13
On the walk back to the village, Jane runs the tips of her fingers lightly over the shrubs that border the pathway, thinking about the flower petals she plucked at the start of the trail two decades ago, how they were in her pocket all those long hours at the police station when William had gone back out to search and night was falling and she’d sat at a stranger’s desk. Jane had touched those petals again and again, saying each time her finger felt their crushed silk, Please find her, please find her; offering all kinds of behaviours, all manner of pacts—If they find her I will always … or If they find her I promise to never …—to whichever god might be listening.
Turning toward the church it occurs to Jane that coming up to Inglewood is the most intentional thing she’s done in a long time. Even the split from Ben four years ago had been ambiguous, almost an accident — a fight over nothing that ended with him moving out. They had been at his brother’s art opening in Chelsea, and Jane had reached out to straighten Ben’s already straight tie and he’d swatted her hand away. Ten minutes later they were out on the fire escape having a go at each other—“You always—” and “You never—” and “If you’d just—” And Ben had shouted, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with you.” Without a word Jane slipped the ring he’d given her for her thirtieth birthday off her finger, tucked it into his jacket pocket and turned toward the railing. There was a streak of orange left in the sky, the outline of the buildings across the river uneven against it. She counted the seconds in her head: one thousand and one, one thousand and two. By one thousand and five he was gone.
What surprises her now about what happened with William last night isn’t that she’d run, but that running away also feels like running toward. Neither her mother nor her therapist, nor Lewis for that matter, thought she should come back here. But returning to these woods — not just for herself or for Lily, but to sort through the story she has started to piece together about N — seems exactly right. Files, books and computer searches are all well and good, but these are the actual woods that N walked through, this is the village she must have come upon the day her new life began.
The church where Jane left the car sits at the top of the main road. Its crenellated tower is from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but the rest of it is early Victorian, probably rebuilt in the throes of the Industrial Revolution when most of the nearby cottages went up, or a few years later when the Farringtons first moved to Inglewood, taking up residence in the house and bringing their money with them. There is a cemetery plot on the west side of the church, its old stones jutting at angles, and on the far side of the parking lot is the field that acts as a brace between George Farrington’s botanical trail and the walled estate with its surrounding woods. Jane skims along the grassy sway with Sam in tow, thinking about the Whitmore trio and how they might have passed under the church tower on their walk to or from the Farringtons’. And then it occurs to her that the Chesters would have passed this way too, only a little later, on the weekend William lectured about. Edmund, Charlotte, the three children and the governess they’d brought on the train with them. Passing under the thumb of the church tower’s shadow, Jane has to work at imagining this. Despite all her reading, until William’s lecture she had never pictured the Chesters outside the museum or the city, never imagined Charlotte bounding energetically across the hump of a field or stopping, as William said they did, at a riverside hotel for lunch, the world around them noisy, bustling and brightly lit.
As she crosses the parking lot back to the Mercedes, Jane cycles through the facts: William said that the Farringtons and Chesters had met twice at Inglewood House: in September of 1877 for the shooting party; and in the summer of 1879, after Norvill’s return from the coast, when Edmund had made enough money with the mill to fund a substantial part of what would become George’s last plant-hunting expedition. Sitting in the car with her hands on the steering wheel it comes to Jane that there is something too tidy about that fact, about their paths crossing here at Inglewood twice—as if the research William had done could summarily limit the extent of their interactions, as if he’d perused all the relevant documents and could say without reservation that those were the only instances upon which the two families properly met at the estate. It seems unlikely to Jane that the Chesters wouldn’t have been at least occasional visitors, especially if Norvill and Charlotte had the kind of relationship that Charlotte’s diaries suggest they did.
Jane starts the car and puts it into reverse. Whether William is right or wrong, it is the certainty with which he made the statement that they’d met twice that’s bothersome. Perhaps the same could be said for Jane’s assumptions about N? Perhaps her disappearance into the trees at Inglewood wasn’t an isolated incident based on a chance encounter but part of a series of connected events. Perhaps Jane’s mistake all these years as she picked up and put down the Whitmore story has been the same one William may have made about the Chesters and the Farringtons in his lecture: presuming that there were few previously existing ties between those gathered at Inglewood House for the weekend; presuming that people’s lives — even those of the Whitmore patients — are ever simple or small, that there is no traffic of the heart or transit between one kind of place and another.
The doorbell at the village inn is answered by a woman in a long burgundy cardigan and jeans, her dark hair lit with grey. She glances down at Sam but Jane can’t tell if the glance means no dogs allowed or dogs welcome.
“I’m hoping for a room. Just a single.”
The woman opens the door and Jane and Sam follow her into the reception area, the smell of sausage and eggs drifting out of the nearby breakfast room. “How many nights?” As the woman pulls a ledger out from under the counter, the silver bracelets she’s wearing jingle and she pushes them farther up her arm so they stop.
“Dogs are all right?”
The woman tilts her head as if to say depends on the dog, or you tell me. “He’s an extra five.”
“That’s fine.”
“Right, fill this out. It’s seventy a night unless you stay for five nights. Then it goes down to sixty-five.”
“Five nights is perfect.” Jane glances over the form: name, address, licence or passport, contact number, credit card.
The woman comes around the counter and pets Sam’s head the way he hates, small taps with flat fingers. “What’s his name?”
Jane hesitates for a second, and then without knowing why exactly, she lies: “Chase.”
“Hiya, Chase, hi there.”
Jane surveys the registration form again, taps the pen against the paper. “Do you have any information on the caves?”
The woman roots around behind the counter but comes up empty-handed. “Let me have a look in the sitting room.” She swings her curtain of hair over her shoulder and pushes open the nearest door and the voice of a BBC radio host—“Up next we’ve got one hour of back-to-back”—floats through from the other room.