When I Come Home Again by Caroline Scott

Author:Caroline Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2020-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Anna

She watches them from the window. Mark rounds the end of the barn and is running up towards the moor. She can see the doctor running after him, but Mark’s legs know the terrain better, and she knows that he’ll get away. Does Mark mean to lose Haworth and to then come back? Will he come back tonight? And, if so, with what intention? The young doctor will not find him, she knows. Mark is familiar with every cranny and hollow of the moor. She remembers him running up and away over that path once before, only it was her crying after him that time. She hadn’t been able to catch him either.

Anna turns from the window. The piano notes are still circling around the room. She had hoped that he would play, that the memory would still be in his fingers, but she had never expected him to play like that. Had he learnt it in France? It was a different man’s music that had come from Mark’s fingers today. Does she know this man? There is so much intensity when his eyes meet hers and yet she can’t read him at all. Is he still angry? Is he trying to hide his anger? Or could he really have forgotten everything?

She had screamed at him, six years ago, as she watched him heading up and away over the moor. She had screamed that it wasn’t true, that there was nothing to blame her for, that it was just baseless, spiteful gossip. She barely even knew the man that her name had been linked with, she didn’t even know his name, but there had been such disappointment and hurt in Mark’s eyes when he’d asked. He wasn’t the sort of man who would hit her, but he’d looked so desperate that she’d briefly been afraid. She thinks of the slam of the piano lid and wonders if he is still that man. She doesn’t know what the intensity in his eyes means today.

Anna can’t see them now from the window. Is there really a chance that he might have forgotten what he accused her of? Could the look in his eyes today mean something else? Does he remember that, when he ran out that day, he didn’t come back, and that it was the last time they had looked each other in the eye?

She gathers the teacups together. There is a swirl of tea leaves in the bottom of Mark’s cup, but they tell her nothing. Did he remember that it was his mother’s tea service? Was he angry that she had broken a cup?

Anna had watched him disappear over the moor in February 1915. She had discovered within days where he had gone, but it would be a full twelve months before he would write her a letter. He told her that he was in France. She could hear the awkwardness in his words, the tentativeness with which he’d formed his phrases. He apologized for leaving her with the responsibility of the farm, and hoped that she had found hands to help her.

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