Eleanor sighs. — I’m sorry. Perhaps it’s better if I go now. I wish I had something kinder to tell you, but it’s simply not the case. You’ll understand this, Mr. Walsingham, and you’ll understand I can’t see you again.
She stands up and Ashley rises too. He comes close to her, speaking in a low whisper.
— What about the child?
— I’m sorry?
He leans into her ear, his words clear above the clatter of the tearoom.
— She was expecting, but she lost the child. She wrote me as much.
Eleanor shakes her head, her face coloring.
— I don’t know anything—
— What happened? Were you there?
— No. She never told me she was expecting. Perhaps she was mistaken—
— Rubbish. She came all way to the France to tell me.
Eleanor’s eyes flit across the dining room.
— I don’t know anything. She went mad when she heard you were killed. It was madness that took her to France. After that I didn’t see her. I’m sorry, I really must go—
— Please stay.
Ashley opens his palm toward the table, beckoning her to sit back down. Eleanor shakes her head. She looks at Ashley sympathetically.
— You don’t need me to tell you this. But I’ll say it anyway, if no one else will. You were both children, the two of you. Can’t you see that? Imogen was only a child then, and she isn’t any longer. You wouldn’t even know each other now. Naturally she cared for you and always will, in some way, and you for her. Only it’s in your past now, and her past too, and you can’t find that anywhere, however hard you look.
— I shan’t give up—
— You are giving something up, Eleanor says. You just don’t realize it.
THE SCHOLAR
It takes me three rides to get from Akureyri to the Eastfjords. I ride in unfamiliar cars along the shores of volcanic lakes, pillars of lava rising from their dark waters; I wait for an hour in a misty desert of black sand, the gravel road punctuated only by yellow mileposts.
My last ride is with a long-haired young man who tells me he waits tables for a living. There is a little girl in a child’s seat in the back. The highway winds through hills of green moss and brown turf. Twice we have to stop when the girl gets carsick from the twisting road. Finally the highway descends to a valley where the ring road meets a smaller road going east.
— I’m going south, the driver says, but you want to go on toward the sea. A little down the highway there’s a small hotel. I could put you there—
— Over here’s fine. It’ll be easier to get a ride by the intersection.
The driver looks at me with concern.
— Remember, he says, the hotel’s just around that bend.
I wait on the shoulder of the eastbound road, kicking stones to pass the time. The rains starts again and soon it’s blowing sideways into my hood. I pace the shoulder to stay warm, walking in circles on a twenty-yard strip of asphalt. I’m already wearing every garment I have, all layered in a carefully practiced system. Three T-shirts, two collared shirts and a jacket; two pairs of light pants; two ordinary pairs of socks and one thick wool pair; my parka, a scarf and a knit hat.
The raindrops turn into hail. I turn my back to the wind and the hailstones beat rhymically against my coat, like countless volleys of buckshot. I check my watch. Eighty minutes and still no cars. The hail’s rhythm quickens. There’s no sign of civilization except the thin band of asphalt.
I’ll lose the fortune tomorrow. I’ve been trying not to think about it, but it’s hard to ignore. I kick a black rock off the road, wondering if I’d already lost everything before I left California, if it was always understood that I’d end up shivering on this highway for no reason. Maybe Ashley never had a chance either, not with Imogen and not with the mountain. Maybe no matter what he did the ending was always the same, alone in a whiteout on the tallest mountain in the world. A man has a certain store of luck and when that runs out he’s finished. They knew that back then, and we haven’t gotten further in all the centuries since.
I turn back to the road. A silver sedan is idling before me. The driver lowers the electric window. He wears wire-rimmed spectacles and he looks to be in his late thirties. He speaks softly in Icelandic, then in English.
— What are you doing out there?
I get into the car. As we accelerate, the driver fiddles with the heater’s controls on the dashboard.
— Warm enough?
— I am, thanks.
The ice on my shoulders melts damp circles into my coat. The driver shakes his head.
— What a time to be hitchhiking. I thought maybe you were a ghost standing out there. You’re from Germany?
— That’s just the coat. I’m from California.
— Sunny California, he murmurs. Why did you leave?
— I probably shouldn’t have.
— I would have stayed.
The driver directs the heater’s vents toward me.
— It’s early in the year for hail, he remarks. You have bad luck.
— I know.
The driver tells me he is a librarian at the university in Akureyri. He grew up in the Eastfjords and he is driving to his parents’ house north of Seyðisfjörður. We talk about books and I tell the librarian that I’m reading Njál’s Saga. He seems pleased by this, so I tell him a little bit about my research.
—Ísleifur, he repeats. I’ve never heard of him. But I don’t know anything about jewelry—
The librarian glances at me.
— One thing I don’t understand. Why would this Englishwoman have come here?
— That’s the problem. There isn’t any reason.
The librarian grins. — There’s always one reason to come to this country.
— What’s that?
— It’s far away from everything.
The librarian lowers the gear, the small engine whining as we climb a steep pass. He remarks that these hills have been inhabited for centuries, though little remains of most settlements but a few stones among the grass. We talk of the myriad stories of mankind both lost and recorded, and of the story that I’m after. The librarian supposes that for every story that is preserved, there must be a thousand others that vanish with the dead from all human memory.
— Imagine if your English couple hadn’t written letters, he says. Who would know they had ever existed?
We drive among hulking mountains, black and green ridges with patches of white snow. The librarian says that when he was a child an old woman went after stray sheep in these hills and lost her way. It happened on an autumn day, he says, when thick mists shrouded all landmarks from view. The old woman was a good walker. As dusk fell she wandered deeper into the mountains until she slipped on the rocks and fractured her leg. She could not walk. The nights were long and dark with freezing rain.
— Did she survive?
The librarian nods.
— She was wearing traditional clothing. Heavy wool. It keeps you warm even when wet.
It took the rescuers two days to find the old woman, he says, and when they reached her she spoke not of the vanished animals but of some rare dreams she had beheld, of a secret hidden between the hills and ridges. It was as if she had been lured by the promise of a prize, just as told in legends of the Nykur, a brook horse that tempts men onto its back only to gallop into swirling lakewater until they are drowned.