CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I wake from turbulent dreams but the morning is gloss-blue and peaceful, translucent clouds fast in a luminous sky. As I lean into the kitchen doorway to tell her good-morning, Rosalind, in an unusual burst of camaraderie, lets me know that Seamus came in just prior, asked her politely for buttered toast; then, on receiving two slices, breathed deeply and handed one of them back. She demonstrates the deep breath for me. Once again I regret the structure which keeps the two of us from friendship.
"Don't feel bad for him. He deserves it. I'll eat what he didn't, if you haven't already." She, blushing, hands it over and I lean against the hutch, chewing.
"Did you get to have any fun, yourself?" Even as I'm asking I know the answer. Rosalind is young and not plain but her life's circumstances constrain her. She went home, not out. There are no free nights for her, no walks in the dark with handsome men. Her family's farmhouse is large and her responsibilities in it formidable. From what I gather her time off looks very much like her workday, only with church thrown in, and her sisters' babies, and social expectations that haven't changed much in three hundred years.
She tilts her head at me, owlishly, and we both wait while she considers the appropriate answer. I watch a protective vagueness slip across her face, the neutral stare that is the countryside's armor. We face one another politely like two strangers. Then, just as she opens her mouth, the blankness drops away from her face like rain sliding off a leaf, and her eyes snap out at me.
"I did, though. I stole John's bicycle while everyone was asleep and I taught myself to ride it out on the road."
I snort with surprise, involuntarily, and she ducks her grinning mouth into her hand.
"Did you fall?"
"Only the once," she says, turning quickly back to the table, the side of her cheek bunched up with her smile and the little ear behind her braid red as a tomato slice. I can't think of anything else but this picture I now have of Rosalind pedaling down the midnight lane, a girl banshee, dust pouring up behind her.
"See how fast you can get," I tell her calico back, "and I'll race you on Easy." A spluttering protest and she shakes her head, picks up a bowl. I back out of the doorway and let her be.
.
Fifteen minutes later as she's setting a plate in front of me it occurs to me that though I might feel trapped myself, Rosalind must feel doubly so, and that I've never acknowledged the complexity of her life or the injustice of the forces which bind her. I push the eggs around, ashamed of myself. Is Agnes also trapped? Perhaps, but by love: the love she bears for Row and the echoing duty of that love which keeps her here tending to me, his successor.
Seamus, I think, might be the only one here who isn't trapped. But just as that thought finishes itself another follows: There is a reason he can't stay in one place. There are other forms of entrapment. I remember his terror in the cave. A fear of containment. I think of how he's trimmed his entire life down to fit in a chest and a bag. Things you could easily carry if, say, you had to leave in the middle of the night. Or things you can grab fast if you wake up with a crowd around you.
.
Outside the back window he's sitting in the shade, very still on the edge of the low stone wall. I come outside by the side door; as I walk up behind him I see the slice of toast, resting intact on a handkerchief he's spread out on his knee. At the sound of my approach he slowly turns his head. Below the ruddiness of his cheekbones he's grey-green, like marble. He's palpably ill.
"Dereliction?" I ask, and he grimaces.
"Give me an hour or so, can you? It's not funny as you think it is."
"It might be just as funny, but all right," I tell him, softly. "You don't look very well. Try to eat that."
A slight shake of his head. Very slight.
I sit down beside him. Along with the lye tang of his soap and his own singular, narcotic scent is a whiff of acid. It's been a while since I've experienced this particular alcoholic stink and the memory of Jepson comes to me full-force along with it, as though Seamus has brought home a ghost. I breathe in through my mouth. Rye whisky and bile. No wonder the toast is just sitting there.
"Long night, then? I suppose you made all sorts of new friends."
He pinches the bridge of his nose and smooths the hand up over his forehead as if to console it. "These men here are fools," he tells me, sourly, not meeting my eye.
It's not anything I expected him to say. I stare at him. Sober, he's excellent company; drunk, even more so: amiable, clowning, banter pouring out of him in a burr like warm taffy. They should've loved him. They should've poured liquor down his throat and had him tell them stories of all the strange things that happen here. They should've been stoking the fears I'd been cosseting all night.
"What happened? Were you overdressed?" With considerable work I'm keeping myself casual. It's taking everything I have to stop myself from grabbing his shoulders and pulling his grey face to mine and saying What did they ask you? What were you looking for?
He frowns. "They don't care much for strangers here, do they?" He's looking at me out of the corner of his eye, and I- eldest son of the village's founding family, lord of its manor, benefactor of its people, and for all of this a stranger- can only shake my head.
"Not much, no. I suppose you had to buy all your own drinks."
"Oh, no. I ran up a bill, but at the end the keep wouldn't let me pay. Said it was his year's good deed on account of my poor luck."
"Your poor luck?"
He turns his eye to me, and it's red, narrow, and measuring. "To take the place of Clyde Jepson. He who was in the cottage before me."
I wait two breaths. I make myself calm. "For nearly half his life. And would be still, if he hadn't drunk himself to death in it."
Seamus leans back and regards me with bloodshot calibration. "Oh. Is that what happened?"
I lean back as well, mirroring him. "What did they tell you?"
"Not much." He cocks his head to the side. "To lock my door at night. And to not go looking about the grounds unless I want what Clyde got." He frowns. "And, God-bless."
I clear my throat to push the anger out of it. "What he got? What Clyde got was gassed every chance he could for as long as I can remember. Then he got yellow with jaundice, and then he got thin, and then he got bad enough he didn't wake up, and that's when I found him." I relax my hands. "He took good care of me when I came here. He treated me as though I were his own son. You could look about the grounds all you liked. Every living thing in this garden Clyde planted, and every thing you've had to fix, Clyde broke. That's what happened."
During all of this he's kept his head down. Now he raises it to me. "You don't need to get so mad, Henry," he mutters. "You asked me."
"You asked them, Mr. Tulloch," I answer. "Why?"
He's silent but the little ball of muscle at the side of his jaw is working. This, I think to myself, is what we've really been playing at when we meet for chess each night. At this moment we are right at the skin of the greater game of strategy that exists between us.
"Why?" I repeat.
He turns and digs in his shirt pocket and draws out a crumpled piece of waxed paper. Opening it in his palm, a sharp and shining cone, long and thin like a nail with a broad hammered head is revealed. It stinks of vinegar.
He isn't looking at the nail, he's looking at me, and when my eyes raise, his are stubbornly inexpressive. The redness of his lids is making them a violent green.
"Know what this is?"
"No," I lie.
"All right, then," he says, and wraps it back up in the waxed paper. "T'was nailed into the cottage door when I woke here the second day. Or maybe it was the third. With a note."
It isn't actually vinegar, of course. It's raw silver that I'm smelling. "What did the note say?"
"It said to keep this close for when I'd need it."
I shake my head, affecting confusion. Inside I am roiling. Rosalind wouldn't have done it. Maybe the driver of the hire-car. Jepson's sister. Jocelyn. Mr. Barker from the store. Anyone; it could've been anyone.
He's putting it back in his pocket. A thin film of sweat is on his brow, making it glossy. "You might not know what it is, but I do." He knocks the piece of toast off his knee onto the grass, shakes the crumbs from his handkerchief, wipes his face with it. "It's witchcraft."
"Witchcraft?" I repeat, foolishly. It is not, in fact, witchcraft, but the opposite: a Saint Hubert's Key, direct from Our Lord's side of the game, this one made of real silver instead of the usual nickel. It isn't the first I've seen. A similar one, hammered out of cheap German silver, sits in a glass in my bathroom cabinet. Agnes told me that it belonged to Row, that he used it as a toothpick, that he often found things funny that weren't, and would I please throw it away; I never did. This one is bigger, older, and a bit bent at the end. They are, historically, amulets given by Saint Peter against the bite of rabid dogs and against worse things, such as myself, which might resemble rabid dogs; the nickel ones don't work but this one he's holding would do the trick just fine. Both of them probably came from the old church in Gale, God knows how long ago.
My throat closes as the answer shows itself. The rector. Of course.
"Witchcraft," Seamus says. "Maybe you've heard of it. Magic spells and such. Like those little bags of hair I dig up every time I plant anything. It's that what the serfs invented to get back at them that's in power."
I cough so I can breathe. "That looks like a nail, not a spell. And anyhow, who's told you I'm in power?"
He looks at me for a long time. Weighing something, or deciding what not to say. "It's still power even if you don't use it. And I said they were fools, didn't I?"
"What did you expect from them? You go about hunting rumors, digging dirt-" I wave an angry hand.
"You hired me to dig dirt," he says, wryly, "and there's plenty enough dirt. What did you expect? Why are they so afraid of you that they're doing this?" He pats his pocket. "What have you done?"
"Nothing," I say. "Not a thing." It's the truth and so I can look him squarely in the eye. But the experience of doing so always makes me flush, as I am now, the warmth pressing through my sinuses and making my eyes tear, and with this flush and now the knowing expression settling over his face, I have to look down and away from his frank green stare, and I have lost.
He's silent. At his feet a horsefly is trudging happily through the butter on the toast, blue wings humming.
I try again. "It's merely, the house- ah, the title, and my family- all very old, you understand, and- there were superstitions- the peasants, you see, back then; simply because the village is so old-"
"Look here," he interrupts, spreading a hand. "I've been all over the world. It's been a long time since someone looked at me they way those fellows did once the sun went down. I'm not a fool. What do you need to tell me?"
I open my mouth. That's all. What's there on my tongue is fully untellable, end to end: what I truly am, what I truly do, what I truly want. I shut my mouth. But as I'm shutting it I realize there are, at very least, two words that I can allow out.
"You're safe," I tell him.
He grins, his triangular grin that stretches the scar on his lip to opaque white. "There, you've done it again," he murmurs, "Henry, with the perpetual check. How you manage it, I don't know."
I don't understand what he means. But he reaches over and rests his hand on my knee. I freeze. Of all of it, it's this moment that causes me actual panic. It's only his hand, warm and gentle and relaxed, the knobs of callus on his palm scratching against the wool of my trousers as he rubs up and down just above my kneecap. He's doing it slowly, absently, looking off across the sloping field, as if he's unaware.
"Hold steady," he says, softly, almost to himself. "Nothing's ever easy at first."
All the sensation in my body has collected under his palm. The rest of me might as well not exist. His hand slides upward, high inside my thigh, pauses there, warm and heavy. I have stopped breathing. Then his weight presses as he pushes down, uses me as leverage to stand, shakily. Rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms.
"Need to lie down again for a while, if that's all right," he mutters, and with that, waves his farewell and walks off unsteadily towards the cottage.