We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [16]
The South had a gentleness with its great trees and richly harvested fields, its winding lanes and meal-drift autumn skies, but it never healed him as this land did. It was too soft, too comfortable. It forgave too much.
The North was different. The bones of the earth were naked here, and there was a beauty in it that spared nothing. You could stand on a narrow road like this and stare across the hills, fold after fold, wind-scoured, to the horizon. In a month’s time, when at last there was peace in the world, there would be the first snows on the shaws, pale-gleaming. The air would smell of it. The wild birds would be flying in for the winter, long skeins of them across the sky, wings creaking. The reeds would spear upward in the rippled water of the tarns. Strangers would disappear, and only the men who loved them would walk these ways.
There was wood smoke rising below him. Over the hills he could see, perhaps five miles away, the roofs of the next village, the church spire high above them.
He turned and continued climbing. He would be tired by the time he got back to the pub, and probably cold, but he would not lose himself up here. There was only one road, and he was long familiar with it. He needed to be alone in the darkness with the wind and the stars.
He thought of Judith Reavley. The painful memory was something he should let go of. Their last parting a year ago had seemed final, and yet he kept turning it over and over. He could not change to please her. Her dreams, like Joseph’s, had no foothold in reality. She fought battles she could not win, for ideals that were rooted in religion rather than the nature of men or of nations.
And yet her face haunted his mind. He found himself watching women who walked as she did, with the same ease, the stride that was a little too long for femininity yet filled with its own grace. He heard someone laugh and turned to find her, then disappointment cut deep when he realized it was a woman he had never seen before but who, for a moment, had sounded like her.
He wanted her ridiculous hopes to be attainable, and he was angry because they were not, and she would always be hurt. He was angry with Joseph Reavley for not having taught her better, protected her. And yet how could he? He was just as naïve himself. Perhaps Matthew, the second brother, was more of a realist. At least he was not a preacher, trying to create a belief in God in the trenches. That was a dreamer’s errand if ever there was one.
He turned and walked back down the hill with the cold wind in his face. A blaze of stars swept above him from horizon to horizon, so low in the clear sky that he felt as if he should have been able to gather them with his hands.
The following morning he took the bus into Harrogate and had lunch in the Rat and Parrot with Robert Oldroyd, who had retired from teaching the year Mason had started secondary school, but Oldroyd’s energy of mind and love of learning had infected Mason, as they had so many of the boys who had come to him raw and ready to be shaped. His former teacher was nearly ninety now, white-haired and bent but still interested in everything, as inquisitive and irascible in his opinions as always.
“Read your pieces,” Oldroyd said, nodding slowly and staring at Mason. They were sitting opposite each other at a small table near the window. “You did well, boy. Don’t want to get your head too big for your shoulders, but you have a nice turn of phrase. Say what you mean, no nonsense, no silly pretensions of making yourself immortal. Make us feel we’re there with you.” He reached a gnarled hand for his glass of cider and drank deeply before continuing. “Would like to have been with you, once or twice.”
“Would you,