Actually, it
I lifted it carefully off the rack and held it up to examine it. A trifle fancy, but it might do. The construction seemed halfway decent; no loose threads or unraveling seams. The machine-made lace on the bodice was just tacked on, but that would be easy enough to reinforce.
“Want to try it on? The dressing rooms are just over there.” The Peke was frisking about near my elbow, encouraged by my interest. Taking a quick look at the price tag, I could see why; she must work on commission. I took a deep breath at the figure, which would cover a month’s rent on a London flat, but then shrugged. After all, what did I need money for?
Still, I hesitated.
“I don’t know…” I said doubtfully, “it is lovely. But…”
“Oh, don’t worry a bit about it’s being too young for you,” the Pekingese reassured me earnestly. “You don’t look a day over twenty-five! Well…maybe thirty,” she concluded lamely, after a quick glance at my face.
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “I wasn’t worried about that, though. I don’t suppose you have any without zippers, do you?”
“Zippers?” Her small round face went quite blank beneath the makeup. “Erm…no. Don’t think we do.”
“Well, not to worry,” I said, taking the dress over my arm and turning toward the dressing room. “If I go through with this, zippers will be the least of it.”
22
ALL HALLOWS’ EVE
Two golden guineas, six sovereigns, twenty-three shillings, eighteen florins ninepence, ten halfpence, and…twelve farthings.” Roger dropped the last coin on the tinkling pile, then dug into his shirt pocket, lean face absorbed as he searched. “Oh, here.” He brought out a small plastic bag and carefully poured a handful of tiny copper coins into a pile alongside the other money.
“Doits,” he explained. “The smallest denomination of Scottish coinage of the time. I got as many as I could, because that’s likely what you’d use most of the time. You wouldn’t use the large coins unless you had to buy a horse or something.”
“I know.” I picked up a couple of sovereigns and tilted them in my hand, letting them clink together. They were heavy—gold coins, nearly an inch in diameter. It had taken Roger and Bree four days in London, going from one rare-coin dealer to the next, to assemble the small fortune gleaming in the lamplight before me.
“You know, it’s funny; these coins are worth a lot more now than their face value,” I said, picking up a golden guinea, “but in terms of what they’ll buy, they were worth then just about as much as now. This is six months’ income for a small farmer.”
“I was forgetting,” Roger said, “that you know all this already; what things were worth and how they were sold.”
“It’s easy to forget,” I said, eyes still on the money. From the corner of my vision, I saw Bree draw suddenly close to Roger, and his hand go out to her automatically.
I took a deep breath and looked up from the tiny heaps of gold and silver. “Well, that’s that. Shall we go and have some dinner?”
Dinner—at one of the pubs on River Street—was a largely silent affair. Claire and Brianna sat side by side on the banquette, with Roger opposite. They barely looked at each other while they ate, but Roger could see the frequent small touches, the tiny nudges of shoulder and hip, the brushing of fingers that went on.
How would he manage, he wondered to himself. If it were his choice, or his parent? Separation came to all families, but most often it was death that intervened, to sever the ties between parent and child. It was the element of choice here that made it so difficult—not that it could ever be easy, he thought, forking in a mouthful of hot shepherd’s pie.
As they rose to leave after supper, he laid a hand on Claire’s arm.
“Just for the sake of nothing,” he said, “will you try something for me?”
“I expect so,” she said, smiling. “What is it?”
He nodded at the door. “Close your eyes and step out of the door. When you’re outside, open them. Then come in and tell me what’s the first thing you saw.”
Her mouth twitched with amusement. “All right. We’ll hope the first thing I see isn’t a policeman, or you’ll have to come bail me out of jail for being drunk and disorderly.”
“So long as it isn’t a duck.”
Claire gave him a queer look, but obediently turned toward the door of the pub and closed her eyes. Brianna watched her mother disappear through the door, hand extended to the paneling of the entry to keep her bearings. She turned to Roger, copper eyebrows raised.
“What are you up to, Roger?
“Nothing,” he said, eyes still fixed on the empty entrance. “It’s just an old custom. Samhain—Hallowe’en, you know?—that’s one of the feasts when it was customary to try to divine the future. And one of the ways of divination was to walk to the end of the house, and then step outside with your eyes closed. The first thing you see when you open them is an omen for the near future.”
