The deed was done, the child was a Christian.

And there the matter would have rested had not the final letter Rebecca sent to her parents been returned to her in that chilling fashion.

Rebecca could not stop looking at the stamp.

'It won't tell you any more than it already has,' Fridleif said.

'What do you think it means?'

He showed her his clear, Arctic eyes. 'It's possible,' he said, 'that it was they who returned it.'

'With an official stamp, Fridleif?'

He took the envelope from her and held it to the light.

'I've done that a thousand times,' she said. 'And anyway, why would they send my letter back? They never did before. Not replying is one thing a and I know it hurt you, Fridleif, as it hurt me a but returning my letter unopened is something else again. That's not their way. We don't behave like that in my family.'

Her husband looked at her in a manner she found provoking. But theirs was a proudly peaceable marriage and she wanted it to remain that way. 'It's too much of a coincidence,' she went on, 'that this should happen when there's so much trouble down there. I'm frightened.'

He touched her hand. 'The Lord will protect them.'

She had heard her father invoke the name of the Lord in the face of danger often enough. But with him the invocation had been ironical, angry, disappointed. The Lord should protect them but wouldn't. Hadn't. And wouldn't ever. Which her father took to be a personal affront to him. And yet his had never been a counsel of despair. There was something out there in which he believed, an idea that answered to the name of the Lord no matter that the Lord himself did scant justice to it. Reason. Human resourcefulness. Intelligence.

Of what use to them their intelligence was now, however, she couldn't imagine.

Seeing her eyes fill with tears, Fridleif stretched out his other hand to her. 'Look,' he said in his gentlest voice, 'we don't really know how bad it is down there. These things get blown out of all proportion.'

'These things?'

'Rumours, I mean. That's all we have to go on.'

He seemed insubstantial to her, all of a sudden. He was a feathery man a that had been his charm. He had flitted into her life, a creature of light and optimism, so unlike her father. His translucent faith a wonderful release to her after the weighty, frightened sonorousness of her parents and their friends. But it was as though he had never before been tested in her presence, and now that he had a well, he was failing. You have God but you have no gravitas, Rebecca thought.

'Then if rumours are all we have to go on,' she replied at last, 'I must see what's happening with my own eyes.'

He didn't say anything, assuming that having spoken from her heart she wouldn't think it necessary to act from it.

But the next day she repeated her determination to find out for herself. He shook his head. 'I can't let you go,' he said. 'It's too dangerous.'

'Too dangerous? Yesterday you said it was blown out of all proportion.'

'We don't know what's true or what isn't, but I can't let you put yourself in danger. You have a child. Our child. You have a husband. You have the people of Mernoc.'

'I have a mother and father,' she reminded him.

'You could have fooled me,' he said.

'Say that again.'

He knew not to say it again.

'I will take Coira with me,' she said. 'If it turns out they're all right they'll be glad to see her. Grandchildren always do the trick.'

'And if they're not all right?'

'Then we'll come back.'

'Rebecca, I can't allow this,' he said.

She told him he had no choice. He told her he was Coira's father. He couldn't allow her to endanger the child. And as for grandchildren always doing the trick . . . he hesitated . . . not this grandchild.

What Rebecca then said, what Rebecca then felt, was a surprise to her. 'They won't see Coira like that.'

'Like what?'

'As lost to them.'

'How will they see her?'

It was her turn now to hesitate. 'As a little bit of both.'

'She isn't a little bit of both. She's been baptised.'

'You make that sound pretty final.'

'It is pretty final.'

'So I've been bypassed, have I?'

'How can you ask that? You too have been baptised.'

'That doesn't change everything, Fridleif.'

'Yes, it does. It changes everything. Otherwise it's of no meaning.'

'It doesn't change what's in me, my blood, my genes.'

'Your blood?'

'We didn't start at the beginning, you know. By our law Coira remains within the fold. As do I, as the daughter of my mother.'

Fridleif put his hands together and prayed silently. He had never expected to hear the phrase 'our law' on his wife's lips. He felt as though she had struck him in the heart.

Rebecca didn't join him in prayer. She looked out of the window at the featureless grey sea.

'I never thought we would fight over who our child belongs to,' Fridleif said at last.

'I'm not fighting. I know who she belongs to. She belongs to us. You and me.'

'And to Christ.'

She waved the idea away. If it had been beautiful to her once, it wasn't beautiful to her now. 'She belongs to us, Fridleif. Us! And I am half of us.'

'I won't allow you to take her away.'

If it was a threat, it had no menace in it.

The following morning she was gone. She and the child.

But she made a concession to her husband, though she never told him of it. She decided against taking Coira with her. If her parents weren't alive, she would be subjecting her to danger for no reason. If they were alive, God willing, she would make peace with them face to face herself, and then return with the child. Her reasoning was clear. If Coira was her daughter by blood, in direct line of descendancy from her mother and her grandparents and their grandparents before them, then she wasn't safe. No one in whom the lust for murder had been aroused was going to stop to consider the finer points of lineage and conversion; no one was going to care that Coira had been baptised and was, in her father's eyes, the child of Christ. She had heard her parents make the argument again and again a 'When they come to get you, Becky, they won't be making subtle distinctions. They won't spare you because you've changed your name and happen to think differently from us on a few points. They won't release you with a kiss because you think it couldn't ever happen here. It's who you are by blood that interests them, nothing else.' She had despaired of them. Well, for different reasons she was despairing now. But she couldn't leave Coira with her father. Not after the words that had been exchanged. She had made great sacrifices for Fridleif. She had broken the hearts of her mother and father who in her own heart she did not expect ever to see again. She had given him everything else; she would not give him her child.

It was at this point in her deliberations that she remembered what she'd heard of St Brigid's Convent and Orphanage. Fridleif would never think of searching for her there. He would as soon go looking for his child in hell. In the anger that spilled from her she took pleasure from the thought that a Roman Catholic orphanage was an even greater anathema to him than her parents' home.

Though she would have liked to check the nuns out, there wasn't any way she could do so without arousing their suspicions. They might recognise her as the wife of a minister, and she did not want them to connect Fridleif to the child. She pulled at the bell to the orphanage at an hour it was evident there were nuns about, and then fled. What the nuns found when they answered the door was a basket with a baby inside. 'Moses' they would have called her, had there not been a label tied around her neck identifying her as Coira. No surname. Rebecca would have liked to restore her own name to the child but a though she didn't share her parents' suspiciousness, especially of the conventual a didn't think she dare risk it. Coira Lestchinsky! a maybe not. An accompanying note explained that the mother was suffering clinical depression and, though she loved the child with all her heart, did not feel capable of looking after her as she would have wished. She commended Coira, who had been baptised far from here, to the tender Christian mercies of the nuns. 'Love her,' she pleaded.

Towards the early years of Coira's education she made what she hoped was a fair contribution. She would collect the child at a later date when, God willing, she would be in better health, but, if she failed to return, a more substantial donation would automatically be made. She left a parcel of letters with the child's belongings. These, were she not to return, were to be opened only on Coira's majority.

She wasn't sure, at the moment of leaving her, that she could go through with it, but her grief reminded her of what her parents must have felt when she left them, and she knew she had to find them if she could.

She removed the label from Coira's neck and wrote a further message on it. 'Protect her for me. See how small she is a she is more shawl than baby. Pray for her. Pray, if you can, for me. Pray that this has a safe and happy outcome.'

But like many other prayers uttered in these days, the nuns' prayers, if they remembered to say them, were not listened to. Rebecca did not locate her parents nor did she ever return, in safety and happiness, for Coira.

Not counting the letters, all she bequeathed to her bereft daughter was her own sense of being between the devil and the deep blue sea. And the terrible conundrum of not knowing which was which.

iii In the days he'd been without Ailinn, Kevern had gone again through his parents' papers. He had been tempted to open the box intended for a grandchild, should one materialise, but couldn't bring himself to disobey instructions he had long considered sacred. For a non-believer, Kevern had a highly developed sense of the sacramental. Duty, to the living and the dead, hemmed him in. His life, from the moment he opened his eyes a and whether he found Ailinn beside him or not a was a chain of rituals he could no more break than he could go without food or self-reprobation. Without obligation and repetition he was as chaff in the wind. If religion meant anything he could understand, it was this: doing again what had worked when you did it the last time, doing it because you believed you had to, remonstrating against the random, refusing to be tossed about the universe as though the universe had no use for you. That was the beginning and the end of religious devotion to him, anyway. Not what you owed to a god but what you owed to the idea that you weren't arbitrary or accidental. And whatever you did more than three times a week, at the same time and with the same reverence, was another blow struck against the haphazard.

Densdell Kroplik had told him, the last time they met, that he was lucky to have been born in Port Reuben. Lucky? The thought that he owed anything to chance disheartened him. If he was only here by chance then he was indeed chaff in the wind and might as easily have been blown somewhere else. So where? Absolutely anywhere, was the answer, but how do you live a life that isn't random when the circumstances of your living it are? There had to be something between him and Port Reuben that was more than fortuitous; each had to have needed the other. All right, he accepted Kroplik's view of him as a child of aphids who were themselves children of aphids. No one can go all the way back to the beginning. Invaders, migrants, vagrants, came and went. He'd settle for ten generations. If he had to, he'd make do with even fewer. Soil was all he was after. Not real soil, God forbid, but the idea of soil. If not native soil then soil that at least was congenial to his growing. Bodies rejected implanted organs; some took but others the body found too alien. Why did he feel that the village of Port Reuben, in which his papers certified he'd been born, had always been rejecting him like an organ it didn't need or want?

This rummaging through his parents' papers was not going to help him find an answer. It never had before. Yet each time he did it he came upon something he hadn't paid attention to previously. A oke so acidic that it had burned through the paper on which his father had written it. The names of azz records he intended to buy. Titles of books still to be read. A manila folder containing a few watery sketches, none of them remarkable, done by his mother presumably, of him as a baby, of his father as a younger but no less rancid-looking man, of a beautiful dreaming woman he didn't recognise but whom now, after Kroplik's description, he took to be his grandmother, of the cliffs, of a sunset, and of hands a just hands a drawn so tenderly they had to belong to her butcher-lover. So they'd lived here at least, his mother and father a because bitterness and infidelity constitute lives.

He missed their lives for them, missed what he didn't remember, yearned for what he hadn't known. Can you be nostalgic for nostalgia, he wondered. His answer was yes, yes you could.

It was while he was again, ritualistically, going through drawers in his father's workshop that he came again upon a foolscap black notebook with scribbled entries in his mother's hand. It hadn't interested him the first time he'd found it, because it seemed to contain no more than lists of non-essentials his father must have asked for, sacks for rubbish, a new coffee mug, a fan heater, antiseptic cream. But he realised he should have wondered why it was here, in his father's space, among his father's things. After the first half-dozen pages the book became something else. Sketches again, but not at all watery this time: strong charcoal portraits, in the manner of woodcuts a had she been thinking of actually doing woodcuts with her husband's help? a of people he didn't recognise, squatting careworn women in turbans, angular men in long beards, carcasses of slaughtered animals, executioners in bloody aprons standing over them, a child looking out of the barred window of a train, figures huddled in fear, and one of herself, he was sure it was her, with her mouth open and a hand, not hers, over it, pressing hard into her face. And then, at the back of the book, half a dozen small crayoned studies in a style so different he marvelled the same person could have done them a what they depicted he couldn't say for sure, cityscapes a couple of them seemed to be, whores, or were they birds, cranes or storks, standing under phosphorescent yellow lamp posts, their scarves or feathers blowing about their necks, their bodies rendered in patches of the most vivid colour, purple shoulders and breasts, vermilion bellies, attenuated lime-green legs, the stones they stood on as black as night. Two were more abstract still, mere blobs of violent colour, like pools of blood, and one a nude, somehow African in conception, primitive certainly, painted freely, her eyes orange, her skin a throbbing pink, her hands stretched out towards . . . towards whom?

Could his mother really have done these? They were signed, simply but deliberately, in upright letters, as though she wanted there to be no mistake about it, Sibella.

He had always discounted his mother. Other than when he heard her calling to him on the cliffs, he rarely thought about her. It was his father he had grieved over, not out of love but out of sorrow. His father had made small beautiful things. Miniature ring bowls whose rims fell away like lace around wrists, mahogany trinket boxes with secret compartments so finely concealed that people who hid things in them sometimes never found them again, slender swaying single-rose vases carved out of 'whispering walnut' a his father's phrase, whispering this, whispering that, their whole lives lived in a whisper. How could such delicacy of work proceed from so frightened, unhappy and lumpen a temper? His mother too had been unhappy, but she was no artist and Kevern Cohen was sentimental about art. Now he had to revise his thinking.

His father had kept this folio of hers. Why? Did he secretly admire her gift? Did he ever tell her, Kevern wondered.

It even crossed his mind, for the very first time, that his father and mother might have loved one another. The idea, at least, of his father being proud of her, made him tremble with the realisation that he'd known as little about his family as he knew about the earth he trod on.

How good an artist was she? He couldn't tell. Her hand was strong and sure, the colours piercing, but were the images hers? He felt he had seen some of them before, or at least that they gave off an atmosphere he had breathed before. Even had they been copies, they were good, for copies too are distinguishable by the feeling they show. But where had she seen such work to copy? He couldn't recall her ever having left the village. Nor did he remember her poring over art books. And if they were hers entirely, out of what depths of visionary dread had she drawn them?

He knew someone he could ask. Ailinn. But if he suddenly rang her to say he had unearthed remarkable art made by his mother she would smell a rat. If you want to talk to me, just talk to me, Kevern, she would say. You don't need a pretext. Besides, what if she didn't value the work? She wouldn't be able to say so. And thereafter there'd be a dishonesty between them. It wasn't fair to ask her.

Then he remembered someone else. Everett. Professor Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky.

iv 'And these were done by whom again?' the eminent professor asked.

He was nervous. Only nerves could explain such a question, given how clear Kevern had been about finding the notebook in a drawer in his father's workshop, how he recognized other entries in her hand, and how sure he was of her signature. Did Zermansky feel he'd been compromised by Kevern's excitement because it showed that he wasn't only illegitimately hoarding heirlooms but hankering inordinately for something in the past? Surely not. Everyone knew that everyone else kept more than they should. Curiosity had not been altogether stifled anywhere.

'My mother. I told you.'

'And you never knew?'

'Never.'

'Never saw her do these?'

'Never.'

'So they might not be hers?'

'Believe me, that's her signature.'

Zermansky shrugged. In the world of art a signature was nothing.

'I can't imagine her signing what she hadn't done,' Kevern continued. 'Nor can I think of who else could have done them.'

'You?'

'Why would I be passing them off as hers?'

Zermansky scratched his head. Good question.

They were standing in Zermansky's studio, on his easel the beginnings of another golden sun setting like liquid gold behind St Mordechai's Mount. 'I am perhaps the wrong person to ask,' he said, nodding at the unfinished painting and laughing uncomfortably.

'You must be able to udge the quality of work even when it's unlike your own,' Kevern said. 'Your students' work, for example.'

'Oh, if any of my students were to do what your mother did . . .'

His voice trailed off.

'What?'

'Well, they just wouldn't. Couldn't.'

'Are you saying what my mother did would be beyond them?'

'Not beyond them technically. Not beyond the best of them technically, anyway. But beyond them a how can I best put this a emotionally and volitionally. They wouldn't know where in themselves to find such thoughts. And it wouldn't occur to them to try. Why would it?'

'Why wouldn't it?'

'Because that isn't how we see any more. To be frank with you, Kevern, that isn't how I'd like them to see any more.'

'That sounds prescriptive, Everett.'