RALPH STRODE THROUGH THE SUMMER GRASS across Durnock Head, dwarfed by the widening horizon as he approached the Temple of Winds.
‘Come on!’ he called down to his mother as she struggled to catch up with him. ‘I’d say you were tired already if I didn’t know you better …’
‘Quite frankly, I am tired, darling.’ Alice was surprised at the spinsterish wheeze in her voice as she finally eased herself down beside him in the shade of the circular bench. ‘After all, I’m not quite as young as you …’ She smiled back at him as brightly as she could manage. Strands of windblown hair clung to her wet neck. And her bones, the bones which had always carried her flesh so well and which she had stupidly imagined would faithfully bear her through the rest of her life, were aching. Our children, she remembered the phrase from somewhere, are the messengers of our mortality. But she’d never imagined that the message would come this suddenly, or so strongly.
Doctor Foot still urged caution, but it was apparent to everyone that Ralph Meynell wasn’t just mending—he was healed. It was no longer a matter of what he or Alice did or didn’t believe. He was fit; impossibly, yet quite demonstrably so. Her heart might be thudding, yet he wasn’t even panting, and the entire time since his recovery now felt like the climb she’d just made up Durnock Head; of trying to catch up with him and never, ever quite managing. She remembered her return to Invercombe on the grey Noshiftday of her visit to Einfell, and the sight of Steward Dunning beaming and hurrying out of the house. Dragged helplessly up the best stairs, Alice had still been entirely unable to make sense of the woman’s gibberings. But all the windows had been open in Ralph’s room. In fact, every single, simple order she’d given had been countermanded, and Alice was a moment away from striking the steward across her fat Negro face when she realised that Ralph’s eyes were open and that he was looking at her with a bemused but essentially happy expression on his face. The fever, as she laid her wondering hand on his stubbled cheek, no longer poured out of him. He truly was past the crisis. A day later, he’d been sitting up and eating with almost worrying greed. The day after that, he’d been striding about the house as he rarely ever strode anywhere. And look at him now, little more than a shifterm later.
None of it made sense. Steward Dunning and her maids might take a mere miracle in their stride, and Ralph could put the whole thing down to his beloved science, but Alice still felt confused, as well as tired and breathless, as she sat in the Temple of Winds. He mind still wrestled with her trip to Einfell, her conversation with Silus, and her glimpse of the creatures he’d called the Shadow Ones.
‘I should have brought some of the textbooks up here from the library…’ He was up from the bench and pacing the boards of this windy chapel to lost gods, his renewed and deepened voice ricocheting off the domed roof. He was saying how the books often spoke of the best, most typical specimens. As if there was something wrong with all the others! As if they, too, didn’t have their story and meaning—although meaning was a word he detested almost as much as all those pious phrases about evidence of design …
Alice, bemused and exhausted, decided she should make the most of the opportunity to rest and enjoy the view. Soon, they’d be wandering around this headland and inspecting the leaves of some trivial plant individually and in pointless detail. Ralph’s good health had come upon her so suddenly that she hadn’t had time to react. Before, she’d always taken responsibility, she had been in charge. The old Ralph had been essentially stationary. She’d known that if she left him in a room, he’d still be there when she returned, but this new son of hers was dragging her about like a dog on a leash. Sometimes, it was hard not to feel just a little resentful. And she had so many other things on her mind. Tom was floundering over this dispute with Pikes and she desperately needed to get back to London, if only for a few days, to steady the ship.
‘You know, you can tear out the relevant pages of the books if you need them. After all, they’re ours.’
‘I suppose so,’ he conceded, almost frowning. ‘But the pages are arranged in a hierarchical pattern, and that pattern isn’t just in the books. It’s out there …’
And off he went and, soon, off she went as well, out from the temple’s shade to examine each blade of grass for length and breadth and hairiness and make tedious notes. It was like unpicking some tiny, pointless knot. And meanwhile her guild was haemorrhaging influence and money. Yes, she admittedly enjoyed her own occasional early morning searches for a particular flower or plant or insect, but they were nothing like this. Most frightening of all, Ralph’s plans were blossoming. He wanted to look at shells next, and the insides of rocks.
Alice slumped down on the billowing greensward and squinted back towards the house. Invercombe’s greens, its glistening waters, its windows and chimneys, all looked so triumphant, so solid—yet her entire world was askew. Then, looking down the north side of valley where the headland dwindled and where, beyond the parterre gardens, Invercombe’s grounds took on a more practical bent, she saw the white flap of washing, and a female figure stooping and rising, and a plan began to form in her head.
That lunchtime, Alice went in search of Cissy Dunning. The house was cool, quiet, softly creaking and ticking, caught in its usual slur of hours. Guessing the steward would also be at her lunch and thus probably in her office, she headed straight there and entered without pausing or knocking, as was her habit with servants.
‘Ah, Mistress…’ Cissy half stood. Her cheeks were crumbed and greased. ‘It’s been such a beautiful morning.’
‘Hasn’t it?’ Alice sat down facing the steward and took a breath. ‘I’ve been up Durnock Head with my son. But you mustn’t let me stop you eating your lunch.’
‘I’m pretty much finished.’ Cissy Dunning dabbed her face with her napkin. The fact was, she half suspected that this beautiful, if slightly windblown, woman wanted her to continue eating because she would be at some minor disadvantage with her mouth full and butter on her face. The greatgrandmistress, on the other hand, scarcely ever seemed to need to eat. Or sweat, or excrete, either… Cissy cleared her throat and tried to meet that penetrating blue gaze. These weaselly thoughts always seemed to come when Alice Meynell was around. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the woman, who had treated her fairly, even if she seemed to relish being unorthodox. It was more as if there was some other kind of standard by which Cissy should be judging her, but which she’d never been able to put her finger on.
Perhaps she’s an angel, she thought. Perhaps that’s what it is. After all, she looks like one. And she certainly acted the part, if that meant behaving in a way which you could never quite understand. And something had come to this house recently. Cissy, who’d always wondered what it must have been like for the onlookers outside Lazarus’s grave, now almost felt, after the shock of seeing Ralph Meynell sitting up in his bed, as if she knew.
‘This really is the most extraordinary time,’ she commented.
‘I’ve never seen Ralph this happy, this active—and I’m certainly not complaining. But I think I—he—needs some help …’ Then Alice leaned forward somewhat, and her smile grew quite dazzling.
In what she was coming to think of as the old times, Cissy would have certainly resisted what this pale, graceful woman was now proposing. To put Ralph Meynell and Marion Price together, who, for all their vastly differing backgrounds, were of opposite sexes and almost the same age, was asking for trouble by all her normal standards. But it seemed to her now as if many of her old certainties were already crumbling.
‘Her local knowledge would be useful from Ralph’s point of view. That, and being fit and able and—and I think I’m right in surmising—reasonably intelligent. And I would guess that she knows quite a bit about the local wildlife. Certainly more than I would ever want to know.’ A small gesture of the hands. That smile again. ‘I want no opportunity to be held back from my son this summer. There will, of course, be many other summers now that he’s so plainly recovered. But, and to be frank, I doubt if they will be quite the same as this one. My husband’s a powerful man, and Ralph must move out from his shadow, if he is to prosper and thrive. This autumn, he will enrol at our Great Academy at Highclare. There will be study and duty, and he will be catching up. Catching up not just because of his illness, but because my son is the son of a greatgrandmaster and must therefore expect to exceed those he finds around him.’
‘You make it all sound rather harsh, greatgrandmistress.’
‘I don’t make it sound that way, Steward. That, I’m afraid, is how it is.’
Cissy glanced at the kidney bean on her desk which, had it been anyone other than the greatgrandmistress sitting before her, she would now have picked up for the small comfort of its shape. But what, after all, was more natural than allowing two young people to spend this summer together?