Chapter 5
“You’ll need your coat,” Cynthia said. “And your boots. The sensible ones.”
Rose looked up from the table, where she had not been eating her breakfast, having perfected the art of moving porridge around a bowl without it visibly diminishing. “Where are we going?”
“Outside.”
Rose looked at the window. Outside, the October morning offered an invitation: clear sky, low gold light, the heath bright and still after days of rain.
It was, objectively, a fine morning. It was also outside, which Rose had not been since Cynthia arrived, and which Cynthia had been constructing, quietly and without announcement, for the better part of two weeks.
“Mrs. Poole says the east field gets boggy after rain,” Rose said.
“Then we’ll avoid the east field.”
“She also says the stream runs fast in October.”
“We’ll avoid the stream.”
Rose considered this for a moment. She picked up her spoon, set it down, and looked at the window again. Outside, a lapwing crossed the sky with decisive energy.
“All right,” Rose said. It was not a concession. It was permission.
Cynthia said nothing. She went to find her own coat and did not let her face do anything in particular.
***
The moors received them without ceremony.
They did not welcome you nor did they object to you.
They simply continued being exactly what they were, enormous, wind-scoured and indifferent to opinion, and if you wished to walk across them, you were at liberty to do so.
Cynthia found this extremely restful. She had spent a significant portion of her life in rooms where she was required to be aware of her effect at all times.
The heath’s complete lack of interest in her was something she had not known to desire until she had it.
Rose walked beside her, with her hands in her coat pockets and her eyes taking in everything, bright, quick and hungry in a way that her face in the schoolroom was not.
She noticed things. She pointed to a cluster of late-flowering gorse and said its name, then corrected herself: “That might be whin. They’re similar. ”
“Is there a difference?”
“My father said there’s always a difference if you look carefully enough.”
Cynthia looked more carefully. “The petals on this one are slightly smaller, I think.”
“That might be whin, then.” Rose looked at it with satisfaction. “Or it might just be a small gorse.”
“We’ll call it whin until someone tells us otherwise.”
“You can’t just decide what things are called.”
“You absolutely can,” Cynthia said. “That’s more or less how all naming works. Someone at some point looked at a thing and said: I’m going to call this whin, and everyone agreed, and that was that.”
Rose appeared to find this philosophically troubling. She walked on with the slightly furrowed brow of a child working through an argument she had not yet found a flaw in, but was confident that it contained one.
The heather was brown and gold now, past its purple season, but the texture was extraordinary, dense and intricate and the ground beneath it soft with accumulated years.
Cynthia reached down, pulled a sprig and handed it to Rose without comment.
Rose took it, turned it over in her fingers and put it in her pocket.
They walked without any particular destination because Cynthia had learned that Rose moved better without one.
She was investigating a patch of clover at the edge of a slight rise when she turned and said, entirely without preamble: “Can you make a clover crown?”
“I can try,” Cynthia said, which was accurate. “I warn you the results may be approximate.”
“I’ll help.”
They sat down on the rise, which was damp through their skirts within thirty seconds and entirely worth it, and they made a clover crown.
It was an enterprise that required more negotiation than Cynthia had anticipated; Rose had strong views about the correct way to interlock the stems, views that differed from Cynthia’s in several important respects.
They had a productive argument that ended in a method that satisfied neither of them but produced a crown of sufficient structural integrity to be placed on Rose’s head without immediate collapse. Rose wore it with absolute serenity.
“You have a bit of a lean,” Cynthia said.
“That’s the style.”
“Is it?”
“My father used to make terrible ones. He could never get the stems right.” She said this with the easy warmth of someone accessing a good memory, and Cynthia, hearing the shift, stayed very quiet.
“He’d make me one, and it would fall off before we got back to the house, and he’d try to fix it, but he would make it worse, and the nurse would say he was creating more problems than he was solving.
” A small pause. “He said that was his general approach to most things.”
Cynthia smiled. “He sounds like someone who liked to be honest about himself.”
“He was.” Rose looked at the open country.
The crown sat on her head at its slight lean, the morning light catching her face, warmer, more open, some careful thing in her unwound by the space and air.
“He used to bring me outside before he got sick. He said the fell was the best thing about Yorkshire, which the nurse said was because he hadn’t lived there long enough to know better.
” A short laugh, unguarded and clear. “But he meant it. He really liked it here.”
“I think I understand that now,” Cynthia said. “I didn’t, at first. But it’s got something in it. Some quality.”
“It doesn’t pretend,” Rose said simply. “It’s just itself. All the time.”
Cynthia looked at her. At eight years old, this child understood something that most adults spent decades working toward.
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly that.”
They found the stream about a mile from the house, following the line of a shallow valley between two rises where the ground grew softer, the grass a brighter green, and the sound of water began to come through the wind.
It was clear, cold and moving over flat stones with the muttering industry of something that had a schedule and intended to keep it.
Rose crouched at the bank and looked into it with complete, focused attention. She picked up a stone, turned it over, put it back, and picked up another.
“My father could skip stones,” she said.
“As can I,” Cynthia said, which was true in the sense that her ability to fold paper birds was true: technically accurate and generously interpreted.
“Show me.”
Cynthia selected a flat, smooth disk of gray shale with all the confidence she could muster and threw it. It hit the water, bounced once, skidded sideways, and sank.
“One skip,” Rose said.
“A strong first effort.”
“My father got seven.”
“Your father was evidently a man of hidden talents. Your turn.”
Rose studied the available stones with rigor and selected one Cynthia would not have chosen, thicker than she would have thought right, and more oval than flat. She crouched low, sideways, muscle memory from someone showing her, and she threw.
It hit the water and sank immediately.
Rose stared at it. Then at Cynthia. “That’s worse than yours.”
“It was a very decisive entry into the water. No hesitation at all.”
“That’s not a compliment.”
“It’s an observation.”
Rose found another stone. She threw it, but it sank again. She threw a third, which achieved, by some generosity of physics, two hops before declining into the current. She stood up straight, satisfied with the result, and prepared to call it sufficient.
“Two,” Cynthia said.
“I know.”
“Better than mine.”
“One is better than none,” Rose said, which was, Cynthia thought, a philosophy she might borrow.
They tried for a few more minutes, neither of them improving substantially.
The stream continued with its schedule, indifferent to their efforts.
Rose threw one that ricocheted off a protruding boulder and flew at a surprising angle onto the far bank, which was not a skip but was, they agreed, more interesting.
Cynthia achieved two skips and felt unreasonably pleased.
Rose laughed, the real, open laugh, and it came twice more before they decided it was time to walk back.
They took the longer path, the one that followed the stream before it curved away south and then cut across the heath toward the estate.
The light had shifted, the gold going deeper and cooler, the shadows stretching.
Rose had another handful of heather in her pocket and a small stone with a hole through it that she had found at the stream and was holding it as though the world had been keeping it specifically for her.
Cynthia was half a step behind her, watching where she put her feet on the path, when it happened.
The path dipped between two rises of moorland, and at the bottom of the dip, a narrow stream branch cut across it; not the main stream, just an overflow channel, a foot wide and a foot deep and full of the black peaty water that ran off the moor after rain.
Rose was small and nimble and crossed it in a single step.
Cynthia reached up to unhook a piece of gorse that had caught her coat sleeve, bending forward as she did…
And felt the sharp, cold catch against the back of her neck.
She straightened and put her hand up. Her fingers found the chain, her uncle’s chain, the thin silver one she had not taken off since the morning of his funeral, and the clasp was open.
The chain slid, but she grabbed for it and caught the cross in her fingers and exhaled.
Then her foot shifted on the muddy edge of the ditch, and the cross slipped from her grip, and the necklace fell.
Into the ditch. Into the black, peaty, cold water, which received it with a small, indifferent splash and swallowed it entirely.
Cynthia stood at the edge of the ditch and looked down.