The Girl at the Window

by Rowan Coleman

  Mab appears in the doorway, growling. In the scant silver light I can make out her ears pressed back against her head, her tail between her legs, the glow of her eyes fixed on a spot just above my head.

  There’s no fear – that is the most curious thing I understand at this moment. I am not afraid of seeing something, it’s almost … almost more that I am afraid of there being nothing there.

  Slowly, so slowly, I turn my head and look over my shoulder.

  The light buzzes on, flooding the room so fast with artificial yellow that I’m not sure if what I glimpsed for just a fraction of a second was made up of moonlight and imagination or not, but whatever created it, she was there, if barely.

  A young woman, as thin as a wisp, bathed in red, looking right into my eyes, though she had no eyes of her own.

  I recognise her.

  I played with her when I was a girl.

  Tru and Abe

  On the day of my eighteenth birthday, Abe and I had been together for ten months. We’d finished exams, and I had finished with school for good. I had a place waiting for me to study English at Leeds, but for now there was just the end of the summer and us. When I went to meet Abe from the bus that morning it was a perfect day, a faultless blue sky presiding over the sun-drenched countryside.

  Ma had made my favourite chocolate cake for when we got home, and when I’d met Abe from the bus he’d carried a huge bunch of fat pink roses and his backpack had chinked with bottles of cheap champagne. Together we’d walk the now-familiar route home, the heat of the sun on the back of our necks, dust in the air. The purple of the heather had faded in the heat of a long, dry summer, and the hills were covered in shades of gold. When we’d come to the path that would take us back to Ponden, Abe had hesitated.

  ‘I don’t want to share you yet,’ he’d said, and we’d kissed, standing on the crossroads. I remember how I’d let my whole self fall into him with every kiss, every touch. Rather than becoming increasingly familiar, each new embrace ignited fresh emotions, stitching us closer still, so much a part of one another that he became me, I became him.

  ‘I don’t want to go home, either,’ I’d said. He’d stashed his backpack in a hedgerow, and we’d walked hand in hand along the path to Top Withens, that cuts its way through the deep heather, reinforced here and there with great slabs of stone, a twisted and gnarled moss-covered tree standing guard where once the gatepost would have been. And as we’d walked, I’d thought of all the people who had trodden that path, including Emily herself, who would have looked across at the rise and fall of the hills, and caught her breath in the wind, and I’d imagined that all of this wildness and grandeur was everything she knew about love. It was so hot … perhaps that’s why the path was empty, or perhaps it was because, as it felt to me, that the moors were waiting there, just for us, on that afternoon, as the heat built in the air. We’d walked slowly, in silence, fingertips touching. Hot skin leaned into hotter air and I’d felt the sweat trickle down my back, the powdery earth crumble underfoot, and still we’d walked until we’d come to the derelict farmhouse that inspired the location of Wuthering Heights. A merlin hawk had hovered in the air and some desiccated roses had been laid in the window of the farmhouse. There’d been almost no wind as we’d sat in the shade of a hardy little hawthorn tree, branches stretching outwards, its growth distorted by decades of the prevailing wind.

  We’d stayed there a while, without the need to talk, just letting the landscape speak for us in the rise and fall of the land, the billowing bank of white clouds, the wind drawing patterns in the heather.

  And then he’d taken my hand and we’d made the walk the rest of the way to Ponden Kirk, and we’d stood on the stone for the longest time, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, each of us trying to work out how to say what we must.

  ‘I was reading about the Kirk,’ Abe had whispered into my ear.

  ‘Were you? Why?’ I’d said, smiling.

  ‘Did you know that there is a long tunnel that runs right though the base of the kirk and if we climb down to the bottom there is a rock there called a marriage stone?’

  ‘Yes, of course!’ I’d said, laughing. ‘Girls used to believe that if they crawled through it they’d be married within a year. Some still do.’

  ‘In recent times, yes,’ Abe had said. ‘But long ago, in ancient times, it was a place of marriage. A rebirth, a crawl through the rock as two people, to be reborn as one.’

  ‘Really?’ I’d smiled into his gentle eyes. ‘Sounds a bit icky.’

  ‘Come through the rock with me?’ Abe had asked, laughing, leading back to where we could make our descent down the steep hillside. ‘Come through the rock with me, Tru.’

  ‘Why?’ I’d broken my hand from his, feeling a sense of unease as I’d neared the edge. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ His smile had been as bright as the warmest sun. ‘Because I want to marry you, Trudy Heaton.’

  ‘I want to marry you, too,’ I’d said. ‘But I have to tell you something first … pretty soon I wouldn’t fit through the marriage hole. I’m pregnant, Abe.’

  The joy in his eyes, the certainty. He’d pulled me into a long hug.

  ‘Then I want to marry both of you,’ he’d whispered into my hair.

  All fear had gone away when I’d taken his hand, as we’d half climbed and half slid down the hillside to the base of the rock. It should have felt silly – it should have been stupid and ungainly – but once I was there, peering into the marriage hole, a long square tunnel that bisects the rock, once my hands were joined with the stone, I’d felt a thousand hopeful hearts, the weight of belief and tradition, older almost than the rocks themselves, and it had seemed right.

  So Abe and I had climbed through the marriage rock, me first, he following after, collapsing onto the soft hillside. Lying side by side, hand in hand, he’d pulled a tiny sprig of bright-red scarlet pimpernel from the rock and laid it in my hand. I’d looked at the miniature treasure, the first time I’d ever seen this strange little flower blooming here, amongst the heather, cotton grass and sundew.

  ‘We’re married now, under the eyes of this rock,’ Abe had said. ‘Trudy, will you marry me under the eyes of the law, too? I can’t promise I won’t get things wrong, won’t hurt you or make mistakes, because I’m only a man. But I will never mean to. I’m a man that loves you, and every day I’ll do my best to deserve you and be a good father to our child.’

  The sky had been filled with cloud, vaulting above us like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and I’d felt that, if I reached out, I could touch heaven.

  ‘I’ll marry you,’ I’d told Abe. ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Bright sunshine, after a deluge of rain at dawn, turns the trees golden against a pewter sky, and the streets look fresh and new as I walk with Will down to his school.

  There’s a dreamlike sense to our walk, and I see the village around me through two sets of eyes: mine, who knows every brick and stone here, and his, to whom it must all seem so peculiar. How strange it must be to the little boy who took a London bus to school every day to walk the streets of a town that tumbles away down the hillside, surrounded by nothing but air and a fortress of hills.

  Will doesn’t hold my hand – of course not. But he keeps his step in time with mine, his eyes fixed on the pavement.

  Earlier, as he ate breakfast, I walked into Cathy’s room and stood right in the middle, in the slant of sunlight that dappled on the floor. In my bag, in their folder, the pieces of paper were waiting. My plan was to take them to the Parsonage, to get the eyes of the experts on the writing and confirm that it really was Emily’s.

  But two things gave me pause.

  Emily had seemed certain that there was more of Agnes’s story to be found, and that might mean that there could be other places around Ponden where she had hidden papers and notes to herself; and if there was more of her to find, I wanted it to be me who found it. And that meant before any furthe
r work was done on the house, which might risk losing it forever. Emily had been a reluctant author; she’d fought against Charlotte’s determination to publish her poems, and we can only guess how she felt about the reviews of Wuthering Heights that she’d kept. Reviews that spoke of her great genius and her wild, uncouth brutality, reviews that wondered how a woman could ever conceive of a novel so full of evil and cruelty.

  For her to want to keep those clippings, they must have affected her. But she never wanted that scrutiny, never needed that recognition in the way her older sister did, so it wouldn’t be impossible to imagine that she might have kept something secret, something just for herself … perhaps even the second novel that she had planned to begin.

  And then there was Agnes. Her story. And a glimpse of something that I couldn’t quite understand. That a girl of her age and social standing was writing and recording her life in the mid-seventeenth century was remarkable in itself. If she hid her papers in the library’s books, and if that’s where they’d remained, then they were lost forever, because the contents of the library were sold in 1898, the year when the Ponden Heatons almost lost their home. But if Emily had found them first, if she’d concealed more fragments around my house, then there was an unprecedented piece of history waiting to be discovered in my home.

  And they belong to me; they are mine. I need them to be mine, so I am carrying two precious, potentially priceless finds in my bag as I walk beside Will, still uncertain about what to do next.

  Now Will’s steps are slowing, his chin dropping ever closer to his chest as we draw nearer to school, until eventually he comes to a standstill outside the old apothecary.

  ‘What’s up there?’ He points towards the alley that runs past the church.

  ‘That’s the Parsonage where the Brontë sisters used to live,’ I say. ‘Remember I was telling you how they used to come to Ponden to read books? And how, when I was a bit older than you, I fell in love with them?’

  ‘But how can you love someone you’ve never met,’ Will asks, ‘someone you never knew?’

  He allows me to take his hand and we cross the street, climbing the steps outside the church until we see the windows of the Parsonage, watching through the trees, drifts of bright leaves banking up around the gravestones.

  ‘Because I believe that people are more than blood and bone,’ I say to him, once we are in full sight of the house. ‘I think people are deeds and ideas. They are thoughts and love and kindness and cruelty. They are energy, Will. And what do we know about energy?’

  ‘It can’t be destroyed, only transformed,’ Will says.

  ‘So when people live as powerfully as they are able to, with as much joy and passion and commitment as possible, then even after they die you can still feel the after-effects of the life that they lived; you can still know them, and love them for what they left behind. All the ideas and words, feelings and images are caught up in the pages of a book, like the flowers we pressed last summer, remember?’

  ‘So, a bit like the radiation waves left over from the big bang?’ Will looks up at me.

  ‘Yes, exactly like that.’ I smile. ‘You know, Emily read whatever she could get her hands on. I think she would have loved all the books you love about physics and space.’

  ‘Will you take me there soon?’ Will asks, and I try my best not to look too thrilled.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I say. ‘Now, how about school?’

  ‘Which way is home from here?’ Will asks me, squinting at the horizon, which is covered in houses.

  ‘Well, if you keep walking in a straight line past the Parsonage you come to the same footpath that we walked along for a little bit the other day. Follow that, turn right at the Brontë Falls, and that leads all the way back home.’

  ‘I meant our real home,’ he says. ‘Our flat. Which way is that?’

  ‘It’s a very long way in that direction, I think.’ I point vaguely southward. ‘But Ponden is our home too, Will. It’s always been a home to Heatons, and you are a Heaton, after all.’

  ‘A Heaton Jones,’ he reminds me. ‘And anyway, what does it matter what name I have?’

  ‘It matters,’ I say, ‘because it says who you came from and where you are going to. And today that means school.’

  It’s a modern building, surrounded by trees, with ceiling-to-floor windows that are covered in handmade decorations. I remember a childhood of sunny afternoons, sitting cross-legged on the story mat while the teacher read to us; remember best friends and imaginary ponies that I galloped round the playground. It was a happy time for me and I want it to be a happy time for Will. Perhaps it would never be as happy as it had been before – he’d learned too young how fragile life was, that those he thought invincible were not, and learning that at any time life can strip away a layer of happiness that never truly returns. But all I want for my son is for him to find a way to be as happy as he possibly can be, convince him that I will do all in my power to protect him from further hurt. That it is OK to breathe out again.

  ‘I’m not ready.’ Will suddenly grabs my hand, his voice trembling. ‘I don’t want to go in, Mummy, please don’t make me.’

  The words, the tone, the squeeze of his fingers strike home hard into my heart. He crams into me, pressing his face into my stomach, his arms reaching around me, and I hold him in return.

  ‘Will, my baby—’

  ‘I need more time, I need more time,’ he says, sobbing. ‘This is too much. I don’t want to go to school. And they shouldn’t make me, should they?’

  He looks up at me with his eyes full of tears, and nothing else matters but the need to take him somewhere safe and hide us both away from the world, where we can curl around the pain of all that we have lost.

  ‘Come on,’ I say, but before we can leave we are stopped in our tracks.

  ‘You must be Will,’ says a kind female voice.

  We turn back and see a woman in her late fifties, shoulder-length silver hair, a smile made brighter by bold pink lipstick.

  ‘I’m Mrs Rose, your teacher. We’ve all been looking forward to meeting you so much, Will. Do you want to come in with me?’

  ‘We were just thinking that perhaps we might leave it until next week,’ I say, aware of Will disappearing into the fold of my coat.

  ‘Yes, of course, if that’s what you want – but then you’ll miss our pumpkin painting, and this afternoon we are going to make working rockets from plastic bottles and baking soda.’

  Half of Will’s face emerges as he looks at her.

  ‘Then we’ll be talking about the solar system, and I hope I get it right, Will, because I know hardly anything about the solar system.’

  Mrs Rose has read the letter that I wrote her, a letter about the things Will loves, the passions and obsessions he loses himself in when he wants a direct flight to the stars, away from what has happened to our family. She’s read it and she understands, and I am profoundly grateful.

  Will comes out from behind me and looks at Mrs Rose for a moment.

  ‘I suppose I could help you with that,’ he says quietly.

  ‘Would you?’ Mrs Rose’s smile is full of kindness as she offers him her hand. ‘That would be wonderful.’

  ‘OK.’ He takes her hand and looks back at me.

  ‘I’ll be here to pick you up,’ I say.

  He nods and doesn’t quite smile, and I mouth a thank you to Mrs Rose as she leads him away. Letting him go pulls me inside out, but perhaps this might be the beginning of that new kind of happy. The best kind of happy you can have after you have learnt, too young, the secrets of life and death.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘Trudy?’ I turn towards a familiar voice, to Marcus walking briskly down the hill towards me, smiling broadly. ‘What luck! I’m so glad to see you. I thought I’d better leave discreetly the other day so as not to rile your mother too much, and I didn’t have a chance to talk over my findings with you. But I’ve written up my report, so do you have a moment to go over it?’
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  His eyes are bright and excited, full of pleasure at the prospect, and I find his enthusiasm a welcome distraction.

  ‘Um, yes, I suppose I do,’ I say, releasing my clenched fingers one by one.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Marcus sees the colour in my face. ‘Oh, you were taking Will to school today, weren’t you? That must have been hard for you both, a big step.’

  For a moment I look away, waiting for my composure to return.

  ‘There’s a big part of you that always wants to keep your children with you, close by your side, where you can protect them from harm,’ I say then.

  ‘How about a cup of tea?’ Marcus’s voice is kind, his smile gentle. When I was sad, Abe would sing to me, badly. But it always made me laugh. I miss him so much, right now …

  ‘One thing we’re not short of around here are tea rooms and very good cake,’ Marcus prompts me again, and I hold on hard to my tears.

  I’m grateful as I follow him to the café, grateful for the lives of others going on around me, for the sweet-scented steamy windows of a tea room, and the balm of buttercream icing. Each thing, in its way, a reminder that somehow, after the worse has happened, we still must go on.

  ‘It really is remarkable,’ Marcus says, as he pours us tea, my cup first and then his, ‘the whole of the original sixteenth-century part of the house is in an incredibly good state of repair. I mean, almost 100 per cent intact and original, except for the roof – and that looks like it’s only been replaced once. I can’t tell you how incredibly rare that is, Trudy, especially for a building in such an exposed position; it’s almost like she regenerates herself.’

  The pleasure in his open face is reviving, his smile the smile of a man who has just found his long-lost love.

  ‘It’s as if time hasn’t moved in that part of the house at the same rate as the rest of it – which, as you know, is in a terrible state of repair. It’s so rare and so interesting that, with your permission, I want to carry out some tests – humidity, materials used, how they’ve been treated, that sort of thing – it’s a bit like a bog corpse that’s been beautifully preserved by an accident of nature, and I’m desperate to know what that accident is. Would that be OK?’