The tutor decides that boldness is the best course of action here. “May I see your…your bird?”
She frowns. “My bird?”
“I saw you earlier, emerging from the forest, did I not? With a bird on your arm? A hawk. A most intriguing—”
For the first time, her face betrays an emotion: concern, worry, an element of fear. “You won’t tell them,” she gestures towards the farm, “will you? I was forbidden to take her out today, you see, but she was so restless, so hungry, I couldn’t bear to shut her up all afternoon. You won’t say, will you, that you saw me? That I was out?”
The tutor smiles. He steps towards her. “I shall never speak of it,” he is able to say, grandly, consolingly. He puts his hand on her arm. “Do not concern yourself.”
She flicks her gaze up to meet his. They regard each other at close quarters. He sees eyes almost gold in colour, with a deep amber ring around their centres. Flecks of green. Long dark lashes. Pale skin with freckles over the nose and along the cheekbones. She does a strange thing: she puts her hand to his, where it is resting on her forearm. She takes hold of the skin and muscle between his thumb and forefinger and presses. The grip is firm, insistent, oddly intimate, on the edge of painful. It makes him draw in his breath. It makes his head swim. The certainty of it. He doesn’t think anyone has ever touched him there, in that way, before. He could not take his hand away without a sharp tug, even if he wanted to. Her strength is surprising and, he finds, peculiarly arousing.
“I…” he begins, without any idea where that sentence will go, what he wants to say. “Do you…”
All at once, she drops his hand; she moves her arm away from him. His hand, where she gripped him, feels hot and very naked. He rubs at his forehead with it, as if to make it right again.
“You wanted to see my bird,” she said, all business and competence now, taking a key from a chain hidden in her skirts, unlocking the door and pushing it open. She steps inside and, dazed, he follows.
It is a small, dim, narrow space, with a desiccated and familiar smell to it. He inhales: the aroma of wood, of lime, of something sweet and fibrous. Also a chalky, musky undertone. And the woman beside him: he can smell her hair and skin, one of which carries the faint scent of rosemary. He is just about to reach out for her again—her shoulder, her waist are tantalisingly close to him, and why else would she bring him in here, really, if she didn’t also have in mind—
“There she is,” she whispers, urgent and low. “Can you see her?”
“Who?” he says, distracted by the waist, the rosemary, the shelves around him, which are becoming clearer in the gloom, as his eyes adjust to the dark. “What?”
“My falcon,” she says, and steps forward, and the tutor sees, at the far end of the outhouse, a tall wooden stake on which perches a bird of prey.
It is hooded, wings folded back on themselves, scaled ochre talons gripping the stand. Its stance is hunched, shrugged, as if assailed by rain. The feathers of its wings are dark but its breast is pale and rippled like the bark of a tree. It seems extraordinary to him to be in such close proximity to a creature which is so emphatically from another element, from wind or sky or perhaps even myth.
“Good God,” he hears himself say, and she turns and, for the first time, she smiles.
“She’s a kestrel,” she murmurs. “A friend of my father’s, a priest, gave her to me as a chick. I take her out to fly most days. I won’t take her hood off now but she knows you’re here. She’ll remember you.”
The tutor doesn’t doubt it. Although the bird’s eyes and beak are covered with a miniature hood, fashioned from leather—sheep or perhaps kid leather, he catches himself wondering, to his irritation—its head twitches and swivels with every word they speak, every movement they make. He would like, he finds, to look into the bird’s face, to see that eye, to know what lies behind that hood.
“She caught two mice today,” the woman says. “And a vole. She flies,” she says, turning to him, “entirely in silence. They cannot hear her come.”
The tutor, emboldened by her stare, puts out a hand. He encounters her sleeve, her jerkin and, finally, her waist. He curves his hand around it, as firmly as she had touched him, attempting to draw her towards him.
“What’s your name?” he says.
She pulls away but he grips her more tightly.
“I shan’t tell you.”
“You shall.”
“Let me go.”
“Tell me first.”
“And then will you let me go?”
“Yes.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your promise, Master Tutor?”
“I always keep my promises. I am a man of my word.”
“As well as a man of hands. Let me go, I tell you.”
“Your name, first.”
“And then you will release me?”
“Yes.”
“Very well.”
“You will tell me?”
“Yes, it’s…”
“What is it?”
“Anne,” she says, or seems to say, at the same time as he is saying: “I must know.”
“Anne?” he repeats, thrown, the word at once familiar yet queer in his mouth. It was the name of his sister, who died not quite two years ago. He has not, he realises, spoken the name since the day she was buried. He sees again, and for a moment, the wet churchyard, the dripping yew trees, the dark maw of the ground, ripped open to accept the white-wrapped body, so slight and small. Too small, it seemed, to go into the earth like that, alone.
The falconer girl takes advantage of his momentary confusion to push him away from her; he topples into the shelves that run around the walls. There is a strange, echoey sound, like a thousand game counters or balls finding their place. He gropes around himself and finds several round objects, tight-skinned, cool, a spike at their centre. Suddenly he realises what the familiar smell in here is.
“Apples,” he says.
She gives a short laugh, across the space from him, her hands resting on the shelf behind her, the falcon beside her. “It’s the apple store.”
He brings one up to his face and inhales the scent, sharp, specific, acidic. It brings a slew of distant images to mind: fallen leaves, sodden grass, woodsmoke, his mother’s kitchen.
“Anne,” he says, biting into the apple’s flesh.
She smiles, her lips curving in a way that maddens and delights him, all at the same time. “That is not my name,” she says.
He lowers the apple, in mock-outrage, in partial relief. “You told me it was.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“You weren’t listening, then.”
He flings aside the half-eaten apple and comes towards her. “Tell me now.”
“I won’t.”
“You will.”
He puts his hands to her shoulders, then lets his fingertips skip down her arms, watching her shiver at his touch.
“You’ll tell me,” he says, “when we kiss.”
She puts her head to one side. “Presumptuous,” she says. “What if we never kiss?”
“But we shall.”
Again, her hand finds his; her fingers grip the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. He raises his brows and looks into her face. She has the expression of a woman reading a particularly hard piece of text, a woman trying to decipher something, to work something out.
“Hmm,” she says.
“What are you doing?” he asks. “Why do you hold my hand like that?”
She frowns; she looks at him directly, searchingly.
“What is it?” he says, suddenly disquieted by her, her silence, her concentration, her grip on his hand. The apples rest in their grooves around them. The bird sits immobile on its perch, listening in.
The woman leans towards him. She releases his hand, which again feels raw, peeled, ravaged. Without warning, she presses her mouth to his. He feels the twin plushness of her lips, the hard press of her teeth, the impossible smoothness of the skin of her face. Then she pulls back.