CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A creaking sound crosses the garden: the cottage door shutting. I've put my shaking hands in my pockets. I can't yet return to the house. I need to walk off what has just happened.
It's been some time now since I've entered the orchard. From years of neglect it is wild again, a maze of rabbit holes, thorny bramble, fallen branches in the tall grass. Inside it I have complete privacy. I use this privacy, pacing back and forth through the trees, gnawing the edge of my thumb, to get hold of myself.
It's better that I know, I tell myself. I, the wolf on the high hill, have killed my faithful servant in retribution for his curiosity. Much more enticing than the various truths, one of which was that Jepson knew of my compulsion before I did, and in the end mine hurt him far less than his own.
Another, that Jepson and I, in the complicated love that sometimes exists between flawed people, both worked fruitlessly to save the other from himself, and both failed.
But the village believes what it will. Now I know what message the village's highest authority, the rector, has been spreading. What do I do? The simplest solution, to leave, dissolves under inspection. There is nowhere to run where I would not still be what I am; here I at least have the cellar and Agnes and my name to protect me. Then there is the matter of my nature. Without this place- these fields and forest that are my territory- I am lost.
The second solution is to hide and never come out. I close my mind against the third solution.
I stumble into a tangle of blackberry vine, watch the spots of blood that bloom dark on the wool of my trousers as I'm pulling the thorns away. I wish I could give my mind fully to the problem of my own survival. Instead it keeps catching, against my will, on Seamus. I can still feel where he touched. I can't get away from him anywhere. The garden is always filled with him working, his noise and energy and rough singing, folk songs, half words I don't understand; the house is always filled with his laughter, his smell, his undershirt reeking in the laundry basket on the back stair, his frayed overcoat on the mudroom hook. The cottage itself overflows with the buoyancy of his life, and, lately, he's even inescapable when he's absent: like now, when the place he's touched aches; like my nights, when he lies close and warm beside me in the dark of the cave, letting himself be held, kissing my mouth- something I know nothing of, something my mind clumsily, vigorously fabricates- until that same ache wakes me up.
I can't help myself. It's just what it is, a truth.
.
By the time I am finished in the orchard a wall of dead limbs lies stacked in the southern corner, I have been stung four times by wasps, all in the same arm, and the sky has dimmed to lavender.
At one point earlier in the day I looked up from my work to see a small old woman scowling at me from the fence. I blinked and it was Agnes, bearing sandwiches on a plate, a little lace napkin over them for the flies. Did I not hear her calling? No, I answered, truthfully. All I could hear was my own tumult. I sat on the fence and thanked her and ate as she stared into the orchard, her hand over her eyes against the noon glare.
"I notice that for once Mr. Tulloch is not present."
"He's busy lying down," I explained, and smiled as I watched her little hackles rise.
"He didn't bother waking for lunch, either. Does he plan to take over everything Mr. Jepson left off?"
"He hasn't the constitution for it," I answered, mouth full, and Agnes snorted. "Men are surprisingly resilient when it comes to avoiding reality," she said.
I was only lightly offended, as I could find no argument. I shrugged, and her hands went to her hips.
"Henry," she said, "look there. In fact, look all about you. You do realize that these trees are dying?"
I did, of course. The cider orchard had already grown old when Row was my age and neither he nor I had ever bothered to replant it. What I'd been doing out here all day was not remediation. The wall of branches was to become kindling to spare culling the forest; the rest of the orchard would gradually dissolve into more firewood, then wildness. At some point Julian's lovely new wife would wake in the morning, nauseated; at another point soon thereafter I would receive a letter; some thirteen years would pass, and then my supplanter here could choose what he preferred in his grounds, cider or anarchy, when it was his time. As always a chill struck me thinking of this. I hoped he would choose anarchy. I suspected I would be gone by then.
"Yes," I said.
"I do love how applewood smells in a fire," she murmured, quietly, as though she had read my thoughts, and it was my turn to stare at her.
.
Now it's evening, and Seamus does not want to play chess.
I'm not surprised, really. I caught a slice of his face as he passed through the back hall before dinner and it was only a touch less haggard than it looked this morning.
"Sorry for it," he's telling me, and there is actual regret in his voice, though I am aware the regret is for the missed game and not the lost workday. We're facing one another in the hall and in the dim light his eyes are a glint in hollow sockets. "It's no matter," I tell him. I have, in fact, been shy of the prospect of his company tonight. Whatever happened this morning was a move in a game whose board only he can see. In addition, I have the suspicion that he, still a little drunk, overplayed his hand. What he does next affirms this. Instead of the pat on the shoulder he usually bestows in parting, I receive only a cursory nod before he turns away, disappearing wordlessly into the far darkness of the hall.
.
I forgot to close the library's windows this morning and now it's humid and scattered in here, and a fine dusting of yellow pollen films my desk. There's a new book spread in front of me, one that I've hunted down and sent for and which has finally arrived, but its pages may as well be empty. My eyes bounce off them. All I see is the inside of my own head.
It's not the particulars of his secret I'm interested in. Obviously something exists in his past, an episode he would rather no one know. Whatever it was, it's not inconsequential. You don't become so adroit at camouflage when the thing you mean to hide is small. I don't care. A death, a betrayal, a cruelty: regardless, I want to hear it and then look in his eyes and tell him, That does not define you. Saying this to someone else might feel almost as good as having it said to me.
I need his secret for a less chivalrous reason as well. Since the afternoon he first mentioned blackmail I've been listening particularly to what he doesn't say. I ask him offhanded questions of his past. Then I watch how he deflects them. His childhood, his mother and father, the house where he was born, his early memories- all of that is a locked room. One night as we had just begun our game I asked, as though on a whim, what it was like for him to board the ship that took him away from his home. I watched him pull back in his chair, startled, watched as his eyes gleamed and then shut themselves off like a cover sliding over a hot lantern. For that second his memories were brilliant across his face. I swear I saw the desire to speak them. Then I saw a self-control as familiar to me as my own name.
"Wet," he told me, "and dark. It was winter. And you? How was it coming here?"
I smiled at him. "Hot," I answered, "and bright. Summer."
.
Nights follow a pattern now, more or less. After his inevitable victory handshake and our mutual exhortations to the other to sleep well, he'll stump down the stairs and then, with a thud that echoes up inside the wall, out the kitchen door. Most often I read for a few hours afterward, as I am now. But, though I might not consciously ask it to, a corner of my eye keeps the library window. This is because I have not forgotten that one nocturnal trip into the woods.
I read, and halfway-watch; I lose him out in the grey pitch, forgetting, till the square of the cottage window lights up and reminds me. Sometimes he draws the curtain, more often not. His shadow moves around the room, taking off and putting on clothes, washing; once in a while coming back outside to sit on the porch where I can only place him by a tiny ember, his lit pipe. Faint creaking of the pump in the dark as he fills his jug of water. His solitary domesticity is so simple, so much like my own, that I hardly need to see it to understand what he is doing.
Then, just as the thick curtain of true night sweeps itself over the forest, his light goes out too. The cottage disappears. My window goes black except for the starry swath over the trees. The day is over. Even so I keep the dark window at the corner of my eye, just in case.
If he ever looks out himself- perhaps sometimes he does- what he sees is one large domed window glowing in Harthome's tower, and through its panels of watery inch-thick broad glass sees walls lined on all sides with books, a stamped ceiling plaster yellow around oak beams. A desk with an oil lamp at the center of its clutter. A tall dark-haired figure hunched at a desk with its chin in a palm, turning pages slowly. Nothing much. Should he in fact look up and see me here I wonder if he ever receives the same feeling of consolation from my presence as I do from his. I doubt it. But I also doubt he sees a sentry, which of late is in fact what I am.
A poor sentry, tonight. The day was long and I am sleepy and I have read these first few pages a dozen times over. My new book's voice is poorly crafted and disappointingly hollow, like strangers' muffled conversation coming from the far end of a train car: mannered, irrelevant, indistinct; my eyes skip back and forth, back and forth. That's why I don't turn my head for the flicker at the edge of my vision. Just a moth, a blurring of my lashes, dust, the beginnings of a dream.
No, it's a light. A hurricane lantern, a tiny bouncing star leaving the garden.
In a heartbeat I am awake, jaw clenched, sweater over my head, already at the stairwell landing. I can't have Agnes hear me leave. I am never supposed to be out at night. Down the stairs in a quick shuffle. I don't put my boots on until I'm outside the back door. That I lock behind me. Pocketing the key.
Once my foot leaves the last stair and hits the earth I am running. Out here in the starlit dark, my second self takes over with incandescent assurance. I now have the upper hand.