Читать книгу The Half Sister - Catherine Chanter - Страница 16

Chapter Nine

Wynhope settles down for the night. In the lodge at the bottom of the drive, the housekeeper secures the guard across the fire; outside her husband double-checks the hen house. The fox is barking in the wood. It is a cold night even for April. Wynhope gathers the park around itself, careful not to disturb the rooks who have finally settled in the conifers or the lambs huddled with their mothers under the shelter of the spreading oaks. A badger snouts his way across the front lawn and triggers the security lights. There he is, black and white on the luminous grass and behind him Wynhope; all three floors of the magnificent Queen Anne house are illuminated for the delight of the night-sliding slugs and the sly and musky polecat. Even the damp gravel drive shines. The curious tower wriggles its toes into the clay for a foothold, clings on to the end of the west wing with its bitten fingernails. It is the bastard offspring and knows it, its gargoyles hide behind stone hands and giggle and spit at visitors when it rains.

The badger shuffles off into the wings. There is no one to applaud save the tawny owl biding his time in the Cedar of Lebanon. The plough is low in the Lent sky, the moon has risen above the fir trees, the international space station is passing over Wynhope, unnoticed; it sees sunrise every ninety-two minutes and now is beaming back footage which shows a planet at peace with itself, just the slow roll of the blue globe whispered in white. Soon it will be on the dark side and all there will be is black. A smudge on the lens of the satellite turns out to be smoke over China. Those minute variations in the colour of the sea, azure, cobalt, indigo, Persian? Sunlight on a tsunami. Beneath its crusted skin, the planet’s joints are old and stiff, the ice sheets melted from this English bed many thousands of years ago and yet still sleep does not come easy. Maybe the dog dozing in the kitchen opens one eye, or the deer trespassing in the spring wheat freeze, tremble, listen and return to graze, but the people rarely pay attention, perhaps only once in a decade questioning the unfamiliar tremor beneath their feet, or once in a century holding tight to the duplicitous banisters, or once in every five hundred years running from their homes in terror that the earth under their feet has turned against them and the cathedral spire has fallen. That time is now.