the road. By the time he’d crunched into the courtyard across the gravel and pulled to a halt in the shadow of the Hall, she’d got rid of her basket, brushed the mud from her jeans, washed her hands so thoroughly that her skin looked abraded, and set a kettle to boil on the cooker.
The front door stood open and when he mounted the single step that did for a porch, she said, “I’m in the kitchen, Constable. Come in.”
Tea, he thought. Questions and answers all controlled through the ritual of pouring, passing sugar and milk, shaking Hob Nobs onto a chipped floral plate. Clever, he thought.
But instead of making tea, she poured the boiling water slowly into a large metal pan in which glass jars stood in water of their own. She set the pan onto the cooker as well.
“Things need to be sterile,” she said. “People die so easily when someone is foolish and thinks of making preserves without sterilising fi rst.”
He looked round the kitchen and tried to get a glimpse of the larder beyond it. The time of year seemed decidedly odd for what she was proposing. “What are you preserving?”
“I might ask the same of you.”
She went to a cupboard and took down two glasses and a decanter from which she poured a liquid that was in colour somewhere just between dirt-toned and amber. It was cloudy, and when she placed a glass in front of him on the table where he’d gone to sit unbidden in an attempt to establish some sort of authority over her, he picked it up suspiciously and sniffed. What did it smell like? Bark? Old cheese?
She chuckled and swallowed a healthy portion of her own. She put the decanter on the table, sat down across from him, and circled her hands round her glass. “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s made from dandelion and elder. I drink it every day.”
“What’s it for?”
“I use it for purging.” She smiled and drank again.
He lifted the glass. She watched. Not his hands as he lifted, not his mouth as he drank, but his eyes. That was what struck him later when he thought about their fi rst encounter: how she never took her eyes from his. He himself was curious and gathered quick impressions about her: she wore no make-up; her hair was greying but her skin was lined only faintly so she couldn’t be that much older than he; she smelled vaguely of sweat and earth, and a smudge of dirt made a patch above her eye like an oval birth mark; her shirt was a man’s, over-large, frayed at the collar and ripped at the cuffs; at the V made where it buttoned, he could see the initial arc of one breast; her wrists were large; her shoulders were broad; he imagined the two of them could wear each other’s clothes.
“This is what it’s like,” she said quietly. Dark eyes she had, with pupils so large that the eyes themselves looked black. “At fi rst it’s the fear of something larger than yourself— something over which you have no control and only limited understanding — that’s inside her body with a power of its own. Then it’s the anger that some rotten disease cut into her life and yours and made a mess out of both. And then it’s the panic because no one has any answers that you can believe in and everyone’s answer is different from everyone else’s anyway. Then it’s the misery of being saddled with her and her illness when what you wanted — signed up for, made your vows to cherish — was a wife and a family and normality. Then it’s the horror of being trapped in your house with the sights and the smells and the sounds of her dying. But oddly enough, in the end it all becomes the fabric of your life, simply the way you live as man and wife. You become accustomed to the crises and to the moments of relief. You become accustomed to the grim realities of bed pans, commodes, vomit, and urine. You realise how important you are to her. You’re her anchor and her saviour, her sanity. And whatever needs you have of your own, they become secondary — unimportant, selfish, nasty even — in light of the role you play for her. So when it’s over and she’s gone, you don’t feel released the way everyone thinks you probably feel. Instead, you feel like a form of madness. They tell you it’s a blessing that God finally took her. But you know there isn’t a God at all. There’s just this gaping wound in your life, the hole that was the space she took up, the way she needed you, and how she fi lled your days.”
She poured more of the liquid into his glass. He wanted to make some sort of response, but he wanted even more to run so that he wouldn’t have to. He removed his spectacles — turning his head away from them rather than simply drawing them off the bridge of his nose — and in doing so he managed to remove his eyes from hers.
She said, “Death isn’t a release for anyone but the dying. For the living it’s a hell whose face just keeps on changing all the time. You think you’ll feel better. You think you’ll let the grief go someday. But you never do. Not completely. And the only people who can understand are the ones who’ve gone through it as well.”
Of course, he thought. Her husband. He said, “I loved her. Then I hated her. Then I loved her again. She needed more than I had to give.”
“You gave what you could.”
“Not in the end. I wasn’t strong when I should have been. I put myself first. While she was dying.”
“Perhaps you’d borne enough.”
“She knew what I’d done. She never said a word, but she knew.” He felt confined, the walls too close. He put on his spectacles. He pushed away from the table and walked to the sink where he rinsed out his glass. He looked out the window. It faced not the Hall but the woods. She’d planted an extensive garden, he saw. She’d repaired the old greenhouse. A wheelbarrow stood to one side of it, filled with what looked like manure. He imagined her shoveling it into the earth, with the strong, bold movements that her shoulders promised. She’d sweat as she did it. She’d pause to wipe her forehead on her sleeve. She wouldn’t wear gloves — she’d want to feel the wooden handle of the shovel and the sunlit heat of the earth — and when she was thirsty the water she drank would pour down the sides of her mouth to dampen her neck. A slow trickle of it would run between her breasts.
He made himself turn from the window to face her. “You own a shotgun, Mrs. Spence.”
“Yes.” She stayed where she was, although she changed her position, one elbow on the table, one hand curved round her knee.
“And you discharged it last night?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The land’s posted, Constable. Approximately every one hundred yards.”
“There’s a public footpath superseding any posting. You know that very well. As does Townley-Young.”
“These boys weren’t on the path to Cotes Fell. Nor were they headed back towards the village. They were in the woods behind the cottage, circling up towards the Hall.”
“You’re sure of that.”
“From the sound of their voices, of course I’m sure.”
“And you warned them off verbally?”
“Twice.”
“You didn’t think to phone for help?”
“I didn’t need help. I just needed to be rid of them. Which, you must admit, I did fairly well.”
“With a shotgun. Blasting into the trees with pellets that—”
“With salt.” She ran her thumb and middle finger back through her hair. It was a gesture that spoke more of impatience than vanity. “The gun was loaded with salt, Mr. Shepherd.”
“And do you ever load it with anything else?”
“On occasion, yes. But when I do, I don’t shoot at children.”
He noticed for the first time that she was wearing earrings, small gold studs that caught the light when she turned her head. They were her only jewellery, save for a wedding band that, like his own, was unadorned and nearly as thin as the lead of a pencil. It too caught the light when her fi ngers tapped restlessly against her knee. Her legs were long. He saw that she’d taken off her boots somewhere and wore nothing now but grey socks on her feet.
He said, because he needed to say something to keep his focus, “Mrs. Spence, guns are dangerous in the hands of the inexperienced.”
She said, “If I had wanted to hurt someone, believe me, I would have done, Mr. Shepherd.”
She stood. He expected her to cross the kitchen, bringing her glass to the sink, returning the decanter to the cupboard, invading his territory. Instead, she said, “Come with me.”
He followed her into the sitting room, which he’d passed earlier on his way to the kitchen. The late afternoon’s light fell in bands on the carpet, flashed light and dark against her as she walked to an old pine dresser against one wall. She pulled open the left top drawer. She took out a small package of towelling that was done up
