red yards away. She walked in that direction for half a minute, and stopped to listen again. But there was nothing, nothing but the tumbling dark mass of the woods just discernible against the grayish-blue of the western sky. After waiting a while she decided to turn back. In order to pick up her path she was walking directly toward the house, toward the terrace where a paraffin globe lamp shone among glasses, bottles, and an ice bucket. The drawing-room French windows still stood wide open to the night. She could see right into the room. And by the light of a single lamp she could see, partially obscured by the hang of a velvet curtain, one end of a sofa across which there lay at a peculiar angle a cylindrical object that seemed to hover. It was only after she had covered another fifty yards that she understood that she was looking at a disembodied human leg. Closer still, and she grasped the perspectives; it was her mother’s of course, and she would be waiting for the twins. She was mostly obscured by the drapes, and one stockinged leg was supported by the knee of the other, which gave it its curious, slanting and levitated appearance. Briony moved to a window on her left as she came right up to the house in order to be clear of Emily’s sight line. She was positioned too far behind her mother to see her eyes. She could make out only the dip in her cheekbone of her eye socket. Briony was certain her eyes would be closed. Her head was tilted back, and her hands lay lightly clasped in her lap. Her right shoulder rose and fell faintly with her breathing. Briony could not see her mouth, but she knew its downward curve, easily mistaken for the sign—the hieroglyph—of reproach. But it was not so, because her mother was endlessly kind and sweet and good. Looking at her sitting alone, late at night, was sad, but pleasantly so. Briony indulged herself by looking through the window in a spirit of farewell. Her mother was forty-six, dispiritingly old. One day she would die. There would be a funeral in the village at which Briony’s dignified reticence would hint at the vastness of her sorrow. As her friends came up to murmur their condolences they would feel awed by the scale of her tragedy. She saw herself standing alone in a great arena, within a towering colosseum, watched not only by all the people she knew but by all those she would ever know, the whole cast of her life, assembled to love her in her loss. And at the churchyard, in what they called the grandparents’ corner, she and Leon and Cecilia would stand in an interminable embrace in the long grass by the new headstone, again watched. It had to be witnessed. It was the pity of these well-wishers that pricked her eyes. She could have gone in to her mother then and snuggled close beside her and begun a résumé of the day. If she had she would not have committed her crime. So much would not have happened, nothing would have happened, and the smoothing hand of time would have made the evening barely memorable: the night the twins ran away. Was it thirty-four, or five or six? But for no particular reason, apart from the vague obligation of the search and the pleasure of being out so late, she came away, and as she did so her shoulder caught an edge of one of the open French windows, knocking it shut. The sound was sharp—seasoned pine on hardwood—and rang out like a rebuke. To stay she would have to explain herself, so she slipped away into the darkness, tiptoeing quickly over the slabs of stone and the scented herbs that grew between them. Then she was on the lawn between the rose beds where it was possible to run soundlessly. She came round the side of the house to the front, onto the gravel she had hobbled across barefoot that afternoon. Here she slowed as she turned down the driveway toward the bridge. She was back at her starting point and thought she was bound to see the others, or hear their calls. But there was no one. The dark shapes of the widely spaced trees across the park made her hesitate. Someone hated her, that had to be remembered, and he was unpredictable and violent. Leon, Cecilia and Mr. Marshall would be a long way off now. The nearer trees, or at least their trunks, had a human form. Or could conceal one. Even a man standing in front of a tree trunk would not be visible to her. For the first time, she was aware of the breeze pouring through the tops of the trees, and this familiar sound unsettled her. Millions of separate and precise agitations bombarded her senses. When the wind picked up briefly and died, the sound moved away from her, traveling out across the darkened park like a living thing. She stopped and wondered whether she had the courage to keep on to the bridge, cross it, and leave it to go down the steep bank to the island temple. Especially when there really was not much at stake—just a hunch of hers that the boys may have wandered down there. Unlike the adults, she had no torch. Nothing was expected of her, she was a child after all in their eyes. The twins were not in danger. She remained on the gravel for a minute or two, not quite frightened enough to turn back, nor confident enough to go on. She could return to her mother and keep her company in the drawing room while she waited. She could take a safer route, along the driveway and back, before it entered the woods—and still give the impression of a serious search. Then, precisely because the day had proved to her that she was not a child, and that she was now a figure in a richer story and had to prove herself worthy of it, she forced herself to walk on and cross the bridge. From beneath her, amplified by the stone arch, came the hiss of the breeze disturbing the sedge, and a sudden beating of wings against water which subsided abruptly. These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing—it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light. The bridge led to nothing more than an artificial island in an artificial lake. It had been there two hundred years almost, and its detachment marked it out from the rest of the land, and it belonged to her more than to anyone else. She was the only one who ever came here. To the others it was no more than a corridor to and from home, a bridge between the bridges, an ornament so familiar as to be invisible. Hardman came with his son twice a year to scythe the grass around the temple. The tramps had passed through. Stray migrating geese sometimes honored the little grassy shore. Otherwise it was a lonely kingdom of rabbits, water birds and water rats. So it should have been a simple matter, to pick her way down the bank and go across the grass toward the temple. But again, she hesitated, and simply looked, without even calling out to the twins. The building’s indistinct pallor shimmered in the dark. When she stared at it directly it dissolved completely. It stood about a hundred feet away, and nearer, in the center of the grassy stretch, there was a shrub she did not remember. Or rather, she remembered it being closer to the shore. The trees were not right either, what she could see of them. The oak was too bulbous, the elm too straggly, and in their strangeness they seemed in league. As she put her hand out to touch the parapet of the bridge, a duck startled her with a high, unpleasant call, almost human in its breathy downward note. It was the steepness of the bank, of course, which held her back, and the idea of descent, and the fact that there was not much point. But she had made her decision. She went down backward, steadying herself on clumps of grass, and at the bottom paused only to wipe her hands on her dress. She walked directly toward the temple, and had gone seven or eight steps, and was about to call out the names of the twins, when the bush that lay directly in her path—the one she thought should be closer to the shore—began to break up in front of her, or double itself, or waver, and then fork. It was changing its shape in a complicated way, thinning at the base as a vertical column rose five or six feet. She would have stopped immediately had she not still been so completely bound to the notion that this was a bush, and that she was witnessing some trick of darkness and perspective. Another second or two, another couple of steps, and she saw that this was not so. Then she stopped. The vertical mass was a figure, a person who was now backing away from her and beginning to fade into the darker background of the trees. The remaining darker patch on the ground was also a person, changing shape again as it sat up and called her name.