A Different Kingdom(45)
THE EARTH SLOWED, wound down to a darker season. In the hedges be-dewed spiders' webs swayed and swung like strung pearls, and the early light caught them in a dance of linked gems. September trickled by, the air full of the flitting leaves and the first coolness falling on the world. Soon the mornings grew sharp, white with frost, the grass crunching underfoot as Michael set off for school. And in the schoolroom itself the breaths of the children would be little clouds until their body heat and the labours of the stove had generated a comfortable fug inside. October came, snapping at Michael's sleepy limbs when he threw off his bedclothes and chilling the water in the taps. In the Fay household the first fires were lit, cautiously at first, like the trial of a newly knit limb, and then banked up as the cold snap remained. Michael loved. those mornings, coming down to porridge in the big kitchen, the table crowded and full of talk, the fire leaping red and friendly out of the opened range. Then there would be the crispness of the air outside, the way smells seemed to hang in the air, frozen. Treacle and creosote, dung and hay, oats and pipe smoke. They pervaded the mornings like some tangled perfume, and underlying them was the tang of the cold, the fallen leaf. Autumn, and winter creeping up on its shirt-tails.
To spend such mornings in a schoolroom seemed to Michael worse than a crime. He chafed and fidgeted and shifted, cursed under his breath and felt his mind lock up and seize. He received extra lines for not paying attention at least once a week, but that was far preferable to having a note to take home. And then Rachel, afterwards, watching him like a well-fed hawk and keeping him at the table until the stupid letters that were supposed to be numbers had resolved themselves. By then, of course, it was dark and the day was gone. He could stand out in the back yard with a pool of lamplight spilling out of the door at his back and listen to the river churning in the night, the call of an owl, the squeaks of the wheeling bats taking their last flights before winter hibernation. That was where he was meant to be, where he belonged—with Cat beside him. And he would dream of her at night, her fingers tight on his shoulders and her body answering his in the leaf litter and the rushing trees.
October passed by and November inched on to the stage, dark and damp. Michael always thought of October as a beautiful month, a coloured tumble of warm days mixed in with the bite of crisp cold and the end of the long evenings. A harbinger of what was to come, but a benevolent one.
November was a dark month, a cold month, when there was likely to be the first flurry of snow. It seemed to Michael to be the end of the year, a limbo time that would not end until Christmas— or midwinter, depending on how you looked at it. November heralded the real start of the cold, the days that made walking to school a chill misery. It was during the night of one of these days that Michael lay in bed listening to the wind pounding the gables. The gale had swooped down on them in the afternoon so that he had had a weary battle home from school and had arrived soaked to the bone with wind-driven rain, his cheeks glowing, schoolbooks beginning to crinkle with damp. He lay now with the covers pulled up to his chin, looking out of the window at the foot of his bed and tracing the glimmer of the racing clouds beyond the black shapes of the farm buildings. One of them had a tracery of rectangular light shining faintly around the cracks in its door—Mullan looking in on Fancy, probably rubbing her down with a twist of straw. She always got sweated up on stormy nights. The other buildings were dark. The wind was a roar overhead that whined around the roof and made the rafters creak. It pushed at his: window, trying to get in, and circled in odd draughts around the floor, for this was an old house, well acquainted with the seasons. It seemed to have compromised with the wind, allowing in the little eddies and draughts but standing hardy as a crag against the worst blasts. If he closed his eyes Michael could almost believe himself to be at sea in some storm-racked ship, the hull groaning but adamant, the wind bending the masts. An unknown shore to his lee and the surf booming white and murderous at its foot.
Except he was not imagining that sound: banging close by, and a rattle as his window shook.
He sat up and was immediately dazzled by the silver moonlight flooding in the window. The moon was up and half-full, the clouds galloping past its horns, but there was a shape silhouetted at the window sill, perched there with one hand spread against the glass and two green lights glowing in a tangle of hood-like hair.
'Let me in, Michael. '
'Jesus!' he blessed himself.
The window was thumped again with an open palm and the face turned to look back down in the yard. He saw the profile then, the one he knew. Her eyes seemed to ensnare the moon, like a cat's eyes reflecting lamplight.