A Half Forgotten Song

CHAPTER TWO

In the bed that had been her mother’s, and still sagged where Valentina’s body had once lain, Dimity was visited. Since the night she saw Celeste, her dreams had been populous, bustling with the long gone, and the long dead. They waited for her to shut her eyes and then they edged closer, on silent feet, flitting out of distant hiding places and announcing themselves only with the hint of a scent, a murmured word, or an expression they often wore. Celeste’s fierce eyes; Charles’s hands, flecked with paint; the quizzical tilt of Delphine’s brows; Élodie stamping her foot. Valentina, breathing fire. And with them came feelings, each one washing over Dimity like a wave, making it hard to breathe. They towed her far from land, so she couldn’t put her feet down, couldn’t rest or be safe. Fighting not to drown. An enveloping sea of remembered faces and voices, swirling and surging so that she woke with her stomach churning and her head so full she couldn’t remember the time, or the place. They had questions for her, each and every one of them. Questions only Dimity could answer. They wanted the truth; they wanted her reasons; they wanted retribution.

And once her eyes were used to the dark, and could pick out the pale outlines of the window and the familiar furniture, the crescendo lulled a little and the foreboding came back. The feeling that somebody was coming, and that because of this stranger everyone Dimity had lost, and everyone she feared, would come to lurk in the dark corners of the house and wait, just out of sight, for the chance to make their demands. They would demand truths she had hidden for decades; hidden from everybody, sometimes even from herself. Their demands would get louder, Dimity realized. Panic quivered in her gut. They would get stronger, unless she found some way to hold them off. Wide awake she lay, humming softly so that she wouldn’t hear them, and strove to discern if the one who was coming would be friend to her, or foe.

The village of Blacknowle lay in a fold of the rolling Dorset coastline to the east of the villages of Kimmeridge and Tyneham-that strange ghost village appropriated by the War Office in 1943 as a training ground for troops and then never returned to its residents. Zach’s parents had taken him to the village when he was a child, as part of an August bank holiday break in the area. Zach most clearly remembered Lulworth Cove, because there’d been an ice cream-much hankered after but rarely had-and the beach’s perfect, round crescent had seemed so unreal, almost like something from another country. He’d filled his pockets with the smooth white pebbles until the lining split, and cried when his mother made him empty them out before getting back into the car. You can keep one, his dad had said, shooting his fractious mother a thunderous look. Now Zach wondered how he’d failed to realize how unhappy they were. In Blacknowle itself, his father had wandered the short streets with an expectant look on his face, as if he was sure of finding something, or someone. Whatever it was, by the end of the holiday the look was gone; replaced by a settled sadness and disappointment. There’d been disappointment of another kind on his mother’s face.

Zach followed a lane so narrow that dusty lengths of cow parsley whipped his mirrors on either side. On the backseat were a hastily packed suitcase and a cardboard box containing all the notes he had accumulated for his book on Charles Aubrey. There were more than he remembered. The box’s handles had sagged dangerously when he’d heaved it out from under his bed. His laptop was zipped up in its bag next to the box, full of pictures of Elise and ways of contacting her; and that was all he had with him. No, he corrected himself ruefully. That’s all I have. He came to the village around the next bend, but the road carried on south, towards where the land dipped and then disappeared into the sea, and Zach was suddenly unwilling to arrive. He had so little idea of what he would do when he did that he felt uneasy, almost afraid. He accelerated again, and carried on through the village, another mile or so, till the lane ended at a small, weed-strewn parking area. There was a faded orange-and-white life buoy, an abrupt sign warning of tides and submerged rocks, and a crumbling lip of land beneath which the gray sea rolled in, choppy and restless.

Zach considered his next move. He knew for a fact that the house Charles Aubrey had rented as his summer house was no more-other people had tried to visit it, but it had burned down at some point in the 1950s, and not even the foundations were visible anymore. The exact spot had been built over in the 1960s, by the council road that formed a large loop to the southwest of the village. He watched the white froth of the sea for a few minutes. The water looked cold and hostile as it broke over the rocky shore, constantly moving, seething. He could hear it grumbling beneath the higher sound the wind made, parting around his car. This sound, and the flat gray light, suddenly seemed desolate, seemed to echo around the emptiness inside him, magnifying it unbearably. He felt as though he barely existed, and he fought the feeling, thinking hard.

Blacknowle was where it had all started. The rift between his grandparents, the distance between his father and his grandpa that had hurt his father so. This was where Aubrey had cast his spell over Zach’s family, and this was where the man’s memory still held thrall. Where pictures that both had to be and couldn’t be by Aubrey were quietly emerging for sale from some hiding place. Zach opened the car door. He’d thought it would be cold; had pulled his shoulders up in anticipation, ready to shiver. Tensed against an onslaught that didn’t come. The breeze was warm and moist, and now it was in his ears it sounded excited, enthusiastic. An ebullient, thrumming sound, not a moan at all. Minute speckles of water landed on his skin and seemed to rouse him, waking him from a trance he hadn’t known he was in. He took a deep breath. Locking the car behind him, Zach walked to the edge of the low cliff. A narrow path ran unevenly through tan-colored earth and rocks to the beach, and without a second thought he began to pick his way down it, skidding on loose scree until he reached the bottom. He made his way across the rocks to the shoreline, crouched down on one large, flat boulder, and dipped his fingers into the water. It was shockingly cold. As a child, he’d have been in, regardless. He’d never seemed to feel the cold, although there were pictures of him, skinny in saggy wet trunks, grinning over a bucket of prawns, with his lips quite blue.

Beneath the water the dull rocks came alive in shades of gray and brown, black and white. Some of the clots of foam floating nearby were an unhealthy yellow, but the water was glassily clear. Sometimes things were too big, Zach suddenly thought. They were too big to step back and look at them all at once. Doing so was overwhelming, frightening. You had to get up close, look at each constituent part, and tackle something of a manageable size first. Start small. Build up to the bigger picture. He put his fingers back into the water and touched a flat rock that had a bright white stripe running across its exact center. He thought about painting it, sifting through colors in his mind to find the exact blend he would need to re-create the cold water, the immaculate stone. He wasn’t sure if he still could, but it had been many, many months since he’d even felt the urge to try. Calmer, Zach stood up and dried his fingers on the seat of his jeans. His stomach rumbled hotly, so he went back to the car and back to Blacknowle, where he’d passed a promising-looking pub.

The Spout Lantern was a crooked building, with walls of Portland stone beneath an undulating tiled roof. The hanging baskets outside were dry and leggy at the end of the season, with strings of brown lobelia trailing from them; the sign showed a curious-looking metal lamp with a handle on top and a long, tapering tube sticking out from one side-it looked more like a misshapen watering can than anything else. The pub sat in the center of the village, where the buildings clustered around a tiny green and crossroads. The pub was the only amenity he could see; a faded Hovis sign painted on the wall of one cottage spoke of a long-gone shop; a letterbox in the wall of another told of a vanished post office. Inside, the pub was cool and shady with that familiar, sour background smell of beer and people that was no longer masked by cigarette smoke. An elderly couple were eating fish and chips at a small table near the fireplace, even though the fireplace was empty and swept clean for the summer. Their whippet eyed Zach dolefully as he crossed to the bar and ordered half a pint and some ham sandwiches. The barman was friendly and highly vocal. He spoke too loudly in the quiet room and made the whippet wince.

A few other people were scattered farther along the room, eating lunch and talking in hushed voices. Zach suddenly felt too conspicuous to take a table by himself, so he stayed at the bar, sliding onto a stool and peeling off his sweater.

“Looks cold but it isn’t, is it? Funny sort of day,” the barman said cheerfully, passing Zach his drink and taking his money.

“You don’t know how right you are,” Zach agreed. The barman smiled curiously. He spoke with a home-counties accent at odds with his rustic appearance-a battered flannel shirt and canvas trousers that were frayed and thready around the pockets and hems. He looked about fifty, and had curls of gray hair reaching down to his collar, growing in a ring around a bald pate.

“So what brings you to Blacknowle? Holiday? Looking for a second home?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. I’m actually… doing some research.” Zach felt suddenly uneasy about saying so, as if once this was known he would have to act differently. Act as if he knew what he was doing. “Into an artist who used to live near here,” he pressed on. In the mirror behind the bar, he saw the elderly couple by the fire pause when they heard this, a gradual slowing of movement, then a halt. They stopped fiddling with the food on their plates, stopped chewing. Exchanged a look between them that Zach couldn’t read but that made the back of his neck prickle. The barman had cast a glance in their direction, too, but he quickly looked back at Zach and smiled.

“Charles Aubrey, I’ll bet.”

“Yes-you’ve heard of him,” Zach said. The barman shrugged amiably.

“Of course. Bit of a claim to fame, he is. Local celeb. He used to come in here all the time, back before the war. Not that I was here then, but I’ve been told; and there’s a photo of him over there-sitting outside this very establishment with drink in hand.”

Zach put down his drink and crossed to the far wall, where the framed photograph was hanging in a foxed mount speckled with dead thrips. The picture had been enlarged and was grainy as a result. It was a photo Zach had seen before, reprinted in an old biography of the man. He felt a peculiar frisson, thinking that he was standing in the same pub that Charles Aubrey had visited. Zach studied the picture closely. The light of an evening sun lit Aubrey’s face from the side. He was a tall man, lean and angular. He was sitting on a wooden bench with his long legs crossed, one hand cupped over the upper knee, the other holding a glass of beer. He was squinting against the light, his face turned partly away from it, which threw his bony nose into relief; his high cheekbones and broad brow. His jaw was hard and square. Thick, dark hair, the light gathering in its kinks and waves. It wasn’t a classically handsome face, but it was striking. His eyes, staring right into the camera, were steady and intense; his mood impossible to read. It was a face you had to look twice at-compelling, perhaps unsettling; as if it might be terrifying in rage but infectious in mirth. Zach couldn’t see what it was that women had seen in him, that apparently all women had seen in him, but even he could sense the power of the man, the strange magnetism. The picture was dated 1939-the summer his grandparents had met the man. Later that year, war would break out. Later that year, torn apart by grief and loss, Charles Aubrey would join the Royal Hampshire Regiment, which would form part of the British Expeditionary Force that set out into mainland Europe to meet Hitler. The year after, he would be caught up in the chaos of Dunkirk and killed; his body buried hastily in an Allied cemetery, his tags brought home by comrades.

When Zach turned away, the old man was watching him with a grave expression, eyes of such a pale blue they were almost colorless. Zach smiled and gave him a nod, but the old man looked back down at his empty plate without acknowledging him, so Zach returned to the bar.

“I wonder, do you know of anybody still living in the village who might remember those days? Who might have met Charles Aubrey?” Zach said to the barman. He kept his voice low, but in the quiet of the pub it was plainly audible. The barman smiled wryly and paused. He didn’t glance over at the elderly couple. He didn’t need to.

“There might be some. Let me have a think.” Behind him, the couple got up. With the slightest of salutes to the publican-a raised, gnarled index finger-the man cupped one hand around his wife’s elbow and steered her towards the door. The whippet followed at their heels, tail curled tightly between its legs, toenails tapping delicately. As the door swung shut, the publican cleared his throat. “The thing is, those that do might not be that keen to talk about it. You have to understand, lots of people have come asking questions about Aubrey over the years. He caused a bit of

a scandal around here, back in the day, and since he wasn’t actually from Blacknowle, most feel no need to play up the association.”

“I understand. But, surely, you know-seventy-odd years later… people can’t still be upset about him, can they?”

“You’d be amazed, mate,” said the publican, with a grin. “I’ve lived here seventeen years now, and run this pub for eleven. The locals still call me a latecomer. They’ve got long memories and they can hold a grudge like you wouldn’t believe. The first week we moved in, my wife pipped her horn at some sheep blocking the lane. She didn’t see the farmer coming up behind them. And one thing’s clear-she’ll never be forgiven for such a display of impatience.”

“People hold a grudge against Aubrey? Why?” said Zach. The other man blinked, and seemed to hesitate before answering.

“Well, if they think my wife wasn’t the right sort for sounding her horn at some sheep, can you imagine what they thought of a man who only came for the summer, made his money drawing saucy pictures of young girls, and lived in sin with a foreign mistress? And all this back in the thirties?”

“Yes, I suppose he must have caused a bit of a stir. But I’d hardly call his pictures saucy.”

“Well, not to us maybe. But back in the day. I mean, he never painted the plain ones, did he?” The man chuckled, and Zach felt a defensive prickle on Aubrey’s behalf. “And then there was all that other business…”

“Other business?”

“You must know about… the tragedy that happened here?”

“Oh yes, of course. But… that was just a tragedy, wasn’t it? Not Aubrey’s fault at all.”

“Well, there’s some that might argue with you there. Ah-here’s your lunch now.” Zach’s sandwiches were brought out by a grumpy-looking girl. He smiled as he thanked her, but she could only manage a flick of her mascara-laden eyelashes in return. The publican rolled his eyes. “My daughter, Lucy. Loves working for her old man, don’t you Lu?” Lucy didn’t answer as she drifted back to the kitchen.

“So you don’t think anybody will talk to me about him? What about… do you know of anybody who has some Aubrey pictures they might be willing to let me see?”

“Couldn’t tell you, sorry.” The publican leaned his knuckles on the bar, tipped his head, and seemed to think hard. “No, no idea. Worth a pretty penny these days, aren’t they? I don’t think folk round here would have any-if they once had, they’d have sold them. Farming folk for the most part, around Blacknowle. Either that or catering to tourists, neither trade well known for making the money roll in.”

“What if… do you think if I offered to… pay for information, or rather memories, of Aubrey… do you think that might get me anywhere?” said Zach, and again the publican chuckled.

“Can’t think of a faster way to get yourself ostracized,” he said jovially. Zach sighed, and concentrated on his sandwiches for a while.

“I suppose you must see a lot of tourists and second-home owners down here; it must be easy to resent them. My parents brought me here on holiday once-to Blacknowle itself, and to Tyneham and Lulworth. We stayed in a cottage not three miles away. And my grandparents used to come here, too, back in the 1930s. My grandma remembered meeting Aubrey. I always suspected… I always suspected she remembered more than just meeting him, if you catch my drift,” said Zach.

“Did she now? Well, I daresay she wouldn’t be the only one! I don’t resent the tourists. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. It’s been too quiet this summer, what with the weather being so crap. Are you staying in the area for a while, while you do your research? Got a lovely room upstairs, if you’re interested. Lucy’s a right thundercloud in the morning, but she does a great fry-up.”

“Thanks. I… hadn’t really thought about it. I might go for a walk and take in the views that inspired the artist, but if nobody will talk to me and nobody has any pictures I can look at, there’s not really a lot of point in me staying,” said Zach. The landlord seemed to consider this for a while, wreathed in steam rising from beneath the counter as he dried clean glasses from the dishwasher. His face shone with the moisture.

“Well, there is one place you could try,” he said carefully.

“Oh?”

The publican pursed his lips, and seemed to consider for a second longer. Then he leaned forward and spoke in a hushed tone, so conspiratorial that Zach almost laughed.

“If you just happened to take a walk along the track that heads southeast out of the village towards Southern Farm, and about half a mile along there you took the left fork, you’d come to a cottage called The Watch.”

“And…?”

“And there’s somebody there who might talk to you about Charles Aubrey. If you pitch yourself right.”

“And what would be the right way to pitch myself?”

“Who knows? Sometimes she’ll chat, sometimes she won’t. It might be worth a shot, but you didn’t hear about her from me. And go carefully-she lives alone, and some people are… protective.”

“Protective? Of this woman?”

“Of her. Of themselves. Of the past. Last thing I need is it getting out that I’ve been helping a stranger ferret for information. This lady’s the private kind, you know. Some of us in the village used to drop in on her, to make sure she was all right, but she’s made it known over the years that she doesn’t appreciate it. Wants to be left alone. What can you do? Must be a lonely life for her but if a person doesn’t want help…” He went back to wiping glasses, and Zach smiled.

“Thanks.”

“Oh, don’t thank me. It may come to nothing, just to warn you. I’ll make up that bed upstairs for you, shall I? The rate’s forty-five a night.”

“Take a credit card?”

“Of course.”

“I’m Zach, by the way. Zach Gilchrist.” He held out his hand, which the landlord shook with a smile.

“Pete Murray. Good luck at The Watch.”

Dimity had been dozing again, after a lunch of hard-boiled eggs and salad leaves. Two of the hens were going into molt. They looked patchy and bedraggled, and she muttered to them when she found no eggs underneath them. Lay, lay my girls. Let the eggs drop or be straight to the pot. Repeated over and over, the little rhyme sounded like a spell, and soon the voice Dimity heard was her mother’s, not her own. Valentina kept coming back to her since her waking dream, since her vision, her premonition. Her mother had been gone a long time. Dimity had thought maybe forever, and hadn’t been sad about that-apart from the endless quiet sometimes, the stillness. But lately she’d caught her mother watching her from the citrine eyes of the ginger cat; in the coils of skin as she peeled an apple; reflected, minute and upside down, in the bloated drip of water that always hung from the kitchen tap. After the night of the storm, after the night she saw Celeste and had her premonition, Dimity had found the old charm on the hearthstone. Knocked out of the chimney by the wind after nigh on eighty years, a shriveled nugget of old flesh the size of an egg; the pins gone rusty, and some of them missing. And then the dreams had started. That was how Valentina had got in; and that was a puzzle, because the charm should only keep evil spirits away. Perhaps not such a puzzle.

Dimity would have to make a new charm, and soon. Where to get a bullock’s heart, fresh, no more than a day old? Where to get a packet of new pins, clean and sharp? But each day without it the house was open to intruders. A wide-open door, especially when she slept. She roused herself from her doze and caught a flash of yellow hair, reflected in the windowpane. Dull yellow hair with black, black roots; gone when she blinked.

“Good day to you, Ma,” Dimity whispered, just to be civil. Just to stay on the safe side. She stood carefully, straightening her back with caution. The light outside was still gray, but bright enough to make her squint. There was much to do before night fell. All the animals to do, and something found to eat, and a new charm of some kind for the chimney flue. She couldn’t make a proper one yet, but something to tide her over-a mermaid’s purse would be a start. Down to the shore, then? Dimity hardly ever went anymore, didn’t trust her own feet. Didn’t like to be seen. But there might be one tucked away somewhere, around the house, and she resolved to look because it was unsettling, having Valentina back. Unsettling to think that her mother might notice her looking for a mermaid’s purse and guess at her purpose. The retribution would be awful.

Dimity turned from the window but as she did, her eye was caught again. Not Valentina, not a vision. A person. A man. Her heart got caught in her throat. He was young, tall and lean. For a second, she hardly dared to believe it, but it could have been… But no. Not tall enough, too broad at the shoulder. The hair too light, too short. But of course not, of course not. She shook her head. A rambler, nothing more. Not many came past the cottage, because the track was not a footpath; he shouldn’t have been there. It was private land, her land, and beyond the cottage he would find no way through. Dimity watched him approaching. Looking at The Watch intently, slowing his pace. Curious. He would get to the bottom and then have to turn around and go back again. Would he be one of those that gazed in at her windows? Twenty years ago nobody ever walked past, but these days there were more. She didn’t like the intrusion. It made her feel as though a tide of people was gathering out of sight; growing, swelling, coming to nudge up against her. But this one wasn’t walking past. This one was coming to the door. He had nothing in his hands; he wore no badge, no uniform. She couldn’t tell what he might want. The hairs stood up all along her arms. This was him, then. This was the one she’d seen coming. Valentina capered in the slant of light on the side of the teapot, but whether it was in warning or simple glee, Dimity couldn’t tell.

Zach listened hard at the door, trying to hear some sound of movement behind the hum of the sea and the fumbling breeze. The Watch was a long, low cottage, the upper story built well into the eaves of the thatch. The straw was dark and uneven, sagging into deep pockets in some places; great tufts of grass and forget-me-nots grew along the ridge and around the chimney stacks. Zach knew precious little about thatch, but it was obviously badly in need of replacing. The stone walls were whitewashed, and it sat facing west at the top of a long slope that ran down into the valley, where Zach could see scattered farm buildings half a mile or so below. The track to the cottage was dry and stony but looked as though heavy rain would turn it to mud. It approached from the north, towards one end of the house, so Zach had seen that the place was only one room deep. Behind it was a yard enclosed by a high wall, and behind that a small stand of beech and oak trees left over from an earlier century. The breeze whispered through those trees, twisting the dry leaves, speaking of the coming autumn.

Zach knocked again, louder this time. If there was nobody at home, he was back to square one; and pointlessly paying for a room for the night. He turned and looked at the view, which was wide and lovely. The cliff, a short way beyond the cottage, was much higher here, dropping perhaps thirty or forty feet. Below, down the slope, he could see the lane that he had driven along earlier that day-following the crease of the valley down to where the land dipped into the sea. The footpath turned inland from the eastern side of the little car park, crossing pasture and then the track to The Watch farther up towards the village. He couldn’t understand why it did this, instead of simply following the cliff edge, and was leaning backwards, trying to see around the end wall of the cottage, when the door cracked open.

The face that peered around the door was pale, lined, and bright with anxiety. An elderly woman with a thick cascade of white hair hanging loosely around her face. Cheeks limp and deeply scored, and a hump across her shoulders that forced her to turn her head slightly to look up at Zach. She took a step backwards when their eyes met, as if she’d changed her mind and would slam the door again, but froze. Hazel-and-green eyes watched him with such suspicion, such doubt.

“Hello… I’m sorry to bother you.” He paused in case she would greet him, but her mouth stayed shut. It was a wide mouth, thin lipped, but the ghost of bow shape, of a delicately pronounced upper lip, was still visible. “Um, my name’s Zach Gilchrist and I was told… that is, I was hoping I might be able to have a quick chat with you about something? If it’s not too much trouble, if you’re not busy?” There was a long pause and Zach’s polite smile began to feel too heavy for his face. He struggled to keep it from drooping. The breeze went in through the door and lifted up tresses of the woman’s white hair, moving it gently like seaweed under water.

“Busy?” she said eventually, and quietly.

“Yes, if you’re busy now I could… come back another time? Maybe?”

“Come back?” she echoed, and then Zach’s smile did fade to nothing, because he feared that old age had muddled her, and she didn’t understand what he was saying. He took a steadying breath and prepared to take his leave, disappointment gripping him. Then she spoke again. “What do you want to talk about?” She spoke with a Dorset accent so strong the words seemed to buzz in his ears, and had a peculiar cadence that was somewhat hard to follow. Zach remembered what Pete Murray had said, about pitching himself right. He had no idea what might be the right way, and on instinct he chose the family connection.

“My grandmother knew Charles Aubrey-she met him while she was on her summer holidays here, back before the war. The artist, Charles Aubrey? In fact… I’ve always wondered if there’s a chance he was my real grandfather. I think they might have had an affair. I was wondering if you might remember him? Or her? If you could tell me anything about him?” he said. The woman stood as still as stone, but then gradually her mouth fell open a little and Zach heard her breathe in; a long, uneven breath like a gasp in slow motion.

“Do I remember him?” she whispered, and Zach was about to answer when he saw that she wouldn’t hear him if he did. Her eyes had slipped out of focus. “Do I remember him? We were to be wed, you know,” she said, blinking and looking up with a sketchy smile.

“Really? You were?” Zach said, trying to square this with what he knew of Aubrey’s life.

“Oh yes. He adored me-and I adored him. Such a love we had! Like Romeo and Juliet it was. But real. Oh, it was real,” she said intently. Zach smiled at the light in her eyes.

“Well, that’s wonderful. I’m so glad to have met somebody who remembers him fondly… Would you be willing to tell me a bit more about it? About him?”

“You looked a little bit like him, as you came down the track. Now I think not. I think not. I can’t see how you could be his grandson. No, I can’t see it. He had no other love but me…”

“Perhaps, but surely he… he had other… women,” Zach said haltingly, and then regretted it at once when he saw how her face fell. “Could I come in, maybe? You can tell me more about him,” he said hopefully. The woman seemed to consider this, and a little color came into her cheeks.

“Other women,” she muttered peevishly. “Come in, then. I’ll make tea. But you’re not his grandson. No, you’re not.” She stepped back to let him in, and Zach thought she didn’t sound wholly convinced by her own words. He scrolled hastily through what he knew, trying to recall a list of Aubrey’s lovers, and to guess which one this elderly lady might be.

Inside the door was a dim central hallway from which wooden stairs led up, the boards worn and cracked. Doors opened to the back and to either side, and the old woman led him through the right-hand one, to the kitchen, which was at the far southern end of the cottage and had windows looking south and west, out over the sea. The floor was laid with stone slabs, massive and worn; the walls had once been whitewashed but were now patched and flaking, and the ceiling crowded down, heavy with sinuous beams. There were no fitted units, just an array of wooden cupboards and sideboards and dressers, arranged in the best possible fit. The stove was electric and looked fifty years old, but everything was clean and well ordered. Zach hovered awkwardly behind the woman as she filled the kettle, which was a modern, bright white plastic one, highly incongruous. Her movements were steady and even, in spite of her age and the bulge at the top of her spine. She wouldn’t have been tall, even if her back had been straight, and there was little spare flesh on her bones. She wore a long cotton skirt with a blue-and-green paisley print over what looked like men’s leather work boots, and a long, colorless cardigan and grubby red fingerless mittens. Her white hair swayed behind her when she turned, and suddenly Zach could almost see her in her youth-see the curves her body would have had, the grace of movement. He wondered what color that mass of hair had been.

“I’ve just realized, I didn’t catch your name?” he said. She twitched as if she’d forgotten he was there.

“Hatcher. Miss Hatcher,” she said, with a curious bob of her head, like the ghost of a courtesy.

“I’m Zach,” he said, and she smiled quickly.

“I know that,” she replied.

“Right, of course.”

She lowered her eyes and turned back to the sideboard to fetch clean mugs, and again he got the impression of something almost girlish and coy about her. As if her spirit had remained in its youth, even as the body around it withered. Hatcher, Hatcher. The name was familiar to him, but he couldn’t place it.

When the tea was poured, they crossed to the room at the north end of the house, where a sagging, threadbare sofa and chairs were arranged around a hearth black with centuries of smuts. There was a prickling, tangy smell, of ash, salt, wood, dust.

“Sit, sit,” said Miss Hatcher, her accent making the words sound like zet, zet.

“Thank you.” Zach chose a chair near the window. On the sill was a ginger cat, small and thin and fast asleep, a drizzle of drool hanging from its lip. Now he was inside the house, Miss Hatcher seemed eager to please, eager to speak. She sat with her knees tight together and her hands resting upon them, on the edge of her chair, like a child.

“Ask away, then, Mr. Gilchrist. What did your grandmother say about my Charles? When was it she thought she knew him?”

“Well, it would have been in nineteen thirty-nine. She came to Blacknowle with my grandfather, on holiday, and they met Aubrey while they were out walking one day. He was sitting out somewhere, painting or drawing. Anyway, my grandmother was very taken with him…”

“Nineteen thirty-nine? Nineteen thirty-nine… so I’d have been sixteen. Sixteen! Can you believe it?” she said with a smile, raising her eyes to the cracked ceiling. Zach did some quick mental arithmetic. So now she was eighty-seven years old. With her chin raised up he could see fine, downy hairs along her jaw.

“The weather was a bit of a letdown that year, apparently. My grandma always said they’d been hoping to swim in the sea, but it never felt quite warm enough…”

“It was gray, most days. We’d had the most shocking spell of late cold-there was snow on the ground into March, and a wind blowing through like someone left the door open on the downs… It was bitter, it was. Our sow died-she’d been sickly, but that cold snap finished her off. We tried to cure all the meat but our hands got so cold, rubbing that dead flesh, that we both had chilblains by the end of the day and our fingers went as red as poppies. Oh, you’ve never felt a stinging like it! No amount of parsnip peelings or goose grease could cure them. After that, we all wanted a hot summer, even a drought. A chance to dry out and be warm, but we didn’t get it. No. Sunny days were a rare blessing that year. Even if it was dry, late on, it stayed overcast. The sun seemed a sad and sorry thing.”

“Both of you? Who did you live with then?”

“Aged sixteen? My mother of course! What do you take me for?”

“Sorry-I didn’t mean… Do carry on. What was Aubrey like?” Zach asked, amazed to hear Miss Hatcher speak in such detail, as though that summer had been two or three years ago, rather than seventy-one.

“What was he like? I can’t begin to explain it. He was like the first warm day of spring. To me he was better than anything. He meant more than anything.” A delighted smile fell from her face, and the shadow of loss crept in to replace it. “That was the third summer they came. My Charles and his little girls. I’d first met them two years before, when I was hardly more than a child myself. He drew me all the time, you know. He loved drawing me…”

“Yes, my grandmother had a painting Aubrey had done of her, too…”

“A painting? He painted her? A proper painting?” Miss Hatcher interrupted him with a troubled frown.

“Yes… it’s in a gallery in London now. It’s quite a famous one. It’s called The Walker-you can see my grandma at a distance, walking along the top of the cliff on a sunny day.” Zach fell silent and watched the old woman’s face. There was a desperate look in her eyes, and they were bright, and her lips moved slightly, shaped by silent words.

“He painted her?” she whispered, and sounded so desolate that Zach made no reply. There was a bloated pause. “But… from a distance, you say?”

“Yes-the figure is only a couple of inches high, in the picture.”

“And no sketches of her? No sketches done from up close?”

“No. Not that I’ve ever seen.” Miss Hatcher seemed to relax and breathe more easily.

“Well, then-she could have been just anyone he’d happened to meet. He was always very interested in people, very easy to talk to. Perhaps I do remember your grandparents, now… perhaps I do. Did your grandfather have black hair? Very black-black as ink?”

“Yes! Yes he did!” Zach smiled, delighted.

They were all together-Charles and Celeste and the two little girls, and this new couple, a pair of strangers Dimity had never seen before. Holidaymakers-there were always some. She’d come along the lane because it had rained in the night and the fields were muddy-the red clay mud of the peninsula where The Watch stood; the white gluey mud of the chalk hills to the west. The strange woman wore loose slacks of a lovely fawn twill, and a fine white blouse tucked into them; and even though her hand was looped through the man’s arm, it was obvious how rapt she was, leaning towards Charles as if she couldn’t help herself. Pulled like the tide. Dimity’s own skirt was torn at the hem, and her sleeves picked by brambles. Sea salt from the breeze had made her hair a wild mess like a crop of bladder wrack, clinging to her skull, and as she approached she tucked it behind her ears, ashamed. She didn’t want to speak to them, to the strangers. She hung back, skirted around them, wished she could hear what they were saying. The stranger spoke and Charles laughed, and Dimity felt hot and angry about it. He looked her way, then-the stranger. The light caught on his hair, or rather, it didn’t. It vanished into it-she’d never seen hair so black before. Blacker than pitch, blacker than a crow’s wing, with no hint of green or blue like the sullen fire of those feathers. He caught her eye but then looked away again, back to Aubrey and Celeste. Dismissing her, like she was nothing. Again, that heat, that anger. But then Delphine saw her, came over to her waving with the fingers of one hand, wanting to go off together. So Dimity never found out how long they stayed together, talking; her Charles and this strange woman who offered herself to him with every tiny move she made.

“So you suppose she broke her wedding vows, do you?” Miss Hatcher said. Zach shrugged.

“Well, they were engaged but not actually married at the time of the visit. It would have been wrong of her even so, of course, to betray my grandfather. But these things happen, don’t they? Life is never black-and-white.”

“They happen, they happen,” Miss Hatcher repeated, but Zach couldn’t tell if she was agreeing with him or not. Her expression was sad, and Zach tried to move the conversation on.

“Perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps she just remembered him fondly, and that was as far as it went. I know I don’t really look like him… plus he’s meant to have had this animal magnetism. I sure as hell don’t have it.” He smiled. Miss Hatcher flicked her eyes over him appraisingly.

“No, you don’t,” she said. Zach felt slightly crushed.

“I do… paint, though. So perhaps my artistic side…”

“Are you a good painter?” Outside, the sun came out and lit her face suddenly, falling into the hollows under her eyes, in her cheeks. Her face was a delicate heart shape, her eyes wide-set, the chin a soft point, now all but lost in pouched skin. Zach felt the sudden shock of recognition, a physical jolt.

“I know your face,” he blurted out inadvertently. The old woman looked at him, and the trace of a smile warmed her expression.

“Perhaps you should do,” she said.

“Dimity Hatcher? Mitzy?” he said, astonished. “I can’t believe it! When you said he drew you all the time, I didn’t realize…” He shook his head, stunned. That she was alive. That he had found her, and that it seemed nobody else ever had. Now she was smiling, delighted; she tipped her chin up, made some effort to straighten her shoulders. But the sun dipped back behind clouds, and it was gone. That ghost of remembered beauty. She was a bent old woman again, colorless, self-consciously smoothing the length of her hair against her chest like a girl.

“Glad to know I’m not so very changed, after all of it,” she said.

“Yes,” Zach said, as convincingly as he could. There was a pause; his mind was racing. “I’ve got a picture of you hanging in my gallery at home! I look at it every day, and now here we are, face-to-face. It’s… amazing!” He couldn’t keep from smiling.

“What picture is it?”

“It’s called Mitzy Picking. It’s of you from behind, but you’re almost looking over your shoulder. Not quite, but almost, and you’re putting something into a basket…”

“Oh, yes, I remember that one.” She clasped her hands together, pleased. “Yes, of course. I never really liked it. I mean, I couldn’t see the point of it, not seeing my face and all.”

She hadn’t been picking at all, she’d been sorting. Delphine had been out to collect herbs and collared Dimity as she passed, asking her to check her spoils before she took them into the kitchen. She’d been on her way into the village, on an errand for Valentina. How that woman would storm and swear if Dimity took too long, so she ran her fingers through the plants quickly, removing the dandelion leaves that Delphine had thought were lovage, picking the chickweed out of the chamomile. All morning a tenacious song had been running through her head. It came again then, a low mumble on her lips, a sign of impatience. As I were a-walking for my recreation, all down by the river I chanced for to stray; I heard a fair maid making loud lamentation, singing Jimmy will be slain in the wars I be feared… She stopped suddenly, heard the faintest echo of the tune carrying on behind her. In a deep voice, a man’s voice-his voice. Prickles like the lick of a cat’s tongue went roughly down her spine, and she froze. In the silence then Dimity heard the pencil, softly scraping the paper. A dry caress. She knew not to move, knew that would annoy him. So she carried on, her mind no longer on the job, letting grass stems stay amid the chives and buttercup pass for cress. And all the while she could feel him behind her, feel his eyes upon her, and as if all her senses had come alive she noticed the sun shining hotly on her hair, and the touch of a breeze on the skin of her lower back where her blouse had ridden up. A small area of skin that suddenly seemed utterly, wantonly naked. In her hand she had posies, her cheeks were like roses… she sang on, and behind her he answered the tune, and she felt it fill her heart, fill it up to bursting.

“What color was your hair?” Zach asked suddenly. Dimity blinked, and seemed to come back from far away. “Sorry, that must sound very rude…”

“Charles said it was bronze,” she said quietly. “He said when the light shone on it, it looked like burnished metal; like a statue of Persephone come alive.” In Zach’s mind he saw all the drawings-all the many, many drawings of Mitzy, and he put this color into the wild hair described by Aubrey’s long, lavish pencil lines. Yes. He could picture it now, as if the color had always been there, waiting for him to see it.

Suddenly, there was a muffled sound from upstairs. The thump of something being dropped, the smaller thump of it bouncing, just once, and the shuffling creak of a footstep. Dimity turned her eyes to the ceiling and waited, as if something else was coming. Puzzled, Zach also glanced up at the sooty rafters as if he might be able to see through them.

“What was that?” he asked. For a second, Dimity looked at him as if he hadn’t spoken, then her expression changed, grew startled.

“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. Just… mice,” she said rapidly. Her fingers in their red mittens fiddled with her hair, rolling the frayed ends to and fro, twisting them. She looked away, her gaze floating aimlessly along the wall.

“Mice?” said Zach, dubiously. It had sounded like something bigger than that. The old woman considered at length before replying. She rocked her feet one way, then the other-to the toes, to the heels, back again.

“Yes. Nothing to worry about. Just mice.”

“Are you sure? It sounded like somebody dropped something.”

“I’m sure. Nobody up there to go dropping anything. But maybe I’ll check. So then, you’ll go on for now? Finished up your tea?” she said, standing stiffly and holding out her hand for it. She looked troubled, distracted. Zach was only halfway down his cup, but he handed it to her anyway. The rim was chipped hazardously, and it tasted as though the milk had turned.

“Okay, sure. It was lovely to meet you, Miss Hatcher. Thanks for the tea, and for talking to me.” She was herding him to the door, bustling around him, eyes down.

“Yes, yes,” she said vaguely. She pulled the door open and that warm, fresh breeze washed in, and all the sounds of the sea with it. Zach stepped out obediently. The front step was worn into a bowl and water had gathered there; moss in all the pocks and crevices of the stone.

“Could I come back and see you again, do you think?” he asked. She began to shake her head automatically. “I would be so grateful… I could bring some of the pictures Aubrey drew of you, if you like? Not the original ones, of course, but prints of them… in books. You could tell me what it was like as he drew them… what you were doing that day. Or something,” he tried. She seemed to consider this, toying with the ends of her hair again. Then she nodded.

“Mind and bring me a heart.”

“A what? Sorry?”

“A bullock’s heart no more than a day old-I need one. And some pins. New pins,” she said.

“A bull’s heart? What, a real one? Why on earth…”

“A bullock’s, and no more than a day old-mind you check.” She was closing the door on him impatiently, her thoughts already elsewhere.

“Well, all right. I’ll-” The door shut firmly, and Zach was left talking to its bleached wood. “I’ll be sure to check,” he finished.

He turned his back to the door and looked up at the sky, bright whites and shades of gray. Dimity Hatcher. Alive and well and living in Blacknowle-still, after all the many, many years since Aubrey did his drawings of her. Zach could hardly believe it. That she was here, and that nobody else had ever been to see her. He thought quickly, sifting through all the books on Aubrey he’d ever read. Most focused on his life in London, his upbringing in Sussex, his bohemian morals, his relationship with Celeste. A few spoke about Blacknowle and Dimity Hatcher, but only in terms of the depiction and significance of both in his work. No, he was sure. None of the biographers had ever spoken directly to Dimity about the man. He smiled to himself, and wondered what on earth she would do with a bullock’s heart and a packet of pins.

He turned towards the sea instead of back along the track to the village, and walked a hundred yards or so to the edge of the cliff. He went as close as he dared, since the grassy lip curled away out of sight, and he worried he might be standing on nothing but a thin slice of turf, suspended precariously above the drop below. Low waves skirled in over slabs of rock that tumbled steeply from halfway down the cliff to the water. He could see no way down, and the rocks looked dangerous-sharp and half hidden by the churning sea. Not a good spot for a swim. In the lull between waves was a whispering sound; a sigh as the water receded. He looked to the east and then understood why the footpath went inland-the trees he had seen behind The Watch marked the edge of a steep gully, a ravine, slicing into the land. It cut inland for around seventy meters, and at its apex was a tiny shingle beach, empty but for driftwood and other detritus. There could be no way down to it-the walls were sheer. Large white gulls perched on it, resting their wings; some asleep on one leg with their heads tucked away. The Watch was cut off on two sides by the sea, and sat solitary on its own small peninsula.

For a while Zach stood there and gazed far out at the flat water, and thought about Elise. What was it that made children love the seaside so? And made adults feel more alive? Perhaps it was the far, distant horizon, putting troubles into perspective, or the way the light seemed to shine up from the ground as well as down from the sky. They had taken Elise to the beach many times, he and Ali-on holidays in Italy and Spain. Back when they were a couple; when their names fitted snugly together, tripping off the tongue. Zach and Ali. But Elise seemed to like the British coast more-seemed to long for rock pools rather than hot sun, seaweed rather than fine white sand. One time she watched, patient and rapt, as Zach poured water from a bucket over some limpets, at regular intervals, for five minutes or more, until they were tricked into thinking that the tide was coming in and began to slide into life. She gasped when they did, hadn’t believed they were alive until then; too still, holding on too tightly-part of the rock, most likely. They couldn’t pull one free, however-as soon as they were touched, the limpets clamped themselves tight to the rock again. Elise tried indignantly, digging with her small pink fingernails until Zach told her to stop, that she would scare them. Then she ran her fingers over them gently instead, and said sorry; apologizing to a scattering of limpets for frightening them.

Turning, Zach walked back past the cottage and was level with the front door when movement down in the valley to his left caught his eye. He paused and looked down the slope to the farm at the bottom. Four or five barns and sheds of various sizes were arranged around two concrete yards, a large one and a smaller second one. The farmhouse was square and painted white, and sat a short distance farther up the valley towards the village, facing The Watch. Its front door was set at the exact center of four sash windows, with an identical row of windows on the floor above. The movement that he’d seen came from a small jeep, which had come into the yard from one of the fields. The driver got out to close the gate, and Zach noticed with some surprise that it was a woman. Short and slight, an unlikely build for a farmer. She strode quickly to the yard gate, and as the wind dropped, he heard the flat metal clang as it slammed shut, carried up to him a fraction of a second after he saw it connect. She turned briskly and he saw a crop of dark, curly hair, cut to shoulder length, held back by a bright green scarf. As she was about to get back into the jeep, something made her pause. She looked up at The Watch abruptly, and Zach, who hadn’t been moving, still felt himself freeze. Caught out, watching a stranger, uninvited. He almost turned away, guiltily, but the way she had also frozen stopped him. There they stood, half a mile apart, staring at each other, and Zach was sure he could sense her surprise. Surprised to see somebody up at the cottage, perhaps. They stood that way for a heartbeat, two, then she got back into the jeep and slammed the door. The sound of the engine was lost to the wind, but as she pulled away towards the house, he saw the pale flash of her face through the window, turning to look at him again.

Zach spent the rest of the afternoon walking along the cliff path in a westerly direction, thinking hard. He needed to go back to his notes, start to restructure the book. It could take on a different format, a different focus. It could be all about the last years of the artist’s life-about his years in Blacknowle. Aubrey had died at what most considered to have been the height of his artistic prowess; the pictures he produced in Blacknowle, and the commissioned portraits he completed in his London studio during those years, formed the bulk of the best of his work. Everybody already knew about his upbringing, his education, his early career, his string of mistresses. But nobody had found Dimity Hatcher before. He thought quickly, totting up. Off the top of his head, he could think of twenty-five drawings of the adolescent girl, made during the thirties. And she appeared in three large oil canvases as well: in one as a Berber maiden, surrounded by desert; in another by some ruins in a deeply forested scene, looking fey and Puckish; and in another as herself, walking along the beach with a basket on her hip full of some dark stuff that Zach had always wondered about. Now he could ask her, he thought with a rush of excitement. In spite of her great age, Dimity’s memories of that time seemed startlingly sharp. Perhaps-no, he was sure-she would remember who Dennis had been. That amorphous young man, whose expression had eluded the artist so.

When Zach arrived back at the Spout Lantern, Pete Murray showed him to his room, ducking his head to avoid the low beams along the upstairs corridor. The room was at the far end of the building, away from the bar. It had a small double bed draped in a patchwork quilt, and a nautical theme-model boats on a shelf with a dried-up starfish; the walls pale blue; seahorses printed on the curtains. An hour or so later, Zach ate a plate of fish pie at a table facing the bar, surrounded by the low buzz of a moderate crowd of locals. He got some nods and smiles, but nobody tried to talk to him, no doubt taking him for a holidaymaker, transient, just passing through and not worth the bother.

People wandered in and out with their dogs, sinking a quick pint as part of their evening walk, and Zach amused himself watching the animals circle and sniff while their owners did the same. He felt heavy with lassitude, the aftereffect of fresh air and exercise. His muscles lengthened and relaxed, his glass of beer made his head light, and he didn’t feel in the least bit conspicuous, or unwelcome. Not until the door rattled open again and a woman strode in, small and wiry, her figure in tight-fitting jeans lost beneath the baggy swaths of a huge tartan shirt. Her legs disappeared into slouchy leather boots, the toes white with dust. Dark curls of hair held back by a peacock-green scarf, its edges frayed and grubby. He recognized her from the jeep at the farm in an instant, and for some reason her sudden appearance gave him a jolt, as if once again he’d been caught out doing something he shouldn’t.

She moved with the same speed and purpose as he had witnessed in the yard, and slowed only when she reached the bar and was greeted by several people. She smiled and shook hands with a few, which Zach found strange and refreshing-to see a woman shake hands rather than offer kisses, like the women he knew in the art world would have done.

“The usual?” Pete greeted her, and though the landlord smiled, Zach noticed he looked slightly uncomfortable, almost nervous. The woman smiled back at him and Zach caught her expression in the mirror behind the bar-the raised eyebrows, the slightly mocking tilt of her lips.

“As usual,” she said. Zach found himself straining his ears to pick up her voice. Pete put a shot of whiskey in front of her, which she knocked back as he pulled her a pint of dark ale. Zach saw her watching the landlord carefully; saw him flick his eyes up at her. As he put the pint down in front of her, he tilted his head to one side and seemed about to speak, but the woman held up her hand. “Don’t bother, Pete. Seriously. I’ve had a crap day and I’ve just come in for this one, okay?”

“Okay, okay. Don’t bite my head off! I didn’t say a word.”

“You didn’t have to,” she muttered, picking up her pint and lowering her head to sip without spilling. As she did, she raised her eyes and caught Zach’s gaze in the mirror. He flinched and looked away. When he looked up again, she was still watching him, and again he looked away. He looked down at his hands; he looked at a circular drip of beer on the table; he looked at his phone, which had no signal, not even one bar. Then he looked up, because she was standing right in front of his table.

“You were up at The Watch today,” she said, without preamble.

“You recognize me?” he said, trying not to sound pleased.

“Not difficult. You stand out like a sore thumb in those clothes.” Her voice was textured, slightly hoarse; the words spoken in the same quick, abrupt manner in which she moved. Zach looked down at his dark jeans, his leather shoes, and wondered what it was that made them so conspicuous. “Got lost, had you? Looking for the coast path?”

“No, I…” He hesitated, wondering if he should own up to what he’d been doing. “I was visiting somebody.”

“What do you want with her?” the woman demanded.

“Is… that any of your business?” Zach said carefully. The woman tipped her chin up a little, as if squaring up to him. Zach almost smiled at her fearless belligerence, and then felt a tug of recognition. He paused, trying to place the feeling. “I’m Zach Gilchrist,” he said, holding out his hand. “Have we met somewhere before?” She eyed his hand suspiciously, and paused before shaking it with a single jerk.

“Hannah Brock. And no, we haven’t met before. I’m Miss Hatcher’s nearest neighbor and I look out for her. Make sure she’s not… bothered by anybody.”

“Why should people bother her?” Zach asked, wondering how much Hannah knew of Dimity Hatcher’s claim to fame.

“Why indeed?” she asked, raising one eyebrow. She had dark eyes to match her hair, a narrow face tanned from the summer sun. It was hard to tell her age, because an outdoor life had put fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and yet she exuded a vitality that was almost unnerving. The hand that had clasped his briefly had been hard, dry, and tiny. Zach hazarded a guess at late thirties.

“I don’t think I bothered her. She seemed quite happy. She made me tea,” he said, smiling mischievously.

“Tea?” Hannah echoed skeptically.

“Tea,” Zach repeated. She studied him for a while, and he sensed a little of her hostility give way to curiosity.

“Well,” she said eventually. “You are honored.”

“I am?”

“It took me near enough six months to get a cup of tea out of her, and that was even after I… Well. Never mind. So, what did you want to see her about?”

“You’re her next-door neighbor. Which makes this… what? Extreme curtain-twitching?” said Zach. She gazed at him steadily for a moment, and then had the good grace to smile briefly.

“Miss Hatcher is a… special case. I wonder if you know how special?”

“I wonder if you do?” Zach retorted.

“Well, this is getting us nowhere.” Hannah sighed. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m looking out for her. And I won’t put up with her being… harassed. Okay by you?” She turned on her heel and started to cross towards a group of people at the far end of the bar.

“She invited me back again. She even set me an errand,” Zach called after her. Hannah glanced back over her shoulder at him and now her frown was puzzled, not hostile. With an impatient roll of her eyes, she turned her back, and Zach chuckled.

When the tall young man had gone, Dimity stood for a long time at the foot of the stairs, listening. Now there was silence from above, apart from all the normal sounds of The Watch. The scuffles of mice in the thatch; the wind in the chimney breast; water dripping onto metal somewhere, striking with a musical note. But there had been a sound; they had both heard it. The first one in a long time, and her heart had leaped at it. Hesitant, bewildered, she began to climb the stairs. In the hallway mirror behind her, Valentina waved a finger, wagged her chin mockingly. Dimity ignored her, but when she got to the top step her heart was thumping painfully. The small landing was gloomy and smelled damp, where the rain was finally coming in through the thatch and soaking the ceiling plaster. A bloom of concentric, tea-colored rings marked the spot. To the left was her bedroom, the door open, a window over the sea letting in a bluish light. To the right a closed door. She stood still again, and listened. She felt herself watched from above; reflected in the clustered eyes of incurious spiders. Slowly, she crossed to the closed door, pressed a cautious hand to the wood. A nervous song hummed in her throat, unbidden. In her hand she had posies, her cheeks were like roses…

“Are you there?” she said, but it came out a croak, and the words sounded all wrong to her own ears. The spiders watched and there was no reply, no sound at all. She waited a little longer, uncertain. The silence behind the door was like a cold, dark well, and the sadness rising from it threatened to consume her. She fought it, pushed it back. Let herself believe again. The ginger cat appeared behind her from her bedroom and wound itself around her shins, and in its loud purr she heard Valentina chuckling.

Valentina Hatcher, Dimity’s mother, had always said that her ancestors were Romany, and had traveled the length and breadth of Europe curing ills and casting fortunes. Odd then that Valentina should choose to make her hair yellow, but then, it wasn’t a glossy Gypsy brunette when left natural. It was a sad-looking mousy brown. That smell was one of the first things Dimity remembered-the piercing reek of household bleach, filling the whole house. Valentina did it in a tin tub of water on the kitchen table, with rags all around to soak up spills. Dimity sometimes hovered in the doorway to watch, fascinated but trying to keep out of sight, because if her mother caught her, opened one screwed-up eye and saw her, she would be made to help.

“Hand me that towel-no, the other one! Get it off my neck!” Barking like a terrier. Dimity would have to stand on a chair, wobbling, to mop the thick, vicious stuff from her mother’s skin. She hated it, and cried if she got any on her fingers, even before it started to burn.

When it was done, it did look magnificent, for a while. Like a mermaid’s hair, as bright as gold coins. Valentina usually sat outside to dry it, with her face tipped to the sky and the breeze running by. Skirt rucked up across her sturdy knees so the sun could warm her legs while she smoked a cigarette.

“Tha’ll pull ships onto the rocks sitting there like that, Val Hatcher,” said Marty Coulson one time, walking down the track with his bandy legs and his tweed cap right down to his ears. Dimity didn’t like the way he grinned. Marty Coulson always grinned when he came to The Watch. Yet when Dimity saw him in the village, he looked the other way, as if he couldn’t see her. No grinning then.

“You’re early,” said Valentina, sounding annoyed. Marty stopped by the front door and gave a lopsided shrug. Stubbing out her cigarette, Valentina got to her feet, brushed the grass from her backside. “Mitzy-go on into the village. Buy a cake for tea from Mrs. Boyle.” She fixed Marty Coulson with a flat, unfriendly eye until he reached into his pocket, found a shilling, and gave it to Dimity. She was always happy to run an errand into Blacknowle. To get away from The Watch, even for a while, and see people other than her mother.

Almost as soon as she was big enough to walk she had been sent out alone; certainly by the age of five or six. On simple missions: to buy tea or deliver something mysterious, wrapped up in paper. A charm, or a spell. A new-made besom to build into a door lintel, for luck; shriveled bits of rabbit pelt to be rubbed on warts and then buried, to remove them. People didn’t like to see her at their door, didn’t want it known that they had bought something from Valentina. They took what she brought them and shooed her quickly away, casting their eyes up and down the street. But they couldn’t help themselves. If they needed luck, or a baby, or to get rid of a baby, if they needed a miracle or a catastrophe, then they tried Valentina as well as prayer. Belt and braces, Valentina sneered, when they’d been and gone from the cottage or, as was more usual, had dropped a written request through the door and fled. I hope the sweat makes their backsides itch when they simper at the vicar come Sunday. Dimity learned all the routes around the lanes, paths, and fields by trial and error. She learned where everybody lived, and all of their names; who might give her a halfpenny for her trouble, and who would slam the door on her.

While she was still small, Valentina went with her on more specialized missions, foraging, picking, and finding. Which stream for watercress, good for strength and digestive tonics; never to pick it from a stream that ran through livestock pasture, since the plants picked up their parasites and would pass them on. How to tell wild parsnip from water hemlock, the latter to be dug up with gloves on, the roots grated carefully and rolled into sticky balls with suet and treacle, to make rat bait that sold all year round. Bucketloads, when someone had a plague of them. Like Mr. Brock, at Southern Farm, one time. He bought two buckets full-almost their whole supply. Dimity carried one and Valentina the other, sliding down the hill from The Watch with the handles cutting into their skin and the pails bumping their shins. Got a problem, have you? Valentina asked the man when they got to the yard. He beckoned them over, a queasy look on his face. Lifted up one end of a tin trough to show them a swath of bobbing brown bodies that squirmed from the light. Had a lamb gnawed to the bone before I found it t’other night. Dimity’s skin had crawled like it was covered in ants. The farm terrier was in a frenzy, chasing and snapping at them. Christopher Brock, the farmer’s son, killed one with a cudgel as they scattered the pellets around the yard. Dimity heard the crack of its bones.

They kept chickens in the backyard, and a pig, but sometimes Valentina wanted gulls’ eggs, or ducks’. There was kindling wood to find, furze roots to be dug up and dried. These made the best fuel for the stove, burning with a clean, hot flame. They hunted for mushrooms and crab apples; or a rabbit, taken from someone else’s snare. Dimity hated stealing them. Her fingers shook and she often cut herself on the sharp wire. The wires were usually covered in blood already, and she wondered if it would get into her veins, if it would make her part rabbit. Valentina cuffed her around the ear for being careless, stuffed the rabbit into a canvas bag, and stomped onwards. Dimity hoped that it was the time together that her mother relished, on these outings; the pleasure of teaching and passing on knowledge. But as soon as Dimity knew all that her mother could teach her, she was sent on these missions alone. It seemed that she had been trained up simply to take over.

From a young age, she knew how to tell when her mother wanted something brought straight back, and when she just wanted Dimity out of the way. When it was the latter, she roved far and wide, wandering around caught up in thoughts and stories. To the west, along the coast from The Watch, was a long, deep beach, mostly stones but with sand revealed at low tide. She spent hours on that beach, staring into rock pools. Ostensibly to catch a few prawns for soup, to pick mussels or Irish moss-Valentina used its purplish fronds to make jellies and set-milk puddings. Everywhere Dimity went, she had a cloth bag or a basket with her; somewhere she could stow the things she found.

One day, the sharp edge of a rock pulled a hole through the rope sole of her shoe. She set the shoe to sail on the surface of a pool, watching it bob and wobble. Seeing how many shells she could load onto it until it started to sink. Then she heard voices above her and she looked up as the first pebble hit the rock pool, sending up a splash that was cold on her cheek. Children from the village, up on the cliff. Mostly boys, but the Crane sisters, too, with their eerie, identical faces all excited and smiling. A stick followed the pebble, catching her arm. She scrambled up and was away over the rocks to the foot of the cliff in moments, to where she knew she could not be seen from above. She heard them calling out names, laughing and chanting; saw a few more missiles strike near where she had last been seen. She moved away along the beach, still in the shelter of the cliff. DIMity! she heard them shout. Dim, dim, she’s oh so dim!

Dimity knew many other paths up from the beach; she didn’t need to use the main one where they might wait, if they were bored enough. She realized, as she reached the finer gravel, that she’d left her shoes behind. One on the rock, one in the pool with a cargo of shells. She would have to go back for them later; and she did, once Valentina had snapped at her for losing them and given her a stinging slap that Dimity thought disproportionate. But she’d forgotten how close to the shore she’d been when she’d taken them off, and the rising tide had swept them away. She scanned the surface of the sea for long minutes, in case she would see them floating nearby. They would not be replaced, she guessed, at least not for a while, even though her mother had found the money for a new lipstick and stockings that week. And she was right, and lucky that the weather set fair and dry. But she picked up a gorse thorn in her left heel. It refused to come out and she limped for a week, until Valentina pinned her down, heated the spot with steam from the kettle, and squeezed, ignoring Dimity’s howls, until the thorn rode out on a jet of yellow filth.

School was a kind of slow torture. It was a forty-minute walk to the drafty buildings in the next village, and there she sat at the back and tried to pay attention when all the while she was glanced at and whispered about, and notes were flung at her with crude drawings and insults scrawled on them. Even the poorest children, even the ones whose fathers were always drunk or beat their mothers or had lost their jobs and slept all day under the hedgerows, like Danny Shaw’s did, even they looked down on Dimity Hatcher. When the teacher caught them at it, she told them off, and ostensibly encouraged Dimity during lessons, but Dimity always saw the look on her face, pinched and faintly disgusted, as if teaching Dimity was above and beyond the call of duty and almost more than she could bear.

When it was time to go home Dimity was always torn between wanting to get away quickly and not wanting to walk with the others behind her, back along the lane to Blacknowle. Mocking her all the way, throwing names, throwing things, laughing. Sometimes she hid until they had all set off, then walked alone at the back, careful to keep one curve in the road between them. She wasn’t scared of them, exactly, more tired. Every bit as unwilling to interact with them as they were with her. Don’t touch that! Dimity’s touched it! It’s got her fleas now! Every insult, every name they hurled was like a dart that would strike, and stay stuck in her skin, hard to brush off. She would try not to feel as she walked behind them, careful never to let them see her cry. They were like a pack of hounds in that way, driven wild by any sign of weakness. She heard their chatter, drifting back to her on the breeze, heard their games and their jokes and wondered what it might be like to be a part of it all, just for one day, just for a short while. Just to see how different it would feel.

Sometimes Wilf walked with her. Wilf Coulson, a skinny runt of a lad, born late to the grinning Marty Coulson and his beleaguered wife, Lana, who, at forty-four years of age and the mother of eight, had thought her travails were over when Wilf was conceived. He had a permanently runny nose and a crusted left nostril. Dimity offered him rosemary oil on a handkerchief to clear it, but he always shook his head, said his mother told him not to take things from her.

“Why not? Your dad comes to see us, sometimes. So your ma can’t mind us so much,” she said one time. Wilf shrugged his skinny shoulders.

“She don’t like it, though. Ma says we’re not to talk about you, even.”

“That’s stupid. And it’s perfectly safe. I made it myself, from our bushes in the backyard.”

“Don’t go calling my ma stupid. It’s got something to do with you not having a dad, I think,” said Wilf. It was November, the fields all sludgy and plowed. They slipped and skidded along a track that cut between great loops in the lane, the pale gray mud caking their shoes, making them walk wide-legged, inelegantly. The sky was the same color as the mud, that day.

“I have got a dad, only he’s lost at sea,” said Dimity. This was what Valentina had told her, when she’d asked enough times to be wary of the woman lashing out. She’d been sitting on the front step, gazing out at the horizon. Smoking, squinting. Will you give it a bloody rest? He’s gone, that’s all you need to know! Lost at sea, for all I care.

“Was he a sailor then?” said Wilf.

“I don’t know. I suppose so. Or a fisherman maybe. So he’s only lost; he’ll come back one day and then he’ll pick up Maggie and Mary Crane by their collars and shake them like a pair of rats!” For the rest of the day she sang “Bobby Shaftoe” in her head, humming it softly. Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea… It was some years before she realized that lost at sea meant dead, meant not coming back.

One stormy day, while the wind tore the water into high, angry waves, she stood and watched them hammer ashore, picturing all the drowned sailors and fishermen, from the beginning of time, swirling down into the depths like autumn leaves in an eddying breeze. Their bones ground up, turned into sand. The coast where she lived was a treacherous one, and wrecks abounded. The year before, she’d gone on the bus with Wilf and his brothers to see the carcass of the Madeleine Tristan, a three-masted schooner that had blown into Chesil Cove. It sat lopsidedly on the beach, surrounded by tourists and locals alike. Dimity and Wilf, along with all the other children, climbed the loose rigging to peer onto the deck and play at pirates. It was the best playground they’d ever had, and they went back again and again until rats took it over, infesting it with their bustling bodies and whiplike tails. Just along the beach from the Madeleine Tristan sat the massive, flaking iron boilers of another ship, the Preveza. Wrecks upon wrecks; layers of lost ships, lost lives.

Realizing that her father would never knock at the door of The Watch, take her side, or shake the Crane twins like rats made Dimity sad for a long time. And when Ma Coulson found out that her boys had taken Dimity Hatcher along with them to the wreck of the Madeleine Tristan, she stood by with her arms folded while Marty took his belt to each one of their backsides. From her hiding place in the blackcurrant bushes, Dimity heard the crack of leather on skin and heard the lads whimper and yelp. She chewed on her lip until it bled, but didn’t leave until the last beating had been given.

When Dimity was twelve, Valentina said she wasn’t going to go to school anymore; that it was a waste of time and she was needed at home. Dimity was surprised to find that she missed it. She even missed the other children, whom she mostly hated. Missed seeing their new pencils and clothes, missed hearing their stories. Missed walking back with Wilf. She didn’t feel she was missing any learning, though. What use was maths and knowing where Africa was? What use was being shown how to bake a pie by a horse-faced woman whose bosoms rested on the waistband of her skirt when she’d been baking them since she was old enough to stand on a stool and reach the countertop? The things Valentina taught her were more important. All the other children were staying on till they were fourteen at the least. That was the law, but nobody said anything when Dimity left. Dimity thought the headmaster might come knocking at The Watch and demand she go back; but he didn’t. She looked out for him for a few days, but not very many.

It was Dimity who first found the way down from the bluff by The Watch to the narrow beach below. In fact, she cleared the path. One day, with her heart thumping, making her knees shaky; one day when she’d been sent out of the house and told to keep herself busy. That meant for hours. She inched carefully over the edge, fingers knotted into the wiry grass, feeling with her toes for a rock she thought would take her weight and not slip or tilt. If it came loose and she lost her footing, nothing would stop her until she hit the jumbled shore below. The soles of her shoes slid a little on a layer of grit, but then they gripped. The rock didn’t move. From there she could see a long, narrow zigzagging way, going first to her right, then left to the bottom. Some of the gaps between safe-looking stones were huge, and she had to stretch her leg right out, or jump, which was terrifying. To voluntarily leave off all handholds, abandon all safety. But she did it, she found a way down, and then spent hours building better steps with rocks small enough for her to move; swiveling them until they stopped rocking, until she could trust them. The sun was bright and the breeze gentle, a gorgeous May day. Halfway up the cliff was a kittiwake nest, the parents out at sea, hunting, and in the nest one fat, fluffy chick. It eyed her with dumb acceptance, bobbing its ungainly head. She knew not to touch it, even though she wanted to. But she wriggled down close to the rocks a short way away and lay still, so still, watching the parent birds come and go with their ink-dipped wings and their throats full of fishy mush for their baby. The other way round than it was for her, she noticed. It was usually her who brought food to Valentina.

She stayed by the nest for a long time, until the mother bird came to roost and the sun was setting. Drowsing in swaths of golden light, tucked out of the breeze. Her skin had that sticky, prickling feeling of being covered in salt; she was heavy with fatigue but enjoying the company of the birds as they whistled and muttered to each other. She liked the way their wet beaks and feet glistened when they came in from the water, and how they never stayed away long before coming back to check on the chick; preening it, nudging it towards a better place in the cramped nest.

She wondered how long it would be before Valentina checked on her. Surely not much longer. It had been about two o’clock, after lunch, when her mother had glanced up at the kitchen clock and told her to make herself scarce. It must have been nearly eight by now, with the sun so low and buttery. Valentina must have been wondering where her daughter was. None of their visitors ever stayed so long-a couple of hours at most. She decided to wait and see, while the kittiwake’s eyelids sank lower and lower; but once the sun had gone she was chilly, and the rocks began to dig into her, and she didn’t dare try to navigate the top half of her new path in the dark. So she got up as quietly as she could, which still made the mother gull squawk, and made her way up with the help of hands and feet. I’m home! she called, rushing in through the door. Happy even to be scolded, just to know she’d been missed. But The Watch was in darkness and Valentina fast asleep in an armchair, her robe gaping open around one flaccid leg. Lipstick smeared around her mouth, an empty bottle beside her.

Later, when she had fed herself a supper of stale bread and bacon and her mother was still snoring in her chair, Dimity crept out of The Watch and went to the Coulsons’ house. Shrouded by the darkness, she lingered in the blackcurrant bushes for a while, breathing in their cat’s-piss smell, peeping in at the windows from a safe distance. When she saw Wilf, she waved, and gestured for him to come out, but he didn’t seem to see her. One by one, all of the lights in Wilf’s house went out, and the night clung close to Dimity, cold and lonely as a winter sky.