The memory of that young bright time, in which he had been an instinctive part of his people and thought of himself as no different from them, would have been something Donal would have looked back on often from the standpoint of his later years… Hal turned suddenly, and walked on through the fieldhouse, to let himself out by a further door.
Outside, he paused for a second, then turned to go through the other outbuildings, which were also not locked. The interiors of these revealed themselves as clean, neat, and in most cases still stored and fitted with what they would have contained if the house was occupied; but while there was an echo from them of lives lived down the generations, they did not produce the strong effect on him that the house and the fieldhouse had. He was of half a mind to turn back again to the house itself, when he saw a final building that was the stables, with a stand of willows beyond, all but hidden by the stables' bulk. He went forward, stepped through the door into the half-gloom within, and all that he had felt before came back.
Once again, something closed about him and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. The stalls on either side of the central aisle before him were empty. He looked down to bales of hay, neatly stacked at the far end, and that which he had come here to meet stood at last face to face with him.
For a long moment he stood, breathing the dusty, clean-stable odor of the structure; and then he turned and went once more out the door. He turned right and went down along the further length of the stables' outside wall, turned the corner at the end and saw, under the long, gently-downreaching limbs of the willows, the white-painted picket fence that enclosed the private graves of those who had lived here.
For a moment he stopped, only looking at it; and then he went forward to it.
There was a small gate in the fence. He opened it, went through and closed it softly behind him. Each grave had an upright headstone of gray rock the color of the mountains looking down on him. On and between the grave plots the grass was neatly cut. There was space to walk between the graves and the headstones all faced to his left, six across in orderly ranks. He turned to his right and went to the head of the graveyard, where the older plots were.
There he paused, looking down at the names cut in the upright stones. Eachan Murad Khan… Melissa Gray Khan Grahame… Cletus James Grahame… he moved down the ranks… Kamal Simon Graeme… Anna Outbond Graeme. On his right, Mary Kenwick Graeme and Eachan Khan Graeme, with a single headstone for their graves that lay side by side with no space separating them.
His step faltered. Then he took one more stride forward and looked down. On his right again, Ian Ten Graeme… Leah Sary Graeme… and Kensie Alan Graeme. Furthest from him, Kensie's grave lay against the far line of the picket fence, so close to the willows there that the branches had grown down until they lightly swept the grassy surface of his grave with their tips, like fingers gently stroking in the little air that stirred about Hal as he stood watching. And in the next rank beyond the graves of Ian and Leah and Kensie were three more identically cut gravestones. His step hesitated again.
Then he stepped forward, turned and looked down. Under the willows beyond Kensie's grave, but untouched by them as his uncle's grave had been touched, was a plot with the name of Donal Evan Graeme upon it. Next to it was the grave of Mor Kamal Graeme, and next to Hal, himself, so close that the toes of his boots almost touched the edge of it, was a stone with the name upon it of James William Graeme…
He could not weep. In the cell, pared thin by fever, exhaustion and the struggle to breathe, he had wept. But here, nearly a century later and in a grown body, he could not. Only his throat clenched painfully and a coldness began to grow in him - not the electric coldness now of the back of the neck and shoulders, but the different, indestructible, unyielding coldness deep in the center of him, spreading out to stain his whole body within. In his mind he felt the powerful arms of his uncle around him once more, heard the voice of Kensie calling on him to come back, come back…
He came back. The coldness went and he turned away from the graves. He went out by the little gate in the picket fence, closing it quietly behind him, and started back up to the house.
He reentered the kitchen door through which he had emerged. It latched softly and he looked at his chronometer. Time had passed. The figures on it now showed less than an hour to noon, the time at which Amanda was due to return.
He went back down the corridor from the kitchen to the living room. Now that he had entered the house for the second time, he felt a difference in his response to it. It was no longer a place in which he was a stranger; and every part of it seemed to have a latent power to kindle emotions in him. The sights and echoes of it were familiar, and the living room, when he came to it, enclosed him like a place well remembered.
He turned his attention to the rest of the building. The stairs off the living room led to bedrooms upstairs, but the bedroom toward which he now felt impelled was down on this level. The corridor opposite the one to the kitchen and leading toward the east end of the house went only a short distance before making a forty-five degree turn to the left for an even shorter distance, then turned back again to its original direction, to run approximately down the center line of the house.
In the left hand wall of the small cross-corridor there was a doorway into a room which was adjacent to the living room he had just left. Hal stepped through the doorway into a library, almost as long and wide as the living room itself. A large writing table of very dark, polished wood stood in one corner near the far windows. As with the living room, the north wall was almost all glass, and the outside daylight lit the shelves of reading cubes and old-fashioned volumes. Low on one shelf near the windows was a long row of tall books, bound in a dark brown leather. Hal walked across to them and saw that they were bound manuscript copies of the volumes of Cletus Grahame's work on Strategy and Tactics. He ran his finger along their spines, but did not disturb them from their quiet order.
He turned and left the room.
Interior lighting went on, down the long leg of the corridor beyond, as he moved through the remaining downstairs part of the house. This section was nearly half of the total building; and the first doors he passed opened on bedrooms to his left, and workrooms like offices to his right. Then the workrooms ended, giving way to bedrooms on both sides. He counted six bedrooms and four offices before the corridor ended at last at a combined master bedroom and office, that took up the full width of that end of the house.
Coming back from the master bedroom, he found the room that would have been Donal's. Biographies written after Donal's death had identified it as the third back from the master bedroom. Of course, Hal thought, it would be this far back, and this small. The youngest of the family and those ill almost always had the rooms closest to the master bedroom; they would be moved farther from it as the larger, double bedrooms became vacant closer to the living room, through the death or departure of their occupants. Donal had been the youngest in the household at the time he had left home to go out on his first contract; and he had never returned.
It was a very small room, a closet-like space for a single occupant, in contrast to the bedrooms closer to the living room, which were usually occupied by married members of the family. Many other young Graemes would have owned this room since Donal. Neither the furniture nor any object within it could be counted on to have been in his possession during the years of his growing-up.
Nonetheless, Hal stood, gazing about, and the lighter, earlier chill took him again, spreading from neck to shoulders. The walls here were the walls remembered; and the view through these windows of the steep slope guarding the back of Graemehouse was as it had been.