Solsbury Hill A Novel (30 page)

Eleanor scanned the countryside without trying to find the children. It was no longer lush green as it had been when she arrived. The bite of winter had come and there was frost over everything. Her throat was sore and she could taste a change in the air that tasted like snowflakes.

With her sweater, she dried her hair briskly, then pulled on layers of shirts and the damp sweater on top of them. The coat would keep her warm. There were fewer small animals to
rustle the grass, in the winter, and more of the chimneys in the distant village were smoking, but other than that it was the same as it had been the day she’d arrived. If she were on the swing, her toes would have had no chance of touching the leaves on the branch, let alone the sky.

Hurrying, she slipped and fell on the damp ground, fell on her knees and the palms of her hands. She wiped her muddy hands on the back of her pants then went to the tree and rubbed her muddy pants against the bark to get the chunks off, to get it down to a thin smear of mud that would dry quickly. She might pass by the graves on the way, but she wanted to get back to the house and she couldn’t remember which direction she should take.

When she came on the gravesite, she imagined her mother and father buried beneath. Together, like Catherine and Heathcliff, wandering forever in love on the moors. A childhood love that wouldn’t let go, didn’t know how to let go. Eleanor wondered why her parents’ ghosts were children, wondered where in the world was John Abbott’s ghost. She made a wish, with her hands in prayer, that she might see them again. All of them. She tried to remember what it was that the children at the pond had said to each other, that first day on the moors. What it was she’d wanted to ask them.

She didn’t feel sad. Mead was right. It was an old grave, an old untended grave, and maybe there was nothing beneath the crosses; maybe they stood only in memoriam. It might have been two beloved animals buried there, or children,
from another century, she thought, and that was a sad thought, but she didn’t know. Alice might have known, but Eleanor herself didn’t know and maybe there were certain things that would be lost and never known. Maybe there were things that didn’t need to be known.

PART

FOUR

T
he shelves were stained, the books were arranged, and Mead had placed the furniture close to the bookshelves, so there was a lot of space in the middle of the finished library. His long desk was cleared of books and papers, but now there was a telephone.

Eleanor dialed Gladys. She told her she was finally on her way back, and Gladys hesitated. “Miles is still in England,” she said. “He’s arranged to work at his firm’s London office, so he’s still there, waiting for you.”

Eleanor took it in and felt confused. How much time had passed since their visit to York? How strange it would be to see him.

She was leaving Trent Hall, and she hoped that in continuing to move, something would come clear. There were
things in New York she had to get back to: her clothing line in production without her oversight, the most important time in her life as a designer. Her apartment going as dusty as her mother’s room at Trent Hall, she felt if she didn’t touch ground in New York soon, none of what she’d learned here would ever make sense to her.

Eleanor climbed up the library ladder and sat on the top rung. From this point of view, the library was even more beautiful than it was from the ground. Sun shone through the stained-glass window and the place felt like a medieval cathedral with the colors of alizarin crimson and lapis lazuli dancing around.

She sat on the top stair of the ladder and watched sunlight sparkle on the glass, light move across the books’ bindings. There was also the shadow cast from the branch of a tree just outside the stained-glass window, doing something interesting.

She missed Emily.

She was wearing the ring again.

She smiled at the memory of her day with the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff. How would she tell anyone what had happened here in the Yorkshire moors, where she’d found herself and her family?

With the courage it took to know one’s self, she’d undone the curse. Facing truths and opening doors that led down dark halls, she’d started the journey.

Love was powerful, childhood love with its innocent hooks could be enthralling, love on the moors wild enough to kill
you, but with feet on the ground and a lofty soul, there was nothing but right love to choose. There was nothing to fear.

Mead would come eventually. He had to come eventually.

And he did. In a matter of time, he came through the old barn door and took her in. He walked to the base of the ladder.

“So, you’re going back,” he said. “You’ve decided.”

“I haven’t decided anything.” She attempted a smile.

He climbed one rung and then one more, and he recited Browning as he climbed toward her. “‘How sad and bad and mad it was—But then, how it was sweet!’”

“‘Grow old along with me!’” he went on, from another piece. “‘The best is yet to be.’”

She scrunched up her nose and he climbed higher to kiss her freckles, then he kissed her lips fiercely and grabbed her so tight that it hurt and she squealed of it, so he let her go.

She sucked her upper lip where it felt like he’d bruised it and his eyes filled with words that even he, a fine Scots storyteller, couldn’t tell.

Eleanor took a deep breath and was trembling. So she couldn’t stop it.

It was one of those things. It was one of those moments of awe and dread and desire, inevitably.

She’d curled her hair and it was thick and tumbled around her face.

He stood just below where she sat on the top of the library ladder and he looked at her carefully. She knew that he was seeing a girl all dressed up and curled for a boy.

“Miles is still in London,” she said. “I made a call to Gladys just now, on your new phone.” She tried a smile. “She told me. I didn’t know, but I’ll see him there, on my way . . .”

Mead ran his fingers through her hair, mussed it, pulled it back into a ponytail with his hand and tugged gently.

“Is there something I could say?” His accent was more pronounced when he was in a certain mood, and she loved this in him. “I know it’s what I didn’t say, or what I did say and shouldn’t have said.”

“Shh . . .” She reached toward him, to put one finger to his lips, and lost her balance for a second, but he was right there in front of her and kept her from falling.

His eyes lit up. “Do you remember when you fell from the tree in your mum and dad’s backyard?”

She was startled.

“Do you remember my catching you?”

Puzzled, she smiled an unfathomable smile.

“It was back then when Alice and I went to Manhattan, for the funeral. That day or another one, and you’d let me come play with you and some friends of yours. You were climbing a tree and you fell from a branch of it, and I happened to be there when you fell.”

“I’ve never forgotten it,” she said. “It’s almost the only thing I’ve always remembered from that time, but I didn’t know it was you.”

“It was like you were falling in slow motion and I just opened my arms.”

Now the world gave her more. It never stopped giving her more. If it was Mead who’d caught her in his arms, was he her childhood love? She inhaled his peace and knew there was nothing to be afraid of.

Mead backed down the ladder and Eleanor followed him. He held her hand and walked her to the other end of the library, to another ladder. He fixed her eyes with his. “Ready to climb again?” She climbed ahead of him and he kept his hand on her the whole time, on the back of her legs beneath her skirt to the swell of her bottom, till they were up in what once had been the hayloft, where the floor was now hardwood, finished and stained, and there was a woven rug and pillows on the floor, like a home in Morocco.

He lit a fragrant candle and she thought they could just live there, where long ago an owl had made his family. They wouldn’t have to come out even to eat, but could live off the light and air in the loft; and she wouldn’t have to go anywhere, she’d be home.

There was a zipper on the back of her skirt. He was harder than she’d ever felt him. In all ways harder. Angry and insistent and suffocating so she kept gasping for breath and her mind was blown, through the top of her skull, he pressed so deep inside her, lifted her so she was upside down, inside out, and he touched something that hit her physical heart.

She was crying and all she could think was she’d fallen from a tree.

Neither could he breathe. They were wet with sweat and
panting like angels in the loft till he started laughing. And she didn’t know why he laughed, but she started laughing as well, and she thought, it was you who caught me.

Mead watched as Eleanor dressed again, to go. Back in her pleated miniskirt, she slipped into one black boot and then the other. Her opaque-black-stockinged legs. He picked up her satchel and carried it outside. She walked slowly, behind him. There were leaves all over the gravel ground and there was frost on some of the branches. Mead put her small satchel on the seat inside. “This all you’re taking?”

She looked up into his face, bit her lower lip, and gave a few nods. Her eyes fell shut and she took a deep breath, took in the fragrance of him, then the leaves in midair, the horses not far away in the stables, so she’d never forget. It seemed a lifetime ago she had just arrived. She felt her jaw chattering. He stepped close to block the wuthering wind.

“I don’t know what you’re doing, but I know you’re the lady of the manor here and you always will be.” He looked about the courtyard. “I wish I had some flowers to weave into your hair.” He took her face and kissed her long again.

She looked up at the tree whose branches had scratched at her window and saw that now it stood without bending an inch to the wind.

“You know there’s much more I will say to you one day.”

She nodded mutely.

His hand on her back, he urged her into the taxi and closed the door before she had a chance to say good-bye. The taxi drove away from him and she sank back in the seat as Trent Hall disappeared behind the hill. The taxi passed the wisp of a village called Flatfields.