An excerpt from Eilegate

The train ride back to the university from the Lerrants’ honeymoon in Aberdeen involved three connections and a two-hour wait in a station called Killbaleen in between the second and third train. 

 

The morning began with fat, ceaseless splashes of rain across train windows, but by Killbaleen the sun had won out and the couple decided to check their luggage at the station and wander a mile up the road to the “picture-ech” village of Straithaven the woman at the ticket booth kept exhorting the praises of. The bright April sun lit up muddy fields in patches, and the rich smells of earth and rain mingled with the wood-burning stoves lining a road of beaten earth. 

 

“What claim can we say to have over the land when it cradles our very bones and carves out times of our waking and rest?” Victoria said, as if reciting.

 

“Mmm? And who said that?” Albert squeezed his wife’s arm through her battered mac.

 

She smiled. “I suppose I did.”

 

“You might want to write that one down. There could be a lecture in there somewhere.”

 

“I doubt it. My medieval authors seem more preoccupied with passing through the earthly and mortal, pausing only to pick up symbols of God’s nature.”

 

“Very forward thinking of them.”

 

“Bertie . . .”

 

“I mean it. We were so sure everything was getting better then, whoops, Belgium happened, and France happened and North Africa and never mind, society’s fleeting. Time’s short, so rip that veil of civilization right up and remember you are nothing more than dust.” 

 

Victoria put her arm around his waist and leaned her head onto her husband’s shoulder. 

 

In the last year of his doctorate, Albert had narrowly avoided a breakdown by clamping his nerves together with a newfound fixation on the discovery of beauty. He studied art history, learned to cherish poems. He became an obsessive lover of music, to the point he tried his hand at composing a truly dreadful series of song cycles for voice and clarinet. Outside, his life blossomed with promise, and inside he told himself over and over he still had the potential to mold feeble clay into more than a machine for trudging. 

 

Then had come his position at St. Binghams, and there, volunteering as the student theatre’s health and safety officer, had been Victoria. She had walked into his life in shoes worn down at the heel, and then Albert no longer had a need to take himself quite so seriously. They had lavished ideas about beauty on each other. She dismissed his crude and cutting ideas or comments that were made only to shock and guided his hand toward stories that built him up from the inside. 

 

He let out a long breath and gave her another squeeze. 

 

“Funny how the old boys seem to make the same set of facts we have seem much more upbeat than we do. I mean, they have hell and all that to think of. Meanwhile, we try to define evil as an aberration and then get let down by the spirit of man.”

 

“Real evil isn’t so unnatural a concept when you can make it secondary to the final doom of man,” she said. “The medieval mind sets itself second, and hard things seem far less dark.”

 

“Well, good on the medieval mind! And good on you for dredging that line of thinking back up.”

 

“It’s my excuse for being so out of step, I’m afraid,” Victoria said. 

 

“It’s not your fault if the times are out of step with you, my darling. They simply must catch up.”

 

With that, she took off running down a dirt path, the backs of her white knees flashing between flying skirts and dark earth. Like an adolescent in a high fever, he roared after her. He was certain her laughing like a maniac would slow her down if the skirts of her green dress didn’t first. And when he caught her . . .

 

He almost stumbled into her standing stock still over a bend in the road by a cement mile marker: “Eilegate House-1/2 mile.” The couple exchanged a look, shrugged, and followed the marker down the hill into a wooded copse. 

 

Albert took in the For Lease sign. After marveling over the house’s ancient beams, and after they had shouted and knocked and searched for signs of life for a quarter of an hour, he hoisted his wife through a second-story window so she could unlock the door.

 

He followed her up a closeted stairwell, breathing in a half century of neglect coating four centuries of decay. When he caught up with her, his wife’s face had gone blank as she stared out of the fourth-floor window into the dipping sun and over the sea of dark green pine. 

 

He came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her crossed arms. She didn’t respond. Wasn’t it queer how cold her body felt, as though an ice flame was burning through her dress and mac? 

 

“This is it, isn’t it?” he asked.

 

She started, and that stiff coldness, that illusion of death was broken. How could he have imagined anything was amiss? She leaned back against him.

 

“This is it.”