CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

That was the last Seamus and I spoke.

We're eating dinner, or at least, Agnes is. Her knife clicks gently against her dish across the table from me. This afternoon was a jumble of pacing the library, of self-recrimination, of the insistent buzz of barely-managed panic. There's a tenderness at back of my head where his fist gripped my hair and I don't want the meal that is in front of me. Nor do I want the truth to be true: that I have caused him harm. That he fears me.

The clicking stops. "You don't look well. Has it begun early?" She's squinting at me in the candlelight. Tomorrow evening is the full moon; normally nothing else could preoccupy me, but tonight it is only my body that's conscious of it. I shake my head and pull back from my plate.

"What's wrong? You look feverish."

I shake my head again, and she frowns, and I see that I have to explain.

"I've done something I shouldn't have," I say.

She ducks her chin, hands frozen, eyes bright, waiting. Through the wall there is nothing but silence. He must not feel much like talking, either.

"What, exactly? You've not compromised yourself?" As though there are no other appreciable wrongs, as though no other act I could commit would matter.

"No," I say, looking down at my lap. My slit knuckle has healed together but a thin black line threads across it if you look closely: what remained of the fur I shaved away. The morning after tomorrow the line it will be gone, absorbed back into myself, and only the scar will remain.

"I was disrespectful," I finish, and she tilts her head to the side.

"That's nothing new," she murmurs, and resumes her knife. "To whom? Certainly not to me, or you wouldn't be having conscience. I suppose it must have been to Mr. Tulloch."

I grimace. In some ways, Agnes is worse than a mother.

She lowers her voice. A concern has occurred to her, as ever. "What sort of disrespect?" She is scanning, of course, for impropriety. "No," I say, firmly, and the narrowed wrinkles at the corners of her eyes relax. We're quiet for a moment, her carving up her chicken into minute little bites and me gazing down the table to the hideous wax-fruit cornucopia, nauseated.

She shakes her head. "That's a relief." There's a moment as she prepares herself. "Please know that I've come to understand there's nothing I can change. It's clear to me that you have made your choice. It would be my preference to let you both alone to figure it out for yourselves, were it not for the difficulty of your situation and the difficulty of Mr. Tulloch's personality." I stare at her, astonished. She is not looking at me. "I've not come around to him, understand. I've no idea what it is you see in him that is so devastating. Obviously he hasn't much to recommend him, although I suppose it's admirable that he hasn't let that slow him, but really, Henry, all that matters is you. And your safety." She sighs, and I watch the dull blade skip over a piece of gristle. She bears down, frowning. "Whatever his complaint is, whatever guilt you're having, please recall that."

And there it is, out of her mouth, the trap in which I had caught myself: assuming that I stand at the center of this story. With a palm, I rub the sore spot at the back of my head. I do not. For better or worse we are all of us equally intertwined, and at the moment, I am simply the antagonist.

Through the wall comes his voice thanking Rosalind and then the prosaic racket of scraping plates.

.

I sit in the dark with my chin in my hand and watch his cottage. My lamp is cold and the only light in the room is the moon sweeping a wide glowing-blue rectangle across the floor, which shivers in unearthly beauty and which I am ignoring. I've drawn my chair up to the side of the window where the shadow hides me.

He is sitting on his porch, in silhouette. The red ember of his pipe makes a slow circuit from his face, where it brightens on his inhale, then to rest on his lap, where the glow dulls down. He is thinking of me, and I am thinking of him, and the moonlight is so fine and bright that I can even make out his fist, clenched tight on his knee.

.

My eyes open. Someone is in my bedroom and they are laughing at me, a staccato, croaking ha-ha. I wrench myself out from the blanket I am wound up in to lunge across the bed and whip away the curtain from the window where the hoarse sound is coming from.

The crow on my windowsill tilts a sideways eye to me, opens his mouth for the last laugh, and wings his way down the roof to land on the turret. I lean out and watch him. He ducks his head, digs beneath a wing, ruffles himself. From somewhere behind the house comes answering laughter: another one.

I haven't seen a crow here in years, but then again, I haven't had a garden in years either.

.

I'm walking from the stable to do what has been on my mind all night and now all morning. Below me in the well of the garden I see Seamus' back, hunched over, his shoulders rocking, spading muck into the beds. Beyond him I also see a post to whose crossbar he's tied a dishtowel with sardine-tin lids affixed to it, clanking weakly in the wind, and which is probably what they were laughing at.

Hearing my step, he turns and stands, and what I see in his face- disappointment, guardedness, irritation clearest, makes me stop short. He leans on the spade.

"Yes?"

"I should apologize."

He lowers his head and regards me under the line of his brow.

"You already did." His eyes narrow to slits. "It's your cottage, isn't it."

"No," I answer. "It's Harthome's. But your chest is yours."

"Mmmm." He tilts his head to the side. "Yes, 'tis. How long do you think you could remember that? A year? Two years?"

Once again I'm lost in his game with the hidden rules. "How long can I remember that your chest is yours?"

He nods.

I don't understand. "Forever. Always. What do you mean?"

"Always? That's a commitment. You'd be surprised. All right. I'll help you remember, don't worry." His voice is low, neutral, pleasant; we could be talking about anything, but for a ruddiness spreading over the tops of his cheekbones. The anger in his eyes is easy to recognize but there's something else there, a complicated challenge, a proposition. It's the same offer he's been making this whole time. I have the same response, which is to stand there and wait. He squints at me, nods- a dismissal- gives me his back, places the spade, puts his heel on it.

"Mr. Tulloch," I say, and he turns.

"How did you come to be here?"

He stands up and looks at me, brow lifting. There is honest surprise in his face.

"You've forgotten? I answered your notice calling for a groundskeeper," he says.

"That's all?"

His grin splits open in spite of himself and for a moment he's broken out of his shell, familiar again.

"Just like you, Henry, to beg for something and be thrown when it's delivered."

.

I go to the cellar early, even before the evening has cooled. I don't tell Agnes, and there is no reason to tell Seamus: I am acutely aware that our chess games have ended.

.

Just like every time I only want to get out of the cellar. When I was a child Jepson stuffed burlap sacks with rags and hay, and padded the cellar walls to help with the bruising. Later, on my own, I looped a rope through the ceiling's iron ring so I would climb it instead of the posts, because of the splinters. This rope is where I am now: coiled round it like a knot, clawing at the cracks in the ceiling. It's not such a far drop. Still it is a drop I make over and over, all night.

Of course I am not fully conscious of any of this; it's only what a spectator would see, were there any. But the door is locked and Row had the narrow ground-level windows bricked up decades ago. This cage was his before it was mine. And he was right to do so for several reasons, not least that no one should see what is now happening to me. It's easier for me when there aren't windows, when I can't see it; still, I can feel the moonlight soaking into the earth above me and I want it. I want, I want. My whole existence is a concentrated wanting. This time of night is the most difficult, these early hours when it's risen in full.

A sound behind me. I drop from the ceiling to all fours. The impact pushes my breath from me.

Key in the lock.

Key in the lock.

Key in the lock, turning.

I don't hesitate. Door opening a crack, needle of blue light, I am scrabbling up, fast, leaping-

My body knocks against something as I run past it: warmth, solidity, another living thing; I don't care at all because through the stairway window I can see the beautiful Mother, my Mother, round and full, so perfect in the sky, waiting for me to come and sing to her.