Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [61]
Climbing the hill toward the vicarage, he could feel the coolness of the copse beyond the church and smell damp wood and wet leaves rotting beside the path. He turned into the vicarage gates, startling a half dozen birds busy at a bush along the drive. They swirled away in a glitter of sound, bright as berries on the wing. Overhead the old trees that sheltered the house spread heavy boughs, reaching out for sunlight and casting an umbrella of shade and shadow across the roof. Thick roots had broken through the earth to form a tangle of enticing places for childhood games—transformed into fortresses for lead soldiers and houses for dolls and sometimes even strong arms in which to curl up and sleep in summer’s warmth.
They dredged up memories. Rutledge’s grandfather’s house had had such places. An ancient oak, which he had thought he would never grow tall enough to reach his arms around, had stood near a pond of garrulous frogs, and just beyond its shade was the swaybacked shed where bicycles and sleds and croquet sets lived. The last time he’d seen it, at the age of seventeen, the back garden had seemed small, like his aging grandfather, and the tree had been toppled in a storm, ripped from rotting roots to sprawl like a drunken giant across the iron fence.
“We worked hard for our bread in the Highlands,” Hamish answered his thought, “and didna’ play with fine toys on well-trimmed lawns. Instead we washed in the stream that ran through the glen, and watched the sun go down over the mountain, glad to call an end to the day.”
Rutledge answered, “It made you what you are, as my childhood made me what I am. I can’t say that one or the other is better.” But Hamish could.
The vicarage was rather plain, sprawling, built of flint, designed more for a large family than for beauty. But there was a small, graceful porch over the door, and a pot of late-blooming flowers had been set in a patch of sun by the step.
Rutledge lifted the knocker and let it fall.
A man came to answer the door, his shirtsleeves rolled above his elbows and a large paintbrush in one hand. Slim and fairly young, his blond hair awry, he looked more like someone’s younger brother than a Vicar.
Rutledge identified himself and Mr. Sims said with some relief, “I’m in the middle of painting. I thought you were someone coming to fetch me. Do you mind if I go on with my work? Before everything dries out? Paint is unforgiving!”
“Not at all.” He stepped into the open hall and followed the Vicar up a flight of stairs.
The house appeared to be equally plain inside, with the kind of furnishings found in most vicarages—the outgrown collections of generations of occupants, left to the next man to serve or to be rid of as he wished. The finest piece was on the landing, a small Queen Anne table that must have belonged to Sims. No one would have left that behind intentionally.
“My sister and her three children are coming to keep house for me,” Sims said over his shoulder. “She lost her husband in the last year of the War, and I’ve just persuaded her to move here. The house in Wembley holds too many memories, and there really isn’t enough space for a growing brood.”
He disappeared into a large room down the passage where new wallpaper had been hung, cabbage roses and forget-me-nots on a cream background. There was a piece of paint-splattered canvas the size of a carpet lying under the windows and along the baseboard. Rutledge, stepping across the threshold, thought how bright and airy it was. Sims said, “This will be Claire’s room. I can only hope she’ll like it!”
His forehead was furrowed with doubt as he scanned his handiwork.
Rutledge said, “I’m sure she will.”
“This is a barn of a place!” Sims added. “I rattle around in it like my own bones. Children’s voices and laughter will make a vast difference.