Free Solsbury Hill A Novel by Susan M. Wyler Page B

branches of this tree, if she’d been here. Had her mother swung from this tree when she was small, she would have leaned back so far that her hair would have brushed the ground.
    What an odd place, Eleanor thought. She had been in England for only two full days and already she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be in New York City. Unbidden, the scene in Miles’ bedroom came to her and she tried to push it away by leaning as far back on the swing as she couldmanage. She came close to touching the leaves on the branch with her toes. Her hair fell out of the bun and it did brush the ground. She felt it to the roots, and at the same time could hear the sound of Miles making love to the woman in his bed, heard him in that awful confusion she was there to witness as he was caught between ecstasy and dread, as he saw her seeing him through the doorway.
    Working the swing to its greatest height, she brought her arms forward and leapt to the ground. Her sweater kept her warm as she walked, preoccupied, with her jacket tied around her waist. When she came upon two crosses in the ground, she stopped. They stood about as high as a ten-year-old child, thick, chunky crosses so close together that whomever was buried beneath might be holding hands.
    Nausea overtook her and she wanted to sit down, but here the ground was muddy. Through a haze of feeling, she recalled an open grave. It was the wind, the swing, the exhaustion, she thought. Choked-down sobs turned her stomach sour as she remembered the day when her father stood beside her, not crying, the day of her mother’s funeral, when they placed the headstone on an empty grave. She had listened to recollected stories of her mother’s life, and prayers, but all she had in her head that morning was the passage she’d read in a book just days before of Heathcliff as he climbed into Catherine’s grave and cried out her name.
    Eleanor hurried away, back toward her room at TrentHall, and when she looked back at the crosses, they seemed to turn toward her, with their arms spread wide and their chests lifted high.

    I n the background of the days but particularly alone at night, Eleanor felt a certain anxiety: an urge to pick up her e-mail, text on her phone, read Twitter, find news from home.
    She’d lost track of time since she’d left New York, since she’d seen Miles on that day that was mixed up with bear claws in the morning and a pixie tangled in his sheets at night, but here she was lying in a bed on the other side of the world, in the middle of nowhere.
    Eleanor looked for a phone. There was no Internet connection in the house, and her cell phone had no signal, but she found a phone in the hall. She dialed Miles’ number and when he answered, she hung up.
    It was late at night and the small library was empty, but the fire was going. The chair was large enough for her to curl up in, and it was warmer by the fire than in her room, so she nestled there.
    Her breath rose and fell. The house was silent. Wind and rain and crashes of thunder outside with flashes of lightning she could see right through the thick curtains. She’d brought her mother’s letters downstairs, to read them for a while.
    The first one she pulled out of the pile, she’d read yearsbefore and remembered. Her mother had written to her from a trip she was on in North Carolina. She wrote about the shoreline and the low gray skies. How cold it was at night on the beach, but when she wrapped up in sweaters and a slicker, it was fine. Her handwriting was even and curvy, elegant and refined.
    Eleanor picked another letter at random, pulled it from the middle of the pile. It was a letter she hadn’t seen before. A letter to her father from her mother, written in Yorkshire, while they were engaged. Anne spoke of the imminent wedding, suggested a quiet elopement and beside this had drawn a smiling face. She’d been in London and had seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream , was on her way to Stonehenge in the