sorry.’
He asked her nothing more, nor did she volunteer any further information. They watched the child on the hearthrug, romping with the dog, pulling his floppy ears. ‘Do you want to continue your journey tonight?’ Bartlemy said. ‘You can stay here if you wish: I have plenty of space. There’s a bolt on the bedroom door, if that would make you feel more comfortable.’
She opened her mouth to say that she couldn’t, she couldn’t possibly, but all that came out was: ‘Thank you.’ And: ‘I’m not worried.’ And she knew that, for a little while at least, she wasn’t.
For supper he filled a mug from the cauldron – it was some kind of broth, with so many mingled flavours she couldn’t identify them – and it flooded her whole body with warmth and ease. She slept side by side with her son, on a mattress that was both firm and soft, sliding the bolt because she knew it was a sensible precaution, though she didn’t really feel it was necessary. And somehow they stayed the next night, and the next, and she forgot to bolt the door, and Hoover woke them in the morning, plumping his forepaws on the quilt so he could lick Nathan’s face.
The Goodmans had lived at Thornyhill for as long as anyone could remember. In the village of Eade, about two and a half miles down the road, the most venerable residents claimed they could recall Bartlemy’s grandfather, or even his great-grandfather, but people were vague as to which generation was which: they were all called Bartlemy, or some similar name, and they all looked alike, fat and placid and kindly. None of them ever seemed to be very young, or to grow very old. It was assumed that womenfolk and childhood were details that happened somewhere else, and they gravitated to Thornyhill in middle age. They had money from some unspecified source, and they appeared to live retired, reclusive but not unfriendly, mixing little in local affairs. They were regarded as mildly and acceptably eccentric, part of the scenery, arousing no curiosity, subject to no prying questions. The dog, too, was said to be one of a succession, all mongrels, strays perhaps, rescued from dog homes. If they had been asked, the villagers might have said that one had been part retriever, another part wolfhound, a third had shown traits of Alsatian or Old English sheepdog; but no one would have been sure. Hoover had a retriever’s brown soulful eyes, the long legs of a hound, a coat shag-headed, maned, tufted like anything from an Afghan to a husky. He chased cats from time to time to prove his doghood and slobbered a good deal over friend and stranger alike. It was inferred that the present generation of both dog and master had been at Thornyhill for some twenty years, doing little, staid and respectable as hobbits in a hobbit-hole, aloof from the workaday world. If twenty years was a long time for a dog to live, nobody remarked on it.
Once, Thornyhill had been the property of the Thorns, a family that was ancient rather than aristocratic, tracing their line back long before the Normans. Local historians said there had been a house on the hillside where now the Darkwood grew, a house that dated from Saxon times with a sunken chapel where Josevius Grimling Thorn, called Grimthorn, had traded with the Devil, though what he had traded, or why, remained a mystery. But the tales about him were confused and confusing, stating he had lived nearly two thousand years ago yet died around 650 AD, and the house had been razed, and the chapel was lost, and Josevius faded into legend, and the Darkwood had grown over all. In the Tudor age later Thorns had built the surviving house, where the woodland was lighter and greener, and bluebells carpeted the ground in spring, and there were woodpeckers and warblers, and deer in the thickets, and squirrels in the treetops. The house was criss-crossed with half-timbering, showing glimpses of plaster and brickwork in between, and cloaked in creepers which turned fire-red in autumn, and tall chimneys jutted higgledy-piggledy from the pointed roofs. There, the family had lived for centuries, keeping their secrets, until the eldest son died in the First World War, and his brother in the ’flu epidemic that followed, and presumably it was then the Goodmans came, though none could be found to remember clearly. There were still offshoots of the family in and around the village: the Carlows were known to be descended, on the wrong side of the blanket, from a black sheep of the Jacobean era, and the widowed Mrs Vanstone, now in her late fifties, was invariably called Rowena Thorn in acknowledgement of her antecedents. She would visit Bartlemy from time to time and talk about the past, and she was always impressed by how much he knew, in his unassuming way, about her more distant ancestors. It occurred to her, once or twice, that his residence there seemed to be a kind of guardianship, though what he was guarding, or for whom, she could not imagine, and she put it down to fancy.
Occasionally – very occasionally – Bartlemy had visitors who were not from the village or its environs, visitors who came late at night, and stayed indoors, away from the gaze of locals, and left after one day or many in the pre-dawn hour when no one would see them go. Sometimes an early riser or a reveller returning late from the pub at Chizzledown would catch sight of a hooded stranger striding along the road through the woods, or glimpse an unfamiliar figure on the twisty path to Bartlemy’s door, but gossip took no interest, since there was neither sex nor scandal afoot, and such sightings were too rare to be thought significant. There were beginning to be Londoners in the area now, high-earning, high-spending West End ex-pats, generally with media connections, who bought into the country lifestyle as pictured in the glossy magazines, and installed Agas in their kitchens, and filled their fridges with Chardonnay, and invited their city friends down for summer parties in their carefully sculpted gardens. Some of them made inquiries about the Goodmans, and Thornyhill, but their questions went unanswered, and the house was not for sale. Nothing seemed to happen there for a long, long time, until Annie Ward and her baby came to the door on a dark afternoon in 1991, and found sanctuary.
Bartlemy had a car of sorts, a blunt-nosed Jowett Javelin from the Fifties. It was dirty and tired-looking but it always managed to go, and in it he drove Annie to Crawley, and waited while she visited the child-minder and the job centre, and came away disheartened. ‘What do you do?’ he had asked her.
‘I’m a computer programmer,’ she told him; but it appeared there were plenty of computer programmers, and she was just one in a queue.
‘I’m planning to open a second-hand bookshop in the village,’ he said later that evening. ‘I want someone to manage it for me. I’ve got my eye on a suitable property: there’s a little flat upstairs. I’ll need a manager who’s good with computers to catalogue stocks and keep the accounts; I’m afraid technology’s a little beyond me.’
What about them? she thought. They’re always out there … But when she looked through the window the woods were still, and door and curtain did not stir, and no mutterings came to trouble her sleep.
‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘You’ve done so much already.’
‘Exactly. So this is something you can do for me.’
She knew it wasn’t true, but he seemed so matter-of-fact, his generosity unobtrusive, almost invisible, and the property materialized somehow, a tiny slot of a building between an antique shop and a delicatessen for the Londoners, with rooms that went back and back, and queer little stairs going nowhere, and bedrooms the size of cupboards and cupboards the size of bedrooms, all in the best tradition of second-hand bookshops. She moved in, and there was no rent, and her slender salary stretched to cover everything. The villagers assumed she was a relative of Bartlemy’s, a niece or distant cousin, and eventually she almost came to believe it herself, half forgetting, under the spell of his protection, that she had ever been a homeless wanderer, who knocked on his door purely by chance, if chance it was. Nathan would grow up to call him uncle, and Annie walked through the woods on summer nights, and they were gone, vanished like an evil dream in the moment of awakening, until she barely remembered that they had ever been.
But for all her trust, it was many months before she confided fully in Bartlemy. Winter came round again, and on fire-lit evenings at Thornyhill she watched Nathan grow.
‘Is he like his father?’ Bartlemy asked once.
‘No,’ she said. A silence fell, laden with waiting. ‘He’s like himself. Daniel …’
‘Your husband?’
‘He wasn’t my husband. We just – lived together. I took his name when he died for Nathan’s sake, I suppose. I wanted my son to