Chapter Five
FIVE
SO LIFE AT Harfold goes on, the year creeping forward.
When I first came here, it felt like the long, dry summer would never break, but now the air is increasingly chill, the weather turned grey and wet.
I move my attention to all the things that need doing in preparation for the winter months, putting the garden into hibernation.
I collect seeds and cuttings for storage, plant in the spring bulbs, sow early kitchen garden vegetables, transport the faded remains of tomato and cucumber plants from the greenhouse to the compost heap – the glorious richness of decay already hanging about them.
Next year, they’ll nourish the new plants.
I love the cycle of it, the repetition. Whatever changes in life, wherever I end up, the patterns of the garden will always be the same.
There’s a comfort in that. Mrs Allen reveals several recipes for gourds that are no more flavourful than her summertime fare – another thing that doesn’t change.
A fraction of her chill against me has lifted since I confronted her about it, but we still aren’t precisely amicable.
Arabella doesn’t invite me into the manor again, but we continue with our chats at the windows.
She might show me her latest needlepoint project.
Sometimes I’ll bring her a sprig of garden blooms. She doesn’t seem to leave the house much; that night I followed her over the fields is the only time I’ve seen her outside.
By contrast, Reacher is always in and out.
He joins us at Harfold fairly often, normally staying several nights at a time, a large trunk strapped to the back of his car and a covered cage in the passenger seat beside him.
I haven’t yet caught a glimpse of whatever feathered friend he keeps in there, but I can sometimes hear it singing down from his open bedroom window, a mournful sort of tune.
He spends his days either dashing to mysterious meetings with reams of paper poking out from his briefcase, or dressed more casually for a spot of birding.
Always makes a point to stop and share a joke with me, though.
November arrives in a cold snap, and with it, Guy Fawkes Day.
‘D’you want to come down to the village with us tonight?
’ Tom asks, catching me at the well in the morning.
‘Me and Nora were going to see the Guy getting burned.’ He stamps his feet in the cold.
Even from here, his big, shapeless coat smells as if Mutton has been using it as a bed, which – knowing the dog’s habits – is likely the case.
‘I could do with that bleeding bonfire now, mind you.’
‘Maybe,’ I reply. ‘If you think they won’t mind.
I don’t really know anyone, like.’ I’m only realizing now that I haven’t spent much time in Harfold village at all, apart from to walk through it a handful of times.
I’ve been so preoccupied with the manor.
With Arabella. I should have made more of an effort to meet my new neighbours.
Go to the pub, to church. Not to get overly familiar, but enough to establish myself as a trusted figure in the community. ‘You know what? Yes, I’d like that.’
‘Smashing,’ says Tom, punctuating this with another heavy stamp. ‘I’ll come by and knock later, then. After supper.’
It’s been years since I did anything to mark the occasion.
I’ve avoided public gatherings ever since what happened with the Reeses, always afraid someone will recognize me from the papers.
And before that, there was the war: the Defence of the Realm Act and its ban on anything that might be used to signal enemy forces.
The lighting of fireworks and bonfires was forbidden.
There was a short period of grace in between those two events, but even so, I’ve spent fewer years celebrating than not celebrating over the past decade.
I have the sense that Arabella hasn’t had much cause for celebration recently either, so when I spot her through the morning room window later in the day, I step over to the glass, thinking I might invite her along.
Pause for a moment to watch her. She has an open notebook in her lap, into which she’s scribbling with an ink pen – too far away to see what, but it looks like words.
Shoulders hunched, expression completely engrossed.
Her hair’s loose, so she has to keep tossing it back to keep it from falling over the page, and I find myself smiling at the impracticality of not just tying it up – that’s Arabella all over, that is, the same as the torn dress she refuses to let Mrs Allen mend, the food she won’t eat until someone else has cut it into pieces.
She’s so stubborn in her ways, even when the smallest change could make her life that much easier.
When I rap, she jolts up in shock, looking round before her eyes fall on me.
The alarm in her face gives way to a relaxed welcome, and she presses the book closed – not pausing to blot – and places it to one side.
A green leather binding. Rises to come to the window, pushing up the sash so that we can talk.
The ill-maintained wood sticks, squealing, so she has to force it.
‘Sorry to bother you—’ I start.
‘It’s no bother at all.’ She smiles, releasing the sash and standing back experimentally to see that it stays.
When it doesn’t immediately come slicing back down, she leans forward over the sill, resting her elbows there.
The morning sun plays pale over her face, a silver wash catching the ridge of her upper lip, the fine hairs and the frown lines.
She has an ink stain on the right index finger.
I nod down at it. ‘What were you writing just now, then?’
‘Writing?’ She half glances behind her, back to the notebook. ‘Oh, that. It’s nothing. A diary of sorts. Self-indulgent habit.’
Propping myself with one shoulder against the wall, I raise my eyebrows. ‘Would you let me read it?’
A barbed flash in her pupils. ‘You must never touch it.’ The words are fierce and sudden, like an animal lashing out in panic.
‘I’m sorry, it was just a joke …’
As if catching herself, she laughs. Scowl melts away.
‘No, I am sorry. How ridiculous of me. It’s just that it is personal, isn’t it?
It was not written for other people to read.
It would hardly make sense, I really just write down whatever I am thinking in the moment – no matter how trivial.
’ She runs her finger absently over a pad of moss that’s growing on the windowsill.
A woodlouse scuttles away, its nest disturbed.
‘It would be dreadfully depressing, anyway: just lots of people dying. There is nothing titillating, I can assure you.’
I shrug. ‘Oh well, still plenty of time for that.’
This seems to tickle her, as she laughs again, throwing back her head. A vein shows blue through the exposed skin of her throat.
‘Speaking of which …’ I say, flicking my gaze away from her and out over the lawn to the distant church tower. ‘Me and the Allens were going to see the fireworks this evening, if you fancy a trip out? Could be a bit of fun.’
‘How thoughtful,’ says Arabella. When I turn back to her, she’s watching my face. ‘But I shall regretfully decline. The village folk will hardly want me there. It would be like having one’s parents at a birthday party.’
‘I’m sure they wouldn’t—’
‘Anyway, I don’t like to leave the manor grounds these days, if I can help it.
’ She shifts her position, back straightening.
‘I know how this sounds, but it puts a dread in me to go beyond them. I can’t bear it.
’ Her voice has an artificial lightness, as if trying to conceal the depth of this statement.
‘What about that time I saw you in the fields?’ I ask. A quick flush of heat in my chest as I remember my behaviour on that occasion, chasing her down.
‘That was an exception. The full moon …’ She touches a hand to her mouth, pulling down on the lower lip. Flash of white teeth. ‘Would you believe me if I said I was looking for the lucky hare?’
‘You mean that folk tale about James Lascy?’
Arabella pulls a scrap of moss off the windowsill, flicking it down to the ground below.
‘I know it’s just a story, but it was something we did as children – Mummy would take us out on the Plain to look.
We did see hares, of course, but never a dancing one.
And in recent years, since everything that’s …
Well, I like to keep up the tradition. It helps me to remember them all. ’
I picture her again on that night, with her lantern. Her search had seemed so determined, so methodical. It wasn’t simply light-hearted reminiscing and, if she really had been looking for the hare, then finding it was much more important to her than she was admitting.
‘Well,’ says Arabella, breaking the silence, ‘you enjoy yourself at the bonfire, Vee. I shall be quite all right up here on my own.’
I eat a quick supper of bread and butter, then prepare myself to go out, putting on a clean set of overalls layered with a woolly cardigan, coat, scarf and hat over the top. There’s a frost in the air tonight.
Tom, Mrs Allen and I take the shortcut over the fields, our breaths misting white.
Clouds scud across a gibbous moon. It would have been full a few days ago, and I wonder if that means Arabella had been out again, searching for her hare.
I can’t see the difference – why she could face doing that, but not this.
Mutton bounds about us in ecstasy, not believing his good luck to have a walk with three people at once. ‘Watch he doesn’t eat those sheep turds,’ says Tom, without much severity in his voice.