Solsbury Hill

by Susan M. Wyler

  They both were startled as the kitchen door slammed open and Granley came in, tense and out of breath. “Sorry to bother you, Mead, but Tilda’s had a bit of a fright.” The old man took off his hat and excused himself to Eleanor.

  “What kind of a fright, Granley?”

  “She seems to ’ave seen a ghost, she has, and she’s unnerved.”

  Tilda appeared behind him. She was trembling, shaking, and trying to make light of it herself.

  “I’m a right idjot,” she said, but couldn’t stop her teeth chattering. “The wind’s bein’ its old fool self.” She sipped the whisky Granley had poured for her. A wool blanket kept her warm. “That’s it, I know it musta been the wind. But she looked at me and wasn’t movin’, stood there and looked right at me. I feel a fool makin’ a fuss this way.”

  “It’s all right, Tild, it’s nothing at all. I mean, it’s not nothing. I’m sure you saw what you saw . . .”

  “Have ye seen ’er?”

  He shook his head.

  “Ye ’ave seen her.”

  “I’ve heard stories,” Mead said.

  “So she’s real.”

  “I’ve no idea,” he said.

  Tilda folded the blanket and placed it on the stool. “Well, I s’pose that’s why God gave us whisky, eh?”

  The kitchen lights were still on after they’d gone. Mead and Granley walked with Tilda back to their place up the stairs, around the back of the stables.

  A chill ran through Eleanor when she realized she was alone in the house. Everyone else slept in one of the structures outside the main house. Despite the doors and curtains closing off the rooms that weren’t used, the house was stony cold and resoundingly empty.

  The kitchen door slammed open and Mead had come back to say, “I’ll sleep inside tonight. Just so you know someone’s close by.”

  “Thank you for that,” she said. “It’s a big house.”

  “I’ll stay in the room across the hall from yours. If you need me for anything at all.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you in the morning.” She stepped onto the first stair.

  “Right,” he said. “Good night, then.”

  “It is possible I’ll get scared in the night . . . ,” she said.

  “Here’s hoping,” he said with a stunning cute smile.

  An edge of Eleanor’s nail had chipped and was ragged. It snagged the blanket and pulled. With her teeth she tried to file it smooth, but it didn’t become smooth. Instead, another part caught between her teeth and ripped down to the quick when she moved it. There was a thin line of blood right at the base. Still the nail was ragged, and now her teeth were set on edge. She curled her thumb into the palm of her hand to keep it from snagging the nightgown, wrapped the blanket like a robe, climbed out of bed, and went to the room across the hall, where she knocked on the door.

  It was morning and there was no answer, even after she’d rapped three times. She was hoping that Mead would still be there, but when she cracked open the door he was already gone. It was a pretty guest room with a queen bed dressed in white linen sheets. The walls were painted a slightly grayed orange and the furniture was faintly washed with robin’s-egg blue paint. Rows of dark green bindings caught Eleanor’s eye.

  There were four shelves of paperbacks by a press called Virago. Women writers, every one. To the right of these on the bookshelf there were Brontë works. Cheap paperback copies of Wuthering Heights, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Anne’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall. And there were dozens of books about them: The Brontë Myth, The Brontë Circle, The Brontës of Haworth. Eleanor pulled out a copy of Wuthering Heights and one of the studies.

  Keeping hold of the wool blanket and the books, with one foot she pushed the big old chair over to the window until it was in the right place. She sat down and curled up in a ball, then opened one of the studies.

  An intrepid writer and diarist, Emily seemed to have left no poetry, no letters, no writing at all from her last few years. None had been found and the scholar surmised that either Emily had done something with them or her sister Charlotte had destroyed them.

  With private delight, Eleanor imagined that the letters and the diary she’d found had been hidden away to keep Charlotte from finding them. There was a secret Emily had written about, something about the Enswell family at Trent Hall, or about her own family, or both. Now Eleanor was curious about how things had occurred in time, and a picture emerged in her mind.

  Emily began writing Wuthering Heights in December 1845. Having met Robert just months before, she’d have been filled with the high hope of a sweet love affair when she’d started writing, but then something else must have happened. Apart from having had to make the choice to go home and take care of Branwell, something else had turned the story so desperately dark.

  Eleanor dropped the Brontë study to the floor and opened the novel itself to the place she’d left off reading. Her scattered mind held a reassuring image of Mead outside in the barn, still simply building the library. She couldn’t hear the brush dipped in varnish smoothing a sheen on the wood, nor the rhythmic whine of the drill making something work, but she knew he was there on the other side of the courtyard, anchoring her.

  Determined to finish the novel before she headed out on the moors, she felt an image tugging at her, like a child at his mother’s skirt. She kept reading but more images insinuated themselves between the words, so she set down the book and then she remembered.

  A dream she’d had in the night. It had to have been a dream. Robert Macaulay, a tall Scotsman with strong limbs, red curls of unruly hair out from under his hat, cheer in his face, and the kindest way about him, walked with Emily on his arm through the seaside town of Whitby. The sun was coming up. Robert and Emily stood in the golden light of the harbor and he turned to her, suggested she choose which of two hands from behind his back. She laughed and tapped one arm and he offered her a small wooden box. Emily’s face brightened with delight as she received it, opened it, and pulled out the glistening ring of jet that would grace her hand for just a couple of years and then be passed on for generations. Robert, the tall gentle Scotsman, drew Emily’s attention to the carved cameo of her beautiful face, and Emily gasped, tipped onto her toes, stretched up toward him as he leaned down to kiss her, full on the lips and in the bright light of day, that one fine morning.

  Eleanor was startled by the vividness of it. Robert’s face wasn’t clear, but the sense of him was. She picked up the books from the floor and put them back where she’d found them on the shelves. There was a part of the moors she had seen from afar but never been. A high cliff and scarp.

  She crossed the hall to her room and dressed for another cold day. In the front hall, she grabbed an overcoat and, moving as if her body were hungry for air, rushed outside, where the sky threatened a storm. It was something Mead had said, something about a writer opening a door onto a real but, to some, invisible world and describing it.

  Eleanor went to the mudroom off the kitchen and put on some boots from the collection there.

  “You off?” Tilda called to her from the kitchen window.

  “Just for a while. Want to get in a walk before it pours.”

  “Here, take some scones with you.” Tilda quickly spread two scones with butter and jam and wrapped them in a paper napkin. She brought them outside to Eleanor.

  “Are you feeling better this morning?” Eleanor inquired.

  “I am, miss, thank you for asking. A bit of a fuss I made last night.”

  “Not at all. I’d have done the same.” Eleanor thought of saying more, but decided against it.

  Out past the straight stone wall, Eleanor passed the bending tree and also the tree with the swing and she kept on walking because there was a part of the moor she had seen, but never been. She thought she could remember where it was, from what she’d seen from high on the swing: it was a place with tall bo
ulders and some ragged trees.

  Eleanor closed her eyes and imagined if there were ghosts in Manhattan, they were discreet. Amid faithfully recurring Papaya Dogs and pretzel vendors, skyscrapers and siren screams, a ghost would be lost in the shuffle like everyone else and no one would know if nightmares haunted some girl’s evening in New York City. If ghosts were there, they would hole up in apartments at the top of stairs and come down only to put out fires set in trash cans on the street.

  When, by a boulder, she saw a woman with deep curling hair, Eleanor’s skin contracted with some kind of knowing. Eleanor walked toward her. The woman’s knee was bent, with the flat of her foot resting against the slate-gray boulder behind her. Twirling her hair on a finger, she seemed not to notice Eleanor’s approach, because her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere below where she stood. An evocative smile shaped her face. She spun her finger around and looped a ringlet of hair, then—barely perceptibly—swayed her hips in a minute, harmonic dance.

  Eleanor decided to walk to her right, get to the edge of the rise before moving toward the woman so she could see what it was she was looking at below. At the rim, once she reached it, Eleanor looked down and saw a wild-eyed, dark-skinned man. The young woman was taunting him and he was climbing the crag as fast as he could. He looked right up at Eleanor, not through her but right into her eyes. The young woman danced her wrist and beckoned Eleanor closer.

  Real as the wind, the girl’s figure curved under her skirts. She wore layers of cotton and at the hem you could count the colors, all shades of brown. She wore a wool shirt and two homespun shawls, one wrapped around the front, another from behind, crossing at her heart and held with a pin. Around her waist she wore something like an apron, this layer the darkest shade of brown.

  The young man climbed the jagged scarp, and his breathing was hard. He moved swiftly, seemed to know the handholds as he climbed, barely looked up except to fix his lustful eyes on the girl.

  “What do ye make of the moors?” She addressed Eleanor.

  “What do I make of them?” Eleanor answered.

  “Aye.”

  “I don’t know what to make of them.”

  “An’ what do ye mean by that?” The girl dropped her foot from behind her, placed it on the ground, stood still, stopped the subtle hip swivel, the disordered and shameless seduction of the man.

  “I don’t know what I mean exactly,” Eleanor answered.

  “Aye, ye do. Tell me, ’cause you can. Ye can tell me what ye mean.”

  “I mean there isn’t much of anything, but the wind, and I get turned around . . .” Eleanor’s head moved in all directions, as if she were looking for something.

  “Aye, ’cause the moors they rearrange things,” the girl said. “The damp that comes in from the sea”—she tossed her head in the direction of Denmark and Sweden beyond—“can ye imagine there’s anything not rearranged by it? Look at that there.” Her wrist was small, her bones petite. She pointed to a hare moving through the heather, hopping on long legs, struggling forward against the wind. “The brown hare. He can’t be seen so well, no more, yet still he be,” she said.

  The way she moved was winning, even bewitching. The strength of each tiny muscle and the grace with which she moved against the world. Eleanor wanted to ask her name. Just in that moment, just as Eleanor was thinking of asking her name, the girl called out, “Heathcliff, climb. Climb faster, we’ve to be goin’ now, coom now, or we’ll be gone.” He looked to ravish her with his eyes, his eyes with a kindness and a rage.

  Eleanor was caught in awe when she heard the woman say the name.

  “Ye see what ye see and it turns ye,” the girl said to Eleanor.

  “So, where is it you’re heading?” Eleanor asked.

  It was about as cold as it had been the whole time she’d been in Yorkshire. The wind was not just blowing but howling in a way she hadn’t heard before. Of course, the bluff where they stood was even more exposed than most, and she’d come to it because she’d seen it from the swing, days before. But reading Wuthering Heights she thought she had recognized something about this particular part of the landscape. This thought was what had driven her out here.

  “Headin’?” The young woman looked to the young man with a saucy, hopeful expression. “There’s nothin’ and nowhere beyond yonder rigg . . .” She sang a Yorkshire ditty. “We’re just pressin’ on,” she said, “same as always we do.”

  Eleanor wanted to say the name Catherine, wanted to see what would happen if she did. The worst was she’d be wrong, and the girl would laugh and realize the joke and explain how it happened that a boy was called Heathcliff in the middle of the moors. They were young, no more than fifteen years old, both of them, and vivid and evidently real. Still, Eleanor knew they were ghosts.

  “I want to ask you something,” Eleanor said with a change in tone.

  With a wistful look made of mist and breeze, the girl reached out her hand and as she did, Heathcliff got to the top of the climb and took it in his. They stood like statues on the edge of the earth and the air was cluttered with leaves floating around them.

  “If you would, if you could, would you choose differently?”

  Heathcliff kept his head down, mostly looked at the ground as if he were shy or servile. When he looked into Eleanor’s eyes for a second she saw the crazy wild there, but when he looked at the girl, everything went quiet in him. Like she calmed him.

  “Why do you stay here?” Eleanor asked.

  “We like it here,” he said with his eyes on the ground, not even looking out at the heather. “Ah, it’s nice enough on the other side”—he squeezed Catherine’s hand—“but it’s nicer here. Don’t ye think?”

  “I think I do,” said Eleanor. She knew not only who they were, but for a moment she knew why she’d come to Yorkshire. Still, as she glimpsed it, it fled like a firefly. While she spun shadows of thoughts in her head, Heathcliff let go of Catherine’s hand and the two young people started to run and they ran across the rocks without looking down, without a worry about stumbling.

  On the long walk back to Trent Hall, a downpour began and Eleanor ducked inside one of the sheltered coves in the wall of rock. She should have seen the storm coming. Now, inside the sheltering rock, her mind spun. She was worried that the hill might come down around her, or that people back at the house would be looking for her, or that she’d never find her way back and would lose track of north and south and wind up in the Outer Hebrides without Mead.

  But that one thought, that last thought, made her smile, and she sat down, feeling the warmth in the stone. The crashing sound of the rain and the wind made her feel small and insignificant in a pleasant way, in a way that brought her relief from the strain she’d been feeling in her brain. She’d decided something. She knew where she was going and she knew Mead would be there. She had the vigor and courage it took to unwind her story.

  From inside the rock, she watched the weather change for hours. Inside it was warm as if a hot spring ran through the rock, so she was comfortable sitting with her legs crossed, and by the time the storm stopped, it was lucky there was a moon so she could make her way home without getting lost.

  Coming from the dark of the moors, the light in the library shone like a beacon. Thinking Mead might be working late in the library, she stopped there before heading into the house. If Mead were still awake, she would be able to talk with him.

  When she opened the heavy library door, Mead was asleep in one of the big chairs. Eleanor leaned down and kissed his cool forehead and as her lips touched his skin, she was grateful.

  PART

  THREE

  Mead had invited Eleanor to go with him to Pickering, a town on the edge of the Dalby Forest where there was an ancient church with the most well-preserved medieval wall paintings in all of Yorkshire. On the way, they were going to stop for drinks with some friends of his, so it was an official
date and Eleanor was thrilled to step away from her thorny preoccupations with ghosts and truths and ancestry. She looked forward to a deeper sense of Mead, meeting friends, and feeling like a simple young woman again.

  “This Dalby Forest was born in the last ice age on the shore of a great glacial lake.” Mead had been telling her all sorts of things about the countryside as they drove along. The houses in town were built of thatched roofs, old brick, and ancient Yorkshire limestone—the geological history of which he’d explained in some detail. He’d told her about the Bronze Age, the Vikings, the Normans, all about mottes and keeps and the structure of medieval buildings.

  As the car rounded a bend on a hill, about to drop into the valley beyond which lay Pickering, Eleanor crossed her arms on her chest in a mock moment of pique and interrupted him.

  “Did you know that the island of Manhattan rests on a massive bed of Paleozoic garnet? It’s what gives them confidence to build those amazing skyscrapers. The earth is so solid underneath them.”

  He looked at her, hazarding a smile. “You come from a fine city,” he said. “Really, you do.”

  “How about I keep my eye out for roe deer and badgers?” She slid down in her seat and Mead patted her hand.

  The road wound around the moors and heathland for miles more before Mead pointed toward a low fortress wall on the top of a hill in the distance.

  “That’s where we’re headed.”

  The long driveway was cobbled with irregular chunks of Yorkstone, and when Mead stopped the car she saw the house was one story of rambling stone and brick, with no apparent windows or doors.

  “It’s unbelievable,” she said, getting out of the car.

  Mead led her through a hardly visible break in the apparently impenetrable wall. Inside, there was a white rock garden with a bubbling fountain and then a pair of glass doors with detailed ironwork. Mead was almost boyish in his excitement as they stood there. Her cheek was at the level of his shoulder and he looked grand in a jacket and loose brandy-colored corduroy pants. He seemed flustered, and she had to remind him to ring the bell.