Through the next few days Damaris steadily bettered. The threat of a headache that had kept crouched behind her eyes finally faded, and she did not need so much sleep. She complained once to Aunt Elspeth, "It was my head I hurt. Why is all of me so weak, so ill?"
"The fall and the hurt to your head frighted your whole body. Fear is an exhausting thing. Your body as much as your head needs chance to get over its fright," Aunt Elspeth said gently. "Nor will fretting do any good, only harm. So don’t fret," she finished firmly.
Damaris did not ask if too much thinking about other things than her head counted as fretting. She tried but failed to put aside the questions that had begun to haunt her. She tried to be content with sitting in the garden or lying on the sofa in the parlor; tried to be occupied sufficiently with quiet talk with her aunt and uncle and Kellan; tried to be satisfied with Irene’s and Lauran’s visits and, when her head bettered, to lose herself in reading; but being told not to fret and not fretting were two widely separate things.
First of anything was worry over school. No matter what she had hoped at first, she soon had to accept she would not be fit to return to Miss Edwards' before the end of term. Aunt Elspeth and Miss Edwards traded letters about that, with Miss Edwards sending assurance that Damaris’ studies were so well in hand that she need have no concerns. That was all well and good, but still Damaris had to wonder – to worry – what would happen now to the few bare plans she had for her future.
Still, worrying on that gave relief from other thoughts, and Nevin’s and Gweneth’s return, with their happiness still shining on them, was even better diversion, although it did mean that in the following days Aunt Elspeth had less time for Damaris while helping Gweneth settle into Thornoak's daily ways; while Damaris sat, it was Aunt Elspeth and Gweneth who worked in the garden and stillroom. Gweneth made no secret of her lesser knowledge of herbs, but at supper one evening Aunt Elspeth declared, "She’s both ready and apt to learn. Teaching her is a pleasure," and Nevin beamed and Gweneth blushed. Damaris, despite she smiled with Kellan and Uncle Russell, was secretly dismayed at her jerk of jealousy. When she could no longer be here, Gweneth still would be, taking her place in every way.
It was not that she resented Gweneth being there. She was glad for the happiness there was between her and Nevin, and that Aunt Elspeth would have her help. What hurt in Damaris was the pain of knowing she could not be here too. That Gweneth could be and she could not.
Nor did it help that the next day she had to stand in the front doorway watching Aunt Elspeth and Gweneth set off to see how old Jack Thwaite’s broken leg was mending and if the milkwort had brought down Tilde Aske’s milk for her baby. Seeing them away she was suddenly, sharply eager to be gone from Thornoak, away from watching her place being given to someone else.
Behind her in the hallway Uncle Russell said, "I’m going to ride down to the river meadows to see how soon they’ll likely be ready for the haying. Do you want to come?"
Damaris said with the expected eagerness, "I'd love to, yes," while surprised to find herself inwardly recoiling with sharp fear from the idea of riding again. But even as she realized her fear, she shoved it away, refusing to give in to it, and went to change her dress for riding.
She had been as far as the stables to see Fansome twice since she had bettered, once leaning on Kellan’s arm, once on Uncle Russell’s. Today she was better enough that she crossed the yard alone. She knew Fansome had been daily exercised and so would be no more mettlesome than ordinary; that Uncle Russell would not put her at any kind of risk. But while her mind knew that, her body remained afraid and she was damp with nervousness, her hands unsteady, as Uncle Russell led Fansome out of the stable and to her. She did not know how much her fear showed, but her uncle said nothing, simply stood holding the mare for her to mount, his own horse waiting ready. Damaris allowed herself a moment of stroking Fansome's gleaming neck and talking to her, then brought herself to step onto the mounting block, settle herself in the saddle, and take up the reins from her uncle with deceptively steady hands. Only Uncle Russell's deep smile upward at her and his small, approving nod showed he knew what she had accomplished beyond the outward simplicity of it, and Damaris' affection for him warmed and deepened. He believed in her courage and in her, making it easier for her to believe, too.
The ride went well. Uncle Russell's quiet company was always good, and the hayfields would be ready for haying in a few weeks, "If the weather holds even halfway fair," Uncle Russell said. On the way home he showed her a lapwing's nest along the path with two brown-speckled eggs in it, and Damaris was thrilled at the small, private wonder of it, just as when he had shown her such things when she was a little girl. It was as they rode on that she dared say aloud, "I wish I could stay here for always."
"I know," Uncle Russell answered. And nothing else. Leaving no way for anything more to be said.
Yet suddenly she was able to ask him, hoping she said it lightly enough to make it seem it did not matter, "Is it true Kellan is adopted? Irene said so the other day, but I hardly believed her."
Uncle Russell’s surprise seemed utter and genuine. "Didn’t you know?"
"No one ever said." She thought her voice trembled despite herself.
"Stones and sticks! Didn’t we ever? We forget, I suppose. When my brother’s wife died, we took the baby. Then a few years later my brother died without marrying again, and Kellan simply became ours." He looked at her worriedly. "I suppose we all simply thought you knew. Does it trouble you we never said?"
Damaris shrugged and a little laughed. "No. It only took me by surprise."
So there had been no deliberate lie, and she told herself she had been foolish to let Virna’s words about lying work in her the way they had.
Home again, she did not resist her need to lie down for a rest. That she did not fall promptly to sleep was sign of how much better she was. As Aunt Elspeth had promised, her strength was steadily returning. In truth, when she went up to bed that night she did not fall into immediate sleep as she had been doing but instead lay wakeful in the dark, listening while everyone else went to bed and night-silence settled in the house below her. Even when there was nothing else to listen to, she was surprised to find she was still listening, still awake. Accepting that apparently she was not going to sleep soon, she pushed aside the covers with a sigh and sat up, bored with lying down to no purpose. Rising, she went to the window and pushed back the curtain. Over the dark outline of the hills, the moon hung in the bright sky, nearly full. Only the smallest sliver of silver light was missing from one side.
Damaris hurriedly drew the curtain against it, returned in the dark to her bed, curled under the covers again, and stayed there, clutching her pillow to her, until finally she slept.
It had become expected that she would rest each early afternoon, either in the parlor or else the garden or the study, as she pleased. The next afternoon she let it be understood she would be lying down on the sofa in the study, and when Aunt Elspeth and Gweneth had left to visit Mistress Ashbrigg and Irene, and Uncle Russell, Nevin, and Kellan were gone to ride out to some of the farther farms, she did lie down – but only until she was sure that Agnes, Betty, and Cook were at their mid-day meal in the kitchen and unlikely to give even a thought to her for a while. Because the dogs had gone with her uncle and cousins and so would not give her away with eagerness to go wherever she was going, she didn't even need to be particularly cautious as she let herself out the front door and went away down the drive and out the gateway.
Thornoak village was perhaps half a mile away along the road, a level, easy walk; but Damaris did not keep to the road. Where a slight roll of the fields hid her from house and yard, she cut away from the road to go along the field wall there to the path that ran between the stableyard and the village. Crossing fields and going through stiles in the stone walls, it was the villagers' way to come and go from the manor house, rather than the somewhat longer way by the road. More than that, at the village the path ran behind the houses, hidden from most of them by their high back garden walls. Unless she actually met someone on the path, Damaris was unlikely to be seen and even that chance was lessened because the house she wanted was at the village’s near end, if Virna still lived where she used to, and likely she did, the cottage having been her mother's and grandmother's before her. Better yet, while most of the cottages faced the single street running through the village’s middle, Virna's cottage was set with its blank end to the village street, its front garden facing down the dale as if deliberately turned away from the village.
Like Virna herself, Damaris thought.
She had made herself think about Virna last night and again this morning. It had not been easy. She had long since grown used to how much Virna disliked her for no reason that Damaris could help. It was... uncomfortable to be that disliked by someone.
More than that, Virna frightened her.
Not enough, though, to counter Damaris’ need to know what she was supposed to have forgotten about the full moon.
Through the years, she had learned to ignore the gap in her memory, but it was still there and she was bothered by it, despite herself, and perhaps bothered the more because no one had ever seemed to think it worth talking of. If Virna could tell her even a little more... always allowing, of course, that any answers Virna gave might well be tainted by her hatred.
Damaris reassured herself that facing Virna would simply be much the same as riding Fansome again – something less bad in the doing than in the imagining.
But at the low gate into Virna's front garden, with her hand on the latch, Damaris paused, finding that after all there was a wide difference between intending a thing and actually doing it; also finding that she hoped Virna was not home.
Then as she stood there, between one moment and the next, a vise closed around her throat. Suddenly, completely, she could not breathe. Blood beat in her ears, and her throat spasmed with the need for air that would not come. Darkness surged in on her, and without thinking she flung her mind against it. This could not be happening. It was wrong that it was happening. She refused it happening. And abruptly, as if it had never been, the grip around her throat was gone. Was simply not there.
She swayed, only her grip on the gate holding her to her feet as she drew in great, grateful lungfuls of air.
And saw Virna standing in the cottage doorway, watching her.
Oddly what Damaris thought she saw on Virna's face in that moment was startled alarm, but Damaris was too shaken in herself to be sure, and if it was there at all, it was gone the next instant into anger so naked that if Damaris had not needed the gate to keep her upright, she would have stepped back from it as from a blow. Right into her bones Damaris felt its weight – the weight of an anger old and deep and practiced, backed by a scorn that fed it and was fed by it, with both so fierce they might have been etched on the air between her and Virna.
Then Virna smiled and only the scorn was still openly there, cold and acid in her eyes.
Still shaken by the darkness that had nearly taken her and all thought of politeness burned away by what she saw in Virna's face, Damaris demanded, "Why do you hate me? I’ve done nothing to you, ever."
"Done to me?" Virna's voice was so gentle she might have been speaking to a well-loved child, but on her face the scorn slipped into loathing. "You haven't done anything to me. You’re too much a fool to be able to do anything to me."
"Then how can you hate me?" Damaris's voice scaled up with disbelief. "When I haven't done anything to you? When I don't mean to do anything?"
Virna came a step toward her, with so much threat in that single step that even though there were still ten feet and the garden gate between them, Damaris had to force herself to hold where she was, to not to step back and be that much farther away from her as Virna said, her voice low, heavy with venom, "Done? Do? What do the hills do? What do the stones do? Or the sky? They don’t do. They simply are, and because they are, things are as they are. You exist. You are. That's enough."
Her throat tight not with the unnatural choking of before but with plain fear, Damaris whispered, "You did something to Fansome that day. You..." Tried to kill me, she wanted to say but her mind refused it. Even with Virna's hatred a dark sheen in the air between them, she would not believe it.
But softly and smiling, Virna answered her thought. "I did. Oh, yes, I did. But there's no way to prove it." She came closer, this time by a half dozen steps, her eyes fixed on Damaris'. Near enough now to be heard hardly above a whisper, she said very softly, "And there's this, too, for you to think on. Your mother fled from Thornoak when she was much your age. She ran away because she was frightened. As you're frightened. And when she came back, she died. And your father died. And you were kept. Haven't you ever wondered why? Are you so stupid you haven't ever wondered why she ran away and why she died? Why they both died and you were kept?"
"You..." Damaris managed to say, accusing.
"No, not my doing." Virna was very near now, her voice still soft, her eyes narrow and lightless in their hating. "That would too easy an answer. Go to the Lady Stone tonight at moonrise. There's where your answer will be. All the answer you'll ever want to have."
Forcing herself to stay where she was, Damaris said, "The Lady Stone?"
"The Lady Stone. At moonrise. They'll be there then, with all the secrets that they've kept from you. You'll see how many lies you've lived with because you were too stupid to wonder anything. If you dare to go. If you don't choose to run away instead. The way your mother ran. For all the good it did her." She paused, staring into Damaris' eyes. Then, as if satisfied with what she saw there, she smiled a smile as lightless as her eyes and with deliberate insolence turned her back and walked away.
She was gone inside, with the door shut behind her, before Damaris was able to move, at first only a single backward step from the gate, like slowly dragging herself out of deep mud, then another step and another until finally she was able to turn and walk unsteadily away.
Feeling unclean from Virna’s words and Virna’s hatred, her instinct was to find somewhere to hide, to be alone – not touched or talked to – until she had found a way to cleanse everything Virna had said out of her mind.
Or until she had time to understand it.
But... understand what?
She did not know. She could not think clearly. She had pushed her strength too far, had hoped to be back to Thornoak before she was missed, but suddenly could go no further. She had reached the field wall, but her legs refused to hold her up any longer, and she sank down among buttercups on the path's grassy verge in the shade of the wall and leaned back against the wall's stones. She drew her legs up, wrapped her arms around her knees, and waited for her body’s trembling to stop. A trembling that had little to do with her tiredness but much to do with fear.