He fled as I turned. This was no ghost. He was flesh and blood and his feet made a racket on the gallery as he raced away. I remember that he had dark hair. I remember that there was something about his hasty turn that set his physique against the fragile memory of that scene on Mr Winstone’s path, and found them to be a match. His eyes were blue, as Mrs Abbey had promised, but more muted than the electrifying glare I had been trained to anticipate.
I thought he was heading for the attic. I reached the point where the cluster of bedrooms met the mouth of the long line of the gallery as he reached the turn onto the narrow attic stairs. Only he didn’t race upwards. He put out a hand onto the dark wooden panelling on the end wall and passed silently through it.
The door swung a little on its hinges, back and forth, but it was still by the time I reached it. I had the Colonel’s cane in my hand. I don’t know why but I used it rather than my hand to prod the concealed door ajar.
It swung smoothly and no violent hand snatched from the other side. My heartbeat was a dull roar in my ears. So was my breathing. There was no one inside. I was stepping into a plain and ordinary landing lit by a window at the far end and housing a collection of various closed doors and a smell of dry dusty wood. There was also a narrow enclosed stairs that led steeply downwards to the bright rectangle of an open door. This was not the moment to marvel at the discovery that at last I’d found where the Colonel kept his bathrooms. Clattering downwards, I found myself bursting abruptly into the kitchen in the space beside the dresser through what I’d taken to be a plain, uninteresting wood-panelled wall. It was disorientating. I didn’t really know what I was doing, except that somehow there was a vital lure in the hope of snatching a closer look at this stray man. I had to choose between racing into the yard outside or back through the house into the darkened dining room. Both doorways were open and empty. He’d moved quickly to escape me.
I opted for the less intimidating space of outdoors. There was relief in the idea of air and light. I couldn’t see any sign of him. But the goat muttered something, a tentative question, and drew me to that small knotted door in the old tithe barn wall.
The cane was again my door lever. Inside was cool and dark like a cave, and quiet except for the clatter as the goat stood up at his door to peer at me down the length of the row of stables. I took a horribly reluctant step towards him along the line. There was the silence of the steps up to the hayloft at the end.
I didn’t have to steel myself for the insanity of climbing into the unknown. I was swept painfully into the rough stone wall when the nearest stable door swung open and the man crashed out and past me into the sunshine once more. I still hadn’t seen him properly. He’d designed his ambush to blind me with the swing of the heavy wooden door. The crush of it hurt. I called out to him but he didn’t wait. I thrust the door back with a bang and lurched out into the sunshine after him, squinting and following instinct rather than his trail down the length of this barn and across the wide yard to the vast gaping maw of the machine barn.
I was snatched back there on the edge of the dark by a thud of feet from behind and a hard hand that caught at my arm.
It yanked me round in a spinning turn. Now my mind had the chance to shrink from the idea that this man might take steps to stop me from pursuing. He didn’t know I only had the idiotic idea of asking his name and I should have guessed from Mr Winstone’s injuries what he might be prepared to do to stop me. I cringed and flung out my free hand to block myself from colliding with his chest and perhaps to fend him off. Only I found that the cane was in my hand and it tangled with him and in the flurry, as I stumbled and a squeak escaped, his hands thrust me onwards almost absentmindedly into the grip of another. As we passed I caught a blur of an averted profile beneath lighter-coloured hair and then Danny left, intent on continuing the hunt. The new set of hands adjusted their grip to take a firm hold of my upper arm and bore me away before I’d even really identified him.
He was marching me across the yard towards the tithe barn once more. Away from that man and away from the noise and bustle of his father’s meeting in the farmyard. Now he merely had a hand out, ushering me along. As we went, I heard him say in a voice that was inexplicably close to being torn by a laugh, ‘Emily, you need to tell me what you thought you were doing.’
The sense of urgency eased. We were heading to the house, I think. He knew I would go with him. He’d released me completely. I was turning my head to ask him something when he abruptly stopped with a sound like a sharp intake of breath and made an impulsive snatch to reclaim my hand and require me to stop also.
We were at the corner of the tithe barn. He was close to me and his hand still had mine. Laughter wasn’t in evidence anywhere now. His attention had passed over my head, captivated by something deeply serious beyond. I twisted round to follow his gaze and saw Mrs Abbey.
Mrs Abbey was standing near the place where my bicycle still rested, watching us with a speculative tilt to her head. She was late for the Colonel’s meeting and she had her children with her. She had been hurrying down the length of the tithe barn but she’d stopped at almost the same moment as we had and with the same air of guilty discovery that wracked us. It was as though we’d all been caught sneaking and now she was standing there, watching us, or rather watching me first and then the man beside me and she was waiting for the friendly fuss and sympathy to explode from one or other of us, as was her due. This was because it turned out the old lady at the shop had slightly underplayed the truth when she’d told me that someone had blacked Mrs Abbey’s eye. They’d blacked the entire left side of her lower jaw.
I think I made an impulsive movement towards her. His hand still held mine, resting now behind my left hip and deliberately, I thought, out of her sight. A faint tightening of his grip begged me to check the impulse to leave him. It worked. And made her eyebrows lift a fraction because she saw my change of heart. My glance over my shoulder up at Richard was no help. The fine line of his jaw was set as he stared past me at her. I bit my lip. Uncertain, while all the guilty suppositions I’d been harbouring about her evaporated in the discovery of the full horror of that assault. She must have needed the doctor to check her cheekbone wasn’t cracked. In my head I had the grim echo of Danny’s admonishment, ‘I saw her face’ and I didn’t like to imagine what it should mean.
Now I couldn’t quite read the expression beneath that bruise. It had eased to something like curiosity. I thought that in Mrs Abbey there was a growing interest in my inexplicable stillness, only she couldn’t have known that for me the stillness was contradicted by the pulse I could feel pounding through the contact I had with Richard. Still he had his fingers entwined with mine; not for comfort or kindness but as a security to keep me on his side. I don’t know what he would have done if I had resisted it. I felt that I alone was being asked to choose and I suspected that, in all honour, I ought to be standing with her.
Still Mrs Abbey said nothing. We all said nothing. I turned my head. A few long seconds passed before the Captain withdrew his gaze from her to find I was looking up at him too. He tipped his head almost imperceptibly towards his car, where it waited before the machine barn. His mouth formed a very muted but urgent shape of, ‘Please?’
It went through me like an arrow. He specifically didn’t want me to speak to her. His hand dropped from mine. Under his scrutiny I chose to betray a beaten woman and broke every commitment I’d ever made to consideration and care. I should have been reacting to the inexcusable violence of the awful bruise that coloured her skin, but instead I turned and marched before him towards his car. I went in near-perfect silence. Mrs Abbey made no move or sound to stop us. Halfway to the car I stopped myself when I remembered the cane. The Captain was there beside me.
‘The Colonel,’ I told him in a race, meaning, I think, to find the old man myself but I wasn’t remotely surprised to find that my hand was met and encouraged after only the slightest resistance to surrender the stick to his grip. I reached the passenger door to the car. It was opened for me and I slid in. The cane flashed overhead as Danny appeared in the doorway from the barn and put out his hand to catch it. I saw the shake of his head and the way he mouthed the word gone.
The car door was pressed shut on me and then the Captain was around the other side and in beside me and we were away, taking the turn past the cottages and up onto the lane from the village towards the main road. As we went, I knew I still had absolutely no justification for the choice I had made except one small excuse and it was this. It was the way Mrs Abbey’s expression had changed as she reached the corner of the tithe barn in time to observe the moment that the Captain dropped into his seat beside me. It was the way the ugly lopsided tug of the bruise upon her mouth had changed as she had smiled. Her mood had been lightened by our flight; her eyes were alive with fascination where they ought to have been delivering a glare of condemnation. I’d dreaded that my parting view would have been of a frightened woman and beneath the interest she was frightened; at least her eyes had been fixed and wide as she had watched us. But now my head was echoing with the memory of Mrs Abbey’s only words spoken through the open window as the car had curved past. She’d made a point of thanking him quite seriously for driving her to the doctor’s house earlier, and her children had waved.