The horses slowed at the crest of the lane, and through the bare branches of winter ash, Wrenfield appeared below like a bruise on the hillside. Mathilde Vance drew the gig to a halt and sat a moment, reins slack in gloved hands, watching smoke climb from a dozen chimneys into a sky the color of old pewter. The village lay in a fold of land, its stone cottages clustered around a green where a finger of winter sunlight lay on the damp grass. From this distance it looked like a painting, one of those quiet English scenes her mother had favored, all soft edges and implied peace.
She clicked her tongue and the bay mare resumed her descent, hooves finding the frozen ruts with practiced indifference. The sound of wheels carried further than she liked. A dog began to bark, then another, and somewhere a shutter banged open and closed. By the time the gig reached the first cottages, faces had appeared at windows and doorways, watching her pass with an attention that did not belong to a Tuesday morning.
A boy of perhaps nine ducked back inside when her eyes found him. A woman scrubbing her doorstep set down her brush and stepped into her cottage without a word. A smith, hammer raised above an anvil, lowered it and walked out of his yard toward the back of his house. Mathilde kept her expression calm, her seat straight. Inside, her stomach drew tight. She had expected resistance at the Manor. She had not expected the village to turn its face from her before she had spoken a single word.
The lane narrowed as it approached the green. She guided the mare around a puddle black with reflected sky, and the gig's iron rim caught a stone, producing a sharp clang that rang off the cottages and sent a rooster into the air from a low wall. The bird sailed across the green, wings beating in ragged protest, and disappeared behind the church. Its cry trailed off into a silence that seemed to grow thicker the further she drove.
She reined in before the inn, a low timbered building with a sign so weathered the painted boar was more suggestion than image. The windows were small and square, set in frames that had not seen fresh putty in a generation. Above the door, a garland of dried rosemary and something she could not identify hung limp in the still air. The smell of woodsmoke and boiled cabbage drifted out as she stepped down, and beneath it something sharper, like vinegar left too long in a cellar.
Mathilde tied the mare to the iron ring set into the stone post, and the beast lowered her head to crop at the frost-bitten grass between the cobbles. The leather of the reins was stiff in her fingers. She flexed her hands, then pushed the inn door open and stepped into the dim warmth of the taproom.
Two men sat at a table near the hearth, pint pots before them, heads close in conversation. At her entrance, they parted like cards shuffled apart, and silence settled over the room as quick and complete as if someone had drawn a bolt across a door. The fire popped, a log shifting in the grate. One of the men, a broad fellow with a thatcher's straw still tangled in the cuff of his coat, lifted his pot and drank deeply, his eyes never leaving her. The other, older, with the sun-creased face of a shepherd, simply stared, his weathered hands wrapped around his mug as if drawing warmth from it.
The innkeeper's wife emerged from a door behind the bar. She was a woman of perhaps fifty, thick in the waist, her hair pulled back under a stained linen cap. She carried a cloth in one hand and a pewter tankard in the, other, and she moved with the careful economy of someone accustomed to long hours on stone floors.
"Mistress Vance." The woman's voice was flat, careful. "We did not look for you down here today."
"No," Mathilde said. "I imagine you did not."
She set her gloves on the bar. The leather left a faint damp ring on the dark wood.
"I will take a cup of cider," she said, "and whatever bread you have this morning. I have ridden since first light, and the road from the Manor is not what it was."
The innkeeper's wife did not move. The cloth twisted slowly between her fingers, white against the red of her knuckles.
"The cider is finished," she said at last. "There is small beer. And bread, if you can wait."
"I can wait."
The woman turned and disappeared through the door. Mathilde could hear the sound of a cask being moved, the scrape of wood on stone, and then the low murmur of voices in the back room, too low to make out words but clear in their urgency. The two men at the table had resumed their conversation, but it was a performance now, their mouths shaping syllables while their attention stayed fixed on the newcomer by the bar.
She did not sit. She stood where the thin light from the window fell across her shoulder, and she studied the room with the same attention the room studied her. The taproom was unchanged since her childhood, when her father had brought her here for harvest suppers and she had been permitted one small glass of mead, sweet as flower water. The settle by the hearth had been re-caned, the brass rail by the bar had been polished, but the bones of the place were the same. The same low beams, blackened by decades of smoke. The same iron sconces on the walls. The same painting above the mantel, a stag at bay in a forest, its eyes rendered with that particular Victorian intensity that made even dead things seem to watch.
The door behind the bar opened, and the innkeeper's wife returned with a tray. On it stood a clay mug of dark beer and a heel of bread so pale it looked underbaked. She set it on the bar without ceremony.
"I thank you," Mathilde said.
The woman did not respond. She had retreated behind the bar and was polishing a glass with the cloth, though the glass already shone. Her eyes flicked up, then down.
"Has my arrival unsettled you?" Mathilde asked. "I had thought the village would hear of my coming by now."
A flush crept up from the woman's collar. The glass turned in her hands, the cloth passing over it in slow, circular strokes.
"The village hears many things," she said. "Most of them are best left unheard."
"You have not answered my question."
The cloth stopped. The woman set the glass down beneath the bar, carefully, as if it were glass in truth rather than pewter, and she looked at Mathilde for the first time since she had entered. Her eyes were pale, almost colorless, and set in a face that had been handsome once and had settled into something harder.
"We are quiet people here," she said. "We keep to our own. Whatever goes on up the hill is the lord's business, and has been since my grandmother's day."
"I am not the lord," Mathilde said. "My brother is."
The words came out wrong. She heard them as she said them, heard the lie in them, and she saw the innkeeper's wife hear it too. The woman's mouth thinned.
"Whatever you say, Mistress Vance."
"I say what is true. Until Callum returns, or until his body is found, the Manor holds for him."
The woman drew a breath. Her hand came up, unbidden, and she traced the sign of the cross on her breast, a quick, furtive gesture, the fingers moving with the speed of long habit. She caught herself mid-motion and dropped her hand to the bar, the sound of her palm flat on the wood too loud in the quiet room.
"Forgive me," she said. "I am not myself this morning."
"Why?" Mathilde said. "What has happened?"
The woman shook her head. She bent to retrieving a fallen napkin from beneath the bar, and when she rose, her face had reassembled itself into something serviceable.
"Ashworth Manor," she said, and crossed herself again, slower this time, her fingers tracing brow, breast, left shoulder, right shoulder with a deliberation that made the gesture less reflexive, more a thing of purpose. "You have come from Ashworth Manor."
"I have come from what my father built," Mathilde said. "And what my brother will inherit, God willing."
The woman said nothing. The cloth had stopped moving in her hands. She stood with her knuckles white against the dark wood of the bar, and her eyes had gone somewhere far away, somewhere Mathilde could not follow.
The door behind her opened, and the innkeeper himself came through. He was a lean man with a beard going to grey, and he moved with the careful tread of someone nursing an old injury. He saw Mathilde and stopped.
"So," he said. "You have come down at last."
"I have."
He came around the bar and stood beside his wife, and his hand found hers beneath the counter, a small, unseen gesture of reassurance. The woman's fingers tightened on his, and some of the rigidity went out of her shoulders.
"We heard the gig on the road," he said. "We did not think it would be you. We thought it might be Mr. Marsh, or perhaps the priest from the monastery."
"Father Brennan?"
"The same. He was asking questions in the village last week. About the old records. About who had lived at the Manor before your family." The innkeeper's voice was careful, each word placed like a foot on uncertain ground. "We told him what we knew. Which is not much."
"Which is not nothing," Mathilde said.
He considered this. His thumb moved across the back of his wife's hand, a slow, absent rhythm.
"Your family has held the Manor since my grandfather's time," he said. "Before that, it was the Ashworths, and before them, I do not know. There are stories, but stories are not for telling on a Tuesday morning to the daughter of the house."
"My father is dead," Mathilde said. "My brother is missing. I am all the house has."
He nodded. He did not offer sympathy, and she was grateful for the lack of it.
"There is bread," he said, "and there is beer. You have eaten. Is there something else you came for?"
"I came to know what you will not tell me unasked. I came to know why my name turns faces away."
The room had gone still again. The two men at the table had stopped their pretense of conversation. The fire had burned down to a low, sullen glow, and the shadows in the corners had thickened. Outside, a cart passed on the lane, its wheels creaking, and the sound receded into the distance and left a greater quiet behind.
The innkeeper's wife drew her hand from her husband's. She reached up and untied the strings of her cap, and retied them with fingers that did not quite obey her. When she spoke, her voice was low, and her eyes were on the dark wood of the bar.
"There was a woman," she said. "In the autumn. She came down from the Manor in the small hours, and she walked the village street with no shoes, and her feet left no prints in the frost. She came to our door, and she stood outside until my husband opened it, and she said nothing, only looked at us, and then she went away. We saw her pass the church, and the churchyard, and the smithy, and the schoolhouse, and then she went back up the hill toward the Manor, and we did not see her again."
"Who was she?"
"We do not know."
"Did you ask her name?"
"She did not speak. She only looked." The woman's hands had stilled on her cap. "She looked at us as if she knew what we had done, though we had done nothing. She looked at us as if she had come to count us."
"Count you?"
"So it seemed. Her lips moved, but there was no sound, only the moving, and we watched her count us with her mouth, and then she was gone."
The silence that followed was the silence of a held breath. Mathilde stood very still. The bread sat untouched on the bar. The small beer had gone flat in its clay cup.
"I am sorry," she said at last. "I did not know."
"No," the innkeeper's wife said. "You would not. You were in London. You were with your mourning, and your lawyers, and your father's affairs. You were not here. We were here, and we saw what we saw, and we have not slept well since."
She turned away then, and disappeared through the door behind the bar, and the sound of her footsteps receded into the back of the inn and was lost. Her husband stood a moment longer, his hand flat on the counter, and then he followed her without a word.
Mathilde stood alone in the taproom. The two men at the table had risen and slipped out by the front door while she was not watching. The fire had collapsed into ash. The stag in the painting watched her from the wall, its painted eyes unblinking, its antlers sharp against a sky that had never held any weather but the artist's.
She untied the mare from the post outside and climbed into the gig, and the village watched her go from behind closed shutters and drawn curtains, and not a soul waved, and not a soul called out, and the only sound was the creak of the wheels and the slow clop of hooves on the lane, carrying her back up the hill toward a house that no longer felt like home.
The chapel at the edge of the Vance estate was older than the house by a hundred years and older than the village by twice that. Its stones had been laid by men whose names the records had forgotten, and its wooden shingles bore the kind of silver-grey patina that spoke of centuries rather than decades. The bell in the small tower had not rung in living memory, not since the last Warden had commanded it silent in some dispute with the bishop that no one now recalled. It hung in its frame like a sleeping animal, its tongue still, its metal dark with tarnish.
Mathilde left the gig at the lychgate and walked the rest of the way on foot, though the path was short and the stones were not unduly steep. She did not quite know why she chose to walk. Perhaps it was the habit of approach, the instinct to slow herself before entering a threshold that asked for reverence. Perhaps it was the weight of what she carried and the wish to feel the ground beneath her before she let the ground give way.
The door of the chapel was not latched. It yielded to her touch with the soft complaint of old iron, and the air that met her was cool and close and faintly sweet, as if someone had recently burned dried lavender in the iron thurible that hung from a hook by the altar. The interior was plain. A nave of perhaps thirty feet, a chancel raised by one step, a stone font near the door whose lip was worn smooth by generations of christenings. The glass in the two narrow windows was not stained. It was a pale, watery green, the colour of the river on a winter morning, and the light it let through was thin and diffuse, the kind of light that made everything inside look like a memory of itself rather than the thing itself.
Father Brennan was not in the nave. She saw his hat on a peg by the door, a black felt hat with a wide brim that had lost its shape, and beside it a woollen cloak the colour of wet slate. She heard him before she saw him. A rustle of paper. The scratch of a pen. A cough, dry and considered, the cough of a man who did not wish to inconvenience his own lungs.
He was in the vestry, a cramped little room behind the altar where a small desk had been set against the wall beneath a shelf of untidy ledgers. He was sitting on a stool that was too low for him, and the desk was too high, and the result was a posture that could not have been comfortable even when he had been twenty years younger and the stool had been newer. He did not look up when she came in. He finished the sentence he was writing, set down the pen with care, blotted the ink with a scrap of cloth, and only then raised his eyes.
"Ah," he said. "The Warden has come at last."
He rose, and the process was slow, and she saw him put one hand on the desk to steady himself as he found his feet. He was smaller than she remembered, or perhaps she had been smaller when she last stood in his presence. His face was the face of a man who had outlived most of his contemporaries and had not been entirely persuaded that the arrangement was a fair one. The skin was loose at the jaw, the eyes were pale blue and watery, the hair that remained was white and combed across the scalp in a way that could not quite conceal the pink of the bone beneath.
"Father," she said.
He came around the desk and took her hands in his, and the gesture was not theatrical. It was the gesture of a man who had known her since she was a child and who was not afraid to show that he was glad to see her, even if gladness was a complicated thing in this house.
"You are thinner," he said. "And your mother's jaw."
"I have been travelling."
"I have heard. The village has a way of making itself heard." He released her hands and gestured to the stool he had just vacated. "Sit. I will fetch a chair from the nave, which is more fitting for your station than this thing of mine, and I will make us tea, if I can find the kettle, which I believe is behind the door where I left it three years ago and where no one has thought to move it since."
He disappeared through the low doorway, and she heard him rummaging somewhere in the nave, and then the scrape of a chair being lifted, and then the more distant sounds of a kettle being filled at a tap. She sat on the low stool and felt the wood creak under her, and she let her hands fall into her lap, and she waited.
When he returned he had the chair in one hand and the kettle in the other, and he set them both down with a clatter that did not seem to embarrass him in the slightest. He poured the tea from a height, the way country people pour tea, so that it splashed into the cups and threw up a little steam, and he handed her hers with the handle toward her, and he sat down in the chair with the sigh of a man who had been waiting to sit in a proper chair for some considerable time.
They drank in silence for a moment. The tea was dark and slightly stewed, and it tasted of the tin it had come from, and of the water of the place, which had a faintly mineral tang that she had forgotten and now remembered, and the remembering was a small wound.
"Your great-uncle," Father Brennan said at last. "You have come to ask about him."
"I have come to ask about many things. But yes. About him."
He set his cup down on the desk beside the blotter, and the porcelain made a small sound against the wood.
"Morcant Vance," he said. "I knew him for forty-one years. I was a young priest when I first came to this place, and he was already old, and he was already Warden, and he had been Warden, in fact, for longer than I had been alive. He received me in the hall of the great house with a politeness that I can only describe as immaculate and a gaze that I can only describe as weighing. He was, I think, amused by me, in his way. I was three-and-twenty and I had opinions about the Liturgy, and he let me have my opinions, and then he told me, very gently, that the Warden of the Hollow had certain prerogatives in matters of religion within the boundaries of the estate, and that one of those prerogatives was the choosing of the priest who would serve the chapel, and that he had chosen me because I came from a good family in the west and because my uncle had once done his father a service concerning a horse. I was not chosen for my theology. I was chosen for my uncle and the horse. And I have been here ever since."
He paused to take another sip of his tea, and the pause had the quality of a man marshalling what he meant to say next.
"He was Warden for sixty years," Father Brennan said. "Sixty years, Mathilde. Longer than any other in the line. He took the title when his own father died in the spring of 1781, and he held it until his own death in the autumn of 1841, and in all that time the title did not pass once. It did not pass because he did not have a son. It did not pass because his only brother, your grandfather, was estranged from him for reasons I was never entirely privy to and which I will not pretend to understand. And it did not pass because, in the end, Morcant Vance did not wish it to pass. He was Warden, and he intended to remain Warden until such a time as the title should pass to him in a manner of his own choosing, and that manner was not to be while he lived."
The tea had gone cold in her hands and she had not noticed. She looked down at the cup and saw the surface of the liquid tremble very slightly, and she realised after a moment that it was her own hand that was trembling and not the cup.
"He refused to name an heir," Father Brennan said. "He refused to sign the writ of investiture that would have confirmed your father as his successor. He refused, year after year, to do the one thing that custom and law required of him in the matter. And when I pressed him, in my younger and more foolish years, he would look at me with those grey eyes of his and he would say, 'Father, the Warden of the Hollow is not a title that is given. The Warden of the Hollow is a title that is taken. And it is taken only in the manner that the Hollow itself provides.' And I did not understand him then. I am not entirely certain I understand him now. But I have thought about those words for a long time, and I have come to believe that he meant them very literally."
"Through death," Mathilde said.
Father Brennan was silent for a moment. The vestry was very quiet. Outside, somewhere in the nave, a bird had found its way in through a gap in the roof and was moving among the rafters, and the small sound of its claws on wood was the only sound in the world.
"Through death," he said at last. "Yes. That is what he meant. The Warden of the Hollow is the one who remains when all others have departed. It is not a title that is conferred. It is a title that is revealed. It is the man or the woman who, at the moment of the passing of the previous Warden, is found to be the one who holds the place. And how that holding is to be determined, and by what signs, Morcant would never say. He would only smile, in his way, and change the subject, and offer me a glass of the claret that he kept in the cellar of the great house, and which was, I must say, exceptionally fine."
She set the cup down on the floor beside the stool because her hands were no longer steady enough to hold it without risk.
"And now he is dead," she said.
"Now he is dead," Father Brennan said. "And the title has not passed. And you have come to this house as the heir of your father, who was the heir of his father, who was the brother of Morcant, and who was never recognised by Morcant, and who is now, like Morcant himself, in the ground. And the village is afraid. And I am afraid, Mathilde, though I am an old man and ought to be above such things, and ought to know better, and I confess to you that I do not."
He leaned forward in his chair, and his hands came together in his lap, and the knuckles were large and swollen and the fingers were thin.
"I have been in this chapel for forty-one years," he said. "I have baptised the children of the village and I have married them and I have buried their parents and I have heard their confessions, and there is not a soul among them that I do not know in some particular, and not a house that I have not entered in some season of grief. I am not a superstitious man. I was trained in a school of thought that considered superstition a weakness of the mind and a danger to the soul. And yet I will tell you, Mathilde, that there are things in this valley that I do not understand, and that I have not understood for forty-one years, and that I have made my peace with not understanding, in the way that a man makes his peace with a chronic ache. I have made my peace with the bell that does not ring. I have made my peace with the procession that does not occur. I have made my peace with the fact that there is a stone in the cellar of the great house that I am not permitted to see and that I have never asked to see, because Morcant forbade it, and because I trusted Morcant, and because the trust was, in the end, the wiser course."
The bird in the rafters had gone still. The light in the vestry had taken on the cooler tint of late afternoon. The shadow of the desk fell across the floor in a long dark shape, and at its edge the hem of her skirt was just within the line of shade.
"Tell me about Callum," she said.
Father Brennan closed his eyes. The lids were thin and blue-veined and they came down over the pale irises like the closing of a book.
"Callum," he said. "Your brother. He came to me in the spring of 1839, and he was seventeen, and he had been sent down from his school, and he was in a state that I can only describe as lacerated. He would not tell me what had happened. He would only say that he had seen something, and that the seeing had undone him, and that he did not know what to do with what he had seen. I gave him what comfort I could. I listened to him. I did not press him, because I could see that pressing would have broken him, and I did not wish to break him. He stayed in the village for a summer. He walked the hills. He spoke to no one, or to almost no one. And then, in the autumn, he went up to the house, and he spoke to his great-uncle, and what passed between them I do not know, because Morcant did not confide in me, and Callum did not confide in me, and the two of them between them constituted a silence that I could not penetrate."
"And then he left."
"And then he left. In the November of that year. He left a note for your father, and a note for me, and he walked out of the valley, and he did not return. And your father went after him, and Tobias Marsh went after him, and they searched for him in London and in Edinburgh and in the ports of the north, and they did not find him, and after a year your father gave him up for lost, and after two years the courts gave him up for dead, and after three years the village gave him up for a memory. And Morcant continued to be Warden, and the title did not pass, and the bell did not ring, and the procession did not occur, and the stone in the cellar remained unseen, and the years went by, and here we are."
He opened his eyes and looked at her, and the look was not unkind.
"I cannot tell you what is in that house," he said. "I cannot tell you what your brother saw, or what your great-uncle knew, or what the Hollow is, or what it asks, or what it gives, or what it takes. I can only tell you what I have seen with my own eyes, and what I have heard with my own ears, and what I have come to believe in the long and quiet watches of the night. And what I have come to believe, Mathilde, is that this valley is not like other valleys, and that the title that you have come to claim is not like other titles, and that the house you have come to inhabit is not like other houses. And that you would be very wise to consider, very carefully, whether the claim is one that you wish to press, and whether the inhabiting is one that you wish to continue, and whether the woman you were in London might not be safer, and saner, and more at peace, than the woman you are about to become in this place."
She did not answer. The shadow of the desk had reached her foot. The tea in the cup on the floor was quite cold. Somewhere in the nave the bird moved again, and the small sound of its claws was like a thought trying to find its way out of a long and patient silence.
She waited until the bishop had withdrawn, until the sound of his robes had faded down the nave and the great door had sighed shut behind him, until the bird had settled and the silence had resumed its ancient shape around her, before she let herself breathe again. She had not been aware that she had stopped. The air came in ragged, and her hands were trembling where they lay flat on the desk, and the trembling was not from cold.
She sat for a long time. The light moved across the floor, shifted, thinned. The shadow of the desk drew itself out across the tiles like a dark water. She did not move. She let the thoughts come and go as they would, the way one lets the tide come and go at the edge of a shore, not chasing them, not holding them, only watching. The bishop had given her the name of her great-uncle. The bishop had given her the name of the thing that dwelt in the valley, and the number of its years, and the shape of its appetite, and the long and patient catalogue of its forbearance. He had told her that her brother had stood in this very room, and looked at this very statue, and heard the same sound rising from the same chimney, and had gone back to the manor to begin his campaign to burn it out. He had told her that her father had gone up into the hills with a hunting party and a cask of salt and a great will, and had not come back, and that what had not come back was not only a man. He had told her that Morcant had watched, and waited, and done nothing, and had inherited. He had told her, without telling her, that the thing in the cellar was still there, and that the silence was its way of listening, and that the long and patient watches of the night were not over.
He had told her to leave.
She did not leave.
She rose at last, when the light had begun to thicken and the air in the cell had grown cool. She gathered the papers together, and tied them with the tape that the bishop had left for her, and placed them in her bag, and checked that the packet of her brother's letters was still there, and that the ribbon that bound them was still knotted. She took one last look around the cell, at the statue and the lectern and the desk and the empty cup on the floor, and then she stepped out into the corridor and walked back through the cloister toward the door of the monastery.
The world outside was still. The rain had ceased. The clouds were breaking up in the west, and through them the light of the lowering sun came down in long and ragged bars of copper and ash. The hills stood up against the sky like the backs of great beasts at rest. The air smelled of wet stone and bracken and the faint, resinous breath of the pines. Somewhere in the valley a bird called, once, and was answered by another, farther off, and then there was silence again.
She got into the motor and started it, and the engine turned over at the first touch, and she let out a breath she had not known she was holding. She let the machine idle for a moment, listening to the sound of it, feeling the vibration of it through the seat and the floor and the soles of her boots, grateful for its small, oily, mechanical heart. She put it into gear, and let the clutch out, and began the long and careful descent down the lane toward the village, and toward the manor, and toward whatever it was that she had come back to.
The lane was narrow, and winding, and strewn with the small bright pebbles that the rain had washed down from the higher ground. The motor crawled along in second gear, the engine note a low and steady hum that rose and fell with the gradient. She passed the place where the wall began, and the place where the first of the beeches leaned out over the tarmac, and the place where the track to the upper pasture branched off on the left, and the place where the stream ran under the road in a small stone culvert, and the place where the cattle-grid clanged under the wheels. The light was going from the sky. The bars of copper had thickened to a low and sullen glow, and the shadows in the hollows of the hills had begun to pool like ink in a well. She did not hurry. She let the motor have its head, and she kept her eyes on the road, and she did not think about the bishop, or the statue, or the cellar, or the sound that had risen from the chimney at three in the morning. She did not think about the three hundred paces, or the seventy years, or the thing that had been waiting in the dark since the year of the king's daughter. She thought about the road, and the gear, and the brake, and the next corner, and the next bend, and the next long slow descent through the gathering dark.
The motor coughed.
She lifted her foot from the accelerator. The cough came again, a small, wet, asthmatic sound, and then a third, and then a long, shuddering splutter, and then silence. The machine slowed. She pressed the clutch, and the gear, and the brake, and the motor rolled to a halt at the side of the lane with a final, defeated sigh from the engine, and then there was nothing. No tick of cooling metal. No hum of the fan. Only the sound of her own breathing, and the small, bright sound of the last of the rain dripping from the leaves of the beech overhead, and the slow, vast, breathing silence of the valley at the fall of night.
She tried the starter. The engine turned over, slowly, with a sound like a great tired animal drawing its last breath, and then it stopped, and would not turn again. She tried it again. And again. And again. Each time the sound was fainter, and slower, and further away, as if the heart of the machine was withdrawing itself into some deep and inaccessible place. The fourth time, there was only a click, and then the click of the solenoid, and then nothing. The battery, too, had had its say.
She sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, and her foot still on the clutch, and her eyes on the darkening road ahead. The manor was a mile away, perhaps a little less. The village was three miles in the other direction. The lane was empty. The light was going fast. The first stars were coming out in the breaks between the clouds, small and sharp and very bright, and the air had begun to bite.
She got out, and locked the motor, and left it where it stood, and began to walk.
The lane was quiet under her feet. The gravel crunched with a small, dry sound. The air was cold, and still, and tasted of iron. On her right the beech woods climbed the slope, and the last of the leaves moved now and then in a breath of wind that she could not feel where she walked. On her left the valley fell away into the dark, and the manor was not yet visible, only the low and ragged line of the roofs of the home farm, and beyond them, much further off, the square and solid mass of the north tower against the sky. She walked at a steady pace, and she did not look behind her, and she did not think about the bishop, or the cellar, or the seventy years, or the thing that was patient, and did not pursue. She thought about her feet, and the road, and the next step, and the next.
She had walked perhaps a quarter of a mile when she became aware of the sound.