Lavender Morning Read online

  She dropped the old shirt on the bridge, then went to her belt, but the horse began to act up and Edi started to go to him.

  “Shut up!” David said to the horse, and it instantly became still.

  Smiling, Edi unfastened her belt buckle and let the trousers fall to the bridge.

  “They were wrong,” David whispered.

  “About what?” Edi asked.

  “Your legs. They have to be four feet long.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never measured them. Would you tie the rope around me?”

  “Yes,” he said, but he took his time, looking at every inch of her while he slowly walked toward her.

  He put the rope around her waist, tied the end to the side of the bridge, then nodded toward the other rope in the back of the buggy. “What’s that for?”

  “If there’s anything still in the car, I’m going to get it out.”

  “Meaning your suitcase?”

  “Yes, my own clothes,” she said, as she glanced down at the big trousers he wore. “Did you bring anything that would fit without the brace?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want you to bother with getting it. If you can find the Allen wrench, fine, if not, then nothing else is important. You understand me?”

  “You’re going to make a great father,” she said, “but I already have one. I think if the car is hidden, then the water is deep enough for a dive, don’t you?”

  “No!” David half shouted. “We’ll go to the edge and you can walk in. You don’t know—” He broke off because she climbed onto the railing and did a perfect swan dive into the river. He held his breath as he waited for her to come up and every terror went through his head. Had she hit bottom? Was she unconscious? He was halfway over the railing when she came up.

  “It’s cold!” she said.

  “What did you think it would be? Tropical?” he said, doing his best to hide his fear. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine. It feels great. I’m going to wash my hair. Throw me that soap off the seat, will you?”

  “Soap!” he said, mumbling. He just wanted her to get this done and get out of there. With his leg held stiffly, he half ran, half hobbled to the buggy and got a bar of soap off the seat, then tossed it to her. “Good catch,” he said.

  “I was the best batter on my school baseball team,” she said. “I could hit the ball just ten feet and still outrun them all.” She was soaping her hair while treading water. Turning, she looked at the car, then swam to it and climbed on top.

  “Look at me,” she yelled.

  “Yeah, look at you.” She had on a clinging teddy that was wet and transparent, and she was standing on top of an upside-down car that couldn’t be seen above the water. She looked like she was standing on the water. “My kingdom for a camera,” he whispered, but he had none.

  “Be careful on that thing,” he called. “The bottom of a car isn’t as smooth as a mattress.”

  She kept rubbing her hair with the soap, then threw the bar back to him. To his shame, he missed it and had to chase it across the bridge. When he looked back, she was gone, and for a moment his heart seemed to stop beating.

  He waited what seemed to be minutes but there was no sign of her. He gave a tug on the rope, but she didn’t tug back, and she hadn’t released it. “I knew this was a bad idea,” he said. “I knew it. I should have stopped her. I should have forced her to—”

  “To what?” she said and she was below him, her hand on a pillar of the bridge.

  “Forced you not to do this.”

  “I’d like to have seen you try,” she said in a suggestive way. “Can you reach my hand?”

  David got down on his stomach and reached down until he touched her hand—and she passed him the Allen wrench. He clasped it tightly, then rolled onto his back and for a moment held it to his chest. Such a little thing, but so very important.

  “I got it,” he said, “so now you can come up.” But when he looked, she was already gone. With lightning speed, David unbuckled his trousers and pushed them off, then he gave one last look of hatred to the steel brace and began loosening screws. For the sake of comfort, all the screws were recessed so the protruding heads wouldn’t chafe a person’s skin, but that made it necessary to use an unusual tool to remove the cage.

  Half of the screws were too tight from water and rust, and one of them broke as he twisted. But with David’s determination and just plain anger—not to mention the desire he had for Miss Edilean Harcourt—he kept working.

  He broke blisters and made some new cuts as he wrenched the thing off his leg, but he managed to tear it away from his skin, then he threw it toward the far end of the bridge.

  When he was free of it, he had trouble standing, but he made it. He had to bend his knee half a dozen times before it began working again. His leg was a mess, with blisters and bloody patches and bits of cloth stuck to raw places, but to him it looked great. “I’m out of it,” he yelled as he looked back at the river, but Edi didn’t answer him.

  He unbuttoned his shirt, threw it on the bridge, climbed on the rail, and dove in.

  “What took you so long?” she asked as she swam into his arms.

  25

  THAT’S IT,” DAVID Aldredge said.

  “What do you mean that that’s it?” Joce asked.

  “That’s all the story Edi wrote, or at least it’s all that I have. Alex McDowell left the papers to me in his will, and I don’t know if that’s all he had, or if Edi wrote more and it was lost. At the end, Alex was pretty bad.”

  “Bad?” Jocelyn asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t remember who he was, much less anything about a story sent to him many years ago. However…” Dr. Dave paused, as though for a drumroll, “I found something interesting just a few years ago. You know how it is, boring day, playing on the Internet, and I typed in Dr. Jellie’s name.

  “This is an excerpt from a series of books about World War II. As far as I know, it’s the only place Dr. Jellicoe’s name is mentioned. Would you like me to read it to you?”

  “Yes, please,” said both Luke and Jocelyn.

  Dr. Sebastian Jellicoe’s contributions to WWII were never acknowledged during his lifetime, or even afterward. Anyone who met him didn’t come away talking about his great brain or how he could look at a scrambled-up jumble of words and tell at a glance what it said. What people always remembered about him was his great storytelling. He could go to the grocery and come back with a story worthy of being published.

  For myself, at the time a young and eager student wanting to learn at the feet of a master, the story I remember best was about the young couple who probably saved his life. It was near D-day in 1944, and Dr. Jellie told that he was sitting by his fire on a cold, rainy night, half asleep in his chair, when he heard the noise of a horse and a man shouting curse words. He said that for a moment he was so befuddled that he thought it was Father Christmas and the fat man had just collided with his roof.

  Instead, it was two tall, strikingly good-looking young Americans, and they’d come tearing across the countryside in the middle of the night in the ancient racing carriage of his old, grumpy neighbor named Hamish. Dr. Jellie said the man couldn’t get along with anyone and as a result he was left alone. It was told around the village that he’d once been a driver of carriages in races and that he’d won nearly everything until an accident made him quit. He retired to his father’s farm and spent the rest of his life complaining to his long-suffering wife and children.

  But on that cold, drizzly night, here came one of Hamish’s buggies being pulled by a horse nearly as old as Hamish, and driven by a girl so tall and beautiful that Dr. Jellie said he thought maybe he’d died and was about to enter Heaven. She looked like Boadicea riding into battle.

  In the back of the buggy was a young man who was taller than she was, just as handsome, but a man who obviously hated carriage riding as much as he adored the young woman.

  “You certainly paid me back,”