Nights of a full moon Damaris never slept well. Even with the heavy draperies closed across the window, dreams came, drawing her out of sleep into the restless shallows of almost-awake or – on the worse nights – fully awake, to lie in bed with too many memories keeping her company.
Tonight was a worse night, and as she lay looking at the muted silver glow through the draperies, she knew she would not sleep again. Not before dawn, and by then it would be time to rise and begin the school day.
Weary of bed, tired of trying to go to sleep again, she rose, went to the window, and pushed back one of the curtains with what she meant to be defiance, to confront the moon poised serene and huge above Hull's crowding housetops, its silver light casting sharp-edged shadows across the paving stones and house-fronts.
They would be finished at the Lady Stone by now, she thought. The singing would be done and the moor left to the moonlight, the spring wind, and the night silences.
She jerked the drapery closed.
Until now, she had heard nothing from Thornoak after she left except a letter from Father Gedney at Christmastime, saying that everyone at Thornoak was well and Irene and her mother were gone to Hampshire for the winter. She had read the letter and then destroyed it for fear she would cling to it as something from the dale. She wanted nothing to hold her to the dale anymore.
But memories still came.
That last morning at Thornoak, Kellan had found her in the front hall, ready to go out the door for what she meant to be the last time. It had still been very early. Agnes and Betty were busy in the kitchen. Aunt Elspeth and Gweneth had probably been still asleep. Damaris had thought Nevin and Kellan were only just starting to stir as she had come down the stairs from her room. Behind her she had left her trunk packed and addressed to Mary Elaine’s house in Hull. She was taking with her only a small bag and her cloak, but she was also in her traveling dress, and Kellan, coming down the stairs behind her when her hand was already on the outer door’s latch, had understood immediately what she was doing without any word passed between them.
Of everyone at Thornoak, Kellan had been the one Damaris had least wanted to meet. He had made some of the ties holding her most strongly to Thornoak. He was one of the ties holding her to Thornoak, and like all of the others he had to be broken. So when he had held out a hand toward her and said, "Don't," she had had to fight to steady her suddenly ragged breathing before she could force out, "I have to."
"You don't," Kellan had said, his gaze locked to hers, his hand still held out. "You know you don’t have to."
Damaris had freed her eyes from his. Had dropped her gaze to his hand. Had nearly – nearly – reached out to take it. Had wanted with more than half her heart to take it, she afterward realized. But instead she had turned away, had opened the door, and gone out. And Kellan had let her.
Why she had thought she had to walk away from Thornoak she had not known. All she had known was that she had to leave as quickly as possible, with the feeling at her back of being hunted, of needing to escape. But when Albert caught up to her with the carriage a half hour later, she silently accepted the ride he silently offered to Skelfeld and been in time to take the morning coach away.
She had arrived on Mary Elaine's doorstep exhausted almost past remembering why she had come, so tired that after the maid had let her in and Mary Elaine had hurried down the stairs exclaiming at how wonderfully unexpected it was to see her, Damaris had simply blurted out, "Lauran is dead," and after that there had been no need to explain further. To the exclaims and questions of Mary Elaine and her mother, she had managed some story that Lauran had fallen from his horse, and somehow it was understood that she had been there when he died and, "Of course you couldn't bear to stay there another moment!" Mary Elaine had cried. "I can't even bear to think of it, and you saw it! Of course you couldn't stay. Of course you had to come here! Where else could you go?"
The other pieces for making a life for herself in Hull had fallen easily into place after that. Miss Edwards had let her have her room at the school almost immediately and been pleased, when school began in the autumn, at how well she took to teaching. Indeed, Damaris did enjoy it and succeeded in losing herself in her duties for much of the time. The girls were not difficult to manage, her classes were interesting, and at nights there were papers to grade and lessons to plan. When she was careful, she could keep her mind filled and busy with all of that, exhausting herself with work.
And there were James' letters, although they were neither so often nor as warm as they had been, and since New Year’s had nearly stopped. She had spent the Christmas holidays with Mary Elaine's family, and James had come for a few days’ visit at New Year's. On New Year's Eve he had made a point of dancing with her as midnight approached, so that when the clock chimed the hour it had been his kiss of welcome to the new year that she received on her cheek. But a short while later, as they had sat together on the small chaise in the corner by the potted fern, sipping punch and for the moment alone, James had asked, "Are you so quiet tonight because you’re thinking of the dead young man? Were you actually in love with him?"
She had not spoken of Lauran in months, had tried to keep thought of him as well as of Thornoak far away from her, but at James' question, memories had risen up, undiminished, forcing her to keep her eyes down, staring into the pale punch in the fine china cup she held a long while before she was able to answer evenly, "We were friends. I loved him as a friend." She stopped, puzzled by why that was wrong, and after a moment said instead, "I love him as that. As a friend whom I very much miss. But, no, I wasn't in love with him." Not the way that James had meant.
When James left two days later, Mary Elaine had been disappointed he had not asked Damaris "the question" she had been sure he had come to ask. "You didn’t pay him enough attention, Damaris," Mary Elaine had complained. "You didn't notice him enough. In fact–" A brief frown had troubled Mary Elaine’s face. "–you don't seem to notice a lot of things enough anymore."
Damaris had only been relieved that he was gone, and since then his letters had grown fewer and less open, and Damaris had had no trouble in answering him in kind. They seemed to have run out of things to say to each other and she did not care. Saying things to people took too much effort anymore.
The letter lying on the table here in her room now, troubling her sleep as much as the full moon had, was not from James but from Father Gedney again. She had hesitated to open it, but in the end she had given way to an unformed fear that something might have happened that she should know of. Afterward, she regretted her choice. He did not mention she had never answered his Christmas letter, he simply hoped she was well, said the winter had been mild and no great trouble to his rheumatism, that nothing had been heard of Virna, and all were fine at Thornoak, and Gweneth's baby was due in early summer.
Damaris' heart had lurched at that. She had not known Gweneth was with child. But of course she would not know, she reminded herself. How could she? But still she had closed her eyes and sat quietly for a while, making herself accept all over again that life at Thornoak would go on changing whether she were there or not, and someday she would be as far apart from it as she wished she already was. There would be marriages and children and seasons and deaths, and none of it would have anything to do with her. That was what she had to accept. There was no place for her at Thornoak and there never really had been. That was the wound she was trying to heal.
But the next paragraph of Father Gedney's letter had opened the wound wider.
"The rectory is too large for one elderly man to make full use of," he had written. "I have been in touch with Mistress Ashbrigg and she has agreed to pay for desks and books and other necessary equipment for converting my erstwhile parlor into a schoolroom to be dedicated to her son's memory."
Despite of everything, Damaris had nearly laughed at the thought of a schoolroom dedicated to Lauran’s memory. Of all things for a memorial, a schoolroom would have been among the last of Lauran’s choices.
But Father Gedney had gone on, "You would be my first choice for teacher here. Mrs. Thorpe in Gillingthwaite would take you for a boarder and you could have as much or as little to do with Thornoak as you choose. You know they will respect your wishes. I offer this to you on the chance you would prefer to live here in the dale, but be assured I will understand if you refuse."
Beneath his signature he had added in a brief postscript, "Kellan stopped in briefly just now. He asked that I send you his good wishes."
She could go back to the dale.
It was that thought as well as the moon that had kept her awake tonight. She could go back to the dale. She had spent all these months trying to drag to death her longing for exactly that, and now, with one simple letter and a postscript, she had found her effort to have been all waste. As much a waste as her mother had made in trying to do the same. Damaris could see in her mind her mother's shining joy the day they had driven up the dale toward Thornoak. Years and marriage and motherhood had not eased the longing in her. It had been still achingly alive.
Would she have better luck at killing it than her mother had, or would it always be there, only waiting for the chance to rise up and tear at her heart again and again? Neither fear nor time had been enough to kill it in her mother, nor all the grief and anger in herself. Was there nothing enough to kill it?
And then, past all the barriers she had made in her mind, she thought with sudden clarity: But if the joy of a thing is the very heart of your being, where is the sense in killing it? Why shouldn’t my love be greater than my fear?
And what if I admit that I love Kellan?
She had been standing staring into the dark folds of the closed drapery. Now she took hold of the heavy cloth with both hands and buried her face in it, as if that would be enough to hide her from what she had been refusing to know through all these months since she had left the dale.
She loved Kellan.
Lauran had been her dear friend. Nevin still was. Kellan always had been. But Kellan was something more in her heart than that. When she let it be, the thought of him was a delight and a longing and a passion in her. More than anyone else, he was a part of her own self, and that was what she had run from, as much as all the lies. Because if she loved Kellan, she was no longer free to ignore what he was or what he believed. Loving him meant she had to choose between accepting or refusing to accept all that he was, and in accepting, accept it for herself. Or, in her denying, deny him, too. Deny her love.
More than anything, it was refusal to make that choice that had driven her from the dale. Worse, she had refused even to face there was such a choice. Instead, she had chosen to make lies for herself and then run away to live in them.
As her mother had run away.
Clinging to the curtain, her face still buried in it, Damaris finally saw – as the barriers in her mind went down, leaving her nowhere to hide from herself – not only her own lies but how she had made them out of fear, out of refusal to face truths and make the choices that would come with facing those truths. All the lies there had been around her in the dale were her mother’s lies, bred by her mother’s fears and forced on Aunt Elspeth and everyone else against their wills. But Aunt Elspeth and all of them had lived in those lies for the sake of love, while her mother’s lies – and her own – were made from cowardice and at the cost of refusing love. There was the difference that made all the difference.
If it was true that "By their works shall ye know them" as the biblical text at Sunday's service said, then by their works Aunt Elspeth, Uncle Russell, Nevin, Gweneth, and Kellan were all deeply good. Father Gedney had tried to help her see that – that deeds gave the truth about someone’s beliefs better than any words ever did.
So what she had to face was that, at the end, she had fled from them and the dale not so much because of everyone else’s lies but because of her own. She had fled because she was afraid. She had fled from love because to have that love, she would have had to look at too many truths, and so had chosen lies instead. But the lies lay scattered in little broken bits around her, shattered by the strength of her own heart. Shattered because she would not live in lies and fear the way her mother had.
She loved Kellan.
And she wanted to go home.