CHAPTER SEVEN
TWO WEEKS LATER
We're sitting on a horse-blanket at the western edge of the lawn, just before it staggers down and falls into the old forest. My eyes are gritty. Salt rings have dried on my shirt. Across from me, Seamus is eating another orange. Lying in the grass before us is a handful of peeled rinds that I have arranged into a miniature hut. Between the two of us and in the span of nine hours, we've rebuilt the garden's crumbled Norman west wall. My entire body aches, but I feel oddly, wearily serene.
I look over at him. There's a hole starting in the sole of each boot and his trousers are too short for his height. The length of sock I can see has been darned with kitchen string. He's chewing thoughtfully, staring down into the forest. Behind him, the fields sloping down to the coast are the same green-grey as the shining stripe of water at the sky's edge. The only difference is that one is glittering and the other has a donkey cart trundling through it.
"You were a sailor, before," I say. He hasn't ever mentioned this, but it's obvious, and besides I recall the wooden chest in the cottage. "You don't miss the sea?"
It's only by chance that my eyes are on his and I catch his wince, a quick pained blink.
"I do," he says, after a moment. "Miss it. But it has a way of taking one over."
I look at him and say nothing.
He shrugs, finally. "Some years, I never touched land." Beneath his light tone is a faint air of turbulence. I wait, but he's finished explaining.
"So you've gone and become a gardener instead," I say.
"Things have to even out," he replies, leans back on his hands, lifts his chin, and spits an orange seed cleanly through the doorway of the little rind hut. I clap, solemnly, and he dips his head in acknowledgement, a bow.
From the house I hear the bang of the kitchen door and then the hollow echo of the bell. My legs are stiff, I'm clumsy rising. Agnes is at the back steps calling dinner, but also, by her presence rather than Rosalind's, giving me to understand that she has noticed what I'm doing and disapproves of it. Reluctantly I start towards the house. Seamus follows, rolling up the blanket.
I've been spending a considerable share of these past days in his company. To be fair, there's too much work for one man. Jepson solved this problem by shoring things up with rocks, putting feed-sacks over anything that broke, and only tending what he preferred to eat, which was mostly peas. I solved the problem by not realizing there was one. Earlier that morning, looking around, I saw the land's shabbiness with a vicious clarity in the bright sunlight, and was ashamed of myself.
After that realization I'd excused myself from our work and walked out to the old greenhouse. Whoever built it had fashioned it as a miniature of Harthome, and it was once beautiful, but in that morning light it was desolate. The pitted glass, ancient, webbed, crusted over, admitted a weak yellow light. I hadn't been inside in years and I wasn't surprised at the piles of leaves and chaff, the empty tubs, the stacks of ropes and rags, the acid tang of rat. What did surprise me hung on a hook in the corner: a child's sweater, motheaten blue wool, stained at the cuffs. In a blink I recognized it as mine. In that same blink I was struck by a memory: shining blood-red strawberries hanging from the greenhouse troughs. I'd come to Harthome, frightened and belligerent, and Jepson had grown them to placate me. Trying to sweeten the sting. My throat closed. The troughs were empty now, holding only withered chaff. I walked outside.
Back at the wall I decided that I would return the grounds to their original state, the one in the paintings in the hallway, the one that lay beneath the overgrowth when I'd first come. Through a childish aversion, an irresponsibility, I'd let everything go to waste. Why? Perhaps because I'd arrived at Harthome feeling displaced. I believed myself to be its victim. Even as I grew to love it- especially its tangled forest- I felt myself to be its captive. So, in rebellion, I had let it run itself down.
Looking at my hands in Jepson's old gloves I'd been struck by the thought that victimhood was merely one story I could tell myself. In reality I was never its captive. Harthome wasn't something that had happened to me. Neither was the wild thrall I experienced each month- it didn't happen to me, it was me; it was my reality, and likewise, I was Harthome's much as it was mine. To care for it was to care for a piece of myself.
"Here, hand me that." Seamus taps my elbow, reaching for the water jug, bringing me back to the present. I pull the blanket out from under his arm and trade him the jug, waiting while he drinks. Beyond him I can see Agnes framed in the kitchen doorway, folding her arms across her chest.
This. This presumption, Seamus' knuckles grazing my elbow, is why she's standing at the back door. After we raised the gate that second day, after that small wry smile, he's adopted an unsuitable familiarity. Now he asks me whatever he wants to know, disagrees often, laughs at whatever he finds amusing, and rarely apologizes. He speaks to me as though he's always known me, or at least known of me, and I can't make myself rebuff the informality. He's forced my hand. I find myself snatching up each crumb of companionship like a beggar. And throughout all of it Agnes has been watching.
He finishes the water and wipes his mouth with the inside of his wrist. At his temples a dusting of salt in his coarse red hair. Salt, also, in the lines outside his eyes, the creases he gets when he smiles.
"Better," he says, with a nod to the wall behind us. I look back. It is better; it looks as it must have centuries ago, and I have the impression that in rebuilding it I have honored something I don't yet have words for.
"Better," I agree, "thank you." He nods in assent, and, taking both blanket and jug, turns toward the house. It is in that moment- perhaps it's the combination of the fading light, my exhaustion, the unreality I lately feel- but it is in that moment that the past fifteen years drop away and I raise my head, look up to see the dark expanse of Harthome, just as it truly is. The way I did the very first time. Without trying to, I remember.
Agnes and I left the train in Gale where a hack stood waiting for us at the station, at that time simply a platform beside a field. Though mollified by the country novelty of the wagon and the adventure of the strange journey through the dusk- the jangling of the horse, geese in the rutted road, Agnes' wardrobe cases jostling behind us in the back, the twilit farms bouncing past- that all ceased for me when we turned off the road and drew up to the arched entrance of the grounds.
First we rolled through the high black wrought-iron gates, made to look like vines of ivy and flanked by the stone walls so overgrown with real ivy that they looked like part of the forest itself. Then out from rows of tangled rosebushes snaked a wide cut-gravel path up to a high wide porch to an enormous carved oak door set into a structure so imposing in the half-dark that I turned and leapt back towards the wagon. Agnes caught my collar. The house was a fortress of decaying stone and narrow windows, tall, formidable against the greying sky. I wanted nothing to do with it. I told both Agnes and the hack so. I don't recall the rest, the unloading of the our luggage or the dismissal of the wagon or how I was eventually quieted, but I recall very vividly the climax: standing on the wide porch before the door, its thick red cut-glass oval window frosted with webbing and dead insects, its brass knocker green with age. Agnes' touch as she gave me something: a heavy brass key the length of my hand.
"This house is yours now, Henry," she told me, and I recall thinking her voice sounded like how I felt, and that we were both afraid.
After a little force the key finally turned and the great door swung inward with a hollow creak and a faint sensation of a vacuum breaking. Agnes walked through it and into to the pitch-black without me. I opened my mouth and nothing came out. But she had found the oil lamp on the wall in the dark, by memory, and lit it, and suddenly there she was, standing in a hall lit mellow sepia by the flickering lamplight, the whole hall warm and brown as though it had been carved from a single hollow tree. I stared. Roses woven in the ancient rugs. Spindly chairs with velvet seats. The smells of dust, beeswax, and ashes. Utter silence. At the end of the hall facing me hung an enormous woven tapestry, a mounted knight with a lance, life-size, leading a white hart by a chain. Over that hung two crossed swords. I have a castle, my own castle, I thought, and then there was excitement inside of me along with the fear.
But the fear was so strong. That night was hard. We ate a picnic dinner by candlelight in the dining room draped in linen sheets as though we were surrounded by ghosts. The water in the tap was like ice. The silence, the displacement, the overwhelming loneliness... I'm ashamed to say that just before dawn I left my bed- the same familiar bed I sleep in now, but back then cold and strange— and ran through the black halls to find Agnes' room in the dark. I entered without knocking and crept up to lie down on the foot of her bed. I was ten years old and considered myself fully grown but it was all too much for me. My shaking woke her up. I tried to explain what was wrong and my voice came out high and babyish. She brought me up to the head of the bed, tucked the blankets around me, and told me that no matter how it felt now it would be morning soon and that in the sunlight my fear would go away.
She was right. It was true. Because that morning I woke late, alone, to the view from Agnes' high window: dazzling light saturating an expanse of untouched medieval forest that stretched in a tangled emerald carpet all the way out to the cliffs of the coast. An enchanted forest. It all belonged to me.