Postscript

The autumn was, he thought, more beautiful than the spring.

Robert Wilde sat on Scarth Gap Pass, on the last stretch before the summit, looking at the lake far below.

It was October, and the Derwent Fells rolled before him. Dale Head dominating the land to his left, a smooth grey-green mountain. Fleetwith Pike falling dramatically to the water, its peaked ridge pointing straight down the length of Buttermere. The lake itself was very light this morning, almost white instead of the dark mass that he remembered.

He had been looking at this view for a long time. He had carried it in his head for years, taking it out in dreams to handle it. But he had forgotten how breathtaking it really was, and the sight of it, spreading away on all sides, brought him what he had been looking for all summer—a sense of peace, of homecoming.

On the way here, he had called in to see Anna.

She had sold her house and bought another—another terrace on the city edge, another high-ceilinged Victorian house. Her equanimity still surprised him—the way she had calmly taken up the scattered pieces, and put them back together. Released from Benedict McGovern’s attention, what he supposed was the old Anna came back to life. She was not teaching, but she was playing, semi-professionally, and on the last night before he came to the Lakes, he had gone to see her in a concert in Manningham city centre.

She looked very vulnerable, there in the stage light. The irony was, of course, that she was not vulnerable any more, but, rather, it seemed, invulnerable. She had not said very much about that last night at the Manor. She had said nothing at all about Matthew Aubrete, who, after his prolonged illness, had retired to his father’s apartment in Pollensa.

He had, as far as Robert knew, never returned to the Manor, which was run entirely now by Laura. After Anna had signed over the estate to them, Matthew’s last task was to insist upon the cottage being given to Anna, who had sold it within six weeks.

Robert lay back, releasing his view of the mountains, and staring into the early morning sky.

They had found the body of Benedict McGovern near the house, washed there, they said, by the force of the flood. Robert had never mentioned the other men to anyone—the disjointed apparition of Acland, or the other man—the man he couldn’t put a name to, the small grey-faced man who had stood at Sara Acland’s side in the rush of light.

Her body had never been found.

He got up, feeling the damp of the ground on his clothes, and brushing it quickly away. They had called it the Third Hurricane on the TV news and in the newspapers. It had wrought terrible damage to the south coast, much the same as that in 1987. He recalled a case then, in Sussex, of trees being torn up and revealing an Anglo-Saxon burial mound, the bones coming to the surface as the trees were uprooted by the storm. Aubrete Manor had been the focus of very similar and intense attention this summer, with industrial archaeologists, investigating the old mine workings, calling in others—experts in Bronze Age burials. They had found quartz cairn stones in the hillside.

The storm had gone as quickly as it had come. Next morning, the whole hillside was still, and the emergency services did their job among the shattered ruins of the trees.

He had tried to get Anna to tell him about that night. But all she would say was that Matthew had thought the girl was trying to commit suicide. Knowing that Anna had known her, however briefly and however distantly, had been the straw he had grasped at when all efforts to reach her or talk to her had failed.

Anna was a pragmatist. She had dismissed Robert’s hesitant references to anything extraordinary. ‘It was the storm,’ she had told him.

‘But you saw him?’ he had asked her. ‘You saw McGovern?’

She had shaken her head slowly, as if this was something that confused or evaded her. ‘He looked different,’ was all she would ever say. In fact, she had not really been convinced that it was him until she saw the notice of his funeral in the newspaper—a funeral that only a priest and the undertakers had attended. Even the fact that Robert himself had identified the body did not seem to reassure her until McGovern was in his grave. And, since then, she had seemed to close the night away. Rush forward to reclaim her past. Wipe out the terrible intervening year, as if it had never happened.

Robert looked upwards, at the peak of Hay Stacks. It was blessed with the first sunlight high above him.

He understood, of course. Understood Anna’s need to be herself again. To turn away from the horrors. To pretend that nothing inexplicable had happened that night. But he thought differently. He thought something had altered, something he didn’t understand.

He had read the transcripts from Manningham from the girl who called herself a Guardian, and he recalled Sara Acland’s utter tranquillity in the face of the light. He remembered the stillness, and the improbable picture of four figures suspended above an endless drop into the dark.

‘Religious fanatics,’ Wallis had called them.

‘Misguided,’ Anna had said. ‘Tragic.’ But she had not looked in Robert’s face.

Perhaps she couldn’t find an explanation yet. Perhaps, in time, she might allow him close enough for them to find an explanation together.

He turned, and looked back down the track.

The grass was cropped short under his feet, and there was a faint veil of dew on his face. It was just six o’clock. Far down the valley, three thousand feet below, the village was one or two small white rectangles. Somewhere down there was the house where he had lived as a boy.

There was a movement on the track.

She came up steadily, smiling at him. When she was within a few yards, she stopped, and they faced each other high over the empty air, at what might have been the top of the world.

‘You’re fitter than you look,’ Alice said, grinning.

She walked up to him, and swung her arm around his shoulder, pressing her face to his.

‘It’s fantastic, isn’t it?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

She moved back from him, still holding one of his hands, and appraised him with that sharp and perceptive gaze of hers.

‘Will you bring Anna here one day?’ she asked.

He turned for the track to the summit, gently pulling her after him with a smile.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘One day.’