She picked Peach up. He was very soft and though his body was warm the rosy-gold fur felt cool and sleek to the touch. The rejected shrew forgotten, he began a sonorous purring. Lyn counted the days on the calendar again and made it either ten days or three, but she was sure it was ten. Her body felt unchanged, static, stilled in its rhythmic cycle and waiting. She went downstairs slowly, carrying the cat. It was a warm afternoon, the kind of sunny, cloudy, faintly breezy day that sometimes means a heatwave is coming, but Lyn tied her hair up in a scarf. She tucked in the wisps of hair that showed. There was a chicken and rice dish in the oven for Stephen and Lyn set the timer to start it cooking at five. She wouldn’t leave him a note, she never did. Because of what had happened to him in his childhood, he didn’t like notes left.
She walked along Tace Way and up the village street and across the green to wait outside St Michael’s gates for the bus from Jackley. She thought of how it would be, coming back later in the dark, but Nick wouldn’t let her come back in the dark, he would bring her in Bale’s van. Out alone in Chesney she often felt a little afraid, even in broad daylight. She wondered sometimes if the man who had killed those two girls knew which girls had long blonde hair and which did not, if perhaps he had marked them out for a long time, so it made no difference whether you covered your hair or not. She wasn’t quite alone now, though. In the churchyard the American professor in a broad-brimmed felt hat and blue jeans and Dr Scholl sandals was standing in front of the angel on Tace’s grave. He came out into the road and raised his hat very courteously to Lyn and said good afternoon, though he didn’t know her at all.
The bus came and she sat in the front. She was longing to see Nick, though she hadn’t long to wait, had seen him that morning and the evening before. And yet sometimes, when she thought of Stephen, she wished she had never met him. All this was very like the way she felt about those ten days, dreading as if it were the end of the world that she might be going to have Nick’s child, yet hoping it was true.
Next day the hot weather began. Every morning, very early, a mist hung over Vangmoor and then the sun came up into a sky without clouds, without even those shreds of cirrus that over the moorland nearly always flecked the expanse of blue. It was very hot in Goughdale and the Vale of Allen and each day was a little hotter than the last until there was a short break of coolness and cloud but not of rain before the heatwave came back with a renewed fierceness.
Stephen went out on to the moor every evening. Once he was sure he was going to keep the secret of the mine to himself, his feelings for the man who had found and furnished the underground chamber began to undergo a change. It was as if he had done the man a particular favour in not betraying him, and this seemed to bring them closer together. They were joined now in a common bond. Stephen no longer felt fear of the man, he no longer felt abhorrence. He even imagined their meeting and himself being invited into the chamber as a fit associate of its denizen.
When, after a week or so, he went back again he examined everything carefully to see if any changes might indicate a return during his own absence. The candles looked exactly as they had done after he had blown them out on that last visit. This time he had brought a ruler with him and he measured them, in centimetres to achieve greater accuracy. One was 18.5 centimetres long, the other only 6. The bed and bedding seemed unchanged. Nothing had been removed from the boxes or added to their contents and the pile of clothes was just as he had seen it before. The hair lay coiled and as if sleeping in its burial place.
That evening he remained for a long time on the slopes of Big Allen, crouched down among the heather, watching for someone to come. What exactly he would do when the figure appeared, climbed up the ledge and lowered itself into the mouth of the shaft, Stephen didn’t know. And he need not have speculated, for no one came that night or the next, though he remained out on the hillside, waiting, until long after the sun had gone. He had to find his way home in the dark.
Perhaps it was due to the suspense of waiting or perhaps to sunburn, for he had been out in the dale since noon and his face and arms were fiery, that he fell into another of those fevers of his. He woke up in the night in a sweat that soaked his thin pyjamas and crying, ‘The master of the moor! The master of the moor!’
There was no abatement of the heatwave. On a Wednesday afternoon, an early closing day, Lyn and Nick drove up on to Vangmoor for Nick to see it. He wanted to see the Foinmen and the Hilder and Bow Dale. They sat on the turf in the deep dark shade the standing stones made and looked over to Big Allen and down across Foinmen’s Plain to the roofs of Hilderbridge glittering in the sun, and they saw that as far as they could see, as far as they had been able to see in all their drive and climb up here, they were the only people on the moor. A universal fear had brought them solitude.
‘I haven’t been up here for years,’ Lyn said, ‘and I expect it’ll be years before I come again. There’s something chills me about it even on a day like this.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘So is that snake in your shop but I wouldn’t want to live with it.’
‘You don’t like living here?’
‘It’s rather hard to answer that when I’ve never lived anywhere else.’
She turned on her side away from him. She was sure now. It was nearly three weeks. Tomorrow she would take her specimen into St Ebba’s and have the test and then she would know for certain — but she knew for certain anyway. The child would be born in February, by which time Nick would have been gone six months. She hadn’t told him about the baby and she thought it might be better not to tell him, not ever. She had a plan forming in her mind for Stephen and herself and the child.
Nick touched her shoulder and turned her face towards him. He kissed her lips. ‘Your hands don’t shake any more.’
‘No.’
‘I think you’re the gentlest person I’ve ever known,’ he said.
‘I think you mean I’m a weak person.’
‘No, not a bit. Gentle and strong. Lyn, we’re going to change things, aren’t we? We’re not going to go on like this, never talking of your marriage, never talking about what we’re going to do when next month comes. I have to go away next month. Lyn, look at me.’
She got up and began to walk away, holding out her hand to him. Even with Nick there she was afraid of the moor now. The silence and the emptiness seemed only to conceal an unseen watcher, the avenue of monoliths eyes that gazed at her hair. And when Nick caught her up and put his arm round her, she pressed herself close against him.
‘You really do hate it here, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You must never come up on the moor without me.’
‘I live on the moor,’ she said, and as she said that the sun seemed to go in. It was only momentary but it made her shiver. Someone walked over my grave, she thought, but she didn’t say it aloud for fear of upsetting Nick.
Like the lead miners of old, Stephen was becoming used to moving swiftly through the narrow, low-roofed winzes. He was more practical and prudent too than he had been on previous visits, bringing with him a spare torch battery in case his failed. After the heat of the hillside, the intense, glowing heat of early evening, it was cool inside the mine and there was a smell of damp and of far-off stagnant water.