第26章 The Watcher in the Wood

The heather was fresh. That was the first thing Eleanor noticed when she knelt at the gate, because no cut flower keeps its color for three days in the October air, and the pale blooms in her palm were as crisp and sweet as if they had been gathered that very morning. She had come out before the household was awake, wrapped in one of Chloe's old shawls, her boots wet with dew, meaning only to look at the lane and the wood and the place where the dusk gathered. She had not meant to find proof. The posy lay at the foot of the north pillar of the gate, bound with a thread of black silk, and beside it, pressed into the mud of a puddle left by the last rain, was the print of a woman's boot. Small. Narrow. The heel worn at the outer edge, the way heels wear when a body walks alone, leaning forward, listening. Eleanor crouched and touched the edge of the print, and the earth was still soft there, and she knew with a certainty that prickled the skin at her neck that whoever had left the heather had stood in that spot in the dark hours of the night, close enough to the house to see the lamps in the library windows, close enough to hear, perhaps, the sound of Thomas and Rosalind laughing at their supper. She carried the posy inside and laid it on the library table, and when Gabriel came down at first light, drawn by the painter's habit of rising with the dawn, he stopped in the doorway and looked at the flower before he spoke. Where did you find this? At the gate, Eleanor said. He crossed the room and lifted it with the reverence of a man handling something sacred, turning the stems between his fingers, and she watched his face change, the guardedness falling away into something younger and less certain. White heather, he said. There is only one place I have ever seen it growing, and only one person who ever spoke of it. My grandmother used to say it grew where a love had been buried, and that it was the luckiest and the unluckiest flower in England, depending on who was asking. He turned the posy over and found the black silk thread, and his hand stilled. This was gathered within the day, he said. This is not old. Eleanor told him about the footprint and the watcher and the three days of being watched, and he listened without interrupting, and when she had finished he set the flower down very carefully and said, Whoever they are, they know the heather. They know what it means. They have read the letters, or they have been told the story by someone who did. Sebastian came in before breakfast, having ridden the boundary at dawn as he did every morning now that the lane was no longer safe, and Eleanor saw him take in the scene at a glance, the flower on the table, Gabriel standing too close to her, and the look that crossed his face was there and gone in an instant, hidden behind the smile he had worn so long it had grown into his features. A gift? he asked, shrugging out of his coat. Of a sort, Eleanor said, and told him about the print and the posy. He listened gravely, and when she finished he went to the window and stood looking out at the wood. A woman, he said at last. You are certain. The print is a woman's, Eleanor said. Small and narrow, and the stride was short. She has been coming at night, and she knows the gate, and she knows the flower. Then we find her, Sebastian said. We ask her what she wants, and if she will not say, we ask her to leave. It is not a game. I know it is not a game, Eleanor said. That is what frightens me. Because she has had every chance to ask us for what she wants, and instead she leaves flowers at our gate and watches us from the wood. Whoever she is, she is waiting for something. The question is what. They searched the wood that afternoon, the three of them and Graves and the two eldest footmen, beating through the hazel and the bramble in a line, and it was Graves who found the place. It lay in a hollow of the bank above the lane, where the heather grew thick and the roots of an old oak made a natural shelter, and someone had been living there, not for a day or a week but for a month or more. There was a bed of dry fern and a fire-blackened ring of stones, and a tin cup, and the remains of a loaf wrapped in oilcloth, and nailed to the trunk of the oak, at the height of a woman's eye, a small square of canvas. It was a painting, or the beginning of one, a study in charcoal and white paint of the house seen from the hollow, the tower rising against a gray sky, and beneath it, half finished, a figure at the gate in a black cloak. Eleanor stood before it and felt the hair rise on her arms, because the figure at the gate in the painting was herself. It was Eleanor who found the stone. It lay half buried at the foot of the oak, a rough piece of slate, and when she cleared the leaf mold away she found letters cut into it, shallow and worn, and she knelt and traced them with her fingers. J. M. 1796. And beneath the letters, very small, a carved flower, a sprig of heather. Graves came and stood over her, and the old steward was silent for a long time, and when he spoke his voice was strange and hollow, the voice he had used on the first day she came to Blackmore. Jenny March, he said. I heard that name once, from my grandmother, who was a kitchen maid here in the old days. She used to say that a girl was buried in the heather, a maid who saved a man from the fire and was never thanked for it, and that her grave was the luckiest and the unluckiest spot in the county. I thought it was only a story. Eleanor looked at the stone, at the date cut beside the name, and she thought of the burned man in Clerkenwell painting his lost love by candlelight, and of the maid who had dragged him through a scullery window, and of the flower that grew where a love had been buried. Not a story, she said. Not anymore. She stood up and brushed the leaf mold from her hands. Someone has come back to tend this grave, and to leave flowers at our gate, and I think they are the person the letters have been waiting for all along. She looked at the house, at the tower, at the pale glimmer in its highest window. We are going to find out who, she said. Before the month is out. That night Eleanor sat in the library with the posy before her and wrote down everything she knew, the names and the dates and the questions, in a hand that grew steadier as the page filled. The watcher was a woman. She knew the heather and the grave. She had come, it seemed, to tend the one and to leave the other at the gate, like an offering, like a question. And she had painted Eleanor at the gate, which meant she had watched the house long enough to know its rhythms, its mornings and evenings, its comings and goings. Eleanor turned the black silk thread over in her fingers and thought of Marguerite, of the letter that had come signed only with a V, of the white heather pressed between the pages of Elian Vance's journal. Somewhere in England, she thought, there is a woman who carries the same secret we do, and she is afraid to knock at our door. So I will go and open it for her. She banked the fire and went up to bed, and in the highest window of the tower a light burned on until dawn. ---