broken there in the Southampton bookshop once on board the boat. It was swollen with damp and smelled of salt and lurched and rocked horribly in the wet weather. No chance of a walk, thought Rilla with a smile for her mother's last effort to interest her in Literature. No matter. She was interested now in the hobbits and their mission because as long as she and Ken were guessing at riddles and laughing over the appalling poetry they weren't wringing their hands. And Rilla supposed there was no point in hand-wringing until they could assess the damage.

They came into Kingsport experts on Hobbits, and at that point Jo Blake met them. He fed them on thick clam chowder that was more clams than creamy soup and did not protest when they insisted they couldn't stay over, that they must get to Sissy and the Cherubs. He laughed when they explained the Cherubs joke, and that made them laugh. Rilla felt terrible about it afterwards, because how could she laugh while Sissy was ill, but in that moment she needed it.

'It's all my fault,' said Jims later. By then they were at the Charlottetown Hospital, and Ken was with Sissy in her room. He sat by the great Iron Lung and read The Hobbit to her while Rilla and Jims watched through the window.

'I should have looked after her better,' said Jims.

If Rilla couldn't save her daughter, she knew how to do this. She got her arms around Jims and pulled him close. 'It's never your fault,' she said. He looked about to cry, and because if he cried she would cry and because above all else she must not cry in front of Jims, Rilla set out to make him laugh. So she told him about Mary Vance and how she had saved him all those years ago from Diphtheria Croup, watching as his eyes grew wider and wider. She took him for tea, and then made him fetch the children so she could give them their treats.

'But we told you not to bring us anything!' Anthony said.

It was so reassuringly normal that Rilla buried her face in his curly dark head and stifled her tears there. He smelled of the Ingleside soap with its lemon zest, and proximity to Miss Abby's horses, of the salt of the sea and the red grit of the roads. He did not smell at all of illness or polio and it was all Rilla could do not to break down sobbing there in the hotel room with Anthony in her arms. Jims poured over the puzzle from Paris, and the stamps were handed lovingly round like stardust.

Liam held up a matchbox car and said happily, 'Sissy will like this one.' Everyone agreed. Anthony cooed over the opera programs when he found them peeking out from among Rilla's handkerchiefs.

'You saved them for me!' he said, jubilant, and then, looking at them, 'Oh, Aunt Cass will be so sorry not to have heard these!'

He fingered them lovingly, now humming something from the Anglican choir in Toronto that Susan had so disavowed, now a beloved piece for banjo that Susan had disavowed still more.

This is good, Rilla thought as she leaned back against the bed, all their little treasures spread out across it. Best of all, Liam, Jims and Anthony scattered between it all, more precious than ever. It wanted only Sissy to complete the picture, but the doctors were hopeful, and the aunts had dared to obey the call back to work. Rilla thought if Persis Ford could stand to leave Sissy there in that awful, clanking lung and not tear a blue streak off her Anthropologists then probably the world was as it should be.

Jims came and snuggled next to her, childish there in the Charlottetown hotel room. He smelled of the hospital, of weak tea and canteen Ditto. 'I'm glad you're back,' he said. 'I mean, I'm sorry we called you back and all that – but I'm glad you're here.'

Rilla tried and failed to order his sandy hair. It had grown long and unruly over the summer. Now she laughed and hugged Jims tight, so that he said, 'Mum!'and anyone would have been forgiven for supposing he recanted of his gladness.

Rilla knew better. She squeezed him tighter and said, 'Me too, darling. So very, very glad.'