The top of Hawk Ridge began to glow as if the seam that stitched it to the sky had parted to let fire leak through. By then, Zeal had already broken her promise to herself. She had vowed that by dawn she would find the courage to jump off the roof.
As she feared only two things, losing control and ignorance, she found jumping doubly hard. First would come the helpless fall. And no one could ever teach you how the end would feel.
Perhaps my heart will stop before I hit, she thought. The more she imagined falling, the more likely that seemed.
She had spent the night on the chapel roof, arms wrapped around her knees while her thoughts scrabbled and squeaked in panic. Reason, when she could catch hold of it, always hauled her back to the same terrible place. There was no other way.
All I have to do is tilt forwards. Fold my wings and stoop like a hawk into darkness and safety.
But those intolerable seconds of falling had to come first.
She leaned out over the edge of the chapel roof, steadying herself with one hand on the crenellated parapet. Now that she could begin to see them in the growing light, the brick walls and paved walks of the herb garden below her looked far harder than she had imagined during the night. The welcoming pillow of darkness had turned into a hungry mouth full of sharp-cornered teeth.
She observed a quiver of terror, beginning just behind her ears, then shooting down through her throat, chest and belly to crimp the skin on the tops of her knees.
One of my…of this body’s…last sensations, she thought.
She swallowed and felt the pressure of her tongue against the back of her lower teeth, the slight roughness of the teeth and the smooth slippery wall of her lower lip. In a few more moments, all this feeling would end. She could not think where it would go instead. Along with all the other stored-up sensations of her seventeen years. As precious as they were to her, such sensations seemed far too petty for Heaven. About which she was not certain, in any case.
If only it weren’t going to be such a beautiful morning.
I can’t bear to miss it! she thought.
The sun had grown too bright to look at directly. Its light now reached the bottom of the river valley where the house stood. She had seen the Shir rise after a heavy rain until it spread across the water meadows in leaden sheets. Now, it glinted between edgings of willow like a line of dropped coins.
She looked down at what was left of her house.
The fire burned again against her eyelids. During the night and following day while it had been alive, the fire was an overwhelming presence, like God or royalty, hungry, terrifying and beautiful at the same time. They had all seemed so puny and presumptuous in fighting it. Except John, on the roof, possessed, taking chances she could not bear to watch, but did. She had breathed all her strength into him, held him safe with her will. If he had fallen and died, her emptied shell would have crumbled into ash.
‘But I knew you wouldn’t let me fall,’ he told her, when she later reproached him for taking such risks, touching his face, his hair and hands.
Now she tested the texture and resilience of her own cheek, as if storing up memories of herself to take into the darkness. Her fingers explored her lips, testing how they might feel to another hand. Even now, their softness still startled her. Until recently, she had never thought of herself as being fashioned to give delight.
His delight had astonished her so much that once she had even, with curious disbelief, and the door barred, examined her quim in a hand-glass.
It had been hard to look straight at it. She could hardly believe that the little ginger beast, that hairy sea shell, had anything to do with love. She believed even less that the sight of it could give such pleasure.
She stroked the peach fuzz on her upper lip.
Only three weeks ago, she had stood on this same roof, with Hawkridge Estate spread out below her, watching for his return from his own estate at Richmond, near London. Even waiting had been delicious. She had spread her arms to the late afternoon sun, closed her eyes and imagined herself lifting, like thistledown caught in an updraught, so alert and alive in every fibre that she had shivered with delight at the tug of a faint breeze on the hair at her temple.
She shuffled her buttocks a little farther over the edge. Breathed in, to fill herself with the void in advance, so to speak. To join it by degrees, as if such a thing were possible.
Don’t look down. Just do it.
Please, God, don’t let me scream.
As she leaned forwards, a sharp corner of his letter in her bodice prodded her breast.
I’ll read it just once more before I jump.
She unfolded the paper, still warm from her skin.
Sweetest Zeal,…I would tear out my heart and send it if I could…
She rocked in misery. She had shouted at him when he told her, had blamed him for pig-headedness that had brought about this horror. Even without other cause, she deserved to die for that cruelty.
…I meant what I said. I will stay true…
And so will I!
I regret only that I did not make you take me with you, regardless of the dangers. I should have followed secretly and stowed away! I would have worked in the fields beside you.
She held his letter against her face, breathed in the smell of damp paper and the wax seal, imagined that she could also smell a trace of him.
I will be true to my vow, she thought. Faithful until death.
She saw the fine, lean lines of his hand and how the tendons shifted under his skin as he moved the pen. Her fingers searched like a dowser’s wand for the exact places he had touched.
She could not wait seven years. She could not wait even seven months.
She wondered if he would feel the shock in his own sinews, lift his head as if at an unexplained noise.
‘It won’t work!’ At the foot of the ladder, Philip Wentworth stood panting and clinging to a rung as if holding himself upright. ‘Did you hear me? It won’t work! Not high enough!’
She closed her eyes. ‘Go away!’
‘I’m coming up.’ Without waiting for her answer, he began to climb the ladder.
Jump now! she warned herself. Or you’ll have to endure another night like last night, all over again. But if she did jump, he would now feel responsible.
She sighed and leaned back. It was beyond belief that the old estate hermit should choose now, of all times, to turn sociable. She heard him stop on the way up to puff and wheeze. Then his head appeared above the parapet. She looked away, pinched with desperate fury. He heaved himself onto the roof and settled beside her on the edge. After a moment, his breathing eased and he gave a little cough.
They sat in silence. The intense greens and yellows of the beech hanger began to bleach in the growing brightness of the sun.
‘So?’ she asked at last. She still could not look at him.
Silently, he tossed a fragment of moss out into the air and watched it fall into the garden below. ‘You’re waiting for argument?’
‘I’m not a