Solsbury Hill A Novel (11 page)

A
fter the strong rain in the night, the bark of the trees was dense with saturated color and everything sparkled as if dappled with diamonds. The sun cut right across the moors as Eleanor walked away from the house in the early afternoon.

She hadn’t gone to bed after Alice was gone. The coroner came in the early morning and the doctor signed papers releasing Alice’s body. Mead whispered things to Alice before she was taken down the stairs and out the front door on a stretcher, covered with a linen blanket, her face open to the air.

Gwen called a friend, Mr. Wilcock, who would arrive at the house by early afternoon. The plans for cremation were already set, and Gwen sat with Mead in the library, both of them quiet, his arm around her on the couch by the fire. Tilda filled vases with flowers that had already begun to come from locals and friends from Cambridge.

Outside, the snap of cold air on her skin felt good as Eleanor crossed the moors. The orange bark of the tree at the top of the hill was now the color of a persimmon after the rain, or deeper still. Eleanor sat on the swing and moved gently back and forth, her cheek against the damp worn velvet. Dreamily,
she turned the swing around and around as she tried to recall her mother’s face, the way she moved, the things she’d taught her.

The swing was a comfort. On it, she felt like a little girl. Feelings she’d put aside since her mother died came back to her, abiding and ineffable. Eleanor lifted her feet off the ground and the swing spun in mad circles unwinding itself, then winding back in on itself, then back again until it stopped. It seemed the wind on the open moors never stopped. “Mother,” she whispered and listened for an answer.

She remembered a picture her mother had had on the wall of her sewing room. It was a large, bright watercolor of a woman serene on the back of a churning crocodile. The Never Not Broken Goddess, she was called, her mother had said. A creature unafraid of heartache, of pain, of being broken in two, who stands on the back of a crocodile that doesn’t snap at its prey but whips and spins her into a state of perfect confusion.

Eleanor took the long way home to avoid seeing the crosses again and ran into Granley.

“They’ll heal most anything, the moors will,” Granley said as she came in through the gate.

“The air’s been good for me.”

“You’re a bonnie walker for a city lass. You’ve got a good bit of Alice in ye, and it’ll serve you well.” He started away
then stopped. “Aye, you’ll not ’ave seen the abbey, ’ave ye? She’s right beyond that hillock there, ’round the other side of the house. Take you no time at all to get there and the sun’s still high. Head straight that way over th’ hill and you’ll recognize her.”

“Recognize who?”

He saw the fear in her eyes and assuaged it with a wink. “The abbey. She’s a girl.”

“I’m sorry.” She lifted her long neck into the wind. “I’m on a scavenger hunt and I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“Scavengers don’t.”

“Well, I’m going to find this abbey to start.”

The mist was waist high at the far side of the house and she stepped gingerly through the dense foliage there, found the strength to climb the steep side of the hill, and descended into a valley where she saw the abbey in the distance. Gray stone against the blue sky, its bare bones still standing. It was an emptied ruin flooded with light and ivy that climbed inside the broken walls.

Through a Gothic arch in the thick outside wall, she stepped into a long arcade with a low, rib-vaulted ceiling so strong it had withstood wind and time altogether intact. She smelled the damp earth, the cold stone, her own body, and the clothes she’d spent the night in. She proceeded through the darkness, through the bones of the abbey, the walls so close she could touch them both with her hands, a splash of sun in a circle of light and then darkness again. At the far end
of the long arcade, there was a rounded archway that drew her. Now she smelled fresh green moss and faint lavender.

Through the archway she stepped into a courtyard, a cloister with broken-down stone columns, and on the other side of these the land fell away down a steep face. Close to the edge of the hill, Eleanor bent forward to see what lay below, and on a smooth flat stone she saw the young woman.

Eleanor’s heart beat so hard her hands trembled, but she went to the edge of the cliff. Though she felt herself rushing, she was careful as she held tight to the edge of a rock and reached with steadiness to the next ledge and so to the next one as she climbed down.

The only place her feet could stand on the flat stone, once she arrived, was inches away from the young woman’s hand. She was more beautiful than Eleanor remembered. She seemed more mature, and her skin was so light it appeared pale blue.

“I come to watch the sun set,” the young woman said.

Eleanor felt awkward, perched there with nowhere to stand but almost on the woman’s hand.

“I was hoping you would come down,” the woman said. “Do sit. Standing there could be a risk to you, if a gust should blow by.”

As impossible as it was that she was here, waiting for her on the side of a hill, Eleanor accepted it as if it were normal.

“Shall I tell you why?” the woman asked.

Eleanor nodded, but was not hearing her words. She was
sure the woman had been younger when she first saw her sitting at the end of the bed, but now she seemed like someone about her own age. The deliberate way she moved was unusual, something contained and formal with a different sense of timing. Her body lacked tone, her head moved slowly, when she talked, as if she were underwater or in a dream. She wore a dress that was distinctly unmodern, in a deep blue fabric made of wool thicker than any wool Eleanor had ever seen. The seams were hand-sewn.

Eleanor believed that if she reached to touch her, her hand might pass right through the dress and the body, but she didn’t feel frightened. Eleanor was sad and tired, and somehow the woman’s presence soothed her.

“From here we could walk to the house and I’ll show you,” the woman said.

Eleanor hadn’t been listening, but responded, “The house I’m in? I know the way. Once I get back to the top, I know the way.”

“You’d rather I didn’t come with you?” the woman asked.

“No, no. I would rather you did.” Eleanor was confused and didn’t want to ask what it was she had missed in what had been said. She started to her feet.

“Even if you found your way home, you wouldn’t know the bookshelf the letters are in. It’s gone quiet and dusty in there. The children all grown and gone.” She turned and waved for Eleanor to follow. Her tiny hand flicked at the wrist.

“You know this way well,” Eleanor called out, catching up to her.

“I do.”

The woman’s skirt didn’t touch the ground but grazed her ankles, and she gathered the full fabric in her hand and lifted it as they walked side by side through the heather. It was not hard for Eleanor to keep up even though the woman walked very fast on the uneven ground.

“I should by now,” she said matter-of-factly. “Let’s run!” And she took off. Like a child in her body now, she skipped and swirled, and as she ran her hair tumbled out of her bun. She called back to Eleanor not to lose her, to hurry and keep up.

Eleanor ran, but her boots were clumsy and she tripped and fell into a clump of bright yellow gorse and got thorns stuck in her hands. Exhausted and on the verge of a temper tantrum, she plucked out a couple of them and got herself up only to find the woman gone.

If she knew her name, she’d call it out. Now she was lost. She had known the way home from on top of the hill, but down in this valley she had no idea. From here, she couldn’t see the abbey. She couldn’t see the tree that held the swing. She couldn’t see the house and had probably taken herself a mile or so in the wrong direction. Because everything was the same color, the landscape was mesmerizing. To be in the center of so much that is some shade of sameness: rolling, climbing, falling away. The land rose up a hill to the right on
ahead. That was where the house had to be. She kept her eyes on the ground and her mind carefully fixed on every thought that flitted by.

A fox moved on the hill and when Eleanor looked up, there was the young woman. She was doubled in half with her hands on her thighs, catching her breath and smiling. “I would have headed back for you, now I’ve caught my breath.”

Eleanor was bothered.

“For a lass not accustomed, you’re not at all bad.”

Eleanor walked without speaking up the hill toward what she hoped would be the house.

“Come on, I was teasing running away from you like that. Don’t you like teasing?”

For Eleanor, it had been an impossibly long day.

The woman’s wrap slipped off her shoulders and she pulled it back up. “Out here on the moors there’s lots left behind. You can see it, can’t you? Sometimes broken hearts, some broken children left with the task of pulling together what’s gone amiss. Out here, there’s lots left behind. You can see it.”

The woman’s shawl slipped again and Eleanor stepped close to wrap it tight around her. “This really is beautiful wool.” Eleanor spoke softly.

“You need to mind my words. The letters are where I left them tucked inside a box hidden inside a cupboard. It was a sitting room when I hid them there, where the children played.”

Eleanor heard a whistle and, turning away from the
woman, saw Granley at the top of the hill waving his arms broadly to let her know she was on her way home.

When Eleanor turned back the woman was gone. She looked all around and as far as she could see. There were trees she might have hurried through, but the sun was setting.

As Eleanor started up the hill, she saw Granley heading back inside the cottage where he and Tilda lived.

Eleanor went in the house through the mudroom and up the back stairs. She had barely closed the door to her room inside a room, when she heard her name and saw Mead below. She cranked open the window.

“I’m going in to the village to pick up some rents. Want to come?”

It had been an exhausting day, but she wanted to be with him, to get away from Trent Hall and escape her confusion. It was late in the evening and almost dark. “Can you wait? I’ll be right down.”

He nodded, put his hands in his pockets, and leaned against the car.

Eleanor hurried down the back stairs through the vegetable garden and onto the gravel driveway, where Mead waited inside a handsome old Aston Martin.

“You ready to go, then?” he said.

“I am, I guess.” She felt out of sorts from the recent encounter, but was determined to shake it off. As she slid into
the car she noticed the burled wood dash, the cream leather seats, soft with wear and care. She looked around for her seat belt, but there was no shoulder strap.

Mead reached across her lap to find the belt and his hand, as it brushed against her leg, sent a surprising shiver up her spine. “She was my father’s once. She’s quite an old thing now.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Came out the same year I did,” he said.

She cinched the seat belt around her waist. “Thanks for asking me,” she said. “I’m tired, but I’ve no interest in going to bed.”

“Well, that’s fine, I don’t fancy you, either.” His voice feigned umbrage, but she was distracted and the tease went right over her head. “We’re off, then.” Mead drove down the long drive onto the wide road for a stretch till he turned onto a dirt road that bounced through the moorland.

Shaggy wool sheep with black faces grazed. They bent to chomp and chew on grasses and heather, on their way home. A ram lifted its head and broke into a clumsy sheep’s sprint. Mead downshifted and let the ram run beside them.

“The thwaite’s just beyond the bending tree on that hill,” Mead said. “You know they grow that way against the wind.”

“I wondered about that.” Eleanor pulled her feet up onto the seat and looked closely at his face. She saw the pain there: eyes that had been crying, skin gray from nights without sleep. She felt drawn to stroke his cheek and comfort him, but couldn’t. Instead, her voice a good deal warmer, she
continued, “You’d think the wind would kill them, but they just bend.”

“It’ll happen to you, if you stick around long enough.”