It was on the top floor of the house, above the children's bedrooms. Next to it was the guest room and beyond it the workroom which used to be the attic. He stood in the dark, listening to all the breathing in the house, feeling enlivened by the chill which had settled into the core of the house as it waited for the central heating to switch on, and then he inched the workroom door open.
As soon as he was in the room he saw the forest. The twilight before the October dawn must already have reached it, because as he made for the desk at the window he was able to distinguish ranks of trees, patterns developing from the dark. He sat at the desk and gazed into the forest and let thoughts manifest themselves to him.
If the anticipation he had begun to experience couldn't be put into words, the insight which had wakened it could be. He felt as if he was growing up at last. As a child he'd half believed that Edward Sterling had discovered a ritual which kept the midnight sun alight, and even as an adult he'd found the idea imaginatively appealing, but now he saw that it was nonsense: no human action could affect the sun. Edward Sterling might have witnessed such a ritual, but it made no sense to deduce that he had then set off to discover its source. If he had found anything significant in the unpopulated frozen wastes, it could only have been the reason for the ceremony – the reason why people were afraid the midnight sun might fail. if only Edward Sterling had written down what he had found! But the last words he'd written had apparently been his last wish. Once he had been fit enough to travel after being brought home to England he and his wife Catriona had journeyed north. Stargrave had apparently been intended only as an overnight stop. Perhaps the late December cold had affected his mind, because he'd risen in the night and headed for the moors, shedding his clothes as he walked. In the morning his naked corpse had been found in the centre of a grove of ancient oaks. His limbs had been flung wide as if he'd been trying to embrace the night or had been crushed by it; his eyes had been wide and pale as ice, and he might have been smiling or gritting his teeth. He'd broken his nails in the process of scratching two words in the earth in front of him: "trees grow". The way Ben's grandfather had told the story one night just before Christmas, those who found the corpse had had to snap the strings of frozen blood which bound the fingers to the marbly earth.
Could it ever have been so cold in Stargrave? Ben had never previously wondered who had told his grandfather the story – one or other of the searchers, or his mother, Catriona – and now it was too late to enquire. He was inclined to wonder if Edward Sterling's message had been merely a delirious reference to the grove in which he'd lain. Catriona had taken it as a plea, and by the time Ben's grandfather was born she had used much of her legacy to buy the Sterling house and to plant the forest which over the decades had hidden the grove from the world.
Ben gazed out of the window while feeble sunlight ventured down the crags and was seized by the forest. When he heard the children beginning to stir on the floor below he sneaked back to bed. Their sounds made him feel somehow less awake than he had been while musing at the desk, and he continued to feel that way as Ellen wakened drowsily and snuggled against him, as Margaret and Johnny made the house sound full of children, as the family took turns in the bathroom to get ready for a walk before Sunday lunch.
A small sun like a coin whose heat had seared away its features hung low in a sky suffused with blue. Autumn had extinguished the brightest colours of the moors beyond the railway, and not only the vegetation but also the houses of Star-grave appeared to be seeking to merge chameleon-like with the ancient limestone. As Ben opened the new gate in the garden wall a wind like the first stirring of winter set trees dancing and brought him the scent of pines. The whisper of the forest made him feel as if he and the trees were about to share a secret. Then a dog barked, and he sighed and turned to look.
It was Mrs Dainty's Doberman. Edna Dainty was the Star-grave postmistress, a dumpy muscular woman whose red hair was growing white. She came stumbling up the track, leaning backwards and heaving at Goliath's leash. "Don't pull, don't pull."
"Ideal day for a run, Mrs Dainty," Ben said over the wall.
"Golly," she cried, and the dog halted, panting. "You've put your nail on the head there," she agreed.
"Are you for the woods?"
"Too blowy up on top for me today. It's an ill wind," she added in case that had some relevance, and almost fell on her face as the dog surged forwards. "Excuse me for shaking my legs, but you know old dogs."
"Can't be taught?"
She peered at him, obviously suspecting a verbal trap, and then lurched away, dragged by the dog. Her voice dwindled up the track, crying "Golly, don't pull."
Ben held the gate open for the family. "If they're going to be in the woods I'm heading for the moors."
Johnny looked disappointed, and said to Ellen "When can we mark some more paths in the woods?"
"Better ask your father. He's the pathfinder."
"No more this year, Johnny, I shouldn't think."
"We've only made titchy paths," Margaret protested.
"We've plenty of summers ahead of us, Peggy. And don't you want to keep some of the forest for just the family to walk in?"
"Besides," Ellen told the children, "you won't have time to make another path if you want to be in the Christmas play, and go to Young Dalesfolk with Stefan and Ramona every Thursday, and all the way to Richmond every Friday for the swimming club, and help me keep our garden tidy…"
"And play with all your other new friends,'' Ben added as he led the way to the main road. Their talk of the woods was aggravating his own frustration, but he'd had enough of Mrs Dainty and her apparently inexhaustible supply of misheard cliches for one day. "They're just words," he said under his breath as he ushered the children across the road to face any oncoming traffic.
They hadn't met any by the time they reached the newsagent's. All summer Stargrave had been packed with tourists, driving up from Leeds to tramp the moors or basing themselves in the hotel or the dozens of houses which offered bed and breakfast for the season. Now just three climbers, two in bright orange and one in blue which rivalled the sky, were visible above the town, moving so slowly they looked frozen to the crags.
Most of Stargrave was indoors. Passing a row of houses, Ben saw successive images of a space battle on their televisions, as if he were reading a comic strip. The clank of swings thrown over their metal frames drifted down from near the school. One of Johnny's schoolmates ran home from the newsagent's, a Sunday paper flapping in his hand. The tourist information centre in the converted railway station was still open; Sally Quick, whose name always sounded to him like advice and who had exhibited Ellen's paintings all summer in the information centre, waved at the Sterlings through the window. Beyond the deserted square and the estate agent's, old Mr Westminster was rooting weeds out of his front garden, chortling vindictively whenever a weed lost its grip on the soil. He was often to be seen driving his rusty Austin through Stargrave, shouting "Baa, baa" at anyone who crossed the street in front of him. "Rub my back, somebody," he greeted the Sterlings, then emitted a hum which was half a groan as he stooped to fork the earth.
"Race you to the top," Margaret told Johnny as soon as they were over the stile. They chased along the grassy path towards the crags, on which the blue and orange insects appeared scarcely to have moved. A wind set the moor trembling, the gorse and heather and countless tufts of grass interspersed with mounds of moss and lichen, and as Ben heard the wind enter the forest all the sombre colours of the moor seemed to leap up. Ellen clutched his hand as if she was sharing what he saw. "I really think that getting married and having the children and coming here to live may be the best things we've ever done," she said.