Solsbury Hill

by Susan M. Wyler

  She stripped down to a T-shirt and underpants, lay close to one side of the bed, and reached her hand back to hold his. She gazed at the dark wood throughout the place, on the furniture and the beautiful well-waxed floors. The light of the Minster was right outside their window. Lit up like a holiday, the church’s glow filled the room. It had been a long day, they were tired, and she felt him press his spine against hers. All night they slept that way.

  Open to the sky where the rails ran through, the train station at York was a modern architect’s dream of cable, wire, and steel.

  “You’ll be back soon, right?” he said.

  She closed her eyes and kissed him. Urgently, he wrapped his arms around her, held her so close she could hardly breathe with his mouth pressed against hers and her body not yielding.

  She pressed her hand against his chest and took one step away. “Listen, I’m not sure what we’re doing. I’ve no idea what I’m doing. Things have changed, you know . . .”

  “Sadly, I do know,” he said. Ever optimistic, Miles’ heart was buried under layers of plans, blueprints he had for the future. Like his city, where things moved quickly and much went unheard. “But I’m not giving up. I’ll call you,” he said.

  “You won’t be able to get through.”

  “I’ll call anyway and when you’re ready, you’ll be home soon?”

  Her wan smile said all she could say.

  The train swept by and its engine drowned whatever else Miles was saying and they had no more time. Urgent travelers climbed out of carriages and others climbed in. From waiting, suddenly the place was abuzz with baggage dragged and a hundred hearts stirring. Everyone was going somewhere. They were leaving or arriving or the one to stay behind. It was time to say good-bye and they both had tears in their eyes.

  Whatever was coming, things had changed between them.

  The train was waiting and he kissed her firmly, so firmly she thought he might not let go, might not let her get on the train before it pulled out of the station. Eleanor stepped inside the train and found her seat by a window. There were people standing on either side of the platform and from inside a group of them, he waved. He got smaller. People do get smaller. With perspective, everything gets smaller. She watched him turn and head inside under the roof where there were ivory stone columns with dark marble at the base and capital. She imagined him on a bench, watching people in the artfully designed station with its receding line of columns and steel. With perspective she saw how the train station mirrored the arc of the river.

  Her eyes dropped closed then opened and her skin brimmed with color when she saw Mead walking toward her at the station.

  “You’re virtually transparent,” he said. “All the life that moves beneath your skin. It’s charming.” He took her bag.

  “Thin-skinned? That’s not exactly me. What are you doing here?” She’d called from the train station to let Gwen know she was on her way back. She was happier to see him than she could have expected to be.

  “I’m picking you up and taking you home.”

  “And what is it you think you see under this skin?”

  “I see passion pulling at you.” He took her arm and she was surprised.

  “Well, that’s easy,” she said.

  “I’m not finished,” he said. “I see confusion, too: a divided self, a self deciding whether or not it wants to know its Self.”

  “That will take me all night to figure out. What you just said. What is it you just said, exactly?”

  It was hard not to inhale him. He smelled of heather much of the time, and leather and wood. Eleanor felt soft, walking next to him.

  He had no sense of entitlement, and yet the world was his place. When he was around, the world seemed a little more delightful in a nothing-matters-much sort of way, and there was a sound in the air, or maybe the absence of a hollow buzz. She thought she heard it for the first time the first day she went for a walk on the moors. Or maybe it wasn’t Mead at all, maybe it was a sound from inside her.

  She laughed to herself and he looked her way. “I think the strangest thoughts in this place,” she said.

  She liked the look of his hand as he carried her small bag. As they walked, she moved just a fraction closer to him.

  “So what wild thought was it, now?”

  She laughed the easiest laugh. A swing that took her so high she was scared but thrilled, coming down from the swing and feeling it sway to a stop, then twirling the ropes and letting it spin until it spun itself out, and then seeing the world was still there, just the way it always was but better.

  “Do you know the Stafford Hotel?” she asked.

  “In London. I know it. Is that where he’s staying?”

  “That’s where he was.”

  “Would he be the reason you left New York?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Methinks you’re a scarperer.”

  “What the heck’s a scarperer?”

  “One who scarpers. Me, my da. People who know me well call me Scarper. It’s someone who runs away from things.”

  “I’m not running away from anything.” Her voice rose. “It doesn’t feel like that at all, to me,” she said. “How are you a scarperer? Hmm? Tell me.”

  “The car is over here.” They walked through the unspectacular train station of Malton.

  He’d washed the car and it was brighter, the great lines clearer now. From the back he pulled a thick brown cable sweater and tossed it to her over the roof of the car, suggested she might put it on. The Chanel jacket was tight and not warm enough—the weather was turning frosty—so she threw her jacket in the back and put on his sweater. It was brown and bulky and reached halfway down her thighs, but she liked it.

  “You look great in that,” he said.

  She smiled.

  The sleeves of the sweater were long, so she folded them back then rolled down the window. On the floor of the Aston Martin, she found the scarf she thought she’d lost and she wrapped it around her neck many times, tilted the seat back, and watched the sky fly by.

  After a while, Eleanor checked her phone. Gladys had texted that now Bergdorf Goodman was also making an offer that would come through in the next couple of days. Eleanor felt satisfied. A lifetime of work had come to this moment with English farmland flying by outside the window, her stocking feet up on the dashboard, her skirt hiked up, and his big brown sweater: something was perfect.

  Tabitha had sent a text saying, Either you’ve dropped your phone in the toilet of a London pub or it’s been stolen by bandits in Sherwood Forest. Either way, you must let me know you’re fine. Send homing pigeons.

  Eleanor wrote them back, then turned off the phone. She wasn’t ready to head back to New York and was grateful to have a task that kept her tied to Trent Hall. Emily had sought her out, insisted on the importance of finding letters hidden inside a bookshelf in the house. Though it worried Eleanor some, to follow the promptings of an odd woman or ghost, she was going to try to find them. It was all there was left to do, and then it would be time to go.

  “Can I ask you something serious?” she said.

  “Ask whatever you like.”

  “I just need a little clarification about something.”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “I’ve seen a woman a few times, in the house and on the moors.”

  “You said that. The woman you were chasing that first day.”

  “Right, her. And some kids, too, and not just outside but in the house, and they don’t seem exactly current . . .”

  “You think you’re seeing ghosts?”

  Eleanor nodded.

  “You’d not be the first to encounter, to wonder . . .” He looked at her, brought his eyes back to the road, then looked at her again. “I think I can explain a bit of it to you. If you want me to.”

  “I definitel
y do want you to.”

  “It’s something like this.” She appreciated his hesitation. “Ghosts are a bit last century, fundamentally, but there are things about this place that might make sense of them.”

  He looked at her, checked to make sure it was all right to continue in this territory. “It’s a fact that things don’t decompose in a quite normal way on the moors. Take the peat moss that makes up much of this place: it’s rich because it’s still living. The stuff that’s in it hasn’t died all the way. You understand that?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “So consider how long it might take. Whether it were possible, I mean, that in some way these ghosts some people see, maybe what you’ve seen, are the not-yet-dead spirits hovering, because the body itself isn’t altogether decomposed.”

  Both her eyebrows lifted as high as they ever had.

  She was glad to be back with Mead, she realized. It was partly that she loved the sound of his voice and the way he answered what she asked, took her seriously, had so much new to offer in exchange. But it was more than that. As she sat beside him in the car she felt buoyant in her body, as if he’d walked up and taken his place on the other end of her teeter-totter, his weight lifting her up until both their feet were just off the ground, and the beam held in perfect balance.

  “Anything left to rot in a boggy place does not ever altogether decompose, so there is living matter still and one wonders if spirit might linger, close by.”

  “Honestly?” Her foot began to tap anxiously on the dash. “Are you serious?”

  “It’s a serious subject you bring up.”

  “There’s a physical explanation for ghosts?”

  “I think there might be.”

  “But she’s not partly decomposed. She’s intact and young and pretty, and the other two are children.” As Mead believed her, tried to make sense of what she had seen, the walls against believing collapsed internally and she was left with being a girl who’d walked with a ghost, talked with a ghost, touched one’s body, and watched it die.

  Anxious with the stirring inside, she changed the subject. “Would you mind if we pulled off the road soon? Stopped for a bit? I’ve been craving chocolate cake. I can’t explain.”

  “No need ever to explain a craving, least not to me. There are dozens of places with chocolate cake.” He smiled.

  Soon he turned off the highway. “I didn’t mean to upset you with all this. I know it’s tricky. I’ve no idea what you’ve been seeing, but if you’d like, you can trust me.”

  The café was empty. It was after lunch and before tea.

  The waitress brought menus.

  “I’ll have a glass of red wine and the chocolate cake, please,” she said.

  “And I’ll have some of the apple and cheese pie,” he said.

  “It’s almost more disturbing that you believe me, that you take it seriously, what I think I’ve seen. I’d rather hear there’s a crazy old woman that wanders in and out of the house sometimes.”

  “You know,” he continued, “stories of ghosts are legion in this part of the country. More than anywhere in the world, I’d venture to say. Alice thought Trent Hall was the site of the real-life Catherine and Heathcliff story, and she had things she thought she’d seen, I think, though she didn’t confide in me.”

  “Gwen said something like that. But what does that mean?”

  “Well, partly it simply means that Brontë based the book on Trent Hall, or someone in it. I don’t really know, but I guess it suggests that.”

  Eleanor was watching him talk and missing some of what he said. She was studying his face for the Scotsman and the Latina woman in it. His eyes were emerald green and almost too big for a man. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a man with eyes so green. She wondered what kind of a gene turned eyes such a deep dark green. His hair was black and curly, but in the light she saw the undertone of red. From Viking ancestors, maybe. His eyebrows were thick and went in different directions. A metro man would have plucked them, but she liked them the way they were. His hands were beautiful.

  He was saying that a writer might open a door onto a make-believe world and describe it. Or maybe she would describe something real, something she has known, something she feels. Something she already feels. “That’s the thing about Emily Brontë,” he went on, “readers then and scholars now have puzzled over how she could write about such a passionate love without ever having had one.”

  “Maybe she did have one.”

  “Anything’s possible, I suppose, but she’s considered a dyed-in-the-wool spinster.”

  Eleanor recalled the odd wool of Emily’s dress. A chill ran through her and she felt suddenly cross. “What difference does all this make, really? I don’t get it. What does it matter if Catherine and Heathcliff were real or what Emily based a story on?” Her voice was strident. “And what does it have to do with me?” Eleanor spilled her wine and it ran across the table.

  “Shit.” She looked for something to wipe it up. Her breath was shallow. There were no napkins and it kept running. It ran onto the sweater and she leaned forward and used it to stop the spill, then took it off. Itchy with irritation, she didn’t like him now. It was too much information.

  With the sweater off she looked lean and bare in her tank top. Shivering, with their lips blue, the children could swim at the waterfall because they were already dead as ghosts, she thought. She looked at Mead, stood up, and left his damp sweater on the seat. “I’m sorry about your sweater. I’m just going to walk around. I’ll be back.” She headed quickly out the front door onto the street, where storefront lights were coming on and everything smelled like Christmas. The cold ached on her skin.

  There was a general store. The bell above the shop door rang. Behind a counter the shopkeeper perched on a stool.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for a sweater of some kind.”

  “You must be freezing with nothing on out there.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, let’s get you dressed,” the shopkeeper said and went around the counter toward the back of the store.

  “I have a man’s extra-large and a small left,” she apologized. The sweater she held was wool, crewneck, and a heathered gray. “Or these, but they’re expensive cashmere.”

  “Do you have the cashmere in a man’s extra-large? I’ll take that.” Eleanor pulled it on over her head and rolled up the sleeves. “It’s warm, it’s perfect.” She paid for the sweater.

  On her way out of the store she noticed a porcelain plate with a familiar profile, brown hair in a smooth bun, a handsome face with pale—almost pale blue—skin.

  “Who is that?”

  “It’s Emily Brontë.”

  “I thought so, but it’s not a great likeness.” Eleanor stepped close to a lamp and looked at the cameo on her ring, gave a small wave to the woman inside the shop, headed out and down the street.

  Mead was finishing his apple and cheese pie.

  She slid in right beside him in the booth.

  “I was about to go after you. Where did you get the sweater?” he asked calmly.

  She slumped low in the seat. “Next door. Sorry about yours. This one’s for you.”

  “It’s just wine. It’ll wash out.” He leaned forward on his elbows and turned to face her.

  “You know the woman I saw,” she said, “she was Emily Brontë.”

  He listened intently.

  “It’s not true what you say, what they say, about her. I know. I’ve seen her, I’ve sat with her, and she’s told me. Frankly, I haven’t been sure, but”—she laughed—“I saw this silly plate next door. I guess you know it, the painting of her profile, and it’s her. It’s the woman I sit and talk with.”

  Mead’s face was intensely serious and he suggested they go.

  Outside walking, he started, “Well,
first you have to know it’s a gift, if you’ve seen what it seems you’ve seen. If you think of it like facets in a diamond and from each of them there’s a view on a world. Right?”

  “Okay.”

  “And maybe caught between the space where light moves through the prism, maybe there are other ways of seeing, other things to see, or, try it this way . . .” He moved his hands as he talked as they walked along on the charming street. “If we assume a continuous range of energy, a continuum”—he was clearly enthused with the subject—“beyond what we commonly understand about space and time, and that it’s perception itself that cuts into it, slices it and freezes it, and makes things concrete. Makes it seem real. Something we hold on to as real. That we agree about, between us. We learn to agree about what we see and what we don’t see.”

  “And what we don’t say we see,” she said.

  He walked close to her. “I think seeing depends on a lot of things,” he said.

  “Like?”

  “How open the mind, how willing the heart.” He paused for a while. “Moisture in the air. If it’s anything like a hologram, there has to be moisture in the air.”

  “If it’s moisture they need,” Eleanor broke in, “then New York in the summer must be teeming.”

  “Maybe a bit of quiet is also necessary, but I can tell you what Emily wrote. At one point Catherine says, ‘Heaven did not seem to be my home;/ and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth;/ and the angels were so angry that they flung me out / into the middle of the heath / on the top of Wuthering Heights; / where I woke sobbing for joy.’”

  Eleanor asked him to recite it again and a long quiet settled in between them as she absorbed what Emily had written.

  “She knew she’d come back to the moors,” Eleanor said.

  Mead looked away. “Let’s get back on the road and get home.”

  “I like it when you call it home,” she said.