CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NINE DAYS LATER
It's mid-morning. Ostensibly we are out inspecting the estate's perimeter fence, or what's left of it. That's what I told Agnes as he and I left together. Really we are just on a walk. I am carrying a brick of smoked cheese wrapped in wax cloth, apples, walnuts, dried figs, a jam-jar of brandy. Seamus is walking beside me, hands in his pockets, telling me stories. Myself, I haven't been bothering to make note of the fallen posts. There's not much point in repairing the fence anyhow. No one ever tries to come in.
This particular story of his concerns a mutiny, which I had thought was an event grave enough to be punishable by death. To him it appears to have been memorable mostly for its amusement. I notice also that it seems he's omitting some incriminating details. Then again, it's hard to understand him when he's chewing.
He bumps into me, absorbed in the build-up, his shoulder against mine. "So I says to him- here, pass me that jar, will you- so I says to him, 'Come away from there,' as I can see he's still not figured it out, and meanwhile they're runnin a net up below the rail-"
We walk. The mutiny rolls along between us. I'm half-listening, not as much to the story as to the sound of his voice itself- the swinging, singsong cadence, the hollow layer in his baritone as it vibrates out from the bottom of his chest. Even in all the time we have spent together I still have not grown used to the pattern of his speech. I find it pleasing- singularly melodic, but strange. He speaks, I decide, as though he's new to the habit. Or that the Scots merely sits haphazardly alongside a dozen other languages he's taken up and discarded.
"Here, pass that," he says again, and holds out his hand before me, palm up. I drop an apple in it instead of the jam-jar. He laughs, says, "All right, then," and bites into the apple. I see myself closely watching the snarling pull of his upper lip before the bite, and I reflect on how strange it is that such a thing can give me pleasure.
I can't help but recall how I felt the night before the hunt. I still feel like that most nights. In the light of day I'm astonished at myself, but really, what would happen? I imagine walking out late in the dark, standing in the doorway of his cottage. What would I say? In my mind's eye I watch him sit up in his narrow cot, alarmed, confused. Watch him light the candle. Watch his face searching mine as he realizes. At this, the cruelest part of my mind takes over. I hear his mockery, I hear my own clumsy apologies. I hear his laughter behind me as I shut the door. He doesn't want what I want, of course. I wouldn't understand it if he did. No one would want what I have to give.
And still, as we walk, his shoulder brushes mine; he reaches into my coat pocket for the brandy, he argues and laughs and asks a hundred questions, he tells me about the world, things I'll never see, a globe's worth of experiences that he's picked up along the way. All of this as though it is he, not I, who is trying to coax the other into companionship.
But there's another reason I won't, will never, go to the cottage. More than the inevitability of his rejection, I worry that strong emotion will rob me of control. I can't afford the feeling he causes in me because I don't want to find out what, exactly, it is that I would do to him. For everything, for all the effort, the pain, the small moments of relief I don't allow myself, for all the ways I am present in this human world, I am still a monster. How terrible a monster, I can only imagine. I only got out the once.
Why else would I be feared, if I was not dangerous? Why else would I need to be locked up?
.
We're at the outskirts of the fenland, heading east across the dry channels. The sky is a thick satin grey, and the metallic smell of storm clouds carries on the coast wind. Once in a while a seabird hovers high and still over us. A ground fog makes the land pearlescent and holds the earth-sounds in close; our footsteps crackle in the sedge.
He stops short. "Look here." A scatter of daisy-wheel divots crosses the slick of mud in front of us: tracks, a running fox. "Must be that fellow you were out botherin the other day," he says. "He's come back lookin for you." He kneels to break a stick out of the brush and hands it over to me. I accept it, brows raised. "There. Now you're safe," he murmurs, and I snort and toss it back at him. He catches it and whips it up out over the brush, whistling.
There isn't much boundary left to Harthome, at least to the eye. Where the Crown's land abuts mine there is none at all. In some places the shale wall still stands but for the most part now it is only rotten posts, alders, overgrown hedgerow. For me it may as well still be stone. Seamus wanders unwittingly back and forth through the wall as we walk, a magic trick, a man passing painlessly through rock. I watch his boots. The patch of crusted grass they're treading on looks identical to the one below mine but it has all the difference in the world. For me to walk as freely as he does, someone else would need to dig up centuries of charms, bags of bones, plaits of hair. The consequences of such action I can't imagine.
"Watch yourself, there."
He looks at me, grinning. In that moment, my foot steps over the invisible hex. It burns. I don't have time to control the jostle of the impact or my gasp of pain. Too late, I feign a stumble. He says nothing but I watch his eyes narrow, still smiling. He's seen.
.
Sea Cliff is a raw, windy promontory that rises in a jagged near-vertical line to drop a steep scraped tumble to the inlet. Below it is nothing but foam, sharp black rocks, and privacy; around it nothing but birds. In all the estate this is the most desolate, and I think most beautiful, point; it is also where I walk the least. That's due to Rowlande. Nothing so crude as his ghost, of course. It's only that there is a feeling here that never goes away, here on the highest reach of the promontory, especially when the sky is dark and the sea winds are running fast against the ground.
The cliff face is more beautiful in this flinty light, striated with layers of shale and sandstone. In the fog it looks even taller, somehow, and I run my eyes along the jagged edge where it pulls away from the sky.
"Henry," a voice mutters at my shoulder, "look." He's pointing. I stand still for a moment, staring at him, shocked by his use of my Christian name. He's said it casually. As if that were the most natural thing in the world. As if this is how we speak to one another. I've been calling him Mr. Tulloch, of course. I have never said his given name aloud.
He frowns at me, and my eyes follow up along his pointing arm. Above a shelf of pale limestone jutting out from the cliff face is a dark blur and inside that, a deeper blur, blue-black. My eyes focus. It's a crack, a large one. No, it's the opening of a cave. Angular and slanted, but clearly a cave. How have I never noticed it? Seamus puts a hand on the outcrop, leans far back, arching. He squints, straightens, looks back to me.
"What's in there?"
I shake my head at him, dumbly. "Then give us a hand up," he says, craning back, rubbing a wrist. He's serious. Nods at me and lifts his boot to show me what he means.
I lace my fingers together and crouch at his knee. He's grimacing over me while I fit the rough heel of his boot into the seam of my joined palms. For a moment he rests his full weight against me, testing. He's heavier than I would've thought. We must weigh about the same, I think, even for my height. His hand opens flat on my shoulder and I feel the spread of his fingers digging down. "If you're going to drop me, do it now," he murmurs. Then he slaps my shoulder, lightly. I dig my heels in and with a heave, breath pushing out of me, throw him upwards into the air with all my strength. In a matching heave his boot heel leaps from my hands, which are left empty. His legs kick up quick over the edge like he's swimming, then disappear over the edge of the shelf in a sandy rain of pebbles. From the top he gives a short laughing bark of victory. Then there's silence.
"Well?"
"A moment,' he says, softly. I hear his footsteps striking hollow across the shale ledge and then suddenly hush, like a curtain has fallen. The rasp of a match. He says something unintelligible. There's surprise in his voice, and a slight echo. A few more steps, very quiet. A slide of pebbles like faint rain.
Then nothing at all.
I wait there, staring up into the dark blur. A few stray pebbles drop off the edge and bounce off my shoulder. The wind picks up. A draught from some hidden cleft in the cliff pushes out in a gust and rattles my cuffs against my ankles. Very faintly a low whistling blows from somewhere deep within the rock. Underneath my shirtsleeves the hair rises on my arms. A realization comes from nowhere: the cave is more than just a crack in the rock, and I am at the threshold of an action which cannot be undone.