Solsbury Hill

by Susan M. Wyler

  With his face turned away, he brusquely wiped a few tears from his face. She wanted to know what had moved him, but didn’t know what to ask. She thought of what Jane had said about Mead’s quest for his own Catherine, then also what it must be like to speak of ghosts with Alice so recently gone, the hope he might have of seeing her again. She wondered if Alice had ever met the ghost of Emily.

  They crossed over a bridge to where the car was parked on the road. Mead opened the car door for her and went around to his side. He rolled up both windows and turned the key.

  “What was it like to grow up here?” she asked him.

  Mead rolled up the sleeves of his blue and green plaid flannel shirt, ran his fingers through his thick hair, shook it off the back of his neck, and faced her with a boyish smile. She’d never before seen him fuss or arrange himself.

  “I grew up around Cambridge,” he started. “We came here for weekends sometimes, parts of summer and most holidays. Alice was old-fashioned, so I wore short pants till I was seven. Gwen fought her on it, but Alice tended to win. There’s not much to tell, really. We had a flat near her college and she thought I’d grow up to be a scholar, but it wasn’t in my blood exactly. I mean, I was good at school.” He laughed a nervous laugh. “But I liked the moors, the wild, inscrutable sheep, the enigmatic gaze of a Yorkshire cow, the slosh and slumber of a good pig. I like the quiet, so I can listen to things and hear myself think.” He knocked the shift into first gear and moved slowly away from the town. “It’s not for everyone.”

  Mead took back roads, not the highway. The road dipped suddenly and there was again landscape that made her gasp. The black bark of the trees against the wet green land. Along the road were thatched-roof houses that looked like hobbit towns from the distance. The road would wind, whipping like a snake, the curves so tight, with high hedges on either side.

  “But you get to know different things living here. See that crimson sea out there.” There was a field of autumn grass. “The puffs of white that look like flowers . . . that’s cotton grass. You’ll see a whole field of it, all white like flowers in the summer, lots of Yorkshire’s covered with cotton grass. Where there’s heather, the peat is less than five feet deep, but where there’s cotton grass, it’s sometimes as deep as twenty feet underneath, and that’s the richest, liveliest peat. It’s like no other place on earth. I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “You’ve also got good wool and good cheese,” she added, lightly.

  “’Tis the depth of it, the stuff in the peat way down there that never fully . . .” He hesitated.

  “Go on, say it again. It never decomposes.”

  “There you are.” He slapped his hand on the leather-covered steering wheel. “Only lived ’ere a wee while and already you’re larnin’.”

  As a little girl she would put her head out the window and feel the cold wind on her face. Now, she reached out her hand.

  “There’s a place I’d like to take you, if you’d be willing.”

  She was curious, but it was late. “Could we do it another time?”

  “Definitely for another day.” He smiled her way.

  There were many places she could imagine going with Mead, but what she wanted, more than anything, was to find the letters. Emily’s face was the face carved on her ring. The letters were real and they would tell her something.

  The road was so narrow that Mead had to pull over for trucks and large cars to pass. Eleanor closed her eyes and he talked about his education, friends who had moved to the States or were having experiences on the Continent, but he thought they’d be back, once they wanted to settle down.

  She asked if he were looking to settle down and he didn’t make a sound.

  “Tell me about being a scarperer,” she said. “What heart did you break and leave behind?”

  “Oh, I left broken pieces behind, I guess, never a dramatic story, but some would say too many. Still, it’s not so much someone else’s heart I broke, but a tendency to break my own in small ways.”

  Her eyes wanted to open, but she was sleepy.

  “Nothing dark and dangerous. Just an internal scarperin’ away.”

  Before long she was dreaming and his words were like the ocean ebbing, flowing toward her and then away. She dreamed of a little boy with a dirty face picking through rubble and finding pieces of broken ruby. His eyes wide, he’d pick up the jewels one by one, and kiss each of them.

  The young crescent moon was high in the sky by the time she recognized certain trees and stones along the road. She recognized the feel of the long drive up to Trent Hall, but it was the crunch of gravel that she liked most. Mead came to a stop and turned off the engine.

  “There’s no wind,” she said. “It’s so quiet.”

  Mead opened his door and the inside light came on but neither of them moved to get out of the car.

  “Does cotton grass grow where the graves are, with the two crosses?” She bit through her lip and let out a yelp. She licked the tenderness where her bite had drawn a drop of blood.

  “Here, let me get that.” He leaned across the stick shift to wipe the second drop of blood away with his finger. With one drop gone, another came. He kissed her. She pressed her hand against his chest to stop him. He looked down at her lip, and she took her hand down. Another drop emerged, and he kissed her again.

  In the study under the stairs, she pushed against bookshelves, because there might be a false wall. The bookshelves were emptied, so the books that had been there were in boxes. Eleanor could not recall whether Emily had said it was inside, behind, or near a bookshelf, nor even what shape or kind of thing it was she was looking for as she rummaged about. She knew they were letters but letters wrapped in cloth, in a box, buried in the plaster?

  She opened one of the boxes stacked in the corner of the study. She hadn’t turned on the lights, because she was hiding. If anyone found her, she didn’t know what she’d explain. The drapes on the two sets of French windows were opened just a crack to let in a little gray daylight, and she moved quietly.

  Each book had a quality of its own. The newer ones had their original dust jackets intact, but the old ones were the treasures: bound with leather or stout cloth and stamped with a gold design or embossed. They were fantastic, and she felt giggles of delight as she sat in the dark corner and pulled them out, one after another. All tones and hues of cloth stamped gold with a design that suggested the story inside: a princess and dragon, a grinning demon, a fat and hungry man. Some had a coat of arms or an Arts and Crafts design, all more evocative than any jacket she’d ever seen, but some pages were brittle, the bindings soft and pliable. She could see why Mead was building a library with glass doors to protect these valuable things. There were piles of books around her, but she’d found no box of letters.

  Then Eleanor remembered that Emily had said a children’s sitting room. While many of the rooms seemed like sitting rooms, none of them were children’s sitting rooms. The children’s bookcase would be upstairs, not downstairs where adults entertained.

  From the landing halfway up the stairs into the hall to Alice’s bedroom, someone had hung a bright floral drape. There were peacocks and cranes on the sea blue background, orange rosebuds about to bloom. Pulling the drape aside, she saw Alice’s room had been emptied. The bed had been stripped and the few pieces of furniture were covered.

  With her sleeves rolled up and her hair in a bun, she started up the short flight of stairs that led from the landing to another stairway and then to a hall that was clearly closed off and had been for a long time. There were no bulbs in the sconces on the walls. Out from under the first door, she saw a thread of pale light. Inside that room there was a long uncurtained window and a bare twin bed frame with a painted headboard.

  There was something about the room that brought back an unexpected memory of her mother standing inside the open door of a taxi. Her mother was on her wa
y to the airport, that last morning, and she stopped, before climbing in, to wave good-bye. Miles had been standing behind Eleanor, and Tabitha was there, urging her to hurry. They’d be late for the game. Eleanor’s mother was going to miss their final basketball game, and Eleanor was cross with her. Her mother in a white cotton blouse with the collar turned up, a beige trench coat tied tight at her waist, her blond hair curling out from under the rim of her hat. Now, Eleanor remembered this image, for the first time. She remembered how pretty she thought her mother was that day, and how much she wanted that pretty being to be at her game. Instead of waving back, Eleanor had turned away, ignored her mother’s hopeful wave. She’d turned away, because her mother seemed excited to be going.

  There was no bookshelf in the room. She went back into the hall and there was enough light, with that bedroom door open, for her to see a set of French doors painted a pale turquoise blue at the end of the hallway. She had to kick one door for it to open. The furniture was draped with sheets of muslin. The room was large and oddly shaped. It was almost an octagon, but not exactly. It was wide where the French doors opened into it and had seven pockets or bays, some with and some without windows, and then it narrowed at the far end with one long, sheer-curtained window. From it, she looked out over a meadow with white tufts of cotton grass.

  Standing to the right of the window she could see, in the near distance, the broken walls and towers of Trent Abbey. Medieval nuns had stayed silent, cooked simple meals, and prayed there, centuries before. From this height, more than three stories up, Eleanor could see almost everything. Beyond the pink and yellow stones of the abbey, she saw the cliff she’d walked down and the ledge where Emily had sat, then where the land fell away sharply, the smooth spread of deep green rolling hills below and the stand of trees inside which was the pond.

  She snapped one sheet and flung it aside. There was an orange corduroy chair big enough for two. Under more sheets, there was a daybed and a long narrow couch. She found a painted closet with an old wood dollhouse on its side, a naked set of dolls, and a small pink leather suitcase filled with clothes for them.

  Casually, she turned her head to the empty fireplace. Beside it there was a child-size bookcase. On the bottom shelf were books stacked one on top of another, in three piles. She blew off a layer of dust and read through titles: Impunity Jane, The Railway Children, Five Children and It. All well-worn copies. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass. Eleanor sank into the big chair with Alice, reached out and grabbed Karoleena’s Red Coat, sat with them in her lap.

  Eleanor’s mother had read to her from the time she was tiny. Eleanor hadn’t wanted to give it up, but her friends’ mothers didn’t read to them before bed, so she asked her mother if it was all right that they stop, though sometimes they sat together in a chair and Eleanor read aloud to her instead.

  She drifted in and out of the books on her lap, looked at pictures and read stray paragraphs. She slipped off the chair onto the smooth wood floor. There was a foot width of old stone that ran around the edge of the room and framed the fireplace. She knelt on the cold stone and tried to open one of the latches on a cupboard door at the base of the bookshelf, but it was rusted shut. She took her barrette from her hair and worked the latch until it opened.

  Inside were two cardboard boxes someone had covered in Liberty print paper, and another small, very old wood one. She pulled them out and laid them on the floor, then worked to open the other cupboards, but those were empty. She stuck her head inside and looked around for secret doors, but there were none.

  She looked carefully through the two boxes, found Alice’s little girl diary. She found marbles, school report cards, a photograph of Alice as a little girl standing in the courtyard of Trent Hall, in a dress with a frilly petticoat peeking out, white gloves, and matte leather Mary Janes.

  In the other box, there were more of Alice’s souvenirs from childhood. There was a good pastel picture, which Alice had drawn and signed, of her little sister Anne with her legs draped over the arm of a chair. In the old wood box, there were postcards written back and forth between Alice and her mother while Alice was staying with a family in the South of France for the summer.

  From the postcards, Eleanor got a glimpse of what her own mother, little Anne, had done that summer. She’d raced around with her best friend, a little boy whom Mrs. Sutton called “Annie’s shadow.” Mrs. Sutton described how mischievous they’d been, how they’d carried things from the house to set up a summer home for themselves in a corner of the ruined abbey with squirrels and birds and ghosts of nuns to keep them company. Annie has got your father to wrap velvet around the rough ropes of the old swing on the hill. It was gratifying to read. Eleanor could picture it now, every part of it, as if a fine-lined sketch were being filled in, fleshed out, and washed with watercolors.

  Eleanor sank back on her heels, leaned against the big chair, and was flooded with locked-away memories of her parents at home: how good they were to each other, how easily they laughed together—watching films, sharing stories, the flush of joy in their faces when they dressed for nights on the town with her mother in a mink jacket, high heels, and blushed cheeks and lips, her father in a tuxedo.

  Small things crashed against each other in Eleanor’s mind. Here to find letters Emily Brontë insisted on her finding, deep down she had hoped she’d find something to make sense of her own life, her mother leaving home and never returning. Or the way her father had changed so drastically. She remembered how patiently she’d waited for him to return to himself again, but something was broken irreparably inside him and he never did. Still Eleanor had made the best of things. Alone at eighteen she got through his funeral, packed up the apartment where they’d lived, made a home of her own, and got busy washing old wool and making quirky clothing.

  Now, she peered into the last empty cupboard. Country air had made her keenly aware of the rhythms of vigor, appetite, and exhaustion. She started to pack things up again and put them in their place. She lifted the wood box and the base of it unhinged. Kneeling, she turned it upside down and saw that the bottom slid out and there was a hidden compartment with a small knob she could take hold of, and her breath caught in her chest as she slid that piece to the side. Inside was a thick package of papers tied with a black satin ribbon.

  Eleanor hurriedly put everything back the way she’d found it. With the strange package of papers in hand, she felt an urge to escape the room. She’d found the treasure from this scavenger hunt with clues from a ghost on the moors.

  In the hall, Gwen’s voice startled her. “Is that you, Eleanor? Are you busy up there?”

  The fine, common sound of Gwen in the hall at the base of the stairs.

  “I thought you were gone somewhere,” Eleanor said as she stepped into the light on the landing.

  “I’m just back and just going again. Is everything all right?”

  “Perfect.” She headed down the stairs. “I was looking to see if I could see the abbey from that last room at the end of the hall.”

  “My word, that room must be dusty.”

  “Not really.” Her voice too high.

  “And there’s no light in that hallway.” Their sentences crossed each other’s.

  “I opened windows. Was that my mother’s old room?”

  “It was, indeed. It was sort of the children’s playroom.” Gwen had started up the stairs, to meet Eleanor halfway, then turned and joined her and they walked back down.

  “Which room was Mead’s room?” Eleanor asked.

  Now Mead had an apartment in the carriage house. Though Eleanor had never been in it, she’d heard it had an upstairs with two bedrooms and a living room, kitchen, and dining room downstairs. Gwen had moved out of the bedroom she and Alice had shared when they stayed at Trent Hall and was in the old gardener’s cottage.

  “When I get back I’ll show you. You would have gone right past it up t
here, but all the furniture’s in a muddle. I’ll be sure to show you.” Gwen had a suitcase by the front door. “I filled the fridge, so have at it, won’t you?” Gwen’s genuinely pleasant smile. “Everything’s gone by so fast,” she said, shaking her head and looking around at the half-emptied rooms. “You must think this would make a dreadful home, but it’s not hard to make cozy. In other times, it has been.” She kissed her cheek. “I’ve got to be off. Do take care of yourself, and promise not to be gone when I get back.”

  “I think I can promise that . . . ,” Eleanor said.

  Eleanor walked her to the door and waved and watched and kept waving until the car passed through the gate in the wall.

  Standing on the stones outside the front door, Eleanor saw the lights on in the barn where Mead was working with Tilda and Granley. Gwen was gone and would come back soon. The house and all that came with it seemed light and bearable. The winter holidays were coming and Eleanor had an image of the house alive with holly strung on the banister and a Christmas tree near the window in the large living room. Standing alone on the doorstep, it seemed possible that the house could be hers.

  The letters gripped in one hand, she went into the living room and sank into a chair. She flicked on a light. As if they were letters from a lover, she wanted to savor whatever lay hidden inside the bundle of papers. She began.

  Between two sheets of fragile paper, there was a drawing folded in four. It was a pencil sketch of a woman sitting against the base of a tree and beneath the picture an inscription read, Here, where courage and passion reigned over the most commonsense and agreed-upon virtues, here where I loved thee, where I found what is truest in my soul and held in thine eyes, myself replete. Know now and for all eternity, I am yours, my sweet Emily.

  The drawing was not perfect, but it was clearly a portrait of the woman Eleanor had come to know on the moors. Right down to the wool dress Emily wore. The dark pencil lines were shaded with blushes of watercolor, which accented the tree’s broad canopy, the heather in the distance, a hint of yellow earth, and the flush of joy in Emily’s cheeks.