A Crooked Mile by Ruth Hamilton

Author:Ruth Hamilton [Ruth Hamilton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2010-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Joe Duffy glanced down at the sheet of paper in his hand. Getting here hadn’t been too difficult, because the tram terminus was quite nearby. In fact, Joe had enjoyed the walk across from the Harwood road, had seen more trees and grass in half an hour than he’d glimpsed in his whole life. Tess would have liked it up here. She’d always relished seeing things clean and fresh. He paused, leaned on a rickety fence. Tess had enjoyed seeing things neat until she’d become truly obsessed with the idea of having a son. Those last months had been . . . untidy. Worse than that. He remembered the house being filthy, yet he knew he’d have swapped all the countryside in Christendom just to live for one more year in squalor with Tess. But he wasn’t going to think about that, because he was going to move on for the children’s sake.

Oh, Tess. He breathed in the clear air, inhaling so deeply that the draught seemed to reach his legs, making him stronger, capable of walking the rest of the way. At the end of the narrow track, he consulted the directions again, found Dog Leg Lane on the map, discovered that it was just a few paces away.

Twin gates hung loosely from broken hinges, the wrought iron pitted and corroded with age and neglect. At each side of the lane, a few feet from the broken gates, stood a stone cottage with boarded windows and patched roof-slates. Mr Althorpe already owned this pair of houses, but he had moved the tenants on in order to start some renovations.

If Joe stayed to the right, he could see part of the big house, but he did not catch sight of the whole building until he met the sharp bend after which the lane had been so aptly named. Like the joint on a dog’s rear limb, the road was angled sharply just before the halfway mark.

When he finally came upon Hall i’ th’ Vale, he sagged against a dead tree-trunk, a huge thing that seemed to have been shattered by lightning. He touched the burnt wood, smoothed it as if seeking to offer comfort to the murdered timber. It was fat for an elm, but it definitely was elm. Joe loved wood and leather, read the textures of both with his fingers, assessed them by feel rather than by sight. ‘I’m getting fanciful,’ he said quietly. ‘But I hope you didn’t suffer. I hope the lightning were quick, quicker than for . . .’ Tess. He did not say the name aloud.

The Hall was awesome. It’s real name was, of course, Hall in the Vale, but like so many locations hereabouts, its name had been affected by the local dialect. The Bottom of the Moor had become Bottom o’ th’ Moor – there was even a thoroughfare somewhere called Stitch-mi-Lane. Funny how things’ titles got corrupted, he thought. Yet Hall i’ th’ Vale seemed right in this instance, as quite

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