She Walks in Shadows(21)
“Why, I believe I said nothing of the sort,” she said softly, taking my hat and coat from the stand. “If you must know, part of the deal for my freedom was poor Henley’s life ... but I was well-compensated with a child.”
“But ….”
She stepped aside just as the thing came racing down the stairs, all unseen save for the brass pins torn loose in its wake.
LOCKBOX
E. Catherine Tobler
IF NOTHING ELSE, remember this: Edgar always knew.1
He found the ruin by mistake, a wrong turn down a street that fizzled out and turned into a rutted dead end choked with undergrowth. Housewarming, helping friends move, whatever the event2 would have become over the course of a sloppy October night, there was no house Edgar could actually see, until — he said with a dramatic pause — the ground crumbled under his feet and he found himself standing within the shattered remains of what he first called a cathedral. It was, he said, as if an entire abbey had been sunk3 into the ground and buried over for a hundred thousand years.
Everyone gave him shit — said he was taking our course on Gothic literature a little too literally. Had he seen any old gentlemen with forty-yard beards? Thomas wanted to know. Were there women weeping upon the moors — No moors, you imbecile, and not a single solitary soul, nor any of the others who had been invited, Edgar said and then his eyes fell to me. The way his mouth slanted up, I knew what he was thinking, that we would go and have each other within that desolate ruin, out where there should have been a house, but there was only a buried ruin that no one could even name.
But I was less careless than he and wanted to know more about this nameless, sunken place before we made to go. I had known Edgar for three years — it was our last year at University, the last year before we were to part ways, unless I followed him to London and I hated London4 with all my heart, no matter how much I loved Edgar. He was decisive where I was not, disruptive — the kind to run shrieking through a church service, daring those amassed to consider matters outside their quiet circles of contemplation. 5
Surely, I said to him as he watched me with the infinite patience of a man in love,6 the ruin possessed a name. Everything in the world was named, controlled, precisely defined. We spent afternoons in the library poring over every ancient tome we could lay our hands on, asking the librarians if they had ever heard of such a place and they said no — but I saw it in their eyes. I heard the unspoken words clawing at the corners of their closed mouths. I didn’t ask more of them, fearing they could not say. Edgar and I propped ourselves against the hard walnut shelves in a tangle with books of old, large maps spread across his loose-thighed lap. No matter how close I was, Edgar drew me closer, long fingers guiding mine over the lines that marked the pages. These were original maps, bound into a book for what had been deemed “safer keeping,” and I could feel the difference between smooth ink and rough paper. Coupled with the heat of Edgar’s hand atop mine, I thought the maps would smudge beneath our fingers, lost to anyone who came after. When Edgar leaned in to kiss me, I felt the line of the River Tyne on the page beneath my middle finger and drew back from both boy and map.
“Exham,7” I breathed.
“Possible,” Edgar said and I couldn’t tell if his expression of annoyance was over the broken kiss or the accuracy of my guess.
As stories went, Exham Priory had housed the worst of the worst; the most depraved creatures had called those halls home and surely, it could not be that which Edgar had found in the ground. It could not — and if it was? Oh, I could not deny the way my heart quickened at the mere idea. If I — If we were to discover the ruins of Exham Priory and prove every single thing about the place true — It couldn’t be possible and yet, I wanted it very much to be.
“Was it an aunt you had in that region?”
His question to me required no actual answer. Edgar tangled his hand into my necktie and pulled me closer, to forestall all dialogue but that between lip and tongue. The ruin didn’t exactly matter then — it was an aunt I had near Exham, widowed and alone for more years than anyone wanted to count — and Edgar seemed to put the place out of his mind, until the end of the week when he looked at me over a stack of fresh books we had been perusing and asked if I wanted to go. Its name didn’t matter, he insisted, but he wanted to show me the ruin; he wanted me to see the way the setting sunlight would fill the depression the ruin made in the ground, a pool of gold draining away as the evening descended. We could also call upon my aunt, if I wished, but thoughts of her made me more uneasy. How that was possible, given our potential destination, baffled me. Something about women wandering alone, unseen.
He bade me pack my camera and we drove south, until Edinburgh was far behind.8 Here, the land was untamed, streets turning to dirt before they fizzled out altogether. The idea that a wrong turn had brought him here in the first place seemed unlikely; it had perplexed me, his disappearance over the weekend, the claim of seeing friends into a new house, but when Edgar parked the car and took my hand to draw me out, I said nothing, captivated by what spread before us. It was as he said, like nothing you might imagine when a person explained it. It seemed a whole city submerged, drawn into the guts of the world where it held the last moments of sunlight from the rest of the land.
Within the dry and crumbling earth, walls made themselves known as dwindling sunlight caressed them. I picked out windows and doorways, even the remains of a sloping roof. Edgar grasped my hand and pulled me down a set of crumbling stone steps, into the building itself, and from there watched me was I wandered. The great hall rose around us to frame the twilight sky. I saw each piece of the wreck in turn, through the camera lens as the light faded and faded. Then it was Edgar’s mouth lighting up the ruin, against my cheek, my ear, as he held me from behind, buckled my knees, and pressed me into the dirt. Here, the earth smelled like eternity. I watched in some measure of amusement as Edgar caught my camera as it tumbled from my hand. He set it carefully aside, showing less care with my jacket, my trousers. He was insatiable, the ground strangely warm beneath my splayed hands, as if with spilled blood, though it crumbled dry between my fingers when hands turned to fists. When we walked up that long staircase later, as if we were drunk on the world and each other,9 the moonlight glossing the stone made each step seem whole once more. Each was solid beneath my feet in a way they had not been upon our descent, no crumbling debris but only smooth and worn from centuries of feet moving across them.