A Position on the Moor

The carriage would take her only as far as the village, the driver said, and not one yard onto the Thornwyck road, and he said it in the particular flat voice of a man who has decided that explaining himself is beneath the dignity of his fear. So Eleanor Astley walked the last three miles. She did not mind the walk. She had discovered, in the eleven months since her husband's death had been followed with brisk cruelty by the discovery of his debts, that she minded very few of the things a woman of her former position was expected to mind. She did not mind plain food, or mended gloves, or being looked at with pity by people who had once been looked at with envy by her. Grief, it transpired, was an excellent teacher of proportion. After you have stood at a graveside in the rain you find that very little else can get a good grip on you. The moor minded her, though. She would grant it that. It was October, and the moor went on in every direction in long brown swells, and the wind came across it with nothing to slow it down, and Thornwyck Hall sat at the far end of the road like a decision the landscape had not finished making — a great dark house, all gables and one high lit window, set against a sky the color of a closed eye. It was, she had been warned, a cursed house. The agency in town had told her so, after a fashion; they had lowered their voices and spoken of "difficulties retaining staff" and "the master's particular hours" and "the situation being unsuitable for a young woman of nervous disposition." Then they had named the salary. It was a very large salary, for a housekeeper. It was a salary that understood it was buying silence as well as service. Eleanor had a great many debts that were not hers and no disposition left to be nervous with. She had taken the position by return of post. The villagers had been more direct. An old woman selling apples by the church had taken one look at Eleanor's traveling case and the Thornwyck road beyond it and said, plainly, "He'll not harm you by daylight, mistress, for he's never once been seen by it. It's the dark you'll want to mind your manners in." And then she had sold Eleanor three apples and refused, with a small firm shake of the head, to say anything further at all. Eleanor reached the gates of Thornwyck as the last of the light went out of the moor. The house was no warmer up close. But the door opened before she had touched it — opened onto a hall of cold stone and old wood and a single branch of candles, held by no servant at all but by a man, and Eleanor understood, the way you understand a thing all at once and entirely, that she was looking at the master of Thornwyck himself. He was not what the village had built. The village had built a monster, a thing of the dark, and what stood in the candlelight was a tall man of perhaps forty, pale, dark-haired, dressed plainly and well, with a face that had clearly once known how to be open and had spent a long time, since, learning the opposite. He looked at her traveling case. He looked at her plain mended gloves. And last he looked at her face, and Eleanor — who had buried a husband and outlived his ruin and walked three miles across a cursed moor at dusk without once allowing her step to falter — looked steadily back. Something moved across the master of Thornwyck's expression. It was not welcome. It was closer to dismay. "You walked," he said. His voice was low, and unused, like a room not often opened. "From the village. In the dark." "The carriage would not bring me further. And I have found, sir, that the dark is rarely the most dangerous thing in a person's day. That distinction usually belongs to the creditors." Eleanor set down her case on his cold stone floor, with a small decisive sound, the sound of a woman arriving rather than visiting. "I am Eleanor Astley. I am your new housekeeper. The agency will have written. And before you tell me — as I can see you are deciding whether to tell me — that the situation is unsuitable, that the house is no place for me, that I ought to turn round and walk my three miles back: I should like you to know that I have heard every warning your village has to give, that I have buried a great deal already, and that I am not, sir, in the habit of being frightened out of a thing I have been promised a salary to do." For a long moment the master of Thornwyck simply stood with his branch of candles, in his cursed and gabled house, and regarded the widow who had walked across his moor. And then — slowly, and with what looked like genuine reluctance, as though the expression were a key turning in a lock that had rusted — the corner of his mouth moved. "No," he said. "No, I don't suppose you are." He stepped back from the door, and the candlelight swung, and the cold hall of Thornwyck opened before her. "Come in, then, Mrs. Astley. Out of the dark. We shall both of us, I think, have to learn to be sorry for it later."