Will North

by Water, Stone, Heart (v5)

  “Nicola!” he said, trying to get her to focus on his face. “It's okay.”

  “No! It's not! I'll tell!”

  She was crying now, her arms clutched around her stomach, her body convulsing. Andrew eased her back down the chaise, and she curled into a ball on her side. He knelt on the floor and held her close, whispering her name, telling her she was safe. Her sobs shook them both. After a while, they lessened and then ceased altogether. He realized she was asleep. He tried to rouse her but failed.

  He looked around the room and saw Randi, watching from the shadows of a far corner of the studio. He was amazed that the dog had not barked. Then he understood that Randi was as frightened as he was. Or perhaps the dog had been through this before.

  Andrew stood and tried to come to terms with what had just happened. Had Nicola fallen asleep as he caressed her and then awakened from a nightmare? Was she drunk and hallucinating? Had he frightened her?

  What Andrew understood was that he needed to get her to bed. He slipped behind the sailcloth room divider and turned back the covers of Nicola's bed. Then he went back to the chaise, gathered her in his arms, and lifted. He was suddenly grateful for Jamie's lessons on how to lift heavy stones; Nicola was not petite. As he settled her in bed, she mumbled something anxiously, but he couldn't make it out. He pulled the covers around her, marveled again at her beauty, kissed her forehead, and turned out the light on the side table. He sat beside her for a very long time, listening to the whisper of her breathing, watching the gentle rise and fall of her chest, and wondering what the hell had just happened.

  After a while, he rose and went back into the studio, where he found Randi sitting patiently in the middle of the room, panting slightly.

  “Well, my friend,” he said to the dog, “what do you suggest we do now?”

  Andrew was troubled by the idea of spending the night in Nicola's cottage, but was also afraid of leaving her alone.

  As he stood in the middle of the room, Randi got up and walked across the studio to the chaise, made a single quiet woofing sound, yawned, and lay down on the floor, his head on his front paws but his eyes still on Andrew.

  “Good suggestion,” Andrew said, chuckling.

  He gathered a couple of drop cloths to use as blankets, and lay down on the chaise. It wasn't very comfortable, and though he was emotionally drained, he could feel the adrenaline still pumping in his ears. The whole experience had shaken him to his core, the way even the most momentary of earth tremors makes you question the solidity of the world around you for the first time. Nicola had seemed in a trance, as if she were possessed. She'd been terrified, though not, it seemed, by him. By something else. Someone else.

  Andrew looked around the room for something tangible to ground him in reality and found the painting of Lee, in the meadow by the river. He wondered if Lee didn't represent Nicola's own childhood spirit—innocent, alive to the world, forever at play.

  But who was “Johnny”?

  The synchronized initiation of showers along the whole coast at about 1100UTC [coordinated universal time] is consistent with friction-induced coastal convergence as the primary cause. Initially the storms developed just offshore, consistent with pure fictionally driven convergence. The subsequent move inland and then back to the coast may be associated with a response to the late morning solar heating…

  Brian Golding, ed., “Numerical Weather Prediction,” Forecasting Research Technical Report No. 459, Met Office

  nine

  Andrew was moving stone like a machine. He'd reached a nearly Zenlike state with the hedging, a zone of quiet concentration in which he had very little sense of the world around him. The choosing, the lifting, and the placing of stone and the movements of his body all seemed of a piece, as if he, the stone, and the hedge were extensions of one another, rather than discrete elements. He wasn't conscious of any single act, just of the flow, of the whole. And however solid the component parts were, the process itself had become fluid, as if the hedging mimicked the river it paralleled.

  They'd completed the first section, mounded turf at the top, and moved on. Becky and Ralph had stripped the second sixteen-foot segment of topsoil and started on the third, while Jamie and Case moved stone with the Bobcat and laid grounders. It was Burt with whom Andrew worked most, the two of them placing the levelers, then stacking the rows of herringbone, and ramming the fill into the heart between the two rising faces.

  Andrew had underestimated the big man. What Burt lacked in words he more than made up for in quiet artistry. While Andrew checked the batter with the plywood form from time to time, Burt never did; his batter curve rose smoothly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Burt often talked to the stone—“How's tha', then?” he'd ask quietly as he thwacked one in place, or “Rest easy there, mate.” He'd catch Andrew watching and smile like a child caught out. They talked sometimes as they worked, and Andrew learned more about Burt's dad, who'd died a couple of years before, and about their farm. Burt said something once that Andrew found revealing. He'd mentioned that laying stone made him feel more connected to the earth than any of his regular farm chores ever had, and that he looked forward to working on his own hedges when the week was out. Andrew thought perhaps it was this task, more than any other, that would make the farm his own, now that his father was gone.

  But mostly, he and Burt worked in companionable silence, and in that silence, Andrew thought about Nicola. He'd left her cottage just after dawn. He'd been awakened by the screech of seagulls arguing over a morsel of something no doubt unspeakably rank and decided he was glad his cottage was in the fields above the harbor, where the morning symphony tended to feature sparrows and little English robins—an altogether sweeter alarm.

  He'd tiptoed around the edge of the sailcloth room divider and found Randi asleep at the foot of his mistress's bed, though the big dog lifted his head momentarily before dropping it again like a lead weight. Andrew could almost have sworn the good-natured beast smiled. Nicola was asleep, the cascade of her hair fanning out across the pillow, her chest rising and falling softly, her breath the faintest whisper, like wavelets kissing a powdery beach, slipping up to the tide line, hesitating there a moment, then sighing as they retreated. Her face was untroubled, almost childlike in its peacefulness. So unlike the night before.

  He'd stood there for a while, thinking, marveling, and then ducked back into the studio, picked up his shoes, padded down the steep stairs, and let himself out into the moist morning. Though the air was warm, the port was thick with mist. There was ventriloquism in the air: the scrape and slap of crab traps being dragged and stacked, the pop-pop-pop of a diesel boat engine warming up, seemed, in the fog, as if they were beside him in the lane instead of down in the harbor. At the bridge, he hesitated, trying to decide which route to take home. He chose the river valley; it would set tongues wagging if he were to be seen walking home along the road through the upper village at this hour. Half the town knew where he'd been last night and who he'd stood beside during the singing.

  In the lower village, the streets were deserted, the shops shuttered. The only human being abroad besides himself was Peter Weston, the newsagent, and he was too busy hauling in bales of The Times, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and tabloids like The Sun to notice him passing on the pavement opposite, for which Andrew was grateful.

  It was amazing, Andrew thought, how a little village like Boscastle could change your way of being in the world—even change your age; he felt like a guilty teenager sneaking back home after a clandestine assignation. It was idiotic, but no less real for being so.

  As he wandered up the valley, following the riverbed and pushing the mist ahead of him with his shins, he kept replaying the stages of the evening before: the by-now expected early verbal skirmishes at the Welly; the unexpected but easily entered armistice; the growing harmony between them, like something that grew out of the music; the unorthodox invitation; the magical intimacy that followed; and then her bli
nd fear, like a seismic fissure growing to a chasm between the here and now and the … what? … Nicola's other reality. The dark continent. The unknown.

  He knew he'd left early not just because he needed to eat and change for work, but also because he did not know what to say to her about the night before. She would be embarrassed, he thought … that is, if she remembered anything. And what would he have said? What should he say? It was clear someone had hurt her. He knew about Jeremy; that much she'd shared. But this other thing … did he have any business asking her about that? Yet he cared about her. No, that wasn't true; the truth was, he was in love. It seemed as if she was, too. It amazed him. And though his head told him he was in no emotional shape to be doing so, his heart thrilled. It was as if that shock he first felt when she touched him had left his heart vibrating like a tuning fork, but with the difference that the vibrations did not diminish. And instead of protecting them, all their verbal fencing had become a strange sort of foreplay He had a sudden vision of porcupines mating, ever so carefully.

  He thought about the tranquillity panels she painted: how peaceful they were, and how apparently at odds with her soul. He wondered how, or even if, he should approach the subject of her terror. He didn't even know whether his care would be welcome.

  It took until afternoon, but he thought of something. And it calmed him. When the crew knocked off for the day, Andrew took a pass on their usual pint at the Cobweb.

  “Oh sure, go missing when it's your turn to stand a round, is it?” Becky teased. There was general outrage all around.

  Andrew laughed. He was fond of this disparate bunch of characters. “I'll buy two rounds tomorrow, promise,” he'd said, earning nothing but jeers for his trouble.

  “We'll nay forget tha',” Burt called after him as Andrew struck off toward the bridge with a wave.

  Janet Stevenson answered his knock wearing blue jeans and a University of Michigan sweatshirt.

  “Reverend Janet?” Andrew said, thinking, absurdly, that the priest would be in her vestments.

  “It's Andrew, isn't it?” she said, smiling.

  “That's some memory you have, ma'am,” he replied, trying to recover from his surprise at her outfit.

  “It helps in this trade,” she said. “Would you like to come in?”

  Andrew looked down at his dirty clothes, then smiled. “Perhaps not, given the state I'm in.”

  “I'm not exactly overdressed myself,” she said. “It's my son's sweatshirt. I was cleaning; I'm the help as well as the vicar.”

  “Look, I've just barged in without an appointment, so let me begin with an apology. Do you have a moment? Maybe we could take a short walk?”

  “Yes, and yes. My husband's doing dinner tonight. Let me just tell him where I'm going. Where am I going, by the way?” she said, smiling again.

  Andrew looked around. The church sat on high ground, looking out to sea. “The churchyard?”

  “I've been there before,” she said. “But it has its charms. I'll just be a tick.”

  A few minutes later, they were walking up the hill.

  “There may have been a church here for nearly a millennium, you know,” Janet said, filling the silence. “A document from 1189 records the gift of the church to the abbey at Hartland, up in Devon, but clearly it was here earlier. There are still portions of the building that are Norman, but much of what you see is much more recent. But you'd know that; I hear you're an architect. An architect learning to build Cornish hedges, which—pardon me for saying this—sounds a bit backward to me.”

  Andrew paused, looked at her, and started walking again. They were strolling among the ancient, lichen-encrusted headstones that surrounded the church. He wondered if the close-cropped grass was the work of a mower or sheep. He hoped the latter: Jesus, the Good Shepherd.

  “It started as a whim, I suppose; or maybe a kind of therapy. But it's become something else, something elemental.”

  They stopped at a gate that looked west, toward the sea and Forrabury Common, a medieval system of raised farming beds that had remained in use until only recently.

  “It sounds like you're searching for something. Is that what got to you in my sermon about Peter last Sunday?” she asked.

  Andrew leaned on the top of the gate. “I've certainly had my faith tested recently, Reverend Janet.”

  “Just ‘Janet’ is fine.”

  “Janet.… But that's not why I came to see you.”

  The priest said nothing. She had learned the value of silence.

  Andrew began walking again; Janet walked with him.

  “Let's say you knew someone,” he began, “to whom something terrible seems to have happened. Maybe a long time ago. But it's clear it haunts the person still.”

  “Why do I think it's not you you're talking about? It's someone else, isn't it?”

  “Yes.” He wondered whether everyone in this village was a mind reader.

  “How can I help?”

  Andrew was impressed that she didn't ask, “Who?” He took a deep breath. “I don't know. That's what I came here to ask you” he said.

  He stood beside a stone cross—Celtic, he thought, its edges and intricately carved pattern worn by centuries of Atlantic storms, but not yet obliterated. The permanence of stone; the impermanence of man's impressions upon it.

  The priest folded her hands together before her, as she might in church. She looked at the ground.

  “I have to confess, Andrew, that the Church isn't very good at this sort of thing,” she said to her feet. “We're charged with looking after the faith of our ‘flock,’ of trying to be of comfort in crises. But it sounds as if your friend is beyond that, and we're ill-equipped to serve as either social workers or psychologists.”

  She looked at Andrew steadily for a moment and he saw a deep sadness.

  “My tools are so limited,” she said. “I could counsel this person about the everlasting love of God, about the redemption inherent in faith in his love. But she—may I guess it is a ‘she’?—would have to embrace that love. And I suspect, given her trauma, that may be a lot to ask.”

  Andrew was amazed. In his experience, ministers always claimed to have all the answers. That had been part of his attraction to religion as a child: the certainty. And suddenly he felt embarrassed. What had he really expected? What did he hope to achieve? He was a searcher all right, looking for the cure to an ailment he didn't even understand.

  “Janet,” he said finally. “Reverend Janet of Forrabury, et cetera and so on, I'm sorry. I should have thought about this more, I guess. I'm just trying to help someone I care about.”

  “I know you are,” she said softly, “and she is lucky to have you—if she will have you. I sense you are a good soul, Andrew. Others in this village think so, too. I believe you can reach her.”

  “I don't know that; how can you?”

  “Think about Peter, Andrew. Think about the lesson of his faith. If you believe you can help, if that belief comes from a good heart—which I believe it does—then you can walk on that water, and perhaps carry her with you.”

  Andrew and Janet Stevenson stood looking at each other for several moments, and he understood that they were done. He nodded to the priest, and said, “Thank you. I'm sorry to have interrupted your evening.”

  “You did nothing of the sort.”

  “Good evening, Reverend Janet.”

  “Good evening, Andrew. And good luck.”

  He'd nodded and had walked just a few steps down the narrow asphalt path toward the lane when she said, “Have you thought of talking to Colin Grant?”

  “The witch? I wouldn't have thought you had much in common with Mr. Grant.”

  “More than you might guess; it's a very small parish, after all. Besides, I'll take someone who believes in something over someone who believes in nothing any day.”

  “But witchcraft?”

  “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio …,’” she said, quoting Shakespeare.

&nb
sp; And Andrew thought, This is not your average priest.

  He did not go to see Colin Grant next; it was late, and he needed to think that suggestion through. He was making a dinner salad in the tiny kitchen at Shepherd's Cottage when he saw Nicola walking across the meadow from Roger and Anne's house. He met her at the door.

  “Some hot date you are,” she said, flashing a grin. “You're so exciting you put me right to sleep!”

  Andrew was so startled by the absurdity of this greeting, he just stared.

  Then he regained his composure. “Would you like to come in?”

  “No, I just walked all the way up here to give you a hard time.”

  Andrew stood aside and Nicola danced in and plopped herself down in the overstuffed easy chair by the stone hearth.

  So,” she said, “I have two questions.”

  “One?”

  “Do you have a decent wine in this house?”

  “Yes, a chilled Pinot Grigio from the Alto Adige in Italy, by way of the Rock Shop. Will that be adequate, madam?”

  “We'll see.”

  “And the second question?”

  Nicola tilted her head to one side and smirked. “Was it good for you?”

  Andrew blinked.

  “Because I certainly don't remember,” she added, rolling her eyes.

  “I'll just get that wine, shall I?” Andrew answered, shaking his head as he disappeared into the kitchen. He was glad to have the excuse to leave the room, because he hadn't the first inkling what he should say next, if anything.

  “Would you like to stay for dinner?” he called from the kitchen. “I was just making a sort of Italian dinner salad—mixed baby greens, tomato, prosciutto, mozzarella, fennel, onion, and black olives.”

  “Wait!” Nicola called back. “You mean you have no fresh basil?”

  Andrew walked to the door of the kitchen and leaned against the jamb. It was impossible to stay focused on the strangeness of the night before. Nicola was sitting sideways in the big chair, her back against one arm, her tanned legs over the other. She was wearing a simple, sleeveless printed cotton sundress with a deeply scooped neckline. She looked delicious. “Of course I have fresh basil,” he said. “I just thought it would be wasted on you.”