Relics (18 page)

Chapter Nineteen

As Faye approached the cash register with a set of turkey-red flannel pajamas, but, sadly, no longjohns, she found Dr. Amory waiting for her.

“I found the reference for the song you gave me,” he said, drawing her aside so that they could talk out of earshot of the folks standing in the checkout line.

For a moment, she thought that some of her brain cells must already be frozen solid, because she had no idea what he was talking about. “Oh. Oh, yeah,” she said as the memory slowly dawned. “Miss Dovey’s song. You found out where it came from?”

He failed to suppress a very unprofessorial grin. “I know where it came from. I even know who wrote it, er, wrote them.”

“What do you mean ‘them’? I only gave you one song.”

“But it’s really two songs that the Sujosa, over the years, amalgamated into one. Look here.” He drew a sheet of paper, folded together in quarters, from his pants pocket. “I put Miss Dovey’s song alongside parts of the two old songs that her ballad was drawn from. Her words are on the right in italics.”

“Henry the Eighth.” Faye murmured. “I wouldn’t have picked him as the writer of moralistic jingles. How could he possibly ‘pass time with good company’ when he had to live with himself?”

“Good question. But his ballad was apparently one of the greatest hits of the day. A book written in 1548, the year after the king met his maker—”

“I bet his maker sentenced him to an eternity of punishment at the hands of his poor wives.”

“An interesting proposition. I have a feeling the Almighty specializes in poetic justice, so you may be right. But,” Amory said, rattling his paper, “if you’ll let me get to the point—”

“Sorry.”

“Even back then, high moral standards were not a prerequisite for getting a song on the Top 40. A book written the year after Henry’s death mentions that “Pastance with gude companye” was quite popular in early sixteenth-century Scotland.”

“Oh, my God. The Song of Songs. I cannot believe I missed a biblical quote,” Faye said as she read further down the page. She wondered if it was time to go back to church before she forgot an important commandment or something. “Grandma made sure I got to church every Sunday when I was little. But I’m wondering why you picked the Geneva Bible as the source. Weren’t there several English translations that were widely used in the sixteenth century? Didn’t Henry himself commission Cranmer’s ‘Great Bible’?”

“Yes, he did. Your grandmother would be proud of your bible knowledge. But Miss Dovey used words that are specific to the Geneva Bible. I pulled this verse out of six bibles published in the century before the King James Version: the Coverdale, Matthew, ‘Great,’ Geneva, Bishops’, and Rheims-Douay bibles. Only the Geneva describes the speaker as ‘comelie.’ The other versions use words like ‘fayre’ or ‘welfauoured’ or ‘beautiful.’ Only the Geneva Bible speaks of the ‘curtines of Salomon.’ There’s no doubt in my mind that the person who wrote new verses for King Henry’s song was familiar with the Geneva Bible.”

Faye, ever-practical, moved from a word-by-word analysis straight to the point. “So, if we assume one of Miss Dovey’s ancestors adapted ‘The Kynge’s Ballad’—”

“Or someone they knew,” interjected the always accurate Dr. Amory.

“Right. An ancestor of the Sujosa, or someone they knew, probably lived in England or Scotland at least until the Geneva Bible was published in 1560.”

“And I’d imagine that they composed their adaptation of Henry’s ballad shortly after that, while it was still fresh in their minds.”

“Right. But the combination of the two songs tells us even more than that,” Faye pointed out. “Have you heard Miss Dovey’s story about the yellow-haired sailors who kidnapped a group of women while they were gathering water? She specifically said that the men came to love their captives. Think about these lyrics: ‘I am blacke, but comelie.’ Can you name a bible verse or, come to think of it, any English poem of the time that would be as meaningful to a white man in love with a dark-skinned woman?”

“Not a one. So this song places some of the Sujosa’s ancestors in present-day Britain through the middle of the 16th century, and it suggests that their dark-skinned ancestors entered their genealogy shortly thereafter.”

“Yep.” Faye read through the biblical passage again. Miss Dovey’s ancestors had taken the words of Henry VIII and of Solomon’s anonymous lover and made those words their own.

“I’m glad there’s a team meeting tonight,” Amory said. “I’ll finally have something substantive to report. I mean
we’ll
have something to report.”

“Tonight?” It had been a long week, but Faye was pretty sure that it wasn’t over yet. “It’s only Thursday. Isn’t the meeting tomorrow night?”

“Raleigh’s going home a day early, so he moved the meeting up. It seems his wife misses him.”

“Like Catherine of Aragon missed Henry the Eighth.” Faye clapped her hand over her mouth after the undiplomatic comment escaped, but Amory seemed to enjoy it.

As Amory turned to go, she put a hand on his arm. “Wait. I’ve got another linguistics question. What is the etymology of the given name ‘Carmo’?”

“How is it spelled?”

“C-A-R-M-O. It’s Irene Montrose’s middle name, and she says there’s been a ‘Carmo’ in her family for generations.”

“I’ve never heard of that name. At first blush, I’d guess it came from one of the Romance languages, but I could be dead wrong on that. Let me check the Internet and I’ll get back to you.” He nodded good-bye and headed for his office.

Faye purchased her pajamas and looked around for Laurel. She found her leaning on her crutches just inside the door. Her purchases were stuffed in a plastic bag that Jenny had tied with an extra-large loop to make it easier for her to handle.

“Let me carry that for you,” Faye said.

Laurel slid the loop over her wrist and grasped the handles of her crutches. “Thanks, but I can manage.”

Faye opened the door and followed Laurel through it, saying, “I’m glad we have this chance to spend a little time together. With work and the accident and the fire and now Jimmie’s death, we’ve hardly had time to talk since—”

“Since we met.”

“Yeah. I guess we’ve never had a chance to get acquainted, have we?”

“Part of that is my fault. I’ve made myself scarce on purpose.”

“Whatever for?”

“I’ve been spending more time with Joe than I ever intended to.” Laurel stretched one crutch forward and took a tentative step with her left leg. Then she reached out with the other crutch and dragged the right foot, encased in its heavy walking cast, forward. “I enjoy sitting at the kitchen table chopping onions while he cooks. And I’m really getting into flintknapping since Joe taught me how. It’s something I can do sitting down that doesn’t involve a needle. Knitting and cross-stitch are so tedious that they make me crazy, but chipping stone settles my mind.”

“That’s what Joe tells me. I mean, I don’t know that he’s ever tried needlework, but he says that flintknapping makes him feel peaceful.”

Laurel picked her way slowly through the parking lot, making sure her crutch tips sat solidly on the uneven gravel surface before trusting them to bear her weight. After the rain ended, a cold front had swept through and sent the late afternoon temperature plummeting, yet Faye could have sworn she saw perspiration on Laurel’s upper lip.

Looking up from the ground in front of her hobbled feet, Laurel said, “Maybe I’m being silly. I mean—I haven’t known Joe a week, but I need to know now, not later, where you stand. When Joe started walking me to work and back, I was afraid you’d be mad at me, but you never said anything. When he gave me this,” she said, reaching inside her jacket and pulling out a necklace fashioned from a bird point and a length of leather lacing, “I was sure you’d have something to say about it, but I was wrong. It looks like I’m going to have to come right out and ask you this. How do you feel about Joe?”

Faye was so busy trying to figure out why she’d never noticed Joe squiring Laurel around the settlement that she almost missed the real question. How did she feel about Joe, anyway?

“Joe’s my friend,” she said. This much, at least, was the truth. She was certain of Joe’s friendship. “I’m happy that he’s found someone who appreciates his gifts.” She didn’t add,
And who overlooks his shortcomings
.

“He helps me so much, without even trying. He tries to walk slow, so I can keep up with him, but I don’t think it’s possible for a man with legs that long to travel at my speed. After walking a quarter-mile with Joe, I’m worn out, but my feet are working better.”

“He would die if he knew he was making you hurry.”

“I know, so don’t tell him.”

Faye watched Laurel creep slowly across a rocky patch of ground. Even if Joe took baby steps, she could never keep up with him.

“So?”

“So how do I feel about Joe?” Again Faye wished she hadn’t been too oblivious to have seen this coming. There was no easy, obvious answer to Laurel’s question, but Faye knew she must answer, and there was only one answer to give. “There’s nothing between me and Joe. I wish you every happiness.”

They neared the bunkhouse and saw Brent standing on the porch, wearing a Crimson Tide jacket and cap to ward off the growing cold. She wondered if he’d heard that Raleigh had rescheduled the team meeting, effectively canceling their dinner date, since Alcaskaki restaurants closed way too early to accommodate workaholic outsiders. And she wondered if he would realize she was angry at him. Faye had a hunch that, when it came to matters of the heart, Brent was as oblivious as she was.

Faye helped Laurel climb the porch steps. She noticed that Brent didn’t scold her for interfering with the younger woman’s progress. Perhaps he noticed the fatigue on Laurel’s face.

As Laurel disappeared into the house, Brent said, “I hear we’ve got to work tonight. Could we set another date to have dinner?”

“Raleigh doesn’t think the rest of us have social lives. He has no problem changing a meeting date at the last minute to suit his own schedule.” She purposely didn’t answer his question.

Too smart to let her reject him obliquely, he asked again. “Want to have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

Faye hated it when people sidestepped a simple question with a question of their own, but she did it anyway. “Why didn’t you tell me you were part Sujosa?”

He actually took a step backward. “Did Adam tell you that?”

“No. You did. Your hairdresser blew your cover,” Faye said, touching the back of her head, near where a line of stitches snaked across her scalp.

His hand crept up to touch the light streak on the back of his own head.

“What made you think Adam had given away your secret?” she asked.

“It’s not a secret. Everybody in the settlement and in Alcaskaki knows who I am.”

“I didn’t.”

He gestured toward the porch swing, as if he thought she’d be calmer and more rational if they had this argument while seated. She stayed on her feet.

“Was I supposed to announce it when we met? Should I have said ‘Hello, my name is Brent, and I’m of indeterminate racial origin,’ before I even asked your name?”

“No, but you could have mentioned it sometime. Like maybe when I was afraid I was out of place, being the only person of color sitting with your Alcaskaki friends. Or when you told me you’d decided to forgo a big pile of money, so you’d have time to do charity work in the Sujosa settlement. You could have said they were your people, instead of letting me think you were Mother Teresa, serving the poor just because they were there.”

“I never said I was a saint. Why are you so angry over this?”

Faye knew she couldn’t explain what it was like to always—always—be set apart from everybody else because you didn’t look like anybody else. Brent’s bloodlines probably weren’t so different from hers, but he didn’t look multiracial. He looked like a white man with a tan. He was smart, he was good-looking, he was personable and, according to Adam, he was athletic. He was born for social success; it was his birthright.

It occurred to her that Adam, in his low-key way, might have tried to tell her about Brent, even before she realized the truth herself. When he’d said that he, Brent, and Leo had been like brothers when they were on the high school baseball team, she’d thought he was saying that proximity had broken down the racial barriers between Adam and Brent, two white Alcaskakians, and Leo, a brown Sujosa. If asked, Adam might have placed the racial barrier in a different place—with him on one side, and Brent and Leo on the other.

“Look,” she said. “Maybe I’m overreacting and maybe I’m not. It’s been a bad week. And my head really hurts. When are you going to take my stitches out?”