Chapter 56 The End of the Land

On the last morning the road gave up its orchards altogether and became a road across rock and low thorn, climbing by degrees to a shoulder of land where nothing stood between them and four hundred miles of open ocean. The wind here did not gust; it simply existed, constant as gravity, humming in the thorn like a finger on a wet glass rim. Rosalind had grown up in a valley that cupped its house like two hands. This was what the world looked like with no hands at all. "There," Ines said. The house sat on the seaward slope below the track: long, low, whitewashed once, its walls the color of old bone in that light, with a small towered chimney at one end and, set into the gable facing the water, a stone niche like an empty window frame. Even at this distance Rosalind could see what was missing. No smoke. No blue doors standing open for air. The garden had gone over to fennel, gray-green and head-high, moving all together in the wind like something breathing. And in the niche where a station lamp should have burned, there was darkness. They stopped, by unspoken consent, two fields off. Julian studied the house through his glass for a long time and reported it in his deck-report voice: roof whole, door shut, shutters closed but sound, no sign of fire within ten years, no sign of violence ever. A sleeping house, not a dead one. "We do not arrive in the dark," Ines said. It was the first time since Lisbon that her voice had sounded old. "That is the rule of this house above all houses. You come with light, or you do not come. Amália kept the rule even after there was no one left to keep it for." "Amália?" Rosalind asked. Ines did not answer, and the wind filled the silence for her. They stood a while in the track, three travelers and one small flame, looking down at the sleeping house, and the wind read them its long inventory — thorn, cliff, fennel, the gray smear of a path from door to niche worn by generations of feet going out at dusk with oil — and then Ines turned her back on it, deliberately, the way one turns a page. "Not today," she said. "Today we sleep like sensible people. Tomorrow we arrive." A shepherd found them at the fold an hour later, drawn by the impossible sight of fire where no fire should be, and stood at the wall with his crook and his suspicion until Julian produced Portuguese enough to explain lamps and keepers and the house at the point; at which the old man spat thoughtfully, said that only the wind lived there now, and that his father had driven his flock past it all his life and never once let the sheep graze the fennel on that slope, why, he could not say, except that the sheep would not eat it. He sold them milk, warned them about adders, and left shaking his head at the English and their habit of walking toward places everyone else walked away from. They made camp in a shepherd's fold a mile back among the thorn, out of the worst of it, and ate bread and cheese and drank the farmwife's wine from a skin, and the stars came out in such quantity over the water that Julian, watching them, began almost despite himself to take their heights out of habit, calling the names softly — the great wheel of it turning the wrong way round, he said, south of England's sky, as though heaven too had a southern approach. Rosalind wrapped herself in her mother's shawl and then in Julian's coat over it, and they sat close together while Ines slept sitting upright against the wall with the traveling lamp lit beside her like a dog that would not be sent to its basket. "I keep trying to imagine it," Rosalind said quietly. "The keeper who leaves a house like that. You don't leave a station because you're tired of it. Graves is eighty if he is a day and he climbs our tower stairs twice a day to swear at the wicks. Something happens. Or someone." She watched the dark shape of the house against the last band of light. "And I am afraid of finding out which, because I have read enough of my own family's story to know that when a keeping fails, it fails on purpose more often than by accident." "Or it passes," Julian said. "Lights get carried; we've seen it done. Perhaps whoever kept this house carried theirs onward and meant to come back." "With the lamp niche cold for years? No." Rosalind shook her head slowly. "When my mother died the flame guttered one night and steadied, and I understood it had been *handed*, not dropped. This looks dropped." She was quiet a moment, and the sea said what it always says. "Do you remember the night we relit the tower? After the vault. You stood one pace behind me the whole time — not crowding, just there — and when the flame caught you made a sound like a man hauling on a rope in heavy weather. I have thought about that sound for weeks. It was relief and terror together. I think tomorrow we are going to find out why this house has neither." Julian considered that with his eyes on the dark house. "Because nobody was there to make the sound," he said at last. Then he turned to look at her, his face a pale blur, the sea loud below the fold. "Julian. When we go in tomorrow — whatever we find — I want to say now, in the dark where it is easier: I do not regret one step of this road. If keeping turns out to cost what this house suggests it costs, I would still walk it again from the first morning, with you, at Ines's pace." She felt rather than saw his smile. "You are learning to make vows without a chapel present." "You are a bad influence. You proposed half of ours at sea." They slept in watches, as he'd taught her, and once in the black middle of the night Rosalind woke to find Julian standing at the fold wall, looking at the cape, where the house was not visible and the darkness had a texture. "The wind dropped," he said when she joined him. He did not say what else, because there was nothing else: no light at the niche, no answering flicker from the dark, only the enormous hush that follows weather off the land's end, and beneath it, so far down the cliff that sound took whole seconds to climb, the sea working at the roots of Portugal. She stood with her cheek against his shoulder until the cold drove them back to the wall, and neither of them named the thing they were both listening for, which was anyone. Before dawn the wind came back from the southwest, mild and wet, and Ines was already standing, already bundled, holding out the lamp. "It is time," the old woman said. "We arrive with light." ---