The brass bell above the door of Loxley's Rest clanged twice before Maud Stapleford had time to do more than lift her chin from the newspaper. Through the salt-streaked window, she watched old Mr. Pip shuffle past with Petunia straining at the lead, the terrier's nose pressed to the ground as though the pavement itself held some urgent communiqué requiring immediate signature.
The pub's interior smelled of peat smoke and lemon polish, a combination Maud had grown up with on the coast and still found more comforting than any quantity of expensive cologne. She had claimed the window seat at the back precisely because it afforded a view of Thornwood Lane's lower switchback, and from here she could see, just, the iron gate at the lane's crest where the hedgerow grew thick and dark even in midsummer. There was a particular quality to that gate, she had always thought, a quality of having been shut for a very long time and of resenting the suggestion that it might be opened.
Behind the bar, Barnaby Loxley was in full throat.
"Forty years," he was saying to the assembled company, which on this Tuesday afternoon consisted of three farmers, a farrier's apprentice, and a woman Maud did not recognise who wore a hat pinned with a stuffed kingfisher whose glass eyes caught the lamp. "Forty years the bonnet of that thing has not seen so much as a sparrow's reflection, and I will tell you now, Mrs. Featherstone, if the Quigley lad cannot coax it back to life, then nobody can. And I include myself, and I include the man who built the blessed thing in the first place, whoever that unfortunate soul may have been."
Maud turned a page she had already read twice.
"It is not that the lad cannot," said a quieter voice from the corner. Mr. Pip had arrived without her noticing, settling into his usual armchair with the careful precision of a man who believed furniture ought to be respected and not sat upon without ceremony. Petunia curled at his feet and began, with great delicacy, to gnaw a biscuit that bore no resemblance to any known commercial brand. "It is that the old man has forbidden it. I was up the lane this morning, delivering the post as I do on Tuesdays. He came to his own gate and told me, in three languages, to go away."
That silenced the room for a moment. Barnaby laughed, but it was the kind of laugh that covers surprise rather than causes it. "Three languages, is it? Well. That sounds about right for Ptolemy Vex."
"Ptolemy," murmured the woman with the kingfisher hat, as though tasting the word and finding it underripe. "An uncommon name."
"It is an uncommon man," said Mr. Pip, stroking his waistcoat with the air of a man tidying his own thoughts. "Or he was, once. Now I think he is only uncommon in the way that a stopped clock is uncommon. Still striking the same hour. Still certain it is correct."
Maud folded her paper. Outside, the light had begun to thicken toward evening, and the lane's shadows were already pooling at the foot of the hill like spilled ink. At the very top, barely visible, the chimneys of Thornwood House cut the sky like broken teeth in the jaw of something long dead.
"What I want to know," said Barnaby, refilling his glass with a generosity that suggested it was not his first, "is what he intends to do with the thing. You cannot keep a motor in a barn for four decades and expect it to remain a motor. That is not how motors work. They are not patient creatures, Mrs. Featherstone. They are not like us. They resent neglect, and they show it."
"The Quigleys have always looked after it," said the farrier's apprentice, who had not spoken until now and seemed startled by the sound of his own voice. He reddened to the ears. "The grandfather, I mean. And the father. And now Wren."
"Wren," repeated Barnaby, and the way he said it suggested a familiarity that went beyond mere village acquaintance. There was something proprietary in the syllable, something that might have been pride or might have been something less comfortable. "Aye, Wren Quigley is up there every other Tuesday with her box of rags and her little tin of oil. Talks to the thing as though it were a sick child. I have seen her at it from the lower field, when I was checking the fence."
Maud knew this too. She had walked that lane herself, once, on an errand she could no longer quite remember, and had come upon Wren Quigley crouched beside the open bonnet of a car so old and so layered in dust that its colour was a matter for archaeology rather than paint charts. The girl had looked up, seen Maud, and said only, "She likes the company." Then she had returned to her work, humming something Maud did not recognise, her hands steady among the greasy innards of a machine that had outlived its purpose and might, if asked politely, be persuaded to outlive it a little further.
That had been in the spring, when the lane was bright with celandines and the air off the sea carried gulls. Now it was July, and the lane was thick with the smell of cut grass and, faintly, of brine drifting up from the coast road three miles south. Maud could taste the salt on the back of her tongue if she paid attention, which she did, because her father had raised her to pay attention.
"The question," said Mr. Pip, "is not whether Wren can start the car. The question is whether Ptolemy Vex wishes her to."
"Why wouldn't he?" asked the woman with the hat.
Mr. Pip did not reply at once. He took a biscuit from his pocket, examined it with the seriousness of a jeweller assessing a stone, and offered it to Petunia, who accepted it with the gravity of a bishop receiving communion. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped half a register.
"Because, Mrs. Featherstone, there are rumours. You have heard the talk about the manuscript. About the bidding war. About what it is that Mrs. Hollyberry wants so badly that she has sent her own apprentice archivist to scour the county's attics and outbid every man who fancies himself a collector."
Maud's hand, which had been reaching for her teacup, stilled.
"That is not village talk," said Barnaby, but his voice was less certain now. The glass he had been raising paused somewhere between the bar and his mouth. "That is the kind of talk that gets a man into trouble."
"All talk gets a man into trouble," said Mr. Pip mildly, "if the man in question has ears. And Ptolemy Vex, whatever else may be said of him, has never been short of ears. He hears everything. He simply chooses not to reply."
Outside, the light failed another degree. The lane was a dark tongue now, pointing up the hill toward the chimneys that no longer smoked. Maud watched a figure begin the long climb on foot, small against the greyness, and knew before she could see the face that it was Wren. The girl walked the way her father had walked, and her grandfather before him, with the particular gait of those who have accepted a duty they did not choose and intend to honour it regardless of weather, discouragement, or the express wishes of the gentleman at the top of the hill.
Barnaby saw her too. He set down his glass with the careful deliberation of a man putting aside something he no longer wished to drink.
"I will tell you one thing," he said, "that I have not said in company before. Last Michaelmas, when the Hollyberry woman came through with her little retinue and her measuring tape and her catalogues, I was asked, as a neighbour and a man of some standing in the parish, whether I would be willing to take a look at the Vex place. To see, as she put it, what manner of household kept itself up there. What manner of household warranted the attention of a person of her consequence."
"And?" said Maud, before she could stop herself.
"And I said no." Barnaby's broad face had lost its customary good humour, the way a hillside loses colour when the sun goes behind a cloud. "I said no, because I have known the Quigleys since I was a lad in short trousers, and I will not be the one to put a spoke in their wheel. Whatever the old man has locked up there, whatever it is that the manuscript wants, it is not my business. And it is not Mrs. Hollyberry's. And it is not, Mrs. Stapleford, if you will pardon my saying so, the business of anyone who has not been invited through the gate."
The room was very quiet. Petunia crunched her biscuit. Somewhere in the kitchen a kettle began to sing, and nobody moved to lift it from the hob.
Maud thought of the lighthouse at home, of her father's habit of saying that some lights were meant to be kept burning and others were meant to be allowed to go out, and that the trick was in knowing which was which. She had never been certain what he meant, not fully, but she suspected, sitting here in Loxley's Rest with the evening coming on and the lane climbing toward its secret, that she was nearer to understanding it than she had been that morning.
"I was not proposing to call," she said.
"No," said Barnaby, and his grin came back, broad and weatherbeaten, a grin that had talked its way out of more awkward corners than this one. "But you were thinking about it. I know the look. It is the same look Wren gets when she is about to climb that hill, and it is the same look her father had, and his father before him, and if you ask me it is the look of someone who has heard a clock striking and intends to find out whether it is correct."
Maud did not deny it. She watched Wren's small figure disappear into the shadows at the lane's crest, where the gate stood shut and the house waited, and somewhere behind it the car in its barn slept its long dusty sleep, patient as a promise, stubborn as the man who had refused to wake it.
She finished her tea. The cup, when she set it down, made a small precise sound against the saucer, and Mr. Pip glanced at her, and Petunia's ears lifted, and Barnaby said nothing at all, which was, for him, the loudest thing he could have said.
The lane climbed, and Wren climbed with it.
She had walked the coast paths of Inishmaan since she was old enough to tie her own boots, and she had crossed the bog planks in winter when the ground tried to swallow her ankles, and she had climbed the lighthouse tower in a southwesterly so strong it tried to lift her off her feet. Thornwood Lane, by comparison, was a gentle slope. But it was a long gentle slope, and it turned in upon itself twice before it reached the gate, and by the time she topped the first rise her breath was coming harder than she cared to admit.
The light was going. Not gone, not yet, but thinning to that particular quality the Irish called the blue hour, when the land lost its colour and became a study in greys and darker greys, and the sky above it turned the colour of a faded curtain pulled back from a window. Behind her, down in the hollow where Loxley's Rest sat with its chimney drawing, the lamps were being lit, and she could see, if she turned, the small orange wink of Petunia's stable lantern.
She did not turn. She had business ahead.
The path was mud and old roots and the occasional jut of stone that had worked its way up through the earth like a sleeper restless in a too-narrow bed. Her boots were not the right boots. They were the ones she wore for the archive room at the Hollyberry estate, where the floor was stone and the dust was old and the worst hazard was a tottering stack of ledgers. They had been her sister's boots first, and before that her mother's, and the leather had gone soft at the ankles in a way that let the damp in if she stood too long in one place.
She did not stop. She lifted her feet high and set them down careful, and the only sound was the soft complaint of the wet earth giving under her weight, and her own breathing, and somewhere to her right, in the wood that crowded the lane on that side, the occasional dry rasp of a rook settling for the night.
The smell of the place came to her as she climbed. Wet leaf. Rotting bracken. The sharp green tang of holly, which had no business being there at this time of year but was, threaded through the undergrowth like a thrown handful of dark glass. And beneath it, something else, something she could not name. A cold mineral smell, like stone that had never seen the sun, like the inside of a church in February.
She thought of Maud, down below, with her teacup and her quiet face, and she thought of Barnaby with his grin and his horses and his way of saying exactly the wrong thing in exactly the right tone. She thought of her father. He had been dead nine years, and the lighthouse was unmanned now, automated, and the light went on and went off without anybody's hand upon the switch, and she still, sometimes, when the weather came in from the west and the air tasted of salt and old rope, found herself listening for his step on the stair.
The lane turned again, and there, ahead, the gate.
It was not the kind of gate you would put up to keep people out. It was the kind of gate you would put up to make people think twice about coming in. Wrought iron, black, the bars twisted at their tops into a pattern that might have been decorative and might have been a word in some language she did not read. The hinges were rusted in such a way that the whole structure leaned a little to the left, like a man listening. There was no bell. There was no nameplate. There was only the gate, and beyond it a path of crushed white stone, and beyond the path the shape of a house rising into the dimness, all gables and tall chimneys and the blank squares of windows that did not yet have lights in them.
Wren stopped at the gate and put her hand upon the top bar. The iron was cold enough to make her fingers ache.
She was reaching for the latch when the russet dog came around the corner of the house at a trot.
It was small, terrier-sized, with a coat the colour of a fox's back in autumn and ears that stood up at sharp points and a tail that was working, even now, even before she had done anything to deserve it, in a way that suggested the dog had not yet made up its mind about her but was leaning in the direction of goodwill. It stopped six feet from the gate and stood there, watching her, and its nose worked, and its tail went on working, and it did not bark.
"Well," Wren said.
The dog tilted its head. One ear up, one ear slightly down. The effect was one of polite interrogation.
"I'm here on business," she said. She felt foolish, talking to a dog at a stranger's gate in the last of the light, but she had spent enough time around Barnaby Loxley's animals to know that they took you at your word. "I'm here about a manuscript."
The dog's tail wagged twice. It took a step closer. Then another. It stopped just inside the gate, looking up at her with eyes the colour of wet tea leaves.
Wren lifted the latch.
The hinge screamed. The sound went up the lane and into the wood and was swallowed by the trees, but it did not seem to startle the dog, which simply backed up a step and waited for her to push the gate open and step through.
She did. The gate, when she let it go, swung shut behind her with a ponderous clang, and she heard the latch fall back into its place with a small decisive click that she did not much care for.
The path of crushed white stone crunched under her boots. The house was closer than it had seemed from the lane, and larger, and the windows were the kind that looked out at you without seeming to, like the eyes of a portrait. There was no light in any of them yet.
The lane bent where the oaks grew thickest, and at the bend the last of the evening sat in a thin yellow line along the top of the western wall, and below that line the world was already turning blue. Wren had been walking for perhaps five minutes when she heard the sound that stopped her: a high thin whine, the kind a machine makes when it is in distress and has not quite given up the ghost. Somewhere ahead, around the curve of the lane, just out of sight.
She slowed. The lane dipped there, where the road dipped into a hollow and came up again, and from where she stood she could see the tops of two small birch trees and, between them, the silhouette of something tall and angular that had not been there an hour ago. It looked, in the dusk, like a headless horseman leaning on a fence.
She came around the bend.
The machine was a motorbike, but a motorbike of the kind that her father would have called a thoroughbred, low slung and painted a deep improbable red that even in this light had a shine to it, the sort of red that you saw in old films and assumed had been retouched afterwards. It was propped on its stand at a tilt, and from under the bonnet a thin column of steam rose and dissolved into the cool air with a hissing complaint. The smell of it was metallic and sweet, the smell of overheated oil.
Beside the bike, with his back to her, a man was crouched on his haunches with a rag in one hand and the other hand somewhere inside the works. He was humming. The humming was tuneless and contented and, in the circumstances, faintly unreasonable.
"Excuse me," Wren said.
The man started, lost his balance, and sat down heavily on the lane. The rag flew from his hand and landed in the ditch. He looked up at her, and she looked down at him, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
He was younger than she had expected, somewhere on the far side of thirty, with a face that was broad and weather roughened and altogether too friendly for the kind of trouble he appeared to be in. His hair was the colour of straw and stood up in a cowlick at the front as if he had just removed a hat, and he had the kind of eyebrows that seemed to be conducting their own conversation above his eyes. Those eyes, when she caught them, were a very pale blue and were at that moment doing something between alarm and delight.
"Oh, lord," he said, in a broad voice that sounded as if it had been dragged across a Yorkshire moor. "Oh, lord, I am sorry, I thought for a second you were the ghost of old Mother whatsername from down the lane. You gave me a proper turn."
"I beg your pardon."
"No, no, my fault entirely. Shouldn't be hunkered down in a ditch at dusk like a badger, should I, only the old girl here has gone and made a meal of herself and I've been at her for the best part of twenty minutes and she won't have a word of it." He scrambled to his feet, brushed off the seat of his trousers with great ceremony, and then, as if remembering his manners, took off a leather cap that had been tucked under his arm and pressed it to his chest. "Barnaby Loxley," he said, with a bow that was about a quarter more elaborate than the occasion required. "At your service. Stuck, embarrassed, and grateful."
"Wren Quigley," she said.
"Quigley." He rolled the name around in his mouth as if tasting it. "That's Irish, isn't it. County Cork, if I'm not mistaken. My grandmother had a cousin who married a lad from somewhere round there. Lovely woman. Made a pudding out of, of all things, prunes and custard that I have never forgotten."
"I don't know that I'm related to your grandmother's cousin," Wren said, "but I'm glad the pudding lived up to the name."
He laughed. It was a sudden, full laugh, the kind that came out of him like a cork out of a bottle, and it startled a blackbird out of the hedge that had been settling down for the night. The blackbird protested, briefly, and went elsewhere.
"Right then, Miss Quigley, since you're here and you're upright and I'm very much not, might I ask a favour. Do you by any chance know anything about engines? Not the newfangled sort, the proper sort. The sort you have to coax, like a horse."
Wren looked at the bike. She looked at the steam, which had thinned but had not stopped. She looked at the man. He had the look of someone who would not have been out of place at a horse fair, in a green jacket and muddy boots, and she felt a small prickle of recognition that she could not at first place.
"I know a little," she said. "My father kept a small fishing boat and I learned to coax that."
"Champion. Champion, champion, champion." He beamed at her as if she had offered him the Crown Jewels. "Only, you see, I've come all the way down from the north on this blessed machine, and she ran like a dream for the first hundred and fifty miles, and then at the bottom of the hill she started making a noise that I did not care for, and by the time I got her round this bend she had turned into a kettle, and I have been peering at her innards and making small talk and she will not befriend me."
He stepped aside to let her look. The engine block was still hot enough that she could feel it without touching, and when she did touch it, briefly, with the back of her hand, the heat stung. The oil cap had worked itself loose. A wire near the carburettor had come off its terminal and was hanging by a thread.
"Did this happen all at once," she said, "or did she run hot for a bit first?"
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "Ah," he said, "now that you put it like that, she did start to feel a bit warm to me about ten miles back. I thought it was the weather."
"It wasn't the weather."
"No," he said, with the chastened air of a small boy who had been caught at the jam. "No, I don't suppose it was."
She could not see properly in this light. She pulled out the small torch she always carried, the one her father had given her when she was eleven and had first gone out on the boat with him alone, and clicked it on. The beam wobbled, and she steadied it against the bike's frame with one hand and began to work with the other. He watched her with the intent expression of a man who had been at sea and just spotted the harbour.
"You've done this before," he said.
"A bit."
"Not a bit. You've done this a proper lot. Look at your hands. Look at the way you're holding that." He crouched down again, on the other side of the bike, and his pale eyes studied her fingers on the wire. "You know what, I don't mind telling you, I'm relieved. I've been sitting here composing letters to my sister in which I confess I've come to grief on a country lane like a character out of a Trollope novel, and I'd been hoping I wouldn't have to post them."
"You might still have to post them," Wren said. "I haven't fixed her yet."
"No, but you're going to. I can tell. You've got the look."
"What look."
"The look that says you've had ten fathers and uncles and cousins and they've all put you to work on something with a temper, and you've come out the other side of it knowing more than they do but being too polite to say so." He paused, and beamed again. "I should know. I am the eldest of six and my father ran a stud farm."
Wren gave a small sound that was almost a laugh. She tucked the loose wire back onto its terminal, found a screwdriver in her pocket, and tightened it down. The engine made a small, acknowledging click, as if it had been listening to all of this and had decided, on the whole, to cooperate.
"There," she said. "That should hold you until you can get to a proper mechanic. There's one just at the foot of the hill, the village garage. I'm told the new proprietor has very capable hands."
He sat up. He had been leaning in so close that his nose had nearly been inside the engine, and now he drew back and stared at her.
"The new proprietor," he repeated. "The new owner of Hollyberry Motors. That's you?"
Wren did not say anything. She felt, suddenly, the colour in her cheeks, and she was glad of the dusk.
"My dear girl," Barnaby Loxley said, and his voice had lost its comedy edge and was, for a moment, simply and entirely warm. "My dear, dear girl. That is the best news I've had in a month of Sundays."
"It's not my garage," she said, quickly. "I'm only helping to run it. The owner is a friend."
"A friend who has very good sense, then, to put you at the front of the house." He got to his feet, properly this time, and dusted himself off again, with less ceremony but more thoroughness. Then he looked at her with the expression of a man about to make a small confession. "I should tell you, since we're being honest in the lane at dusk, the reason I'm on this contraption at all. I'm Barnaby Loxley of Loxley Stud, near Ripon, and I am a journalist."
She blinked. "A journalist."
"A freelance journalist. I write for the motoring journals. I've a piece due in at the end of the month, a feature about cars with character, you understand. The sort of motorcar that has a personality. The sort that argues with you. I've been down here to look at a few old things, and I have to be back in the north by Friday, and I had a very narrow escape on a hill just now, and then your good angel sent you round the bend."
"You might still break down again before you get to the village," Wren said.
"I might. I very well might." He took the cap from under his arm and placed it on his head with a small flourish, and the effect was so boyish, in a man of his size, that she had to bite the inside of her lip. "But if I do, I'll crawl to the door of Hollyberry Motors and ask for Miss Quigley by name, and I'll tell them she fixed my engine at the side of the road with a torch and a screwdriver and the temper of a saint."
"You'll do no such thing."
"I will. I will tell every man, woman, and child I meet between here and Yorkshire. I'm a journalist, Miss Quigley. It's what I do." He extended his hand, and after a moment she took it. His grip was firm and his palm was rough and warm, and he shook her hand twice, solemnly, as if they had just signed a contract.
Then he swung his leg over the bike, started it on the first kick, which surprised them both, and set off down the lane at a careful pace, the red of his machine dwindling in the dusk until it was only a small point of light at the foot of the hill. She heard him, faintly, singing. The blackbird had come back, and was answering him from the hedge.
Wren stood for a moment longer. She listened to the engine until she could not hear it any more, and she listened to the blackbird after that, and the small rustling of the wood, and somewhere in the distance, very far off, the low sound of the sea.
She thought about the house she had left behind her at the top of the lane, and the man who had sat in it, and the manuscript, and the things she had been asked to do, and the things she had refused. She thought about the lane, and the bike, and the man with the cowlick, and the laugh that had gone off like a rocket. She thought about her father's boat, and the torch he had given her, and the village she had not yet quite made her home.
She began to walk.
At the foot of the hill, where the lane met the road, the small square windows of Hollyberry Motors were lit. She could see, faintly, the shape of her uncle moving between them, and she quickened her step. There was tea, and there was a long evening ahead of her, and there was, somewhere up the lane behind her, the house at Thornwood with its closed eyes and its patience.
She did not look back. But she listened, all the way down the hill, for the sound of a blackbird singing in an oak tree, and for the small distant hum of an engine that might, or might not, have been Barnaby Loxley, riding home through the dusk to write, in his own hand, the first pages of a feature about a village garage, and the young woman who had met him at the bend.