CHAPTER FIVE
FOUR DAYS LATER
At the end of the hall my portrait hangs with the rest. Unlike the others, mine is a photograph, and in its milk-grey haze my face glares into a middle distance, looking both self-conscious and irritated. An angry, privileged young man in a brocade sitting room. In my lapel is a dog-rose. The hand that rests on the rifle in my lap is signet-ringed. The young lord. The scion of the estate. Heir to the village.
Occasionally I'll walk down to the village at dusk. Like I am doing tonight. It's not a long walk, but a peaceful one- a mile of fields and jumbled fences, empty pastures, flocks jangling back to the barns. Nighthawks calling across the sky. Black ponds with frogs calling from the reeds. Rabbits here and there, flashes of grey and white bounding across the road. A pair of does pulling hay from a cattle-feed. The farmhouses like dark castles sprawling down their hilltops, some of them nearly as old as Harthome.
I walk slowly and watch the sky change to luminous lavender-grey. It's beautiful. Glowing at the end of the road, the village appears: shops bright with electric lights, small houses in dark rows behind them. Children running in the alley. Shop-windows' garish gilt-painted glass, their brick entryways crusted with muddy boot marks. A woman in a red coat walking quickly with a twine-tied package, two old men arguing in a doorway. I know their names, I know everyone's names, and of course they know mine. Tinny music from a rear window, a dog barking behind a back fence. And, everywhere, the doors closing as I pass.
My reflection walks beside me in the uneven plate glass windows of the mercantile, a negative of the portrait in my hall: a tall figure, dark eye invisible under a heavy brow, the raincoat's cape behind me like a folded wing. I turn my head to look my double in the eye, and through the jolting shadow of my reflection I see another shadow, inside: someone standing at the shop counter in the dark. I watch his thin silhouette, grey on grey, turn to peer after me, framed by the glass like a figure in a shadow-puppet play. He gives no response to my short wave.
Now I've come to the end, near the crossroad heading up to Gale. Here where the road turns back to mud a narrow cobbled path on my left leads out to the old inn in the valley. Once there was nothing on this road but this inn. Probably it looks much as it did in the sixteen-hundreds, when it was the only thing between Gale and the crumbling Norman ruins over which my ancestors built Harthome. Even now it belongs to the road rather than to either village. And even now the faint air of superstition hangs around it like mist in the dusk.
If I liked I could go inside and sit on one of the ancient benches and give my order and I would, I suppose, possibly be tolerated. If I liked I could keep coming back every evening until I became an old man, but the tolerance would never, not even once, extend to welcome. I understand. A circle has been drawn around the village to protect it from destabilizing influences. It's only common sense- someone must be excluded in order for a community to know its own boundaries; someone must be the outside line. The border.
But let us be frank. Borders are never enforced by kindness.
.
I stand for a moment at the end of the cobbled path, looking up. The wooden sign hanging over the door of the inn, dull in the dusk, is older than the forest around us. You can just make out the daisy-wheel carved in the silvery wood. I doubt anyone in the village recognizes this symbol any longer. But I do: it is a hex sign, like the ones that men used to carve into Harthome's gates and burn into its fields in midsummers, before I was born. I don't enter, or touch the worn handle, or move. Laughing, drunken voices push against the bullion windows from inside. Out here they sound as though they're underwater. I turn away. Some evenings I just come to look, as though there's some place inside myself that needs reminding.
The walk home is dark, overwhelmingly lovely. Only a sliver of moon- waxing, ten percent, a crystal shard leaning on the waving field I'm walking through. The nighthawks pass over it in black flashes. Its pale-blue light pours over the fields endlessly, a waterfall. I can feel the light sliding over me, as well as see its slow cascade raining down from the sky like smoke. The light is a living thing.
Once I asked my tutor if she, too, loved the feeling of the moonlight's hands holding her.
Now where did you read that? she asked, laughing.
I didn't, I remember answering her. Don't you know what I mean, when the moon holds on to you and pulls you? And makes you run out of your house and do what you're not supposed to?
I saw one droplet of fear fall behind in her eyes. And I understood, by the silent moment she sat regarding me before delivering her careful response- No, Henry, I believe that's your imagination speaking- that she knew what I was talking about. Along with that droplet had been a sudden flash of recognition between us: at some point, my tutor must have found herself out in some windy wood, away from the road, the house, the candlelight; she must have looked up; she must have felt it too, just a glimpse. Maybe that was why she was old as my mother but unmarried, and had a throaty and incautious laugh, raw, not a lady's laugh. And maybe that was why she looked so fearful of me in that moment.
After that I took more care in what I said.
An owl is calling- who, who, who cooks for you? across the fields from a dead oak black against the blue-glow sky. It's an enormous tree, curled in a dancer's pose against the fenceline. I'm reminded of the silhouette of the man watching me from his shop- Barker, his name is; and every two weeks his wagon pulls up to Harthome with our order. He's always treated me with the wary deference one gives a bull out of the pen, even though all I want from him is the pound of coffee. Or, perhaps, that he once return my wave.
Who, who? Everyone in the village is like Barker, more or less, and I understand. I can't expect otherwise. We all are what we are. It is only that I also understand the vastness of what is lost in these lost connections.
It isn't till I reach my door that I realize I've forgotten the key. I knock- the special knock from my childhood; one, one, wait, and one-two-three- but it takes Agnes a long time to make it down the stairs, and when the door finally opens the cold draft hits me before the pale oval of her face appears.
I'm late coming home, she informs me as I'm bringing the logs in for the fires. She was alone after dark and she's nervous of the stranger in the cottage, is what she means. I take off my gloves and hold her tiny, chilly claws in my hands and tell her, as we stand in the now-warm study, that it is ridiculous for her to be frightened of anyone, because everyone she's ever met in her entire life is afraid of her. She frowns at me but a glint of amusement crackles in her eye.
.
The little cottage has a water-pump but no electricity. Our new groundskeeper has also lit his fire and from the study I can see the glowing square of his window, red-orange, brilliant in the misty dark.
.
There is a letter waiting at my place on the table, my mother's tiny, back-slanting script. I need only to read the first line-
Henry- Have heard this morning from A that you have hired on a stranger & must insist you immediately
-to not feel any guilt in tossing it on the coals.