priest – Hugh, as I must learn to call him – begins his slow walk back up to the road, pausing again at the brow of the hill where I think I see his right hand rise and fall in the sign of the cross, although he may just have been adjusting his hat.
‘A very holy man,’ I comment to Three.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Three replies.
Nor would I.
The whole house feels different, even the air hangs awkwardly; neither of us is used to visitors. I walk through my garden in the dying light and reclaim it, surprised by how disorientated I am at this contact with another human being. He was right about one thing: there are ghosts to be confronted here. I turn back and go inside, but it takes a long time before I get as far as the landing. I stare at the closed door which separates me from Lucien’s room and strain to hear beyond the silence. My thumb is on the latch, my fingers around the black metal handle. I press and release the catch and open the door, just an inch or two, just enough to check the night-time breathing. Without going in, I reach around the doorframe and fumble for the switch, stepping into the room for the first time since I have been back. It is virtually empty, except for a black bin liner of Lucien’s things returned to us by the police, tied in a knot which I will never be able to undo. The mattress on the bed lies sullen and ugly – no sheet, no duvet, no pillow to grace it. No head on the pillow. No hair on the head. No carved wooden rose hung with a leather thread around his neck. To not know who murdered your grandson is a terrible thing. If only I were to find the wooden rose, I would be one step closer to knowing.
I move the bedside light as if the rose necklace might have just dropped down behind, in the way that in more ordinary times pound coins find the gaps between cushions or earrings rest between floor-boards, but there is, of course, nothing. On my stomach I force my chewed fingernails between the cracks in the floorboards, lie face down with my mouth licking the dust, squinting into the darkness; on my knees I crawl to the bed and drag it from the wall so that the spiders scuttle from the skirting boards. Not this room then, not here, but surely somewhere there is a small rose carved in wood and threaded with leather and if that was found, then the truth would be next.
In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet has been emptied by the guards, all cleaning fluids locked away, but I can still rip up the carpet and tear down the false hardboard wall which conceals the pipes, cutting my arm on the screws sticking out of the plaster. Downstairs, I can claw the curtains from the rails and I do; I can empty the coal dust from the bucket and shower the sitting room black so that it too can be in mourning, and I do; I can pull the emptied drawers from the sideboard and dislocate the sides from the front, the bottom from the sides, the brass handles from the front, and I do. I must, because somewhere is the small wooden rose which my grandson wore and which has never been found and if I can find it, if I can only find it . . . Nothing will stop me searching, nothing, nothing, nothing.
‘Can you speak to me, Ruth?’
There are men on my brittle arms, over my wasted legs, the weight of men on top of me. Sister Amelia warned me about the weight of men, holding you under until you cannot breathe any longer. I am offered a drink in a small, cardboard beaker and I know it is poison from the moment it sleeps my tongue.
Sleep is a malevolent force. It lurks around the edges of my bed like a sick dog, its bad breath hanging on the night air. There are many explanations for what I may have done. It is not unusual for people to be unable to remember the heinous deeds committed by their own hands, conceived in their own minds even in broad daylight, while wide awake. Then there are those who do terrible things when they are asleep. Then there have been those throughout history who have done things of great importance, both good and evil, when it was not clear if they were awake or asleep or in some half world, as yet unclassified by scientists. This is another grammatical construct I have not thought of until now. I have been thinking about what I may have been, what might have been, but now my mind turns to what must have been.
My thigh is branded with the sign of the Rose. One night, during those last days, I must have stood over the Rayburn and heated the metal emblem until it was white, must have held it with an oven glove as I pressed it against my own flesh, must have smelled the burning, must have felt the million pins pierce me. Sister Amelia blessed and tended the burn the next morning with honey, I do remember that. The mark is here now, I feel its uneven writing with my fingers and it reminds me of the pain I could suffer and the pain I could inflict in an ecstasy of unknowing.
Although the psychiatric assessments dismissed as unlikely the possibility that I was one of those people capable of terrible acts of destruction while in a state of sleep, there are those who still consider it a possible solution to Lucien’s unsolved death, myself among them. The press, of course, loved it.
‘The saint: did she sleepwalk her way to murder?’
‘Was this a visionary death?’
I will never be able to dismiss that possibility until someone else is found guilty – and until that happens, I cannot sleep. When I do finally fall asleep, which is usually when it grows light (as if the diminishing darkness takes with it the possibility of destructive acts), then I dream of footprints leading in the reeds, of a heron cast in iron on the far bank of the Wellspring, staring. If I am not to become a prisoner not only of the state, but of my own self, I must go to the Wellspring again.
The grass in First Field is becoming sparse, the thistles scratch my ankles and I can feel the flints through the soles of my shoes. We always thought the water table here was close to the surface, but as the rest of the country has proved, that cannot last forever. There is a strange quiet in this empty field. The guards told me that the government disposed of the remaining livestock, by which they meant my lambless ewes, my harebrained hens, Mark’s feral piglets. Disposed of. Shot. Hundreds of years these fields have hosted sheep, cows heavy with milk and the wind whispering the barley, and now they are barren, unless you count the sterile strips of engineered produce patrolled by the guards, and I don’t. Reaching the crest of the hill, I stop. The history of the River Lenn is embodied in the landscape around me: the position of the church close to the bridge, its Norman tower clearly visible now that so many of the trees, weakened by drought, have come down in the gales; the ribbon of cottages along its length, road following rail following river as our industrial past snakes its way towards Wales. Then to the north, the Crag, a bitter and rugged hill keeping its bald head bullish above the simpering lowlands. I bring my eyes away from the horizon to the nearby landscape and the footpath descending the hill in front of me, down to the stile into the wood, between brambles and low-hanging boughs of budding ash, until it reaches the Wellspring.
Despite the afternoon sun slanting through the canopy, the water looks black and the reflections of the surrounding trees blur as three or four mallards dip their heads for food in the thickening sludge. Sister Amelia would not have liked the brash dominance of the male birds, their harassment of the muted females on her reservoir of femininity. There is a flash of blue over yellow as the kingfisher takes flight over and is gone, then it is still and quiet apart from the intermittent warnings screeched by the vulgar crows in the treetops. The water level is low and parts of the old moss-covered stones are exposed, but they hold in their memory the marks showing where the surface usually lies. Matter holds memory they say, in which case these are sad stones. I approach the pond, kneel down and dip my fingers in, feel the coolness, cup my hands and wash my face and let the drips run down the front of my shirt, trace their way down the veins of the inside of my arms. Staring into the dark mirror, it is as if I can see his face, as if he is about to say something.
With my eyes closed, I can banish the spectre of the Sisters encircling the water and pray. No. It is not a prayer. It is rather a saying out loud of things which need to be said, but I do not anticipate
