In the cavern Norvill called “the Inverted Forest” he took his sketch pad out of his satchel, gave Nora one of the lamps and asked her to hold it against the wall she would find some twenty paces past where she was standing.
“Go slowly,” he cautioned, and just as he said so a large glinting tooth — what she could only conceive of as a giant incisor — appeared hanging from the roof of the cavern inches above her head. She lifted up the lamp and saw dozens, no, hundreds more.
Norvill stayed where he was, even though he could see she was frightened. He said, “It’s as if the trees stripped by winter have been strung upside down. That’s why we call it the Inverted Forest.”
“No,” she replied, even though she knew it was not her station, “it’s as if we are inside the mouth of that bear you have stuffed in your entry, and are about to be swallowed.”
What Nora didn’t tell Norvill, even as the years progressed and they fell into an easy affinity — he always treating her as help, though he gave her secretarial tasks and praised her liberally — was that she’d had a strange sensation in the cave in that hour when she was asked to hold the lamp up toward the lined and glittering wall behind her. She did not believe in spirits or ghosts, and she was not deceived by the mesmerizing theatrics she’d once seen Samuel Murray perform in a comedy for the Superintendent — the poet with black around his eyes and a gypsy scarf over his head, predicting everyone’s future in return for coins made of paper. No, what she felt instead was a kind of tenor — like on those rare days when a shift in the weather or a word dropped by a stranger recalls you to some other time, to how you felt or where you once stood or what work you were doing; recalls you to the person you were then.
The tenor of the cave reminded her of Leeson. Of how she had been cold in the woods that day they left the Whitmore, and how, in one of the clearings, he’d seen that and had suggested she move to a spot of sun. Herschel had come back then, conveying urgency, so their movement had resumed; and Leeson had plucked her hand and tucked it into his when they reached the fallen tree, escorting her over it.
In the cave the memory of Leeson had been there — so vitally present it was as if he had left his body by the lake and remained with her, watching.
“Higher,” Norvill said, a second pencil in his mouth.
Nora lifted the lamp and debated asking him if he felt something similar.
But then he spat the pencil onto his lap. “Come now, Miss Hayling, lift it back up to where it was. Or is your arm getting tired?”
The late-afternoon air carries the first fusty smell of autumn, and even though the trees are still green, the leaves, here and there, are letting go. Overhead a crow on the ridge of the church roof caws, then flaps up and over the bell tower.
“Accck,” replies Herschel, and he lifts his arms up and down.
A group of hikers with walking sticks and stuffed packs walk past Jane as she heads across the road and into the field that sits between the woods and the trail. One of the women lags behind to pet Sam, looking around for his person until she spots Jane standing along the grassy verge. Jane waves as if to say, He’s with me.
It’s here that we briefly lose the girl — though she is a child and prone to do this: run headlong out of our orbit on the promise of some great adventure.
“I’ll go,” Cat sighs, moving off toward the trail.
But then the one who has been circling us for days says, in a gentle voice, “I’ll find her”—because he is good at that, and there are four slats on the gate, and two low branches bolstering the oak, and six hikers coming off the trail, and the world, today, is evens.
A hundred years ago, Jane reasons, Nora Hayling was a flesh-and-blood human being who probably walked across the road she herself has crossed almost daily this week, coming out of the servant tunnel and passing between the church and George’s waterfall as she strode smartly into the village on errands for Prudence or on her half-days off, her body ghosting the same places Jane’s body has been. In one of Jane’s imaginings, the sun is on Nora’s face and she is closing her eyes under it, breathing in deeply through her nose; in another version, it’s that hour before rain when the air feels like dew. Or maybe it’s winter, the first lilt of snowfall, and Nora stops to lift her glove to see if she can catch a crystal of snow, study it before it disappears. And in that wondrous, short span of time, when the perfect sphere of it is there on her palm, maybe Nora sees Herschel, standing in the woods with his hand out to the field the day they took their long walk. Or maybe she sees Leeson sitting in the net of sun on the stump beside her, saying that the countryside was theirs to wander over as they saw fit, his face lit up and his eyes accidentally meeting hers, and Nora thinking, How lovely, how lovely it is to be seen.
We see Jane. See her as she walks Sam along the stone wall, as she stops under the oak, tugs a leaf off its lowest branch and slips it into her pocket. Leaning against the wall by the stables she writes a note to Blake and at the bottom she adds call me and includes her number in London. Then she does what he’d done in his note to her, and underlines please.
• • •
Jane stretches out the kink in her neck and looks back to the woods, to the place where Lily went missing, and some of us feel the shape our hearts once took hang like pendulums in the hourless clocks of our chests.
Sam barks at Jane and wags his tail and she picks up a stick and tosses it, says, “Go on!” And we watch as Sam runs nose-down through the waving grass, and we are as happy as she is to watch him run, to witness his unfettered pleasure.
Some nights when there were only a few of us in her room, and it was still early and we were not yet tired from watching, we would ask each other to name the first thing we could remember.
“Sand,” one of us said, “the good kind, not like the pebbled bits by the sea, but the fine grain you’d find in an hourglass.”
And then we would try to puzzle if this sand was a memory from life or from a story — or something we glimpsed in the in-between we think of as “now.”
“Was it in your hand or under your feet?” we asked. “Was it warm or cold?” “Was there water nearby?” “Did you swim?” “Who were you with — a man or a woman, a boy or a girl?”
“I remember a park,” another said, “with gas lamps and a bench near the water.”
The boy remembered a terrier bouncing up to catch a stick, and a carousel with brightly painted horses. The girl remembered her mother’s face appearing over hers so that they could rub noses.
“Mwah!” said Cat at this, and she went around blowing kisses at everyone.
“What we saw first is less vital than what we saw last,” the theologian droned, though the idiot corrected him, waved his hand at all the talk of Ceasing, said, “It is what things become, sir. The world is congregated by force, and no force is lost, it can only be converted.”