Майкл Ридпат - The Wanderer

She smiled to herself. The excitement was pathetic for someone who was nearly fifty. The smile widened. But it was fun. She hadn’t felt like this since, oh, since she was dating John.

A car slowed outside on the little street. She looked out of the kitchen window and saw the neighbours’ Oldsmobile pull into the driveway of the cottage opposite. She spotted a wilting rose in her front yard. She grabbed the pruning shears, grateful for the opportunity to do something and to watch the road.

The front yard was looking good: a riot of peonies, zinnias, larkspur and hollyhocks penned in by the white picket fence, and the wonderful yellow rose that draped itself over their grey shingle cottage. They had owned the little house in Siasconset — or ’Sconset as it was known locally — for fifteen years now, and they both loved it. The garden was Nancy’s particular joy, and she planned the blooms for July and August, the only time they could reliably spend on Nantucket. They would be shutting up the house on Saturday and heading back to Pennsylvania just in time for the fall semester.

The kids were already gone. Katie was staying with her cousins on the Cape, and they had just dropped Jonny off at Amherst a few days early for his sophomore year. Which meant it was just the two of them in the house.

And Emilio.

Nancy grinned again as she reached over to snip off the head of a browning blossom.

Because that time two months before in Tuscany had been the most mind-blowing night of sex Nancy could remember. And she was pretty sure that John felt the same way.

They hadn’t talked about it since, not even that morning. They didn’t need to: it was a wicked secret, shared, more exciting because unspoken.

Emilio said he was bringing something very special for them. Something he had found in Rome. Nancy had no idea what it was, but she was intrigued, as was John.

She looked up at the sound of a car approaching down the street. It was their station wagon, with John at the wheel and Emilio next to him. She straightened and pushed a lock of her fair hair out of her eye. Emilio bounded out of the car, grinning as he held out his arms. They hugged. He was a couple of inches shorter than her, but his arms felt powerful behind her back.

There followed a bustle of chatter and of carrying things into the house. John fixed some daiquiris and soon they were outside in the back yard, around the wooden table under the maple.

‘Your garden is as beautiful as ever, Nancy,’ said Emilio.

Nancy could feel herself blushing at the compliment. ‘Round here it has to be,’ she said. ’Sconset’s cottage gardens were famous, and you couldn’t let the neighbours down.

‘Well?’ said John. ‘Can we see it?’

‘All right.’ Emilio went back inside and emerged with a battered briefcase, which he put on the table. He reached into the case and extracted a pair of white cotton gloves, which he slipped on his hands. Then he pulled out a folder, inside which, wrapped in tissue, were three sheets of paper. Old, brown paper, covered in tiny writing.

‘What does it say?’ said John. ‘Let me take a look. Is it in Italian?’

‘Not quite.’

John bent over the manuscript. He had taught himself Italian and had become familiar with its linguistic development over the centuries.

‘Hah!’ he said. ‘It’s addressed to Bertomê. I can guess who it’s from. Let me see.’

Emilio smiled and showed him the third page. ‘I knew it!’ said John. ‘Christoffa! It’s from Christopher Columbus to his younger brother Bartholomew!’

‘That’s right,’ said Emilio.

John peered at the text. ‘I can’t really understand it. It’s not Italian, is it?’

‘No it’s Genoese, which is the dialect the Columbus brothers spoke to each other, although they rarely wrote in it. Here. I’ve translated it into English. That way, Nancy can understand it too.’

Emilio whipped out some crisp white typewritten sheets of paper, and laid them on the table. Nancy picked them up and began to read, with John looking over her shoulder.

‘That’s amazing,’ John said.

Nancy read the three pages, fascinated. She wasn’t a Columbine scholar, but it all sounded plausible to her. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Those navigational instructions. That island. It’s Nantucket!’

Emilio grinned. ‘I thought you’d like that.’

Eygló gazed over the valley to the rank of mountains on the other side, a wall of bulging hard grey rock, flexing its muscles in scraps of August sunshine. The valley was broad, flattened by a series of volcanic floods caused by eruptions under the glacier a hundred kilometres to the south. A river, narrow at this spot, threaded its way through sand and meadows where multicoloured horses grazed, dozens of them. A raindrop fell on her nose. She ignored it. She immersed herself in the view. The place. She took a long slow breath. She smiled.

She spoke.

‘This is the view Gudrid saw a thousand years ago. I am standing at Glaumbaer, in northern Iceland, the farm to which Gudrid came with her husband Thorfinn Karlsefni after so many years away from Iceland.’

Eygló turned and walked towards the back of a tiny church, clad in corrugated metal, squatting behind a row of turf-covered farmhouses.

‘Of course, she had married Thorfinn in Greenland. And they brought back to Iceland with them their little son Snorri, the first European to be born in North America.’

Eygló turned to face left as she walked and talked. She was speaking English, in which she was fluent, but with soft esses and a clear Icelandic trill that English speakers seemed to love.

More raindrops on her nose. And on the far side of the church a large black cloud was rolling towards her from the west. She resisted the urge to gabble her way through the rest of her story before it burst upon her.

‘Gudrid had travelled thousands of miles, farmed a new island — Greenland — explored a new continent — America — suffered shipwreck and attacks from Skraelings — what we now call Native Americans. It was here in Glaumbaer that Gudrid the Wanderer hoped to come to rest, to settle down with her small family.’

Eygló stopped. She was now in front of the church, next to a bronze sculpture of Gudrid standing in a ship with her infant Snorri on her shoulder. The drops were falling harder; Eygló resisted the temptation to wipe one from her eyebrow. She cocked her head to one side.

‘But Gudrid’s travels were not yet over. She had one more journey to take. A pilgrimage to Rome.’

The drops became a torrent. Eygló couldn’t help hunching her shoulders, as the cold water flattened her spiky blonde hair.

‘Cut!’

Eygló smiled with relief as Suzy, her English producer, waved them towards the church door.

‘Let’s get under cover!’

Eygló, Suzy, Tom the cameraman and Ajay the sound guy all ran to the shelter of the doorway, where a tall man was talking to a young woman with short dark hair, streaked with yellow. The woman hurried away as they approached.

‘Can we use those takes?’ Eygló asked.

‘What do you think, Tom?’ said Suzy.

She hunched over Tom’s camera, examining the digital images they had just captured.

Eygló stood next to the tall man, who was staring out at the turf farmhouses beside the churchyard: an eighteenth-century reincarnation of that Viking Glaumbaer farm, and now a folk museum.

‘“It was here Gudrid the Wanderer hoped to come to rest,”’ he said, sarcasm lacing his words. ‘You have no idea what Gudrid hoped. For all you know, she wished she was back in Greenland shagging Erik the Red.’

‘You mean I should have said: “Gudrid stood here and dropped an earring, thereby spawning a hundred pages of bullshit in an archaeological journal ten centuries later”?’