Chapter Text
By the time Margery’s daughter was ten years old, Uncle David had read Little Women and Good Wives aloud to her four times in as many years. Margery had married a clergyman soon after David’s graduation from Cambridge. David had attended the wedding in his rifle corps uniform, and on his return from the front, Annette had been old enough to understand the main events of the series, but not yet able to reread it for herself. By Uncle David’s fifth long holiday at the vicarage, Annette had blossomed into a precocious, voracious reader, but she still imperiously handed the books to him as soon as he put down his suitcases; David’s quiet smile assured Margery that he found the child’s demand charming rather than onerous.
That it had become their tradition was curious, though, and a few days into his visit, Margery asked him about it, after Annette had gone to bed. “Why Little Women, with you?”
David was gazing at the moon, which was seated within a moat of clouds. “I daresay I read it well,” he said. “Your little boys need you more right now, and Charlie—” Margery’s husband— “is, forgive me, too much Mr. March to do justice to the girls.” Margery didn’t remember enough about the Marches to recall the father’s personality, but she nodded anyway, because her dear Charlie was indeed not much of an actor at all, and very much a Grown-Up, as was expected of parish priests. David gestured to himself. “I, on the other hand, am all the girls: domestic as Meg, harum-scarum as Jo, music-loving as Beth and in love with pretty things as Amy.”
“There’s a boy in there too, isn’t there? Likes books and music and Jo?”
David abruptly turned back to the moon. “Well, I did say that Amy loves pretty things.” After a beat, he added, “I’m also pretty good as Hannah, and the parrot. Not so much the teachers, but I don’t honestly think Louisa May gave a fig for them either. Nor does Annette.”
Margery studied her brother’s back, not without worry. Of the men she knew who had gone to war and returned, he seemed well enough. His work as a groundskeeper for a highland estate seemed to suit him. The position was viewed with some dismay, if not outright disdain, by people who thought that a chap who had scored a First from Cambridge should be more gainfully employed, but David had evinced scant interest in becoming a don or other pedagogic specimen even before his time in the trenches, and other desk- or podium-bound jobs likewise failed to appeal to him. He had been athletically inclined before the war, and whatever he’d endured on the Swiss frontier remained with him as a ferocious dedication to daily time outdoors, heedless of wind and weather.
The tense line of his shoulders hinted at a desire to bolt out the door even now, but his voice sounded relaxed as he said, “Louisa May writes a good yarn, even though it’s downright priggish a lot of the time. Maybe I’ll manage the same someday.”
“Jo became an author, didn’t she?”
“And housemother to a school full of boys. Not for me, thank you.”
“Nor the Jovelike German tutor?” Margery ventured.
David didn’t turn around. “Teddy is more my type. Music, games, and pranks.”
“Are you anyone’s Jo?” Margery quietly asked, feeling very daring. She knew so little about his life in Scotland.
David shrugged—a smooth, casual counterpoint to his brittle tone. “A also stands for archaeology. Life isn’t obligated to pair people up.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “And neither are you, even if you are the head of a parish, so don’t you start scheming for me.”
Margery couldn’t help smiling. “The bishop would have twenty kitten-fits to hear you call me the head.”
“Then I should do exactly that next time I see that dried-up sack of mouldy prunes. Everyone knows that the curate’s wife is in charge. Or should be.”
“Oh, David.” Margery walked up to him then, twining an arm around his shoulders. “You sounded more like yourself just then.” He stiffened, and Margery instantly realised why, tightening her arm. “I’m sorry. That sounded like I don’t like whom you are now. You do know that we all do, don’t you? Charlie and I and Father, none of us give a hill of beans about titles or trophies or the thousand other ways people try to lord it over one another. We know you aren’t just a lily in the field, and it wouldn’t be sinful even if you were. Charlie preached on that two Sundays ago, in fact. He’s seeing and hearing so much desperation, from people who can’t work, or can’t find it. It’s so very awful when people are made to think they’re worthless.”
“Rather.” David returned his gaze to the moon. “The war is still picking off people I knew.”
“Oh, David,” Margery repeated helplessly. She lay her head against his shoulder, as if to reassure herself that he was truly real, and hale, and out of harm’s way.
“I haven’t gone anywhere,” David lightly said. “Or rather, I have, but I didn’t care for it. It was nowhere as nice as Amy or Laurie’s travels, or even Jo’s, but just as humbling. And Amy never did send for Jo to go digging in the Forum for relics.”
“What’s keeping you from going to him?” Margery whispered, although a dozen reasons naturally suggested themselves as soon as him instead of her left her lips.
The pronoun hung in the air for a heartbeat, and then David slid an arm around her waist, although his eyes remained on the moon.
“Some nights,” he said, “when I felt like I would never be dry or clean again, I let myself wallow in memories, and build them out. I loved fagging for Frank, so I’d think of a castle in the air—some sprawling beauty of a manse designed by his uncle, or a hut near some grandiose hole in the ground—and I’d spend the night there, making tea and washing dishes and putting them away proper, and talking cricket and singing Morley. And stepping through all the steps of those imaginary chores and camaraderising would get me to the next day of staying alive, and shooting before I got shot. I washed and put away so many teacups in that castle, Margery, I cannot tell you. And then, what good fortune for me these past few years, to have a hut to myself, near a fancy house. It quiets my mind there too, to make tea and wash the dishes and play my piano as much as I want, since it bothers no one else but the cows, and they like Chopin.”
Margery tried again. “Do you think he might come to you there?”
“Well, I’ll have to be somewhere else before long,” David said. Margery twisted around to stare at him. “The laird died earlier this year, see, and the heir needs the money more than the land. They’ve kindly let me leave my things in the hut for now, but the animals are gone, and there isn’t the need to keep up appearances.” The words were laced with ruefulness, but he gave her a reassuring squeeze. “I have enough in savings to take a bit of time.”
“So that’s why you chose to visit us now. I wondered, it being summer—how you couldn’t get away, before.” David nodded. Margery persisted. “You could invite Frank here?”
David sighed. “I could—if only I actually knew where he is or what he’s really up to. No one does. Not even his mother. Which says to me and her that he’s probably still military intelligence, though he’s never admitted as much. She’s heaps of friends everywhere, and his notes to her don’t line up with what he spins when they try to look in on him.” David allowed himself a faint smile. “If I could fancy women for longer than a summer’s day, I’d marry her in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Frank and I joked about that once, but in truth, she’s handsome as he is and a good deal smarter than us both.”
“Then I want to be her when I grow up,” Margery said.
David’s smile deepened. “I’m sure you will be. Even more than you already are.”