Solsbury Hill A Novel (15 page)

“Mead won’t be turned out—of course he can stay at Trent, but he has a mysterious place he’ll inherit one day.” She pulled in a deep draft of smoke. “An estate on an island in the Outer Hebrides.”

“Really? Does everyone have an estate here?” Eleanor said.

“Hardly. He doesn’t go there, but it is his ancestral home and he’s never been under any illusions about Trent Hall.” Jane unhooked their arms and they mounted the last part of the hill to see Top Withens for the first time.

“You don’t have to worry about Mead,” she said.

Eleanor had pictured a grand house, dark, with bent and twisted trees, cliffs, and ditches dug out by rain and wind, all in a forbidding landscape, but Top Withens was a disappointment. Most of the building was gone, there was no roof, and there were woolly sheep with black faces and piercing pale eyes mulling about inside the broken walls.

Eleanor walked down the slope to the front of the house and stood next to one of the two remaining trees on the hill. It was unromantic and the whole place seemed an unlikely site for the place in the book.

“This can’t be it. It doesn’t feel like the house in the book
at all,” Eleanor said to Jane, who’d just made it down the side of the hill to join her.

“Not convinced?”

“This can’t be it.”

“Starting a revolution?” Only half of Jane’s face lifted when she smiled. “What do you think the ghosts must make of it?”

“If I were a ghost I’d stay pretty far from here, wouldn’t you?” Eleanor said with as much levity as she could muster. It was wearing her down, all the glib talk of ghosts.

“I can’t imagine they’re fond of tourists,” said Jane, smiling.

Jane was kind and irreverent and it was good to have her around. Her deep brown hair was tied with a scarf. She was more handsome than pretty, with a strong square jaw, full crimson lips, and almond eyes.

“You know I can’t stay,” Eleanor said. “I don’t understand why no one said anything about this to me years ago, so I could have planned something, but how in the world can I stay?” She shook her head with small rapid shakes. “It makes no sense to me.”

“Father can’t imagine anyone
but
you in that house,” said Jane. She lit another cigarette with the one she’d just finished. “Trent Hall’s an old estate and it’s meant to be yours. Over here, these things mean something.”

“I just think Mead should stay.”

“Mead
will
stay,” said Jane. She nodded her head toward the other tree and they climbed the slope to stand under its
shade. Jane leaned against the trunk and Eleanor sat in its crook.

“The thing about Mead is, he’s got an idea in his head that there’s a Catherine for him, out there somewhere, and he’s doing all he can to prepare himself for her.”

“A Catherine?”

“Heathcliff’s Catherine. Alice was a Brontë scholar and those books were his bedtime lullabies. A great love requires a sturdiness of self, he says.” Eleanor thought she heard an ache in Jane’s voice. “A hardiness developed in accord with these Wuthering Heights moors.” Jane shook her head as if shaking away a pesky bee.

“This place doesn’t look anything like Wuthering Heights,” Eleanor said, “but Trent Hall, on the other hand . . .”

“You’re absolutely right.” Jane brushed off her pants and sweater.

“I sleep in the room within a room.”

“I’ve seen the room. It’s true,” Jane exclaimed. “Must have been a fashion at the time. Let’s be off, shall we? We can have tea at the Rochester before you get on the road. How’s that?” She called out, “Mum, Papa,” with the accent on the last syllable.

T
he insistent tree woke Eleanor in the night and she cranked the window open to push the branch away, but it found its way back and continued to scrape and
scratch the pane. Eleanor woke and slept and woke again and each time wiped tears from her face. She’d brought up a Goethe book she’d found on one of the half-empty shelves in the study downstairs, so she read for some hours, then slept again.

Like sap from a tree, her eyes wept all through the night. She might have dreamed, but she couldn’t remember the dreams. Even in the morning, with the curtains open and the sun in her eyes, she turned over in bed and pulled the comforter up to cover her shoulder, pulled a pillow against her belly, read with the book perched on a pillow, and soon fell asleep again.

Gwen had been up to check on her late in the morning, but hadn’t wakened her. Tilda came up at noon and left a tray with tea and warm biscuits that went cold. In the early evening, Mead knocked on her door.

Eleanor woke and wiped her cheeks dry. “Come in,” she called, trying to make her voice light and bright. She wriggled up in bed, kept the comforter close to her chest.

“Hey, you,” he said. He came in and sat tentatively on the edge of the bed. “You all right?”

The wall of leaded windows let in lots of light. She’d drawn the curtains wide.

“It’s not that I’m so tired.”

His smile was encouraging.

“I’ve just not figured out a reason to get out of bed today.”

“Just thought you’d be thirsty or hungry.”

“No, I’m not, but I was thinking . . .” She leaned against the pillows, the scratched window ledge behind her. “Would you be willing to take me out on a ride sometime, maybe tomorrow?”

“If you mean horseback, I would.”

“I do.”

“Are you as masterful on a horse as you are on foot?”

“It can’t be that hard,” she said.

“You’ve never been riding?”

She shook her head no. “I saw you wrangling the horses one day. I’m not here for much longer.”

“Is that a fact?”

He touched her foot under the covers and Eleanor’s heart jumped in her chest. She wondered if Mead and Jane had taken rides. Jane seemed the kind who’d be a natural on horseback.

“Hard to say, I guess,” she said. “Maybe not a fact. But I’ll be ready to ride in the morning, if you are.”

Mead stood.

“Can we ride without running into anybody?” she asked.

“I should think so. You’ll need a good jacket as it’s cold in the clearings. We’ll do our best to make the ride utterly uneventful, how’s that?”

“Perfect. Thanks, Mead. I’ll see you early in the morning.”

“You don’t want anything at all now?”

She shook her head again.

“I’ll wake you,” he said.

“I’ll hear you in the courtyard.”

“Come on, then.” His head cocked away from the house the next morning. Mead untied the horses and she realized she had imagined herself on the back of his horse with her arms wrapped around his middle.

At the edge of the field, he gave her a boost up onto the saddle then slipped her foot into the stirrup, went to the other side, and slipped the other foot in. “Keep your heels down and away from her body.” He placed a rein in each of Eleanor’s hands, then climbed on his mare.

“We’re so high off the ground,” she said.

Mead introduced her to Kindred and she leaned forward to touch the smooth auburn hair.

“Now, keep your hips nestled into the deep part of that seat, keep your face pointed in the direction you want to go and your hips square.” Eleanor wriggled in deep and pressed her heels down against the stirrups, sat up tall.

“Good. Now imagine you’re part of that beautiful horse. Your arms are relaxed, the reins loose and easy.” He urged his horse forward without moving anything. “Ready?”

Eleanor’s heart beat hard, her knees were loose, her calves were pressed against Kindred’s belly, and they rode away from the house. They rode straight on for over an hour. First
they walked, then Mead encouraged a trot and a canter, till Eleanor was confident enough to let Kindred gallop the way she wanted to.

The mare all fresh and wild in the morning, it didn’t matter so much what Eleanor knew about riding, she had only to relax enough to let Kindred soar. Eleanor laughed with joy when she cantered, then whooped when she galloped, all the sound swallowed by the wildness of the wind. Kindred’s ride was muscular and smooth, and as the hour became two hours, Eleanor felt the possibility of staying forever on the moors.

What had been unnerving those first days—unbroken landscape, unmeasured time—now seemed wholesome and very fine. Mead’s solid body moved in rhythm with his mare as he bounded over low hedges. Unruffled, he turned his face to her and smiled, all satisfied. She wished they could keep riding, wished they would never turn back, wished there were nothing for her to decide.

When there was a river to cross, Kindred headed in without hesitation; she pushed through the water as high as her shoulders, soaked Eleanor’s legs in the cold. Eleanor clung; she was scared and then she was stunned by the strength it took for the mare to climb up and out onto the river’s edge. The ripple of muscles under the blanket, Kindred’s legs rose high as she climbed out of the mud onto the bank.

Awed by the power of the horse beneath her and the river
and the wild, Eleanor kicked Kindred lightly, as she’d learned to do, and caught up with Mead on the river path.

The horses paced themselves to each other, side by side. They panted, the sound of their heavy breath and the creaking of leather, wind in grass, and in all the silence Eleanor said, “I’ve been wondering. Where
are
the Outer Hebrides?”

He tipped his head, curious. “Where do you imagine they are?”

“Somewhere near Antarctica, I think. Or off the tip of Africa, but not near here.”

“Not very near.”

She reached across the space between them and touched his arm. “Do you know how to play cold, colder, warm, warmer, hot?”

He held one eye half-closed, peering at her with lighthearted suspicion. “Start in, then.” He kicked open a gate in a wall in the middle of a field, and they passed through it.

“Antarctica is too cold, I think, so how about off the southern tip of Africa?”

“Very cold.”

“The coast of Africa?”

“Which coast?”

“Umm. West coast.”

“Moving in the right direction.”

“Say
warm
or
cold
,” she said.

“Right. Cold.”

“The Baltic Sea.”

“Closer.”

Eleanor liked him. “Ireland?” she said.

“I’d have to say very warm, almost hot.”

“Scotland?”

“Right you are. The lady wins the cigar!”

She smiled and he smiled, as if they’d accomplished something.

It was another hour back, this time over a bridge, this time with the wind blowing against her. Mead had lifted her up to the horse and down from the horse and had kept his promise: the most serious thing he’d said all day was that being with her was as good as being alone. She’d looked at him with a quizzical, screwed-up face, but she knew just what he meant.

When they finally stopped, Eleanor’s hair was tangled and knotted. She tried to run her fingers through but couldn’t and didn’t have anything with which to pin it up. Drenched from her knees down and mangled by the weather, she was out of breath, without a thought in her head.

He was kicking the mud off his boots at the kitchen door, when he told her, “I was seven the first time Alice took me to Manhattan. There was snow on the ground and it was quiet. I remember Alice stepping to the curb and raising her arm high, and it seemed like a miracle, every time a yellow car pulled up and invited us inside where it was all smoky and warm. Like we were kings and queens. And in we climbed.”

Mead crouched before her where she sat on the bench and he pulled one boot from the heel and then the other. For a moment he gave a tender rub to what had been her swollen ankle and her warm blood rushed to her heart and back again. In something of a swoon she realized what was happening and it was something different from anything that had ever been.

When she walked into the kitchen, her face bright from fresh air, her hair a mess of wind tangle, she was sore and felt bowlegged, cold through and through.

From the back of his head, she knew him. Miles. He stood and Eleanor swallowed her gasp, then hurried to hug him, because she should, but stopped short of it. “I’m a mess and I smell of horse . . .” She padded across the kitchen in thick socks to wash her hands at the sink and gather her wits.