Coming Home

‘They are better off without me,’ David told him curtly, turning his head away so that the priest couldn’t see his expression.

‘Maybe … maybe not.’

‘I can’t go back,’ David repeated, but the priest could hear the uncertainty and yearning in his voice.

Ever since he had read the report of David’s nephew, Max’s knife attack, in the island’s paper, he had been preparing himself for this moment. David had become as close to him as a son and the love he felt for him was that of a father, but he was not David’s father, and had he been he knew perfectly well that it was the duty of a loving father to set even his most beloved child free to live his own life.

Since David had been working here helping him in his self-appointed task of nursing the island’s terminally sick, those too poor … too shunned by society to merit any other kind of help, Father Ignatius had come to realise just how solitary and lonely his life had been.

He had found David lying drunk in one of Kingston’s stinking gutters and even now had no real idea just why he had stopped to help him, a man who had cursed him and who, when he was sober enough, had blamed him for not allowing him to die.

It had been months before David had finally brought himself to start talking to him about his life, his past, but once he had done so, the priest had not passed any judgement. Why should he? Judging others was not what he was here for. Helping them, healing them, loving them; those were his duties.

Originally, when he had entered the priesthood, he had been filled with such ideas, such visions, but then had come the faith-shaking discovery that the man he most admired, his inspiration and guiding light, had been guilty of one of the most unforgivable of sins. Father John had broken his vow of chastity and had not just had a secret relationship with a woman but had also given her his child. Torn between conflicting loyalties, tortured by what he should do, in the end the younger man had simply felt obliged to speak up.

The result of his action had been catastrophic. Father John had taken his own life and he, Francis O’Leary, known by the church as Father Ignatius, had been to blame. Totally and absolutely. Even the bishop had seemed to think so.

He had been sent away out of the area, hopefully to get a fresh start, but the news of his role in the tragedy had followed him and he had become untouchable, defiled, someone to be avoided, a priest whose faith not just in others but in himself had been destroyed. He had volunteered for missionary work and had been granted it.

‘Even if I wanted to go home, I couldn’t,’ David said, bringing the priest back to the present. ‘There’s no way I could raise the cost of the airfare.’

It was true they lived very simply and meagrely, growing as much of their own food as they could and relying on the generosity and gratitude of the patients and their families for the rest of it.

‘There are other means of travel,’ Father Ignatius pointed out and then added, ‘There’s a yacht in the harbour now waiting to be sailed back to Europe. The captain was in the Coconut Bar yesterday saying that he was looking for a crew willing to work their passage.’

‘A yacht bound for Europe? What’s her cargo? Drugs?’ David asked him drily.

‘No, but her owner is dying and he wants to go home.’ The two men exchanged looks.

‘AIDS?’ David asked him forthrightly.

‘I imagine so,’ the older man agreed.

A very large proportion of the priest’s patients were in the final stages of that ravaging disease, abandoned by their frightened families and friends. Working alongside him, David had learned to respect the disease and those who suffered from it. To respect it and not to fear it.

‘I can’t go … not now….’ David resisted, but there was no denying the longing in his voice.

‘Do you often dream of your brother?’ Father Ignatius asked him obliquely.

‘Not like I did last night,’ David admitted. ‘I dreamed about when we were children. It was so vivid. It was when we got our first bikes, but the odd thing was …’ He paused and frowned. ‘In my dream, though I could see myself riding my bike, my feelings were Jon’s.’

The older man said nothing. He knew David had seen Jon Crighton from a safe distance when he had come to the island to visit Max in hospital and eventually take his son home. Life was so precious, and because he was becoming increasingly aware of just how frail his own physical strength was getting, the priest prayed that Jon Crighton would find it in his heart to welcome home his twin.

‘I can’t go,’ David was saying, but the older man knew not just that he could but that he would.

CHAPTER TWO (#u44dddb37-0695-58a7-81d1-69714cfdb8fa)

‘YES, MRS CRIGHTON … very well, Maddy,’ Honor corrected herself into the telephone receiver with a warm smile as she responded to her caller’s request that she use her Christian name. ‘I’d be very happy to come and see your father-in-law, although I can’t promise …’

She paused. Over the years she had grown used to the fact that her patients and their families, having failed to find a cure for their illnesses through conventional medicine, tended to expect that she could somehow produce something magical to restore them to full health.

‘Herbal medicine is not some kind of black art. It’s an exact science,’ she sometimes had to tell them severely.

Many modern drugs were, after all, originally derived from plants even if more latterly scientists had discovered ways to manufacture them synthetically in their laboratories. In her view, synthetic drugs, like synthetic foods, were not always sympathetic to the human system, and to judge from the increasing number of patients consulting her, other people were beginning to share her views.

Honor had not always been a herbalist. Far from it. She had been at medical school studying to become a doctor way back in the seventies, a sloe-eyed brunette burning the candle at both ends, studying and partying and desperately trying to deny her aristocratic background and connections to become part of the London ‘scene’. Ironically, it had not been on the London scene that she had met her late husband but through one of her mother’s friends.

Lady Caroline Agnew had been giving a coming-out party for her daughter, and Honor’s mother had insisted that Honor had to attend. Rourke had been there photographing the event. Lady Caroline had contacts at Vogue and he was the ‘in’ photographer of the moment, more used to photographing long-legged models than chubby adolescent debs.

Honor had been fascinated by him. Everything about him had proclaimed that he belonged to the world she so longed to join. His clothes, his hair, his laid-back manner and, most of all, his sharp cockney speech. Somehow or other she had managed to catch his eye and they had left the party together.

Three months later they became lovers and three months after that they married and she dropped out of medical school.

For two years she had been so passionately and completely in love with him that she had blinded herself to reality, his unfaithfulness, his drinking, the drugs he was taking with increasing regularity, the bills that mounted up because he refused to pay them, the unsavoury characters who hung like dark shadows on the edges of his life, their lives, and then she had become pregnant.

Their first daughter Abigail had been less than six months old the first time he left her.

Her parents, who had never really forgiven her for her marriage, had refused to have her home, but her father had given her a tiny allowance just enough to cover the rent on a small flat, and she had found herself a job working in a small family-owned chemist’s shop. It had been whilst working there that her interest in medicine had been reactivated. The shop was old-fashioned, its upper room stuffed with all manner of things amongst which Honor, who had been sent upstairs to tidy it, had found the herbal book that once opened she had been unable to put down.

Rourke, his affair over, had turned up on her doorstep one dark, wet night and foolishly she had taken him in. Nine months later Ellen was born. Rourke had already embarked on another affair with a rich older woman this time.

On her own again, Honor had become fascinated by herbal medicine and cures, so much so that when she learned of a local herbalist in a magazine she was reading in the dentist’s waiting room, she made a note of her address so that she could get in touch with her.

Now a fully trained herbalist herself, Honor always made a point of advising her patients to make sure they went to similarly trained and accredited practitioners whenever they chose alternative forms of healing.

Her own training had been long and thorough and one of her main reasons for coming to live here in the rather dilapidated house she had just moved into on her second cousin Lord Astlegh’s Cheshire estate was because of the land that went with it—land on which she would be able to grow some of her own herbs in a way that was completely natural and free from pesticides and any kind of chemicals. The house, which was miles away from any other habitation, might have drawn cries of despair from both her daughters, who had protested at its lack of modern amenities and creeping damp, but Honor had assured them that once she had time to get someone in to repair and improve the place, it would make a very snug home indeed.

‘It’s a hovel,’ Abigail had said forthrightly.

‘A wretched hovel,’ Ellen had agreed.

‘The locals will probably think you’re some kind of witch,’ Abigail had joked.

‘Thank you very much,’ Honor had told her daughter drily. ‘When I want my ego boosted, I shall know where to come.’

‘Oh, no, Mum, I didn’t mean you look like a witch,’ Abigail had immediately reassured her. ‘Actually, you look pretty good for your age.’

‘Mmm … Nowhere near forty-five,’ Ellen had agreed.

‘Forty-four, actually,’ Honor had corrected her with dignity.

‘Honestly, Mum,’ Abigail had told her. ‘With all the money you inherited from Dad, you could have bought yourself somewhere really comfortable. I know you had to scrimp and scrape whilst we were growing up, but now …’

‘Now I have chosen to come and live here,’ Honor had told them firmly.

She was still not totally over her shock at the amount of money she had inherited from Rourke. She hadn’t expected him to die so relatively young and certainly not from something so ridiculous as a cold turned to pneumonia. She was even more surprised to discover that since they had never divorced, she was his next of kin. The young leggy model he had been living with had been quite happy to accept the fact, simply shrugging her sparrow-like shoulder-blades and gazing at Honor with drug-glazed eyes as she shook her head over Honor’s concern and explained in a small, emotionless voice that she was really quite rich herself.

Rourke’s unexpected wealth had come not from his current work as a photographer but from his earlier and highly original work as a young man, which had now become extremely valuable collector’s pieces, selling for thousands upon thousands of pounds.