‘We’ve to pay the miller for that flour he delivered on Monday. I didn’t have the coins about me when he called,’ said Bridget, when Starling asked.
‘I can do it, if you want. You don’t need to walk all the way with me,’ said Starling, who loved the freedom to dawdle. Bridget was flushed and breathing deeply, so she paused and gave Starling a shrewd look through screwed-up eyes.
‘You’ll give Miller Harris the money, and nobody else, and no going back to make calf eyes at Pip Blayton?’
‘Of course!’ said Starling, with an almost straight face. Bridget rolled her eyes and hefted her basket higher up her arm. She fished some coins from her pocket, handing them to Starling.
‘There, then. Go on and take it to him, and mind you hurry back. Good girl.’ She gave Starling a nod and a purse of her lips, which was as close as Bridget generally came to smiling. On light feet, Starling carried on alone.
The bridge marched across the wide span of the River Avon on hefty stone arches. The water was deep and clear; its bed was cloaked with vibrant green weeds which wafted in the current, sheltering trout and perch and other fish. On the far side, coming from Batheaston, there was a toll house where a man with a face full of grog-blossoms sat and sipped brandy all day long, collecting coins from those who wished to cross. Starling hung over the parapet and watched the mill’s huge wheel turning, throwing up jewels of sunlit water and a sodden, river-bottom smell of wood and minerals and muddy life. The slap and splash of it was hypnotic. Starling stared, the sun hot on the back of her head, until Miller Harris popped his head out and shouted at her. She paid him Bridget’s coins and sauntered back over the bridge, stopping on the home side, facing west, to look for fish and throw in a few pebbles from the dusty lane. She almost didn’t see Alice against the blinding brilliance of the sunlit water. Starling shaded her eyes with one hand, and looked again.
The figure was perhaps three hundred feet from the bridge, by the water’s edge where the bank dropped steeply from the meadow. In the dappled shade along the bank it was hard to see her, but Starling was sure it was Alice. Nobody else was so lathy slim, had hair so arrestingly pale, or wore a dress the colour of lavender. Alice was picking her way gingerly along the water line, using the gnarled tree roots as stepping stones and the low branches as handholds. She stopped when she reached one tree, a weeping willow which snagged the shining water with its silvery tendrils. As she stepped beneath its branches, Starling lost sight of her. She moved a little further along the bridge to find a better vantage point, but from no angle could she see through the willow’s draping leaves. Then, a moment later, she saw Alice emerge again, going back along the bank to the spot where she could climb up to the meadow. As she reached open ground, Alice looked around, as if to check for observers. Starling thought about waving to her but something stopped her, and instead she sank a little lower behind the stone parapet.
Starling knew she ought to go back to the farmhouse. Bridget would know she was dawdling, and would want help with the cleaning and their lunch. Alice had been heading that way; Starling could ask her what she’d been doing on the river-bank. A farm wagon pulled by heavy horses came rumbling over the bridge just then, so Starling had to move. But she didn’t go straight home; she climbed over the fence and picked her way down through the trees to the meadow-marsh. The bank dropped four feet straight down to the water’s edge but Starling was bolder and more nimble than Alice. She clambered down through the roots of the weeping willow, grasping at handfuls of snaking, whip-like branches, until her feet landed with a squelch in the mud where the water was lapping.
The tree’s trunk had split into two early in its life; the partition began just a foot or so above the ground. The two parts of it had wrapped around one another, twisting tight together. Its bark was rough but looked as supple as skin; the trunks locked like mighty arms in a perpetual, sinuous embrace. The drooping branches shielded Starling all around, and turned the light a fresh green; it felt private, magical, like a fairy dell. Just above her head, Starling saw a dark crack between the two trunks. Some animal or disease had caused a narrow opening to form, a slight gape between the loving arms. Then Starling saw the carving, just beneath the opening. It was not new; the bark had healed and swollen around the cuts, so that they sat deep in the wood. Six or seven years’ growth at least, Starling estimated, since the cuts were made. Before I was even here. When I was still… wherever I was before. It was a simple carving: two initials, J & A. The middle symbol had been carved with curving flourishes, so that it touched on both of the letters, joining them up. Starling’s heart quickened with some strange emotion. She reached up, and slid her hand into the hollow.
She groped around inside, flinching as she felt an insect hurry away from her intruding fingers. There was a square of folded paper inside, and with her heart bumping even harder, Starling drew it out and opened it. There, in Alice’s neat script, were the words: Sunday, after church, before noon. My love. Starling felt a jolt in her stomach, and there seemed to be a little hitch in the world, a little moment in which it stopped turning. She tried to swallow but her throat was dry. She folded the note back up, with fingers that shook, and then hesitated. She’d been about to put it back, but the same impulse that had stopped her waving to Alice now stopped her again. There were times, not many, when Jonathan came to visit the farmhouse with his grandfather; other times when he came to meet Alice and Starling somewhere, and Starling had always known that those meetings were to be kept secret from Bridget and Lord Faukes. Now it seemed that there were other visits, other meetings, of an even more secret kind. So secret that not even Starling could know of them. She sat down on a huge root protruding from the bank, noticing as she did so that the root had been worn smooth and clean by being sat upon many times before. Starling bit her lip in dismay, and with an angry little sound she started to cry.
She hated to cry; she almost never did. There was some latent memory in her, some buried knowledge of pain and fear so great that there had seemed nothing in the world worth crying over since then. But this betrayal cut with a poisoned blade. She wiped at her face and gulped and forced herself to stop. She had been included in their affair in so many ways – in their friendship, even in their letters, though Alice knew nothing of that; to find herself excluded from so much more was intolerable. Little cracks appeared in the very foundations of Starling’s world, and she was suddenly afraid, horribly afraid; as though the cracks might gape open, swallow her down and cast her back to that time before the farmhouse, before Alice. Fear, anger, hurt; they swelled to a crescendo in the few short minutes Starling sat on the root beneath the willow tree. When they receded she felt calmer, and had a strange new hardness in her heart. She stood, and cast the note into the river. The water carried it swiftly away, twirling it, spinning it about. Starling watched until it slid out of sight, then she climbed back out into the sunshine and walked home with no one thought coming clearly to her mind.
Back at the farmhouse, Bridget was putting stuffed apples into the oven, and hardly bothered to scold Starling for taking so long. A look was enough, weary and long-suffering.
‘I’ll fetch some angelica for the custard,’ said Starling.
Alice was in the kitchen garden, sitting on a metal bench surrounded by rosemary and lavender, thyme and bay. She had her legs tucked underneath her and was reading a cloth-bound book of poems. She looked up and smiled as Starling came out to sit with her.