cut randomly toward the bridge in the valley beyond; and the other branch flowed to the race, where it took on dimensions of shadow and darkness as it moved between parallels under the cedars on its way to the turbines of the mill.
They both stood astonished. Morgan had never seen such beauty. He had never imagined, in all his reading and limited travels, that there could be such a place. He knew other people were moved by mountains or wilderness, the Sistine Chapel or Stonehenge, Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon, the Acropolis, High Arctic archipelagos, or the gardens at Kew. But his mind raced and found no comparisons. For him this was the right combination of nature and the gentle intrusion of human design. For Miranda there was shock, a chilling bewilderment that nothing had changed.
Stepping into the light, she walked to an imagined depression in the grass, knelt, placed her hand on the ground, and ran it slowly over where she would have been spread out so long ago, so recently that it hurt. Morgan came up and stood beside her, resting his hand on her shoulder. He looked over at the dilapidated structure of the old mill, the roof still precariously balanced in sheet metal shards on its tumbledown tower.
Crossing the dam to the mill, Morgan shifted his weight carefully over the thick walk-board. When he got to the mill, he pushed open the door and stepped into a dank maze of shadows and light, crenellations of the sun shining between separated boards of the ancient walls. He pushed against myriad cobwebs, some wheeling in small riots of intricate strategic design, some invisible in the shadows, and choked when they clasped at his face.
Morgan climbed gingerly up the suspended ladder steps into the tower loft and stepped onto the precarious floor, bracing against rafters that swooped ominously over his head. He looked down through the splayed floor-boards into a watery shimmer two storeys below beneath gaps in the ground-level floor — still-water seepage, closed off long ago by the earthen embankment when the pond was diverted to the race. Morgan crouched where the wallboard opened and peered toward the dam and down at Miranda, who was lying spread-eagled on top of her coat on the grass, fully clothed but pathetically vulnerable. She was staring up into the sky, not at the tower but into the layers of cloud and open blue.
Morgan’s eyes adjusted to the chiaroscuro lattice of shadows and light that surrounded him. Tracing in his imagination where the man must have spent all those hours, he lowered his weight to the floor and found it difficult to breathe.
A hand-forged nail lying on top of an exposed joist caught his eye. He picked it up and toyed with it, imagining other hands holding it, other eyes examining the flanged head where it had been drawn and snipped from redhot iron two centuries earlier. Morgan had read about nails. He knew the different shapes of pioneer nails, each peculiar to one region or another, declaring its vintage as clearly as if it were labelled. He didn’t own antiques, but he loved reading about Canadiana, especially early Ontario furniture with its original paint. He watched the Antiques Road Show, both the British and American versions, on late-night reruns.
As he replaced the nail, exactly where he found it, he noticed deliberate marks etched into a wallboard. He brushed the dust away with the side of his hand, blew across what seemed to be letters.
The inscription was brief and enigmatic, like the flourish of a signature that concealed yet expressed identity. The first letter was a capital M, like a skull with the top carved away. The next was a B, crudely done with the eyes of the letter gouged out. Then there were a linked pair of letters, what seemed like a gaping mouth with a slash to one side, followed by the crooked jaw of a G. Leaning to the side, he spied in the shadow of an upright beam other marks scratched into the wood. When his eyes adjusted, the marks became very distinct: M period. Q period.
Griffin knew her name!
Morgan could taste bile in his throat. How many hours and years did he hide here, watching? Morgan spat into the dust.
“Mary Bingham Carter-Griffin,” Miranda explained when he described what he had found after rejoining her. “His mother. He named the semiology institute after her.”
“He knew your name!”
“So you said. Names aren’t that big a mystery in a village. It would be easy to find out from the mill hands. Everyone knows who everyone is — you don’t know them, necessarily, but you know who they are.”
“That’s why I like cities. You know who you know. And who you don’t know, you don’t know. It’s simple. That wanking creep knew it was you he was watching.”
“Why does that make it worse? Morgan, there are people in the city, you see them for years, they have your coffee and muffin ready when you get off the subway because you’re a regular and you tip them at Christmas. They sell you a paper, a haircut, shoes. They nod to you in the hall, you pat their dog. They work in your office at unknown labours. On the street corner you give them a dollar once a week and miss them when they’re gone, maybe in rehab or dead, you don’t know. You know these people. You don’t know anything about them. We all live in villages. The difference is that in a village like this you know everyone’s name. You can be just as lonely.”
Miranda wasn’t sure why she had added the bit about loneliness. She wasn’t certain why being known made her more vulnerable, but it did, at least now, looking back.
“He wasn’t just looking,” said Morgan, turning her perspective around. “He was watching. There’s a difference. He was watching your life.”
“Or I was putting it out on display.”
“For goodness’ sake, Miranda. You said yourself he may have been there for years.”
“We used to gather crayfish in jam jars. I wonder if he saw us. Sometimes we didn’t come by the mill. You could cut across Mr. Naismith’s pasture from the village if the bull wasn’t out. He couldn’t always know we were here. Celia and me, we’d come out when we were only nine or ten, even younger, and we’d catch crayfish in the shallows.”
“What did you do with them?”
“We talked about taking them home to eat, but we let them go. I can work out how old we were by the sequence of gatherings. When we were really small, it was bits of driftwood and pebbles. Then we graduated to crayfish for a couple of summers. Then it was gathering flowers. We’d pick great bunches, and naturally they’d die. We’d pluck water hyacinths and lay them out in the mud like drowned things, and lilies with long, snaky stems. Then we got old enough and we’d come and just admire the flowers, wade out and smell them, and swim by the dam and lie in the sun. We wore bathing suits then. We were modest until we hit puberty. Celia was fully mature at twelve. I think we sunbathed naked after that, except we kept our panties on. I’m not sure why. It seems reckless now to strip down like that, even here, but we kept our underwear on, for periods I suppose, not propriety, and we read romances aloud, graduating year by year from the most romantic drivel with pastel covers to almost Jane Austen. By the time I was reading Jane Austen, Celia was married or close enough to it. Donny was all the romance she could handle, and I preferred Austen in solitude.”
She took a deep breath and glanced up at Morgan, who seemed to be listening, seemed to be waiting. Miranda felt under pressure, as if something were expected of her and she wasn’t sure what it was. “Perhaps he was our necessary witness,” she went on. “Scrunched up in his tower. Dreaming of his dead mother. We had him trapped there, Morgan. We kept him locked away day after day. Rapunzel, a bald-headed wanker. In all our innocence we had the power.”
“Not if you didn’t know he was there until later.”
“But maybe we did. I can’t remember. Sometimes there were pigeons, sometimes maybe
