Coming Home

Looking away from him, David said passionately, ‘On a night like this, I can’t help wondering what it is about us human beings that compels us to behave so imperfectly when we have been given the gift of such a perfect universe, the potential to enhance our lives, to be the best we can be….’

‘It is a perfect evening,’ Father Ignatius agreed gravely as he sat down slowly next to David on the rocky outcrop of land from which it was possible not just to look up into the star-studded Jamaican sky above them but also out to sea. ‘But there have been other equally perfect evenings and they have not resulted in such a philosophical outburst.’

‘Philosophical.’ David shook his head. ‘No. To be philosophical is to be detached, to talk about the human condition in general terms, whereas I was thinking … wishing … regretting …’

He stopped whilst the priest looked at him and said knowledgeably, ‘You want to go home.’

‘Home!’ David gave a mirthless laugh. ‘This is my home and a far better one than I deserve.’

‘No, David,’ the priest corrected him gently. ‘This is where you live. Your home is where your heart is. Your home is in England … in Cheshire …’

‘… in Haslewich,’ David supplied wryly for him. ‘I dreamed about my father last night,’ he said to the priest abruptly. ‘I wonder what they have told him … about me … about my disappearance. I wonder if …’

‘From what you have told me of your family, your brother, your twin,’ the priest emphasised, ‘I doubt they will have told him anything that might hurt him. But if you really wish to know, then you should go back,’ he said gently.

‘Go back,’ David repeated brusquely. ‘No, I can’t do that.’

‘There is no such word as “can’t”,’ the priest replied sturdily.

‘I’m a thief, a criminal. I stole money,’ David reminded him sharply.

‘You sinned against one of God’s laws,’ the priest agreed. ‘But you have repented your sin, acknowledging it with humility and genuine contrition. In God’s eyes, you are making atonement.’

‘In God’s eyes, maybe,’ David agreed grimly. ‘But in the eyes of the law, I am still guilty.’

‘Which is more important to you, David?’ the priest questioned him softly. ‘The burden of guilt you carry for the debt you owe your family or that which you carry in the eyes of the law?’

‘My father might no longer be alive.’

‘You have other family,’ the priest pointed out. ‘A brother … a daughter … a son …’

‘They are better off without me,’ David told him curtly, turning his head away so that the priest couldn’t see his expression.

‘Maybe … maybe not.’

‘I can’t go back,’ David repeated, but the priest could hear the uncertainty and yearning in his voice.

Ever since he had read the report of David’s nephew, Max’s knife attack, in the island’s paper, he had been preparing himself for this moment. David had become as close to him as a son and the love he felt for him was that of a father, but he was not David’s father, and had he been he knew perfectly well that it was the duty of a loving father to set even his most beloved child free to live his own life.

Since David had been working here helping him in his self-appointed task of nursing the island’s terminally sick, those too poor … too shunned by society to merit any other kind of help, Father Ignatius had come to realise just how solitary and lonely his life had been.

He had found David lying drunk in one of Kingston’s stinking gutters and even now had no real idea just why he had stopped to help him, a man who had cursed him and who, when he was sober enough, had blamed him for not allowing him to die.

It had been months before David had finally brought himself to start talking to him about his life, his past, but once he had done so, the priest had not passed any judgement. Why should he? Judging others was not what he was here for. Helping them, healing them, loving them; those were his duties.

Originally, when he had entered the priesthood, he had been filled with such ideas, such visions, but then had come the faith-shaking discovery that the man he most admired, his inspiration and guiding light, had been guilty of one of the most unforgivable of sins. Father John had broken his vow of chastity and had not just had a secret relationship with a woman but had also given her his child. Torn between conflicting loyalties, tortured by what he should do, in the end the younger man had simply felt obliged to speak up.

The result of his action had been catastrophic. Father John had taken his own life and he, Francis O’Leary, known by the church as Father Ignatius, had been to blame. Totally and absolutely. Even the bishop had seemed to think so.

He had been sent away out of the area, hopefully to get a fresh start, but the news of his role in the tragedy had followed him and he had become untouchable, defiled, someone to be avoided, a priest whose faith not just in others but in himself had been destroyed. He had volunteered for missionary work and had been granted it.

‘Even if I wanted to go home, I couldn’t,’ David said, bringing the priest back to the present. ‘There’s no way I could raise the cost of the airfare.’

It was true they lived very simply and meagrely, growing as much of their own food as they could and relying on the generosity and gratitude of the patients and their families for the rest of it.

‘There are other means of travel,’ Father Ignatius pointed out and then added, ‘There’s a yacht in the harbour now waiting to be sailed back to Europe. The captain was in the Coconut Bar yesterday saying that he was looking for a crew willing to work their passage.’

‘A yacht bound for Europe? What’s her cargo? Drugs?’ David asked him drily.

‘No, but her owner is dying and he wants to go home.’ The two men exchanged looks.

‘AIDS?’ David asked him forthrightly.

‘I imagine so,’ the older man agreed.

A very large proportion of the priest’s patients were in the final stages of that ravaging disease, abandoned by their frightened families and friends. Working alongside him, David had learned to respect the disease and those who suffered from it. To respect it and not to fear it.

‘I can’t go … not now….’ David resisted, but there was no denying the longing in his voice.

‘Do you often dream of your brother?’ Father Ignatius asked him obliquely.

‘Not like I did last night,’ David admitted. ‘I dreamed about when we were children. It was so vivid. It was when we got our first bikes, but the odd thing was …’ He paused and frowned. ‘In my dream, though I could see myself riding my bike, my feelings were Jon’s.’

The older man said nothing. He knew David had seen Jon Crighton from a safe distance when he had come to the island to visit Max in hospital and eventually take his son home. Life was so precious, and because he was becoming increasingly aware of just how frail his own physical strength was getting, the priest prayed that Jon Crighton would find it in his heart to welcome home his twin.

‘I can’t go,’ David was saying, but the older man knew not just that he could but that he would.

CHAPTER TWO

‘YES, MRS CRIGHTON … very well, Maddy,’ Honor corrected herself into the telephone receiver with a warm smile as she responded to her caller’s request that she use her Christian name. ‘I’d be very happy to come and see your father-in-law, although I can’t promise …’

She paused. Over the years she had grown used to the fact that her patients and their families, having failed to find a cure for their illnesses through conventional medicine, tended to expect that she could somehow produce something magical to restore them to full health.

‘Herbal medicine is not some kind of black art. It’s an exact science,’ she sometimes had to tell them severely.

Many modern drugs were, after all, originally derived from plants even if more latterly scientists had discovered ways to manufacture them synthetically in their laboratories. In her view, synthetic drugs, like synthetic foods, were not always sympathetic to the human system, and to judge from the increasing number of patients consulting her, other people were beginning to share her views.

Honor had not always been a herbalist. Far from it. She had been at medical school studying to become a doctor way back in the seventies, a sloe-eyed brunette burning the candle at both ends, studying and partying and desperately trying to deny her aristocratic background and connections to become part of the London ‘scene’. Ironically, it had not been on the London scene that she had met her late husband but through one of her mother’s friends.

Lady Caroline Agnew had been giving a coming-out party for her daughter, and Honor’s mother had insisted that Honor had to attend. Rourke had been there photographing the event. Lady Caroline had contacts at Vogue and he was the ‘in’ photographer of the moment, more used to photographing long-legged models than chubby adolescent debs.

Honor had been fascinated by him. Everything about him had proclaimed that he belonged to the world she so longed to join. His clothes, his hair, his laid-back manner and, most of all, his sharp cockney speech. Somehow or other she had managed to catch his eye and they had left the party together.

Three months later they became lovers and three months after that they married and she dropped out of medical school.

For two years she had been so passionately and completely in love with him that she had blinded herself to reality, his unfaithfulness, his drinking, the drugs he was taking with increasing regularity, the bills that mounted up because he refused to pay them, the unsavoury characters who hung like dark shadows on the edges of his life, their lives, and then she had become pregnant.

Their first daughter Abigail had been less than six months old the first time he left her.

Her parents, who had never really forgiven her for her marriage, had refused to have her home, but her father had given her a tiny allowance just enough to cover the rent on a small flat, and she had found herself a job working in a small family-owned chemist’s shop. It had been whilst working there that her interest in medicine had been reactivated. The shop was old-fashioned, its upper room stuffed with all manner of things amongst which Honor, who had been sent upstairs to tidy it, had found the herbal book that once opened she had been unable to put down.

Rourke, his affair over, had turned up on her doorstep one dark, wet night and foolishly she had taken him in. Nine months later Ellen was born. Rourke had already embarked on another affair with a rich older woman this time.

On her own again, Honor had become fascinated by herbal medicine and cures, so much so that when she learned of a local herbalist in a magazine she was reading in the dentist’s waiting room, she made a note of her address so that she could get in touch with her.

Now a fully trained herbalist herself, Honor always made a point of advising her patients to make sure they went to similarly trained and accredited practitioners whenever they chose alternative forms of healing.

Her own training had been long and thorough and one of her main reasons for coming to live here in the rather dilapidated house she had just moved into on her second cousin Lord Astlegh’s Cheshire estate was because of the land that went with it—land on which she would be able to grow some of her own herbs in a way that was completely natural and free from pesticides and any kind of chemicals. The house, which was miles away from any other habitation, might have drawn cries of despair from both her daughters, who had protested at its lack of modern amenities and creeping damp, but Honor had assured them that once she had time to get someone in to repair and improve the place, it would make a very snug home indeed.

‘It’s a hovel,’ Abigail had said forthrightly.

‘A wretched hovel,’ Ellen had agreed.

‘The locals will probably think you’re some kind of witch,’ Abigail had joked.

‘Thank you very much,’ Honor had told her daughter drily. ‘When I want my ego boosted, I shall know where to come.’

‘Oh, no, Mum, I didn’t mean you look like a witch,’ Abigail had immediately reassured her. ‘Actually, you look pretty good for your age.’

‘Mmm … Nowhere near forty-five,’ Ellen had agreed.

‘Forty-four, actually,’ Honor had corrected her with dignity.

‘Honestly, Mum,’ Abigail had told her. ‘With all the money you inherited from Dad, you could have bought yourself somewhere really comfortable. I know you had to scrimp and scrape whilst we were growing up, but now …’

‘Now I have chosen to come and live here,’ Honor had told them firmly.

She was still not totally over her shock at the amount of money she had inherited from Rourke. She hadn’t expected him to die so relatively young and certainly not from something so ridiculous as a cold turned to pneumonia. She was even more surprised to discover that since they had never divorced, she was his next of kin. The young leggy model he had been living with had been quite happy to accept the fact, simply shrugging her sparrow-like shoulder-blades and gazing at Honor with drug-glazed eyes as she shook her head over Honor’s concern and explained in a small, emotionless voice that she was really quite rich herself.

Rourke’s unexpected wealth had come not from his current work as a photographer but from his earlier and highly original work as a young man, which had now become extremely valuable collector’s pieces, selling for thousands upon thousands of pounds.

She had insisted on sharing the money with the girls, her daughters … Rourke’s daughters. Both of them were adults now and they often tended to treat her as though she were the one in need of parenting. Whilst both of them loved their mother’s elderly second cousin and thought that his Palladian home, Fitzburgh Place, and the philanthropic way in which he was developing the estate’s resources were both worthy of their highest approval, they were united in disapproval of the ramshackle place their mother had chosen to make her home.

‘I can’t bear to think about your living like this,’ Ellen had said, grimacing in distaste as she wiped a fastidious finger along one grimy window-sill the weekend her mother had moved into Foxdean.

‘Then don’t think about it,’ Honor had advised her gently.

Much as she loved them, her daughters, both wonderful girls, clever, independent, good fun to be with and undeniably beautiful, could, at times, in their attitudes and conversations, remind her disconcertingly of her own mother.

‘Honoraria has always been … way ward,’ her mother had been fond of saying exasperatedly, and Honor knew how pained and bemused her mother in particular had been at what she had seen as her daughter’s determination to turn her back on the kind of life they had expected her to lead.

If her decision not to go to Switzerland following in her mother’s footsteps and attending an exclusive finishing school but instead to study medicine had shocked and confused her parents, then the way she had ultimately lived her life, the man she had married, the friends she had made had earned her their wholehearted disapproval. But as she sometimes pithily had to remind the more conventional members of her large family, their aristocratic forebears, of whom they were so proud, had received their lands and titles for acts that had been little short of outright theft and barbarism.

Her parents had tried their best, poor darlings. No one could have been more true to stereotype than her father. His family, although not quite as noble as her mother’s, was nonetheless extremely respectably provenanced. No doubt the Victorian son of the Jessop family, who had so providentially married the only daughter of an extremely wealthy mill owner, had been more than happy to exchange his upper-class connections for her wealth. Honor’s mother’s family had always managed to marry well, which was, of course, the main reason why her second cousin, unlike so many of his peers, could afford to be paternally benevolent towards his tenants and keep his large estate in tiptop condition.

Apart, of course, from her house.

What she had not told her daughters, and moreover had no intention of telling them, was that the main reason the house was so dilapidated was because of the history appertaining to it.

Local legend had it that originally it had been built on the instructions of the younger brother of the then Lord Astlegh to accommodate his mistress. He would visit her there, often spending several days with her much to the disapproval of his elder brother and the rest of his family who had arranged a profitable marriage for him with the daughter of another landowner.

The young man refused to do their bidding. The only woman he wanted, the only one he could love, was his mistress, the wild gypsy girl for whom he had built the house but whom he would often find wandering barefoot through the woods scorning the comforts of the home he had given her.

‘Come with me,’ she was supposed to have begged him when he told her of his family’s plans for his future. ‘We can go away together … be together….’

He had shaken his head. He loved fine food, fine wines, fine books.

‘I can’t stay here,’ the gypsy girl had told him. ‘It hems me in. I need to travel, to be free. Come with me.’

‘I cannot,’ he had told her sorrowfully.

‘You are a coward,’ she had returned contemptuously. ‘You have no fire, no passion. You are weak. You are not a true man, not like a Romany man. A Romany man would kill for the woman he loved.’

Her voice had been scornful, her eyes flashing, and in the darkness of the small copse where they had argued, he had mistaken her tears for a gleam of taunting mockery.

It had been said later when the bodies were found that she had bewitched him and that only by killing her and then killing himself had he been able to break free of her spell.

He came from a powerful family, the most powerful family in the area. James, his elder brother, the then Lord Astlegh, used his position to have the affair hushed up, but news of what had happened quickly spread amongst the local population and with it claims that the copse and the house itself were haunted. Tenants who pooh-poohed the warnings and moved sturdily into it very quickly decided to move out again!

It was a reasonably sized house, a well-built, pretty Georgian red brick building with its own small porticoes and elegant sash windows, the kind of house that the upper-class women Honor had grown up with would drool over as the ideal country retreat, but her cousin was unable to successfully find a tenant. It was he who told Honor of the legend surrounding it.

‘Have you ever seen a ghost there?’ she had asked him, intrigued.

Immediately, he had shaken his head. ‘Dashed nonsense if you ask me,’ he told her gruffly. ‘But wouldn’t want you not to know about it. Give it to you rent-free. Can’t sell it—part of the estate. Have to do your own restoration work on it … local workforce shun the place.’

Honor who had fallen in love with the house the moment she saw it had been delighted.

Her chance visit to her second cousin had really been a duty visit since she had heard on the family grapevine that he was suffering badly from a colicky stomach disorder that the doctors seemed unable to relieve. She had guessed that she was being subtly asked if she could do anything to help, but the visit had had the most advantageous outcome. She had been looking for a new home for some time.

Rourke’s inheritance meant that she could actually afford to completely renovate the place and fulfil the ambition she had been harbouring, not just to prepare her herbal remedies but to grow the herbs themselves, as well. Foxdean, with its surrounding land, was perfect for her purposes. Why, she might even be able to persuade her cousin to allow her to erect a glass house where she could grow some of the more tender, vulnerable herbs.

A visit to Haslewich’s excellent health-food shop and a long chat over lunch with its owner had resulted in her being contacted by so many potential patients that her diary was becoming quite full. This was why, as she listened to Maddy Crighton outlining her grandfather-in-law’s problems, she had to tell her, ‘I can’t do anything for Mr Crighton until I have seen him, of course, and unfortunately, my first free appointment is not for a few weeks.’

There was a small pause at the other end of the telephone line, then she heard Maddy saying, ‘Oh dear. Well, in that case we shall just have to wait until then.’

As she pencilled the appointment into her diary, Honor asked Maddy several questions about her grandfather-in-law.

‘He’s had two hip operations in the past few years, but he’s still complaining about the pain he’s suffering,’ Maddy informed her. ‘But it isn’t just his pain that’s concerning us. Just lately he seems to have lost interest in life. He’s always been rather dour and a little bit tetchy, but these past few months …’

‘If he’s in constant pain, it will be having a debilitating effect on him,’ Honor responded, ‘if his GP hasn’t prescribed some painkillers.’

‘Oh, he has, but Gramps threw them away. He isn’t very good about taking medicine … he doesn’t have a very high opinion of the medical profession.’

‘Oh dear,’ Honor sympathised, guessing that Ben Crighton was the kind of patient who made most doctors’ hearts sink.

‘I’m afraid I must be painting a rather gloomy picture,’ Maddy apologised. ‘Gramps can be a little bit difficult at times, but I hate to see him in so much discomfort. He isn’t so old after all, only in his early eighties. I know it must be frustrating for him not being able to get about as much as he used to. He doesn’t drive any more and he can’t walk very far.’

‘Try to persuade him to take the painkillers his doctor has prescribed,’ Honor advised her.

‘Do you think you’ll be able to do something to help him?’ Maddy asked tentatively.

‘Hopefully, yes. You’d be amazed at the difference even the smallest fine-tuning of someone’s diet can make where joint pain is concerned. Then there are poultices that can be applied to the damaged joints and a variety of herbal medicines that can help. I’ll be better placed to discuss these with you, though, once I’ve seen Mr Crighton.’

After she had finished speaking, Honor went through to the old-fashioned back kitchen that she was in the process of turning into her still-room. In the passage that led from the kitchen proper to this room, she had put up bookshelves and she looked quickly along them, extracting a volume that she carried back with her to the kitchen proper. She sat down in a chair whilst she looked for what she wanted.

The book was one she had found tucked away amongst a pile of fusty documents at the back of a little bookshop in the cathedral town of Wells. As it was entitled A Medieval Herbal, she had pounced on it straight away. Now as she turned the pages, she paused at the one headed ‘Bramble’ and read it with a small smile. ‘For sore of joints take some part of this same wort, seethe in wine to a third part and with the wine then let the joints be bathed.’

As she closed the book, Honor sat back in her chair. Herbalism had come a long way since its early days, but its principles were still the same as they had always been—to heal the sick.

In the high-pressure world of modern drugs the race was on to comb the most remote tracts of land searching for the plant that would give the world a panacea that would cure mankind of all his ills and give him eternal youth.

Personally, Honor felt that their efforts would be better employed in preserving the rain forests instead of letting them be destroyed. Surely the increasing incidence of childhood asthma and eczemas was proof enough of what polluting the earth’s atmosphere was doing. Trees cleaned the air. Without them …