Solsbury Hill Read online

  Eleanor nodded and smiled. She noticed that under the apron was a well-cut wool dress. Ms. Angle’s face was long, lean, with a broad jaw and high cheekbones. Her eyes were intelligent and deep blue. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the oven.

  “This is Tilda,” she said briskly, introducing the woman who’d just pulled fresh loaves from the wood-burning stove. Tilda nodded her head with a confident smile.

  “Will you sit down and have a bite? There’s dinner warm in the stove and it’s good.”

  “It smells incredible, but I’m not at all hungry right now. Later maybe?”

  While Ms. Angle kicked off her slippers and stepped into a pair of heels, Eleanor had a chance to take in the room, pristine and intact from another century: the refectory table and a mismatched collection of tatty Windsor chairs, dishes draining on a rack, stone walls, and a brick fireplace deep and almost tall enough to stand inside.

  “The kitchen could use an update,” Ms. Angle said as she led Eleanor out, under the front stairs, into a large sitting room with high, coffered ceilings. It was gracious, with deep upholstered furniture and a lush Oriental rug that was pretty, feminine, with an abstract design in ivory, pale apricot, and celadon.

  “Alice is sleeping, of course,” she said. “I’m sure you’re eager to see her. You must be exhausted. Will you have a glass of sherry?”

  Granley interrupted, “Ms. Angle, she’s all set. In the best room.”

  “Thank you, Granley, good night.” Ms. Angle rolled her eyes. “Alice’s idea of the best room is an odd, small room at the corner of the house with a lovely view. If it’s not all right . . .”

  “She’ll like it,” Granley broke in abruptly and left the room.

  “I’m sure I will,” said Eleanor.

  “There’s another one across the hall from it, if you don’t. Sit down, darling,” Ms. Angle said.

  There was a log fire blazing in the fireplace and Eleanor picked a large chair close to the warmth of it. She was out of sorts, felt a buzz at the edge of her skin, was confused by the stately home and by Ms. Angle’s warm and familiar welcome at such a late hour.

  “It’s such a pleasure to see you,” Ms. Angle said. She seemed in good spirits.

  “It’s good to meet you, too.”

  “I hope you don’t mind not seeing Alice tonight, but I’m worried she won’t sleep again if we wake her now. Do you mind terribly? Waiting till the morning?”

  “Not at all, it’s fine. Of course. Is she any better?”

  “She will be when she sees you, dear. It means the world to her, your coming. Since she fell ill, it’s been a steep slope down, and she’s been working so hard since then. It seems like her soul is urgently taking care of things, packing for a very long journey, you’d think.” She poured dark sherry into a small, tulip-shaped crystal glass and handed it to Eleanor.

  “How long has she been ill?”

  “Not very long.” Ms. Angle was firmly cheerful. She stood and walked to the window to close a gap in the drapes. Then she took the poker and stirred the fire, careful not to tumble a log. She turned back to Eleanor. “I sometimes wonder if she’d have felt it at all had no one told her, had the doctors not given it one of their names.”

  Ms. Angle adjusted some long-stemmed cut flowers in a vase, getting them to stand against each other in a different way, and Eleanor said, “This is an unbelievable place.”

  The furniture was pulled close to the fire, the windows were draped in rose velvet against woodwork painted a pale olive green. The design was spare and lived-in, but everything was large and very old: gilt-framed oil paintings, Chinese porcelain, piles of books, and antiques from many centuries. The stone walls, the massive Oriental rug that warmed the floor, there was nothing fussy about it, but it was grand.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. These thick stone walls . . .”

  Ms. Angle joined her. “It’s a good old house,” she said. “But it’s a bear to keep warm.” She smiled. “It’s been in your family forever, you know.”

  “My family.” Eleanor shook her head. She made herself more comfortable in the low upholstered chair. “It’s not at all what I expected.”

  Ms. Angle sipped. “What did you expect?”

  “I wouldn’t even know how to say—just less.” She laughed an embarrassed small laugh that barely left her chest and throat. “You said I’m much like my mother. No one’s ever said that to me before, you must have known her . . .”

  With a warm smile, she leaned forward. “I knew your mother since the day she was born. I was Alice’s friend way back then. We were girls, still, and excited about a baby coming.” Ms. Angle offered Eleanor some spiced nuts in a bowl and she took a handful.

  “Did you grow up here?” Eleanor’s eyes were on the furniture and the high ceilings and the cold stone walls.

  “Not I, no. My family lived nearby, but Alice did, of course, and your mum until she left. They left here when she was just a girl, and she wasn’t at all happy about it, but that’s how it was.” Ms. Angle changed the subject, gestured to the room itself. “Alice has put a lot into the place over the years, though there’s still a lot to be done. It was a tatty place when we were girls racing about and tracking mud, breaking windows, the house itself ripping at the seams. And that yard out there full of chickens and even goats at one time. Quite a bit ‘less,’ as you said, than it is now.”

  Eleanor laughed with Ms. Angle. They laughed easily together. “Yes, that’s much more what Mom described.” The fire crackled and the logs shifted in the fireplace. “Really, she never said a thing about a house like this.”

  “Alice loves this place.” She seemed to see the bewilderment Eleanor was feeling and took her hand in hers. She shook it gently with encouragement. “It will come to seem smaller, in time.” Her voice was more intimate. “It’s not as big as it looks.”

  They sat for a quiet moment. Eleanor was taking in the tired majesty of the place: the faded but still lush velvet drapes, the deep seat in the bay window, the thick stone walls.

  Ms. Angle lifted her glass. “Finish up your sherry,” she said in a kind tone, then drank hers down in a swallow. “You must be hungry.”

  “I’m bleary with exhaustion.”

  “Of course you are.” She stood. “Let’s go up.”

  “Thank you for staying up so late to wait for me.”

  Eleanor was reluctant to leave the room with the warm light from the blazing fire casting its glow and so much still unknown. She stood and looked around. “All this will still be here in the morning?”

  Ms. Angle smiled. “The fire will have died by then.” She took Eleanor’s hand to lead her into the hall and up the front stairs. “But the sun might be out, if we pray hard enough.”

  The doors along the upstairs hall were closed tight. There were portraits on the walls. They passed one door after another till Ms. Angle stopped and opened one into a room with a yellow and cream silk Persian rug. There were empty bookshelves on the walls and nothing more in the room except what looked like a large three-sided box, paneled and carved in oak. It took up a third of the room and had its own door.

  “I know it looks odd, but there’s a fine view from inside,” Ms. Angle said. She opened the door and beckoned for Eleanor to pass through into this room-inside-a-room with its high four-poster bed, crisp white linens and drapes. Leaded-glass windows ran behind the bed and along the wall from the wainscot to the ceiling. Ms. Angle pushed the drapes aside till they framed the full moon high in the sky.

  “If you’d rather have the other room . . .”

  “No, it’s great.” Eleanor gazed around, enchanted.

  “You must feel entirely upside down.”

  “I do.” Eleanor took off her cardigan.

  “I’ll bring up a tray, just in case you change your mind and find you’re hungry.”

 
Then she was gone. Eleanor lifted herself up onto the mattress and lay back on the bed. The room shifted and spun, so she closed her eyes for a while. When she opened them again, she was still dizzy. Feeling thirsty, she went into the hall and tried a few doors, looking for a bathroom till she found one, and a glass, and ice-cold water from the tap. She sat on the edge of the claw-foot tub and drank two glasses down.

  Above the bed in the room was a chandelier with flame-shaped bulbs and marble-sized crystal pendants in five different colors. The bed was in front of the windows and she could feel the wind outside right through the glass and two layers of the drapes’ fabric. The branches of a tree blew against the glass, scratched against the window, and Eleanor wondered if she’d be able to sleep.

  First she would unpack. There was no dresser but a low empty bookshelf where she stacked her jeans, some shirts, and sweaters. She looked for a hanger, then hung the dress and the suit she’d brought on hooks on the back of the door and put the box of her mother’s letters on a low shelf. In her haste, she hadn’t remembered to bring pajamas or a robe, and with the bathroom down the hall, she regretted it. She took off her clothes and crawled in naked under the thick down comforter on top of at least one layer of feather bed.

  She lay without moving, listened for something beyond the sound of the wind: for dinner plates downstairs, the sounds of the kitchen. Her laptop had no charge, and there were no plugs in the small room. She was restless. She was tired and stirred up. She wanted it to be morning.

  Then she noticed a bundle of ivory fabric hanging from a hook partially hidden behind the far end of the curtains. She slipped from the bed, went to the fabric, and took it in her fingers. It was warm. She held it to her nose and the linen had a sweet perfume. She thought it would be all right if she slipped it on, and did so. It was a nightgown, a long-sleeved poet’s gown with full arms and ruffles at the wrists, small buttons that buttoned up the front. Out the window, the wind had suddenly died down.

  Her long hair tumbled out of its bun when she unfastened it. Eleanor felt old-fashioned and fanciful in the nightgown, felt her figure under the thickness of the fabric, felt the cut of her waist and her hip bones. At the sudden knock, she almost jumped out of her skin. She opened the door.

  “I startled you, I’m sorry.” Ms. Angle had a silver tray with sausage rolls and a large glass of beer. She set it down.

  “They smell delicious.” Eleanor smoothed the gown. “I hope it’s all right,” she said, “I borrowed this.” She was blushing. She felt caught and she was blushing.

  “Of course you can wear that. It suits you, doesn’t it? Let me show you where the toilet is, and a bath if you’d like one.”

  “I wandered around already. I peeked in a couple of doors and I found it.” Eleanor was still flushed.

  “By all means, you make yourself at home, dear.”

  Embarrassed that she’d already presumed to do just that.

  Ms. Angle took in Eleanor from head to toe. “It is good on you. Where did you find it?”

  “On a hook.” Eleanor pointed toward the end of the curtain. “Ms. Angle, are you sure I can’t see her tonight?” She was surprised by the depth of her childlike desire.

  “I promise, the morning will be better.”

  “Would you wake me up? Make sure I’m awake?”

  “Of course I will, if you’ll call me Gwen.” She winked, stepped close, and kissed Eleanor on the forehead. “Sleep well, dear.”

  The pastry around the sausage was a crunch of juicy, sweet, and salty. The meat was perfect. It was about the best thing she’d ever tasted.

  She couldn’t picture her aunt’s face. She could hardly recall her mother’s face anymore.

  The dark beer was cold and refreshing. She finished the one large glass and wished she had another. She thought of tiptoeing down to the kitchen, once everything was quiet, but decided she’d better stay still and get into bed again, stay there through the night, hope the morning would come quickly.

  Eleanor tucked herself in: she turned on her side and pulled pillows behind her, pulled one against her chest, and tucked one between her knees. She missed the feeling of Miles curled in behind her. Drowsy, dizzy with travel, she allowed herself to think about what Miles would offer as an explanation. Maybe in a full life, these things just happened. Maybe she would see the house and find out about her family here, then head home and forgive him. Her eyes drooped, then dropped, then melted closed. She thought she heard whinnying horses and the sound of carriage wheels.

  The tree branch crashed against the windowpane without stopping, crashed as if it were insisting, and Eleanor tossed through the night. She clutched the pillow to her stomach as she slept and dreamed.

  She dreamed of stars in a clear sky over the moors and the moon growing as big as the sun with enough light that she could see a fox and his family curled up in a corner of earth like a cave, and she walked on the moors in her dream and felt the peat moss settling under her feet.

  When suddenly she wakened, there was a very young woman on the far side of the bed, just sitting there and watching her. The young woman sat as far from Eleanor as she possibly could, perched so lightly she seemed weightless, making no indentation on the bedcovers. Then she spoke to Eleanor in a calm, quiet voice. She was young, but her face looked drawn and tired and was wet from rain and her hair was tangled. She said, “It’s my nightgown you’re wearing,” and she ran her thin white fingers through her damp hair.

  Eleanor felt foolish wearing a gown that didn’t belong to her.

  The young woman straightened the blanket at the foot of the bed before she got up and gingerly walked across the threshold into the other room. Eleanor called out, then climbed from the bed and followed her, but there was no one. Not in the anteroom, not in the hall. Not on the dark back stairs into the kitchen, where copper pots hung from hooks, and dishes dried on the counter. There was no woman sitting by the kitchen’s fireplace, reading a book on a small low chair, as Eleanor had half expected.

  If she had seen her there, Eleanor would have been more surprised. It was a dream—that edge of a dream that lingers even after you’re awake. It was a waking dream she couldn’t quite shake, because everything was strange but familiar, old and new at the same time. Still, the feeling of the young woman somewhere persisted, so Eleanor searched the downstairs rooms.

  Anxious with every step she took, Eleanor kept thinking she was crazy to go forward, but she didn’t turn back. Through a hall past a series of rooms along the front of the house where the moonlight shone bright through French doors and windows, she was afraid to find the young woman but too curious not to try.

  Through dozens of rooms, the young woman was nowhere. In her life Eleanor had never seen nor imagined a person who wasn’t there. Her pace slowed. Maybe the woman had turned the other way in the upstairs hall and slipped into one of the rooms behind a door. Eleanor thought she’d followed close behind her, but maybe she hadn’t at all. Maybe it had been part of a dream, maybe she was still dreaming.

  A set of French doors opened into a courtyard with a dry fountain and two bicycles against a wall. The full moon made the courtyard as light as a cloudy day. She sat on the edge of the fountain and longed for Miles. She imagined him on this trip with her, holding her hand while she talked to Gwen Angle, standing in the doorway while she met her aunt Alice again, holding her heart through all of it, and then taking her home at the end of it, back to New York City and everything as it was.

  She didn’t sleep further, but as soon as it was daylight Eleanor walked through the upstairs halls hoping to find Alice’s room. Past a landing and down a small flight of stairs, she saw Gwen tying the belt of her silk robe and closing the bedroom door behind her.

  Gwen pressed one finger to her silent lips. “She was in some pain in the middle of the night, so she’ll be sleeping now for a while. Come down and get some breakfast with me, will you
?”

  Still in her nightgown, she followed Gwen down the front stairs past a mullioned picture window. It was a cloudy dawn with blue skies coming, and she saw the bright green rolling hills of the moors for the first time.

  They passed a large empty room and went into the kitchen, where they drank coffee, ate biscuits with butter. It was early and the house was quiet.

  “Why did they leave here, my grandparents?” Eleanor asked her. “I’ve never really understood what made them leave. Leave Alice behind and take my mother away . . . And now seeing it . . .”

  “Your mother was just a girl. Your grandfather decided to try it in the New World.”

  “Just like that? Leave all this?”

  “Alice can tell you more, but it had to do with the inheritance of the estate and the way things are here. We have some quirky old systems for property, and this one has its own particularities.”

  Eleanor was quiet and clearly curious.

  “There’s an entail that defines the way the property moves and this one is unusual because it requires the estate be passed to the first daughter in each generation.”

  Eleanor considered what that would mean. “And what if there isn’t one, a daughter?”

  “Quite. Exactly right. When it came to it, when your great-grandmother died, it jumped right over your granddad and went to Alice. Your mum was still young, and your grandfather felt a bit strange living here, in Alice’s house, once it passed over his head. He knew it was coming, of course, but hadn’t anticipated how he might feel about it, I suspect.” She shook her head and tossed one shoulder. “He found a good placement in a law firm there in New York, so they crossed the pond and made a good life of it. That’s the long and the short of it.”

  “They just left Alice? Here on her own?”

  Gwen pursed her lips and nodded solemnly. “She was ready for it. She was grown and good at it. She did just fine, but she missed your mum.”