Dark Angel (124 page)

“No, neither do I. Let’s walk. I love to walk at night.” So we left the terrace; we set off down the path toward the lake. At first we walked side by side; then—as often happened when we took walks together—Frank drew ahead. Neither of us minded this: Frank’s strides were longer than mine. He still walked, as my uncle Steenie had once said, with a certain lack of moderation. He had a questing walk; he liked always to press on, to the next bend or the next vantage point. I liked to walk more slowly, sometimes looking back.

There were still swans on the lake—white ones now. We watched them stealing upon us out of the dark—silent, white, like beautiful ghosts, the cleft between the arch of their wings as black as ebony.

We walked on. I watched the clouds scud across the face of the moon. I watched the trees move. The air was damp against my skin. I thought, with affection, of the dead. I thought of those who had died most recently: Wexton, and (a few years before him) Jenna. Jenna, whom I had succeeded in tracing, some years after my marriage; Jenna, whom I had last seen in the center of her new family, with her husband, her stepchildren, her grandchildren. Jenna had found happiness in the end, and I was glad of that.

I thought of those I had lost before this, in the middle period of my life: of Steenie, and of Constance. I thought of those who had died even longer ago: my own parents, an uncle I never knew except at second hand, Frank’s lost family. So many ghosts: there, and yet absent. I wished they had been more substantial; I would have liked to speak to them.

“Not through the woods,” Frank called as we approached them.

“No, not through the woods. Shall we take that track?”

“Where does it lead?”

“We took it once, with Freddie’s greyhounds. It goes on for miles. Out of the valley, up onto the plain. It goes as far as the circle, farther maybe. When we took it, we stopped up there, on the hill.”

“The circle? The stone circle? I’ve never seen that. How far is it?”

“Four miles. Five, maybe.”

“Shall we do it? I want to walk a long way tonight. On and on, without stopping.”

And so we walked on. It was a wide cart-track, clearly defined. The moon gave just enough light to show the path winding ahead, out of the Winterscombe valley and up to that harsher landscape beyond.

As we walked, the wind strengthened; the sky began to clear. We saw, first, the polestar, then—as if they were being unveiled for our benefit—the brightness of the constellations. I thought: Cassiopeia, Orion, the twins Castor and Pollux. It was perhaps then that I decided to write down the story of my parents, and of Constance.

When thinking of this idea before, I had discussed it once or twice with Frank. I think he read my mind, and knew I was thinking of it then, as we walked. We crested one rise. We began to mount a second.

“If I did write it down, Frank—”

“Winterscombe?”

“Yes, Winterscombe. Where should I begin?”

“Oh, I know that. That’s easy. You must begin with the fortuneteller.”

“The fortuneteller? Why?”

“Well, you should begin with magic, I think.”

“Why magic?”

“Because of all the other magic, of course. Wasn’t there magic when Constance was ill and then recovered? When your father recovered, come to that? What happened to your mother in those caves? What was it I sensed, back there in that wood? All those things are magic. So begin with the magic. Begin with your fortuneteller.”

“Do you believe in magic?”

“Certainly.”

“Even though you are a scientist?”

“Perhaps
because
I am a scientist. And when you get to us”—he paused—“be sure to mention the arithmetic….”

I smiled. Frank strode on ahead. He stopped at the summit of the hill. I watched the figure of my husband outlined against the sky. Whatever it was he could see from this vantage point seemed to please him, for he lifted his arms. One of his odd, impulsive gestures, half triumph, half jubilation. I watched him with love as he moved against the sky. I walked on, and as I reached the top he held out his hand to me.

“Look this way first.”

I turned and looked back to Winterscombe. The moonlight was stronger now, the terrain clear. I could see the bowl of the valley, the dark thread of the river bellying out into the lake, the shelter of the belt of woodland, and the great mass of the house, its black roofs, its bays, its turrets, its ranked windows and their lights.

“Now this way.”

He turned me to face the other way. I drew in my breath. There, at the base of the bare and treeless hills, was the monument. A huge and lonely circle of stones, a place prehistory: The stones were white as bones in the moonlight.

Beyond the pillars and their immense capitals, the clouds banked on the horizon, the night sky above them clear. As we looked I saw those clouds were edged with light: Their extremities, frayed, diffuse, constantly in motion, gathering, dissipating, were tinged with an unearthly and sulfurous luminosity. They were at once massed and striated.

This silenced us. We watched the clouds thicken, converge, disperse.

“Is it the comet, Frank? Is it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I never thought it would look like that. There, and not there.”

“Neither did I.”

We stood watching some time longer. The moon rose, and as its light grew stronger, the discoloration of the clouds grew less intense. What had been burnished faded to an opalescent silver, then to gray, and finally to black.

“Look at us. How small we are.”

Frank looked at the sweep of the hills.

“Small—and large. Both at once. Do you feel that?”

“Yes. I do.”

“I want to walk down there. All the way down.” He pointed to the monument. “I want to stand there tonight, right in the center of that circle. With you.”

He began to walk down the hill at a fast pace. The wind whipped his hair about his face. Frank, always indifferent to the elements, ignored this.

I looked one last time back, toward the lights of Winterscombe, the enclosure of its valley. Frank turned; he waited for me.

I ran down to join him. He took my hand once more, and hand in hand, the wind in our faces, we walked down toward the circle of stones.

Sally Beauman was born in Devon, England, and is a graduate of Cambridge University. She began her career as a critic and writer for
New York
magazine and continued to write for leading periodicals in the US and the UK after returning to England. In 1970, she became the first recipient of the Catherine Pakenham Award for journalism, and at the age of twenty-four, was appointed editor of
Queen
magazine. Beauman has written for the
New Yorker
,
the Sunday Times,
and
Telegraph Magazine
, where she was arts editor.

Her novels, which include the
New York Times
–bestselling sensation
Destiny
, have been translated into over twenty languages and are bestsellers worldwide. In addition to her works of fiction, Beauman has published two nonfiction books based on the history and work of the Royal Shakespeare Company:
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Centenary Production of Henry V
(edited by Beauman, with a foreword by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, 1976), and
The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades
(1982).

Sally Beauman is married to the actor Alan Howard. They divide their time between London and a remote island in the Hebrides. They have one son and two grandchildren.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1990 by Sally Beauman

Cover design by Angela Goddard

978-1-4804-4474-4

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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