Solsbury Hill Read online

  What an odd place, Eleanor thought. She had been in England for only two full days and already she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be in New York City. Unbidden, the scene in Miles’ bedroom came to her and she tried to push it away by leaning as far back on the swing as she could manage. She came close to touching the leaves on the branch with her toes. Her hair fell out of the bun and it did brush the ground. She felt it to the roots, and at the same time could hear the sound of Miles making love to the woman in his bed, heard him in that awful confusion she was there to witness as he was caught between ecstasy and dread, as he saw her seeing him through the doorway.

  Working the swing to its greatest height, she brought her arms forward and leapt to the ground. Her sweater kept her warm as she walked, preoccupied, with her jacket tied around her waist. When she came upon two crosses in the ground, she stopped. They stood about as high as a ten-year-old child, thick, chunky crosses so close together that whomever was buried beneath might be holding hands.

  Nausea overtook her and she wanted to sit down, but here the ground was muddy. Through a haze of feeling, she recalled an open grave. It was the wind, the swing, the exhaustion, she thought. Choked-down sobs turned her stomach sour as she remembered the day when her father stood beside her, not crying, the day of her mother’s funeral, when they placed the headstone on an empty grave. She had listened to recollected stories of her mother’s life, and prayers, but all she had in her head that morning was the passage she’d read in a book just days before of Heathcliff as he climbed into Catherine’s grave and cried out her name.

  Eleanor hurried away, back toward her room at Trent Hall, and when she looked back at the crosses, they seemed to turn toward her, with their arms spread wide and their chests lifted high.

  In the background of the days but particularly alone at night, Eleanor felt a certain anxiety: an urge to pick up her e-mail, text on her phone, read Twitter, find news from home.

  She’d lost track of time since she’d left New York, since she’d seen Miles on that day that was mixed up with bear claws in the morning and a pixie tangled in his sheets at night, but here she was lying in a bed on the other side of the world, in the middle of nowhere.

  Eleanor looked for a phone. There was no Internet connection in the house, and her cell phone had no signal, but she found a phone in the hall. She dialed Miles’ number and when he answered, she hung up.

  It was late at night and the small library was empty, but the fire was going. The chair was large enough for her to curl up in, and it was warmer by the fire than in her room, so she nestled there.

  Her breath rose and fell. The house was silent. Wind and rain and crashes of thunder outside with flashes of lightning she could see right through the thick curtains. She’d brought her mother’s letters downstairs, to read them for a while.

  The first one she pulled out of the pile, she’d read years before and remembered. Her mother had written to her from a trip she was on in North Carolina. She wrote about the shoreline and the low gray skies. How cold it was at night on the beach, but when she wrapped up in sweaters and a slicker, it was fine. Her handwriting was even and curvy, elegant and refined.

  Eleanor picked another letter at random, pulled it from the middle of the pile. It was a letter she hadn’t seen before. A letter to her father from her mother, written in Yorkshire, while they were engaged. Anne spoke of the imminent wedding, suggested a quiet elopement and beside this had drawn a smiling face. She’d been in London and had seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was on her way to Stonehenge in the morning. She wrote John that she missed him terribly, that at night she sat on the edge of the fountain in the courtyard and imagined he might be looking up at the same moon. She made him promise to come, promise never to let her come back to Yorkshire without him. It was all love and purple prose: they would take their honeymoon in Jamaica and find the waterfall they’d seen in a brochure. Eleanor put the letter back into its envelope.

  Relaxed by the sounds and the flames of the fire, Eleanor was finally growing tired. She pulled a pink envelope from the bottom of the pile. It was addressed to Martin Garrens in Scarborough, England, but there was no stamp, no postmark, and the envelope was empty. She unfolded the back flap and caught the scent of her mother’s perfume. She had expected to cry when she sat next to Alice, but she hadn’t. Now, the scent of her mother was strong and tears came. She closed the envelope and opened it again, brought it to her face and inhaled.

  Eleanor reached for another envelope and saw the return address from Martin Garrens in North Carolina. The letter was simple. It started, Dear Anne, I’m still on the beach watching the sun come up, because that’s where my memory keeps you . . . The body never bartered with the truth. Eleanor’s heart clenched at the intimation of an affair.

  But she read on and found the rest was a common letter to a friend in which he asked mostly about her, about Eleanor, about the play she’d been in and the basketball games her team had won, about the weather he heard they were having in New York. Tucked in the envelope was a note in her mother’s hand that read, There’s a storm outside, so El and I are going to make Thunder Cake from the Polacco book you sent her. There’s a recipe for wonderful chocolate cake at the back. A chocolate wonder with strawberries inside and one on top. We’ll eat a piece for you. Always, sincerely, your Annie. He seemed to have received the note and sent it back because below her signature, in another hand, was written, I can picture the cozy scene and can just taste the strawberry.

  Eleanor gathered the letters together, pulled her sweater close, and closed her eyes. Her heart let go and now it fluttered. Her eyes beat like butterfly wings under the lids and the sky was bright white inside the dream she fell into, where there was a snowy white owl, close up, turning its head all around and batting its wide eyes slowly. A knowing owl who watched Eleanor as she folded letters into airplanes and made them fly, letters that disappeared against the white sky and then the snow on the ground, when they landed. The owl’s tree oozed sap that dripped onto the ground where Eleanor lay and Mead arrived on a horse, covered her with a blanket, then stepped away into the fireplace and burned in the flames.

  She startled awake, wiped drool from the corner of her mouth, oriented her eyes.

  “I was set to stir the fire a bit. I wakened you,” he said.

  She rubbed her eyes. Her body stretched, writhed like a waking cat, an involuntary shiver, and she ran her fingers through her hair.

  “I’ve been considering carrying you upstairs over an hour now.”

  Eleanor moaned. “I’ve been sleeping that long? God, I’m glad you didn’t. I would have been scared.”

  He sat down.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Three or four, I’d say, the fire will burn awhile more.”

  “What are you doing up so early, or didn’t you go to bed?” she asked him.

  “No, I did. I slept.” He gazed beyond her face, into the fire. “I woke up at two or so and went in to check on Alice,” he said. “And what about you? Your clock still boggled by travel, eh?”

  “You know, it’s not just that. I hadn’t realized how much tension I held in my body till it started to unwind. That first day walking on the moors I could feel it, and now I’m this strange new mix of vivified and ready to sleep at the drop of a hat.”

  He sat down with his legs wide and his fists dropped between his thighs, his shoulders collapsed. “I must say I’m glad you’re here. Maybe I was hoping to wake you.” He looked despondent.

  “What’s wrong?” She sat up.

  “I just happened to wake and come in the house, which I don’t often do. Alice was barely breathing. Of course Gwen was there already. Should we have come to get you? I didn’t think of it . . .”

  Her hair was all mussed and her eyes were unfocused.

  “The doctor’s here. Gwen’s up there, and if you want to see her, you m
ight . . .” He bobbed his head from side to side.

  “Will you come with me?”

  His eyes held her eyes and saw she hadn’t understood. “She’s gone,” he said. “She went just a while ago.”

  “Mead?” Empty and dry, she felt a stiff familiar feeling, the edge of going lifeless.

  “Yes, I’ll go with you. But we don’t have to go up, right now. We can stay here awhile, if you need to.”

  But she stood. She waited for him and they walked together to the stairs, where she stopped because she felt herself moving like bones without flesh and blood attached to them, a skeleton swinging its limbs making its way through space on to the next thing that had to be done. She thought she was going to faint from the emptiness.

  “Would you take my arm?”

  He took her arm as they mounted the stairs.

  The bedroom doors were open. Eleanor saw the doctor was there. Gwen was lying on the bed beside Alice’s body.

  “I can’t believe she’s dead,” Eleanor whispered. “I don’t know if I should go in.”

  “You should go in,” he said. “You can’t do wrong here. You belong here.” His accent seemed strong with a Yorkshire lilt now.

  She hesitated a long time.

  “You don’t need me to give you a hug, do you?” he said. Rough and sweet and young and sad.

  Alice’s face was already blue-gray. Gwen climbed off the bed when she saw Mead and Eleanor come in. She hooked an arm into each of theirs and said, “I can’t cry unless I lie down beside her.”

  It all seemed so strange, so warm and convivial. Tilda brought tea and small sandwiches into the room and set them on a table. When Eleanor’s mother had died, her body remained in England. When her father had died, they took him away before she had a chance to see him. The housekeeper found his body and they had him in a big black bag coming down the front stairs when she burst into the house, unaware. The boy who, just then, let his end of the gurney fall looked mortified. In weeks or months, a wood box came in the mail with her father’s dusty remains inside.

  She’d never seen a dead body, but here was Alice, whom she’d kissed just hours before. Time and change were overwhelming her.

  Gwen joined Eleanor where she sat in the bay window. She drew up the wheelchair and sat in it to drink her tea, saying to Eleanor in a hushed tone, “I lay beside her and prayed she might hear me say a few last words of love. I’m not a believer, but I was praying that God might be able to tell her I was lying there waiting for her to smile at me, when suddenly she turned her head and gave me a wink. A saucy old Alice wink.” Tears streamed down the fine woman’s lovely old face. “Wherever she’s going, she’ll be altogether well there.” Gwen nodded. “She was my only love. I can’t believe she’s on her way without me.”

  Mead sat on the lounge chair on the far side of the room, sitting still for the longest time and not speaking to anyone.

  “Is he going to be okay?” Eleanor spoke softly.

  “He is. They’ve had a good life together with no regrets, nothing left unsaid.”

  With a sharp pain behind her left eye and a headache in her temple, Eleanor felt a churning in her stomach. A feeling surged inside and she thought, I’m not a part of this, I shouldn’t be here. She felt cold, thought she might be sick, and stood up, asked if there was a bathroom nearby, and was shown to it by Granley, who seemed to come from nowhere and moved quickly with her on his arm.

  After the strong rain in the night, the bark of the trees was dense with saturated color and everything sparkled as if dappled with diamonds. The sun cut right across the moors as Eleanor walked away from the house in the early afternoon.

  She hadn’t gone to bed after Alice was gone. The coroner came in the early morning and the doctor signed papers releasing Alice’s body. Mead whispered things to Alice before she was taken down the stairs and out the front door on a stretcher, covered with a linen blanket, her face open to the air.

  Gwen called a friend, Mr. Wilcock, who would arrive at the house by early afternoon. The plans for cremation were already set, and Gwen sat with Mead in the library, both of them quiet, his arm around her on the couch by the fire. Tilda filled vases with flowers that had already begun to come from locals and friends from Cambridge.

  Outside, the snap of cold air on her skin felt good as Eleanor crossed the moors. The orange bark of the tree at the top of the hill was now the color of a persimmon after the rain, or deeper still. Eleanor sat on the swing and moved gently back and forth, her cheek against the damp worn velvet. Dreamily, she turned the swing around and around as she tried to recall her mother’s face, the way she moved, the things she’d taught her.

  The swing was a comfort. On it, she felt like a little girl. Feelings she’d put aside since her mother died came back to her, abiding and ineffable. Eleanor lifted her feet off the ground and the swing spun in mad circles unwinding itself, then winding back in on itself, then back again until it stopped. It seemed the wind on the open moors never stopped. “Mother,” she whispered and listened for an answer.

  She remembered a picture her mother had had on the wall of her sewing room. It was a large, bright watercolor of a woman serene on the back of a churning crocodile. The Never Not Broken Goddess, she was called, her mother had said. A creature unafraid of heartache, of pain, of being broken in two, who stands on the back of a crocodile that doesn’t snap at its prey but whips and spins her into a state of perfect confusion.

  Eleanor took the long way home to avoid seeing the crosses again and ran into Granley.

  “They’ll heal most anything, the moors will,” Granley said as she came in through the gate.

  “The air’s been good for me.”

  “You’re a bonnie walker for a city lass. You’ve got a good bit of Alice in ye, and it’ll serve you well.” He started away then stopped. “Aye, you’ll not ’ave seen the abbey, ’ave ye? She’s right beyond that hillock there, ’round the other side of the house. Take you no time at all to get there and the sun’s still high. Head straight that way over th’ hill and you’ll recognize her.”

  “Recognize who?”

  He saw the fear in her eyes and assuaged it with a wink. “The abbey. She’s a girl.”

  “I’m sorry.” She lifted her long neck into the wind. “I’m on a scavenger hunt and I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

  “Scavengers don’t.”

  “Well, I’m going to find this abbey to start.”

  The mist was waist high at the far side of the house and she stepped gingerly through the dense foliage there, found the strength to climb the steep side of the hill, and descended into a valley where she saw the abbey in the distance. Gray stone against the blue sky, its bare bones still standing. It was an emptied ruin flooded with light and ivy that climbed inside the broken walls.

  Through a Gothic arch in the thick outside wall, she stepped into a long arcade with a low, rib-vaulted ceiling so strong it had withstood wind and time altogether intact. She smelled the damp earth, the cold stone, her own body, and the clothes she’d spent the night in. She proceeded through the darkness, through the bones of the abbey, the walls so close she could touch them both with her hands, a splash of sun in a circle of light and then darkness again. At the far end of the long arcade, there was a rounded archway that drew her. Now she smelled fresh green moss and faint lavender.

  Through the archway she stepped into a courtyard, a cloister with broken-down stone columns, and on the other side of these the land fell away down a steep face. Close to the edge of the hill, Eleanor bent forward to see what lay below, and on a smooth flat stone she saw the young woman.

  Eleanor’s heart beat so hard her hands trembled, but she went to the edge of the cliff. Though she felt herself rushing, she was careful as she held tight to the edge of a rock and reached with steadiness to the next ledge and so to the next one as she climbed down.


  The only place her feet could stand on the flat stone, once she arrived, was inches away from the young woman’s hand. She was more beautiful than Eleanor remembered. She seemed more mature, and her skin was so light it appeared pale blue.

  “I come to watch the sun set,” the young woman said.

  Eleanor felt awkward, perched there with nowhere to stand but almost on the woman’s hand.

  “I was hoping you would come down,” the woman said. “Do sit. Standing there could be a risk to you, if a gust should blow by.”

  As impossible as it was that she was here, waiting for her on the side of a hill, Eleanor accepted it as if it were normal.

  “Shall I tell you why?” the woman asked.

  Eleanor nodded, but was not hearing her words. She was sure the woman had been younger when she first saw her sitting at the end of the bed, but now she seemed like someone about her own age. The deliberate way she moved was unusual, something contained and formal with a different sense of timing. Her body lacked tone, her head moved slowly, when she talked, as if she were underwater or in a dream. She wore a dress that was distinctly unmodern, in a deep blue fabric made of wool thicker than any wool Eleanor had ever seen. The seams were hand-sewn.

  Eleanor believed that if she reached to touch her, her hand might pass right through the dress and the body, but she didn’t feel frightened. Eleanor was sad and tired, and somehow the woman’s presence soothed her.

  “From here we could walk to the house and I’ll show you,” the woman said.

  Eleanor hadn’t been listening, but responded, “The house I’m in? I know the way. Once I get back to the top, I know the way.”