by Flynn Berry
Praise for
Under the Harrow
“Once I started reading Under the Harrow, I couldn’t stop. It’s like Broadchurch written by Elena Ferrante. I’ve been telling all my friends to read it—the highest compliment. Flynn Berry is a deeply interesting writer.”
—Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children and The Woman Upstairs
“I read Under the Harrow through the night—I couldn’t put it down. Berry’s deft touch with atmosphere and emotion are sure to make this a stand out.”
—Alex Marwood, author of The Wicked Girls and The Killer Next Door
“What grabbed me by the bones and hurled me through this read-in-one-sitting novel wasn’t the plot, as compelling and tenacious and suspenseful as it is. Rather, it was Flynn Berry’s perfect, unrelenting prose. This is flawless storytelling.”
—Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Hausfrau
“Under the Harrow is a compulsively readable and atmospheric novel that I consumed almost in one sitting. The portrayal of the two sisters is subtle, original, and compelling.”
—Rosamund Lupton, author of Sister
“A nail-biter that fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train will no doubt love, Under the Harrow is swiftly carried along by a momentum of unraveling certainties that ramp up with every page, building to the end’s thrilling crescendo. I loved this dark, chilling book and couldn’t put it down.”
—Suzanne Rindell, author of The Other Typist
“Flynn Berry’s writing is clear and spare yet textured and instantly immersive. You know from the get-go that something is not quite right, and this sense of unease and mystery grows and grows as you discover more about Nora’s complex relationship with her sister. I read Under the Harrow very quickly and when I wasn’t reading it I was thinking about it.”
—Harriet Lane, author of Her
“Under the Harrow offers exactly the kind of voracious, absorbing, one-sitting read that readers love. Taut with suspense, it is full of insight and suffused with emotions that will move you. The central relationship between two adult sisters is a heartbreaker, the tenderness, the loyalty, and the sorrow all ringing so true.”
—Robin Black, author of Life Drawing
“Under the Harrow airdrops the reader into the unsettling aftermath of trauma, where shifting memories collide with obsession in a propulsive story of love, grief, and murder. Gripping and nuanced, this stylish thriller is not to be missed.”
—Koethi Zan, author of The Never List
PENGUIN BOOKS
UNDER THE HARROW
Flynn Berry is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, and has been awarded a Yaddo residency. This is her first novel.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Published in Penguin Books 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Flynn Berry
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Title page art © Karina Simonsen / Trevillion Images
eBook ISBN 9781101992067
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Berry, Flynn, 1986– author.
Title: Under the harrow / Flynn Berry.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2015040248 | ISBN 9780143108573 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Sisters—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | Suspense fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women.
Classification: LCC PS3602.E76367 U53 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Julianna Lee
Cover image: Karina Simonsen/Trevillion Images
Version_1
To J.A.B.
Come, what do we gain by evasions?
We are under the harrow and can’t escape.
—C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
CONTENTS
Praise for Under the Harrow
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
Hunters
PART TWO
Marlow
PART THREE
Foxes
PART ONE
HUNTERS
1
A WOMAN IS MISSING in the East Riding. She vanished from Hedon, near where we grew up. When Rachel learns of the disappearance, she will think it’s him.
The hanging sign for the Surprise, a painting of a clipper ship on a green sea, creaks in the wind. The pub stands on a quiet road in Chelsea. After finishing the job on Phene Street, I came for lunch and a glass of white wine. I work as an assistant to a landscaper. Her specialty is in meadows. They look like they haven’t been landscaped at all.
On-screen, a reporter moves through the park where the woman was last seen. Police and dogs fan out across the hills behind the town. I could tell Rachel about her tonight, though it would ruin our visit. It might not have anything to do with what happened to her. The woman might not have even come to harm.
The builders at the house across the road have finished eating, the white paper bags balled at their feet, and are leaning back against the steps in the cold sunshine. I should have already left for the train to Oxford, but I wait at the bar in my coat and scarf while a detective from the station in Hull asks the public for any information about the disappearance.
When the broadcast moves to the storm in the north, I leave under the hanging sign and turn on the next corner toward Royal Hospital Road. I walk past the trimmed squares of Burton Court. Past the estate agent’s. Sunny homes in Chelsea and Kensington. I still live in a tower block in Kilburn. The stairwell forever smelling of fresh paint, seagulls diving at the balconies. I don’t have a garden, obviously. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, etc.
Black cabs drive down Sloane Street. Blurry orbs of light glow on the sides of buildings, reflected from the facing windows. The bookshop displays a pile of new translations of The Thousand and One Nights.
In one of the stories, a magician drank a potion made from an herb that kept him young. The problem was that the herb grew only at the top of a mountain, and so every year the magician tricked a youth into climbing the mountain. Throw down the herb, said the magician. Then I’ll come get you. The youth threw down the herb. I can’t remember the end. That may have been it. I’ve forgotten the ending for most of the stories, except the important one, that Scheherazade lives.
A few minutes on the tube, and then I am back out again, hiking up the stairs to Paddington station. I buy my ticket and a bottle of red wine at the Whistlestop.
On the platform, the train engines hum. I wish Rachel would move to London. “But then you wouldn’t get to come here,” she says, and I do love her house, an old farmhouse on a shallow hill, with two ancient elms on either side of it. The sound of the elms soughing in the wind fills
the upstairs bedrooms. And she likes living there, living alone. Two years ago she almost got married. “Close brush,” she said.
On the train, I press my head against the seat and watch the winter fields pass by the window. My carriage is empty except for a few commuters who have left work early for the weekend. The sky is gray with a ribbon of purple at the horizon. It’s colder here, outside the city. You can see it on the faces of people waiting at the local stations. A thin stream of air whistles through a crack at the bottom of the pane. The train is a lighted capsule traveling through the charcoal landscape.
Two boys in hoods run alongside my carriage. Before I draw level with them, they jump a low wall and disappear down the berm. The train plunges through a tight hedge. In summer, it turns the light in the carriage green and flickering, like being underwater. Now, the hedge is bare enough that the light doesn’t change at all. I can see small birds in the gaps of the branches, framed by vines.
A few weeks ago Rachel mentioned that she plans to raise goats. She said the hawthorn tree at the bottom of her garden is perfect for them to climb on. She already has a dog, a large German shepherd. “How will Fenno feel about the goats?” I asked.
“Demented with happiness, probably,” she said.
I wonder if all goats climb trees, or only certain types. I didn’t believe her until she showed me pictures of a goat balanced at the edge of a fan of cedar, a group of them in a white mulberry. None of the pictures showed how the goats climbed the tree, though. “They use their hooves, Nora,” said Rachel, which doesn’t make any sense.
A woman comes down the aisle with a trolley and I buy a Twix bar for myself and an Aero for Rachel. Our father called us greedy little girls. “Too right,” said Rachel.
I watch the fields trundle by. Tonight I’ll tell her about my artist’s residency, to start two months from now in the middle of January. Twelve weeks in France, with lodging and a tiny bursary. I applied with a play that I wrote at university called The Robber Bridegroom. It’s embarrassing that I haven’t done anything better since then, but that no longer matters because in France I will write something new. Rachel will be pleased for me. She will pour us a celebratory drink. Later, over dinner, she will tell me stories from her week at work, and I won’t tell her about the missing woman in Yorkshire.
The train sounds its horn, a long, low call, as it passes through the chalk hills. I try to remember what Rachel said she would cook tonight. I see her moving around in her kitchen, shifting the massive slate bowl of chestnuts to the edge of the counter. Coq au vin and polenta, I think.
She likes to cook, partly because of her job. She says her patients talk all the time about food, now that they can’t eat what they want. They often ask what she makes, and she likes to give them a good answer.
Clay roofs and chimney pots rise above a high brick wall alongside me, and then it wraps around, enclosing the village. Past the wall is a field of dry shrubs and hedges with a few paths tunneling through it. At its edge, a man in a green hat tends a trash fire. Charred leaves rise on the drafts and spin into the white sky, floating over the field.
From my bag, I take out the folder of properties to let in Cornwall. Over the summer, Rachel and I rented a house in Polperro. Both of us have time off at Christmas and plan to book a house this weekend.
Polperro is built into the folds of a coastal ravine. Whitewashed houses with slate roofs nestle in the green rivulets. Between the two cliffs is a harbor and, past a seawall, an inner harbor, large enough for maybe a dozen small sailing boats, with houses and pubs built to the water’s edge on the quay. When the tide is out, the boats in the inner harbor rest on their hulls in the mud. On the western hook of the ravine are two square merchant’s houses—one a tweed-brown brick, the other white. Above them, umbrella pines stand outlined against the sky. Past the merchant’s houses, on the point, a fisherman’s croft is built into the rocks. The croft is made of rough granite, so on foggy days it blurs into the stones around it. The house we rented was on a headland ten minutes’ walk along the coast path from Polperro and included a private staircase with seventy-one steps built up the cliff from the beach.
I loved Cornwall with a mad, jealous ardor. I was twenty-nine and had only just discovered it, but it belonged to me. The list of things I loved about Cornwall was long but not complete.
It included our house, of course, and the town, the Lizard Peninsula, and the legend of King Arthur, whose seat was a few miles up the coast at Tintagel. The town of Mousehole, pronounced “mouzall.” Daphne du Maurier and Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, and of course you did, anyone who left here would. The widow’s walks. The photographs in pubs of wrecks, and of townspeople in long brown skirts and jackets, dwarfed by the ruined hulls.
Every day the list had to be rewritten. I added the umbrella pines and the Crumplehorn Inn. Cornish pasties and Cornish ale. Swimming, both in open water and in the quiet, dripping caves. Every minute, really, even the ones when we were asleep.
“Everything’s better here,” I said.
And Rachel said, “Well.”
“What’s your favorite thing about Cornwall?” I asked, and she groaned. “Or I can tell you mine.”
But then she said, “Well, to start, there’s the ocean.”
If anything, she loved it more than I did, and she is even more excited than I am to go back. She hasn’t been herself lately. She seems frayed by her work, and always tired.
At the next station, the conductor warns the riders of possible delays tomorrow from the storm. Excellent, I think, so it is going to snow.
We pass through another town, where the cars now have their headlights switched on, pale yellow marbles in the weak afternoon light, and then the train curves around a poplar hedge and straightens as it pulls into Marlow.
Rachel isn’t at the station. This isn’t unusual. Her shifts at the hospital often run late. I leave the platform under a light so dull that the roofs of the town already seem to be dusted with snow. I walk away from the village toward her house, and soon I am on the open stretch of the road, a narrow tarmac ribbon between farms.
I wonder if she is walking to meet me with Fenno. The bottle of red wine thumps against my back. I picture Rachel’s kitchen. The bowl of chestnuts, the polenta bubbling on the hob. A car drives toward me, and I step onto the verge. It slows to a crawl as it approaches, and the woman behind the wheel nods at me before accelerating down the road.
I walk faster, my breath warming my chest, my cold fingers curled in my pockets. Heavy clouds mass overhead, and in the quiet the air takes on a tinnitus ring.
And then her house is in sight. I climb the hill, and the gravel crunches under my feet. Her car is parked in the drive, she must have just gotten home. I open her door.
I stumble back before I know what is wrong with the house, like something has flown at me.
The first thing I see is the dog. The dog is hanging by his lead from the top of the stairs. The rope creaks as the dog slowly rotates. I know this is bad, but it is also amazing. How did you do that, I wonder.
His lead is wrapped around a post on the banister. He must have tangled it and fallen, strangling himself. But there is blood on the floor and the walls.
I am hyperventilating, though everything around me is calm and still. It is urgent that I do something, but I don’t know what. I don’t call for Rachel.
I climb the stairs. There is a stripe of blood on the wall just below my shoulder, like someone sagged against it while climbing. When the stripe ends, there are red handprints on the step above it, and the next step, and then on the landing.
In the upstairs hallway, the stains turn messy. I don’t see any handprints. It looks as though someone crawled or was dragged. I stare at the stains and then, after some time, I look down the hall.
I can hear myself keening as I crawl toward her. The front of her shirt is black and wet,
and I gently lift her onto my lap. I put my hand to her neck, trying to feel her pulse, then lower my ear to her face to hear her breathing. My cheek brushes her nose and chills sweep down my neck. I blow air into her mouth and pump on her chest, then stop. It might cause more damage.
I bend my forehead to Rachel’s and the hallway goes dark. My breath rolls on her skin and into her hair. The hall closes around us.
My phone never has service in her house. I’ll have to go outside to call an ambulance. I can’t leave her, but then I am stumbling down the stairs and through the door.
As soon as the call ends, I can’t remember what I said. There is no one in either direction, just her neighbors’ houses and the ridge behind them, and in the humming quiet I think I can hear the sea. The sky roils above me. I look up. Put my hands to my head. My ears ring as if someone is shouting very loudly.
I wait for Rachel to appear in the doorway. Her face confused and exhausted, her eyes fixing on mine. I am listening for the soft pad of her footsteps when I hear the sirens.
She has to come downstairs before the ambulance arrives. It will be finished when someone else sees her. I beg her to come down. The sirens grow louder, and my ears lift away from my jaw like I am grinning. I watch the door for her.
And then the ambulance is in view, racing down the road between the farms. It comes up her drive, gravel spraying from its tires, and when the doors open and the paramedics run to me, I can’t speak. The first paramedic enters the house and the second asks if I am wounded. I look down, and my shirt is stained with blood. When I don’t answer, he begins to examine me.
I pull away from him and run up the stairs behind the first paramedic. Rachel’s face is turned to the ceiling, her dark hair pooling on the floor, her arms at her sides. I can see her feet, in thick woolen socks. I want to crawl around the woman and squeeze them between my hands.
The paramedic points at a place on Rachel’s neck, then touches the same place on herself, under her jaw. I can’t hear her over the sounds I am making. She helps me down the steps. She opens the ambulance doors and settles me on its ledge and puts a foil wrapper around my shoulders. The wet on my shirt turns cold and plasters the fabric to my stomach. My teeth chatter. The paramedic switches on a fan so heat pours from the ambulance behind me, warming my back, escaping in vapors into the cold air.
