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Excerpt
Chapter One
One was a tired traveler at the end of his tether, fleeing from an annual act of penance. A gaunt shadowed man, the flesh burnt off him by guilt, his soul smouldered close under his skin. Old women sought to feed him. Young women sought to comfort him ... until they saw the steel shutters behind his eyes.
Two more shared a house but that still lay ahead and he did not yet know them. He was as alone as it was possible to be and that was his choice. All the way on his headlong journey from the Welsh mountains he had avoided looking in his mirror, for fear of seeing ghosts. No speed he could reach proved fast enough to leave his past behind until the exhaustion that grief brings forced him to pull over. Then, as soon as the car had stopped, he had slumped in his seat, fast asleep.
The edge of the storm awakened him three hours later, at that time when the body is closest to death. Sudden rain drummed on the roof and splashed his forehead through the open window, bringing him back to bones that ached from his curled posture and a head filled with the sour residue of his tears. He had climbed out of the car, standing with his face tilted up to the dark sky, taking the downpour as a further punishment.
Wales was behind him. Standing by the grave in the wet churchyard, it was no longer easy to apologize because he could hardly believe the person he had once been, the man responsible for this disaster of a headstone with its letters of accusation bitten into the hard grey slate. The man he had been -- that guilty, misled man -- was serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, locked in a cell somewhere inside his head where he never went anymore, leaving this other Patrick, rigidly controlled, to go on paying his dues for him year after year after year.
Back in the car, he emerged from under the edge of the cloud into that great glistening bowl where the rain had left its wet canvas prepared for the bright moon. Only now, in the safe English hills, did he dare to look back.
On a country road winding down through the hills towards Oxford and the plain of the River Thames, he looked in his mirror and saw the wet tarmac worming behind him, a mercury river in which his tyres left their wake of spray.
The earth was soaked in light, puddled silver by the storm, an eldritch light meant for the eyes of foxes, as hard as a welding spark. The full spring moon, a handsbreadth up the sky, cast it cold across the ocean roll of hills, x-raying the bones around the heart of England. Sunsets are for the many, sunrise for the few; the moonlight that paints the land in shades of silver is a secret, a privilege to be observed alone with a sense of due unease.
The sideways moon etched the shape of the land in silver contours, precise in the washed, chill air. Those contours are the archive of the past, the record of ice, the signature of water and wind. Man walks on top of the packed sedimentary evidence of that past, leaving only dust and fragments to settle on top into the latest layer.
On the edge of the village of Wytchlow, a woman sat in the attic room that had been hers since she was born, wakened even earlier than usual by outriders of apprehension instead of the fresh-start joy that usually came with her dawns. She curled on the edge of the window seat, with the sagging window open as wide as it would go. The moonlight showed her the village as if it were a stage prepared for the first entry of the main characters and she alone had the rehearsal time to prepare herself. Against the faint brightness of the eastern horizon, the cricket ground was a shining lake, lapping up to the wooded island beyond, where the church held the high ground. Beyond that, out of sight, was the place where she would go into battle when the day began. In her whole life, she had never ducked a fight that mattered.
That woman was Bobby.
The moon's third witness was out on his wanderings. Joe paced his life to need little sleep; he preferred to make his inspections in the hours when no others were about. A morning such as this was not to be wasted in bed -- a morning when the moon shadow revealed with perfect lunar clarity the twisted history of the land. He swayed his feet through the glistening grass with delight, walking through the humps and folds of his ancestral land until he reached its crown and its core, and then he stood motionless in the top field, which wrapped itself over the brow of the hill like a grass handkerchief on a bald man's head. In these hurried times, those who still bothered with names for fields called it the Bury Field, but in the past, when field names were part of the vital navigation of the working day, it had been the Low Field. In time, people forgot what that really meant and decided the name made no sense for a field on a hill. That was what Joe's father had told him, the names and the tales strung through the songs that held them all together.
Joe thought of that man, long gone, with a pang of sadness. Out there on the hilltop, he sang a quiet song for his father, and the moon listened.
Under the earth there were others; he knew they were there, others from the frontier time who had looked out on just such moon secrets. Their history had blown away on the wind, no words set down to keep it, only the songs, his songs.
In the hour before dawn, these three people stared separately at what the moon chose to show them.
