It was Martha’s hair that he was remembering when consciousness returned. He was remembering the fragrance of it and the soft touch of it against his face. He remembered how it was to hold her head against his shoulder and gather up the long golden threads in his fingers and kiss the white slope of her neck.
He wanted to remember for just a moment, to hold back the catastrophic flood of more recent memories before he wrestled with them and felt their torment twisting his soul.
Martha was tall and her beauty of the kind sometimes called handsome in a woman because she had none of the diminutive fragility that was Kit’s.
“We Swedes had to be big,” Al used to say, “in order to get the world civilized.”
John Wilkins was—had been, rather, he thought grimly—framed more sparingly than the Dem
