‘It’s beautiful,’ Ellie said. ‘So noble.’
‘A peregrine falcon. Falconry has always been the true sport of kings.’ Blanchard took out a lure tied to the end of a long string and held it in his right hand. ‘It requires infinite patience and deep pockets.’
Blanchard strode across the field with Ellie in tow. A black hound trotted at his feet, while the other guests followed at a wary distance, watching Blanchard and sipping coffee that the driver had brought in the Land Rover. The falcon wore a bell tied to its tail feathers which trilled whenever it moved.
They stopped in the middle of the meadow. Blanchard pulled off the hood and unclasped the chain. The falcon looked around, its head twitching. For long moments man and bird stood absolutely still, dark figures against the white field.
With a trill of the bell and a clap of feathers, the bird rose off Blanchard’s arm. Its wing almost caught Ellie in the face. It shot into the air so fast she barely saw it, climbing to a point above a small copse at the end of the field.
‘She’s seen something.’
From the deep pocket of his fur coat, Blanchard took what looked like a miniature radio and turned it on. Through a burst of static, it began to emit a regular low-pitched tone. When he pointed it towards where the bird was hovering it grew louder.
‘The bird has a radio beacon attached to its leg. If we lose sight of it, this will help us find it.’
The falcon hovered, flapping its wings against the breeze to stay in place. Ellie squinted at the sky. The air was so clear she could see everything: the black feathers under its wings and the fleck of white at its breast; the curved point of its beak. She almost imagined she could see its eyes, scanning the air. Waiting, waiting –
— And down. It happened so fast Ellie didn’t even see the prey. The falcon swooped and vanished behind the trees.
‘Come on!’ Blanchard shouted. In an instant they were running across the field, staggering through the deep snow. Blood rushed in her ears: the wind, the crunch of snow, the baying of the hound. They scrambled over a fence and pushed through a hedge into the copse. Blanchard waved to his right.
‘The trees disrupt the signal. It is better if we keep apart.’
She veered away through the virgin snow, pushing into the undergrowth. She crossed a narrow stream, tripped on a buried tree-root and just caught herself on the trunk of a birch.
You’ll never find it like this. She stopped, resting her hands on her thighs to ease the cramp, breathing hard. Heavy branches creaked under their coat of snow; a robin called. Away to her left she could hear distant barking. And somewhere ahead, not far off …
There. The trill of a bell, like a sleigh harness.
Moving more slowly now, Ellie crept through the trees. The bell grew louder. She peered round a bush.
The falcon sat triumphant on the grey carcass of a goose. The goose’s wings had cratered the snow like a bomb blast, though it lay still now. The falcon leaned over, mewling softly as it pecked out the bird’s heart. It was very clean — the only evidence of death were three drops of blood spattered on the snow, so cold and precise beside the corpse.
Ellie stared at them. She suddenly felt dizzy. The snow dazzled her, so bright that the drops of blood seemed to lift off it and swim in front of her eyes. She thought she’d never seen such a colour.
Through her daze, Ellie heard another trill. It was such an alien sound it took her a second to realise it was her mobile phone. She fumbled it out of her pocket.
‘Eleanor? It’s Mrs Thomas. From No. 96.’
Ellie knew her: a short woman who lived down the road from her mother, with round cheeks and a terrier. But why —?
‘I knocked but you weren’t at home. I got your number from your mother’s bag. I didn’t know if you were down — or if you were spending Christmas somewhere … Such a shock. Such a terrible thing.’
She was babbling, talking around something too awful to come at directly. Ellie stared at the falcon gobbling the heart out of the bird it had killed.
‘What’s going on?’
Mrs Thomas was saying something about ambulances, about hospitals and doctors and whether she’d be all right. Her words made no more sense to Ellie than the falcon’s mewl.
‘Who?’ But she already knew.
Snow shivered off a cluster of branches as Blanchard pushed into the clearing. He held the radio receiver like some sort of remote control, pointing it at the bird. He looked at it with delight, something almost approaching rapture, then saw Ellie.
‘What has happened?’
From down the mountain and across the sea, a voice in her ear said it’s your mother.
Saint-Lazare’s plane was in Vienna for maintenance and a storm had closed the runway. Ellie spent the night at the airport and took the first flight next morning, a budget airline filled with screaming families and returning skiers. The cabin blazed aggressive colours; it smelt of sweat, old sunscreen and fresh beer. Two rows back, a child was sick all over the floor. At Bristol, she waited an hour for the skeleton-staffed airport to produce her baggage.
No trains were running on Boxing Day. Ellie took a cab from the airport all the way to Newport — forty miles that cost almost a hundred pounds. She stared out of the window at the tired city, the few high-rise towers that struggled above the skyline and the tangled attempts at public art. She hadn’t been back since she started at Monsalvat. She’d forgotten how grey it was.
To enter a hospital, even as a visitor, is to surrender yourself — as if the only way to manage so much human suffering is to build something incomprehensible to humanity. The Royal Gwent was no exception. The moment Ellie stepped through the doors she became a captive: to unwritten schedules and rules, Byzantine hierarchies that never came to a head. Even the architecture seemed designed to dislocate. She remembered something Blanchard had said in the vault about time becoming space. By the time she reached the room in the stroke unit, both time and space had compacted into a fluorescent-lit void.
Her mother lay in a curtained-off corner of a four-bed ward. There was a window, but the only view it offered was a brick wall. Her mother couldn’t even see that. Her eyes were closed; there was something subtly asymmetric about her face, though Ellie couldn’t say what. Needles and tubes probed her body, while screens and monitors brought second-by-second news of what was happening under the skin.
Ellie sat and fished out the box of Swiss chocolates she’d bought at the airport. She laid them on the plastic bedside table.
‘She can’t eat at the moment.’
A doctor had appeared, a tall man with fair hair and a smile that offended Ellie.
‘What happened?’ Ellie heard the crack in her voice and realised how close she was to falling apart completely. ‘I’m her daughter,’ she added.
‘She went to church on Christmas morning. Apparently, she’d gone to light a candle after the service when she collapsed.’
Ellie could imagine the scene. The grey austerity of Saint David’s, whose vicar would never allow a Christmas tree inside his church. The white-haired ladies — they were mostly ladies — drinking their Christmas morning sherry, the news going through them like a panicked flock of birds. Father Evans pushing through, calling for calm. The ambulance in the churchyard. How long did you have to wait for an ambulance on Christmas day?
‘They brought her straight here. She hasn’t regained consciousness yet.’
‘Will she …?’
Ellie couldn’t finish the sentence. Her mind rebelled; her imagination refused to supply the necessary possibilities.