CHAPTER TWELVE
This morning I rose so early it was still the black night. I shivered from bath to kitchen, fixed a cold candlelit breakfast. The house was in silence. Now that I'm ready to leave, the pipe to Agnes' bath is gurgling, cocks are crowing, and the first lavender-grey ribbons are stretching up from the horizon. Outside the open kitchen window the morning's close and foggy, not best for hunting, but the excitement has begun inside me anyhow.
Desire is a ridiculous irony. Without it your life is a series of impersonal habits and tasks and reactions; without it your life is interchangeable with anyone else's. And without it you can truly have peace. The way I feel at this moment is anything but peaceful. Inside of me, inside the oldest part of my mind, the part that holds the fears and hungers, the part that can smell the tracks in the dirt, is also the place where my deepest needs are kept. It's impossible to refuse them. Almost as difficult to ignore them. There is something about hunting in a group that satisfies an urge down in the core of me, and I'm excited, but satisfaction and peace are not interchangeable. My jaw is sore from grinding my teeth together. My heart is making my chest feel too full.
And it isn't peace, either, that I feel in bed at night, nor am I able, really, to experience satisfaction afterward. As badly as I want the moon's light on me, I also want touch, real and actual; I want to be held and to hold, I want contact. Terribly. I would trade almost anything, including the shame of refusal. Last night I wanted to get up and go out to the cottage so intensely that it became a physical ache. But I didn't. And now it's morning again, and reality is once again here, stolid in the daylight.
I'm standing in the hallway, closing my mouth on a yawn while I receive my benediction from Agnes. "You look very well, Henry," she tells me, tying my stock too tight. "Very handsome." She frowns, staring up at me. "The older you are, the more you favor Row."
She means Rowlande Brack, the last Lord Harthome. My dashing uncle. Six months before I was born to his younger brother, Row Brack took an early-morning walk to the sea cliff at the farthest point of our property, where he sat down with his legs hanging over the edge, loaded his Webley with a melted-down teaspoon, and shot himself in the heart. A few days later Jepson found him.
He was, I am told, the bright star of the family, charming, vital, handsome as a devil. He's Harthome's ghost. His name has become the cautionary fable I've heard all my life, for fear my death might take after his the way my face has. That's mostly because of Agnes. Her fondness for Row was a family joke, the kind that is more uncomfortable than humorous, the kind everyone knows and no one repeats. She was only a girl when she came to our family but she and he were of an age. When she speaks of him, her voice clouds with a subterranean emotion that hasn't diminished over the years.
In her drawer, tucked in her jewelry box- I was young, I didn't mean to pry into her life, I was only looking for the pantry key- was a folded note on linen paper. I suppose it is there still. In faded brown ink, elegant hand angled in a slant across the sheet, it read
Forgive me. I can find no compromise
It was unsigned. At the time it meant nothing to me. But it has been haunting me since I was old enough to understand it. I look down. Agnes' hand rests on my chest, and her face is constricted. "If you'd only smile more often, you might be his double."
I stop and retie my stock in the mirror on the way out.
The stables are older than Harthome itself; the back half of it, past the stalls, was built off of the remaining edges of a Norman ruin. The rest of the ruin, I assume, is either directly beneath Harthome or else has tumbled and sunk into the garden. I'm inclined to let it all lie, although over the years I've fended off men from the conservation leagues bearing clipboards and threats. Under no circumstances would I ever allowing digging. For one, we're all buried here, even Row, all together in a small patch at the head of the arbor. (That, too, was made explicit in the parchment. The village churchyard will not have us. Of course we would not have the churchyard either.) But it's not just my ancestors' rest I don't want disturbed. I have an idea that there is a good deal more lying beneath Harthome than there is above it, and that it has all been buried for very sound reasons.
Certainly the stable feels its age- at least, it does to me. I love it here. It's calming, the cool, quiet, still dark, the homey stink, the owls purring up in the eaves. The loudest sound is a hollow drowsy breathing. I take the box of matches from the tin basket hanging on the nail.
It took three difficult years to get Easy accustomed to me; that's how he got his name. Things improved when I came to realize that it was not myself but my scent that he found distressing. I don't take it to heart. There are no longer wolves in the forest here but somewhere in the ancient back catalogue of his mind there's a warning and he heeds it. So now before I go into the stable I light a sulphur match and wave it about me, and he and I are better friends.
It helps that we share a joy. As we turn towards Harring he understands that we are not merely riding but going to meet the hunt, and he breaks into a few dancing sideways steps beneath me. I pat his bobbing, velvety neck. He's happy and so am I. This is the nearest acceptable excuse to do that which I desire most. As for him, he loves jumping fences.
This morning will be another entry into that long-running, unsolved equation between myself and the village. This is one way that I can join them, that they can have a look at me, and also one way that I can bear it. It's Harring who hosts the hunt, as I won't have his hounds, or any hounds, at Harthome. In return I stand the dinner afterward. Really only the liquor's expensive, but my recompense is worth it: it's rude to be suspicious of the man who's bought your drinks.
Some of these men I will ride with today remember Row, of course. None of them have ever spoken of him except obliquely; nor has there been any reference of the ten years Harthome stood empty and untended prior to my coming. Neither have the ones nearer my age remarked on the isolation of my life against theirs. I'm sure some of this is due to the constraints of status and polite conversation. Regardless, I can feel the unanswered questions simmering underneath our interactions, trembling like the lid of a pot about to boil. Why are we as we are, what happens inside the gate? The way the older ones eye me, I can tell they never asked any questions of Row either. That in itself is suspicious. His disappearance cast a long shadow over my arrival. It occurred to me several years ago that the village likely never learned exactly what had happened to him. It's possible that in the collective rumor he is still alive, walking the grounds at night, or perhaps confined in a room somewhere. Nine years from now I will be his age when he died. By then, should his ghost ever decide to come forth, we might be mistaken for one another. For some reason this thought makes me smile. I would welcome the opportunity to shake his hand.
The road to Harring is a gentle swoop two steady miles up into the fog, birds calling in the open fields on both sides. Beauty infuses everything. Before we know it we've arrived, and Easy does his dancing trot again. Even this early in the year the lawn at Harring is like a velvet rug rolling out before us, scrupulously tended. At the center of the turf a cluster of mounted scarlet figures show bright in the grey dawn, drops of blood on the lush green. I ride up to meet them. Easy snorts and dances. Irony strikes me, how we hunters dress as the little foxes do- our red coats, our white shirts, neat black feet. I smile. The group sees me; the scarlet riders wheel round. But it's a lonesome feeling, to join up with a group to which you only nominally belong. There is no word for this kind of piecemeal inclusion. I'm close enough now to see the first expressions on their faces, as always their mouths tight and guarded, as always their eyes a little wide.
But I pay a heavy subscription, and when Jocelyn Harring sees me, he raises his hand in welcome.