Later, Bill he would recall about it was how happy he’d been, and the memory would make him feel like a fool. Had he always been so naive? Or had something changed so dramatically even a savvy old public servant didn’t see the danger

On the day it began, he got home from Town Hall at about sunset, and as soon as he’d changed, he went into the pool.

Bill didn’t swim every day anymore. He got out of breath too quickly, and while Dr. Graves had told him merely to cut back, not give it up entirely, it depressed him not to be able to go the distance as he used to.

But this evening, he felt pretty good. Even a bit excited. Projects always invigorated him, and swimming got his gray cells working. He just had to pace himself because if he ended up gasping for breath it would spoil things. After he’d swum the length of the pool a second time, he noticed the light from the kitchen window flickering, heard the sound of cabinets being opened and shut. Bridget was back from her committee meeting.

“You didn’t overdo it, did you?” she asked when she heard him come in,

and then she let out an amused squawk when he threw his arms around her. “You’re still damp! You’ll catch a chill.”

“I have a new project Bridge.”

“So that’s what you’re so happy about.”

“Today at City Hall I met…”

“Don’t tell me about it now. Hop into a hot shower, get into some dry clothes and we’ll talk.”

He could tell from the look she’d given him that he was going to be given a tonic later that night.

By the time he’d showered and dressed, the table was set, one child had been pried away from the tv and the other was back from the library. In two weeks Judy would take the MCAT, and on most evenings she went straight from her classes at Kilkenny College to her study group. She was nervous, but everyone knew she’d do fine.

“Meatloaf!” Elisha sang happily. “We’re having meatloaf! Meatloaf…”

“Yummy, yummy meatloaf,” Judy caroled back, smiling, and Elisha laughed.

“No singing at the table,” Bridge said absently.

“No singing.” Elisha nodded and put his finger to his lips.

“How was school today, Lish?” asked Bill.

“Miss Pascoe read us a poem about a Highwayman. Tlot-tlot, Tlot-tlot…”

Judy smiled and began a to recite:

“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.”

“Miss Pascoe said I can recite it to the class on Monday if I memorized it. I’ve already memorized it! ‘Tlot-tlot in the frosty silence, tlot-tlot in the echoing night…””

“Nearer he came and nearer. Her face was like a light.…” said Bridget. “Oh yes, Minnie Pascoe loves that poem. I remember her reading it to us when I had her class in high school. ”

“I like it too!” said Elisha. Elisha could memorize something on his first hearing if it struck his fancy, but for him, it was invariably about the sound rather than the sense of the words. “Tlot-tlot,Tlot-tlot, Tlot-tlot…”

“E-lish-a,” Bridget said, and he hunched his shoulders and grinned, but fell silent, looking down at his plate and carefully separating the peas from the meatloaf and gravy. Bridget looked across the table at Bill. “You were telling me something earlier. You said you have a new project?

“I saw your Uncle Artiste at the town hall today,” said Bill.

As always when her family was mentioned, she became politely cool. “And how did he look?” she asked.

“Frail. Very frail. But he’s still a smart man, and we had a very interesting talk.”

He’d encountered the Reverend Mr. Artiste Macana pausing at the top of the steps in front of the town hall. Bill had reached the age where he understood instantly the hesitation, the look of faint trepidation as Macana prepared to move slowly and carefully, and he’d trying to think of a tactful way to offer his help.

Macana had saved him the trouble by smiling and saying “Mr. Quiller! Just the man I was hoping to see.”

The two of them had ended up talking there on the Town Hall portico for almost half an hour.

“My wife,” Macana had explained, “came home from Saint Jerome’s Orphanage a bit upset the other night. A new child was brought in. Leonide Kitchen, two years old, brought in by her aunt.

Her father was washed off his fishing boat last year, and her mother died from cancer a week ago. I wish you could see that child. I wish everybody could see that child. She’s a little bag of bones — bent ones. Her little legs are so bowed they look as though they’d snap if she put any weight on them, and her skull is so soft, so misshapen.

Rickets, of course. Leonide didn’t get enough milk. Celeste Kitchen was too sick to produce any, and she couldn’t afford to buy it. And this is just one example, Mr. Quiller. Just one. Leonide Kitchen is an usually bad case, but even so, it is a sin and a shame that on this Island in this day and age there are children with even slightly bowed legs and bent spines because their families were too poor to buy milk. A sin and a shame.”

“Now, I know the school has a policy of providing milk to some of the poorer children, but what about babies like Leonide who are too young to attend school? Something needs to be done.” Macana had looked at Bill.

“And I believe, Mr. Quiller, that you are the man to help us do it.”

“I did explain to him that I’m retired…”

“No doubt he found that very convincing after meeting you in your suit and tie going into town hall,” said Bridget.

“But he’s right, Bridge. He’s absolutely right,” and he noticed that Judy was nodding.

“You should see some of the kids who come into the hospital with broken bones when I’m there,” Judy said. “Little bird-bones, so fragile… It really is wrong.”

“Bird bones!” exclaimed Elisha, frowning at Judy and shaking his head.

“Bird bones! That’s not right!” Then he looked back down at his plate and frowned as he carefully cut a bit of meatloaf into two exactly equal halves.

“So,” Bridget said. “What’s to be done?”

“A Free Milk Committee. That’s where we should begin,” Bill said.

He had always bounced ideas off of Bridget. He often thought she would have made a good general, with her insight into strategy, her almost infallible sense of where resistance might be, and how to either head if off or deal with it when it occurred. She listened as he talked about how to form the committee, who should be on it, what cooperation could be expected, how long before it could actually have an impact. Their conversation lasted to the end of the meal, and continued well after the children had cleared the plates away.

Occasionally Bridget nodded; sometimes she frowned and offered a suggestion.

He felt that wonderful, familiar sense of being poised at the starting gate and ready to go. Every time he thought he was done with life, that his health and age had consigned him to the sidelines, something else would catch his eye, a project, a cause, a need to be filled. And he would feel strong and useful again.

She brought him his tonic as he was getting ready for bed. “Drink it down,” she said, he took it smiling tightly, but turning away, trying to hide his annoyance.

“You’re tired,” she said. “You don’t swim every day anymore and you’re going to be achey tomorrow morning.”

Which was true. He sat down in his easy chair and sipped his drink, which, as always, tasted faintly of bourbon and vanilla. Bridget was watching him, apparently framing a comment. He set his glass down and looked at her, waiting.

“This means a lot to you, doesn’t it, this new project,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You should talk to my father.”

He tried not to look too astonished.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t dealt with Tel Duday in the past. If you worked at city hall, or hoped to get anything done at all on the Island, working with Papa Duday — or at least, taking the man into account — was a fact of life. It was one of the first things he’d learned back in 1923, when he’d come to the island. But never before had Bridget actually suggested he go to his father-in-law about a pet project.

They were not entirely estranged — she visited her parents at least once a week to check on Tel’s health and, Bill suspected, deliver a lot of largely unwanted advice. The fact remained, however, Bridget openly disapproved of her family. And Bridge had always made it plain she preferred not to know of any dealings Bill might have with her father when it came to city affairs.

“I know it surprises you” she said.

“But I think this Free Milk Committee may not be as easy a sell as it should be.” She cocked an eyebrow at him. “I gather from our talk that this program would serve all mothers of poor children. Including those who aren’t married? And I don’t mean widows.”

“Of course.”

She sniffed, as if she were smelling something bad, and her mouth curved in a faint moue of disgust.

“Well, I suppose if we must we must. I certainly don’t see any way around it. But it’s going to be a problem. I can’t imagine Madelyn Cooney being in favor of a charity that would benefit depraved women. Even Shirley is going to need some convincing. Some people will absolutely not budge on this issue, which means funding may not be so easy.”

“And your father could help?”

She sighed. “He’s mostly retired now, you know. Even more retired than you are. Only goes down to the club about once a week, and that’s mainly to make sure Bay Silvestri is doing his job. But I understand Roland still calls him every now and then, and Papa still knows people. Papa still knows about people. And he loves children. Even… well… those kind of children….”

For a moment they fell silent, each knowing what the other was thinking.

One of the big secrets-not-really-secret on the island was Tel’s illegitimate son. It had become practically a piece of island lore.

Papa Duday loved his wife. Nobody who’d seen him with Felicia could ever doubt that. But he was like most of the Island men, and at some point in the past, he’d fathered a child by another woman. What made Tel unlike most of the Island men was that he’d taken even that form of parenthood seriously. Apparently he’d moved mother and babe off-island, for years managing to keep the boy’s existence under wraps, sending occasional infusions of cash so that the child was healthy and educated.

But even conniving old Tel couldn’t escape the realities of war. The birth was hidden for over thirty years, until the night Tel opened an envelope, read what it contained, and went crashing, unconscious, to the floor.

A man named Duday, a reporter, had gone missing while covering the end of the war in Europe.

Other men might have learned about the loss of a bastard with only a flicker of regret.

Not Tel. That knife in the heart had not been the kind of secret he could keep.

“It’s not that you’d have to do everything Papa says right off, but he could tell you things you might use later, if you hit any really tough obstacles.”

“I promise I’ll talk to your father,” said Bill. “Ask his advice.”

She nodded, then turned away. “Drink your tonic,” she said.

He sipped his drink, framing the questions he would ask his father-in-law, and the reality of what Bridget was suggesting began to dawn on him.

“Papa still knows about people,” she’d said.

People and their secrets. Island men, rich and poor, (especially the rich) and their children.

All their children.

He looked at her as she folded down the bedsheets. Yes, he thought, the woman should have been a general. For all her snobbishness, her longing to be more than a cut above her raffish, Frenchy family, she had a streak of practical ruthlessness that would have served her well in the military — or in politics.

He’d never dare to say so out loud and in her presence, but in many ways, Bridget was her father’s daughter.