The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(56)

“You be here for Mr Hulne?” she asked brightly. “I’ll bring up some tea.”

Up a staircase designed to decapitate anyone higher than seven years old, through a wooden door with a black iron latch on it was a room with a small orange fire burning against the wall and a series of poorly painted images showing still waters bedecked with lilac flowers. There was a small single-person bed and a rocking chair by the fire. In the rocking chair, more blanket than man, was Rory Edmond Hulne, and he was, right on schedule, dying. From the yellow tinge at the end of his flaking nails to the protruding weakly throbbing veins on his chicken-neck, he was a man for whom little more could be provided than palliative care and a little emotional redemption. It took very little to assess which one I was.

I perched on the end of the bed, put my bag down on the floor and, as his eyes flickered open against the gum that weighed his lashes down, I said, “Hello, Mr Hulne.”

When had I seen him last? A warm May in 1925 of this life, when I had, as I always did, finally mustered enough self-awareness and recollection to regain my former self and composure, and had written in my firmest hand to the Cronus Club, requesting extraction from the tedium of childhood. Charity Hazelmere, that great matron of the Club, had replied at once, informing Patrick and Harriet that a generous scholar was offering to pay for the education and board of deprived youths, and my name had been put forward for a position. A figure had been named, and I had absolved my foster-parents of all guilt at my departure by exclaiming gleefully how exciting the prospect would be, and how I had longed for a chance to better myself, and would write home often, though they could both of them barely read. They had packed my one bag of tatty clothes and put me in the back of my foster-father’s cart to take me to the station, and Rory Hulne had come out of his house to watch me go, and stood in the door, and said nothing. In some lives, as we went through this ritual, he would come to shake my hand and tell me to be a brave young man; not this time, though quite what it was in my behaviour that so altered his, life to life, I can never say.

That had been nearly thirty years ago. On the few occasions I returned north, to spend Christmas silently with Patrick or to attend Harriet’s funeral–that constant fixture of my childhood–my father had not been there. Away on business, or taking the waters, or up in town, or other such emptinesses of occupation. Yet now, here he sat, dying before my eyes, alone in a cottage on an island, no signs of wealth or power about him, a frail old man by a fire.

“Who are you?” he murmured, voice grown as thin as his frame. “What do you want?”

“It’s Harry, sir,” I replied, the deference of youth intruding despite myself. “Harry August.”

“Harry? I wrote you a letter.”

“That’s why I came.”

“Didn’t think you would.”

“Well… I did.”

Hundreds of years of living, and why could this man still reduce me to empty platitudes, make me feel a child again, hiding from the glare of a master?

“Are you well, Harry?” he asked, as the silence grew too thin and high between us. “Are you rich?”

“I do all right,” I replied carefully. “I teach mathematics.”

“Mathematics? Why?”

“I enjoy it. The subject is… engaging, and the antics of the students are always curious.”

“You have… children?”

“No. I don’t.”

He grunted, a sound which conveyed to me almost satisfaction. A wrist flicked towards the fire, a command to put another log on. I did, crouching down by the brazier and poking it with the end of a stick before tossing that too into the flames. When I straightened up, he was staring right at me with a face that would one day be my own, and though his body was fading, his mind was still very much alive. He grabbed my arm as I moved back to the bed, holding me in place, staring up urgently into my eyes.

“Do you have money?” he demanded softly. “Are you rich?”

“I told you, Mr Hulne, I teach—”

“I heard you were rich. My sisters… the house…” A flicker of pain passed over his face, his hand falling from my wrist as if it suddenly lacked the strength to hold on. “Soon there’ll be nothing left.”

I sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed. “Do you need… a loan, Mr Hulne?” I spoke very slowly, to keep my rising anger out of my voice. Had I been summoned after twenty-seven years to serve as a walking bank to a man who wouldn’t even acknowledge me his heir?

“The Depression…” he grunted. “The war… the new government, the land, the times… Constance is dead, Victoria dead, Alexandra has to work in a shop–a shop of all things. Clement will inherit the title, but he’s drinking it all–all of it, all gone. We sold half the land to pay the debt on the mortgage, not even the mortgage itself! They’ll take the house and fill it with union men,” he spat the words, “with middle-class bankers and their spawn, with lawyers or accountants. They’ll auction it all off, all of it, and there’ll be nothing left. All gone. All for nothing.”

I had to force my body into stillness, felt the twitch in my knee, wanted to fold my arms, cross my legs, as if the very muscles in my being had to express their rising hostility.

“Is there something you want to say to me, Mr Hulne?”