temple, '-is hers and only hers.'
'Maybe if she talked about it-' Will tentatively suggested.
'Words aren't absolutes. I've told you that before, haven't I? What your mother says and what you hear aren't the
same thing. You understand that, don't you?' Will nodded, though he only grasped the crudest version of what
he was being told. 'So we're moving,' Hugo replied, apparently satisfied that he'd communicated the theoretical
underpinning of this.
'Where are we going?'
'A village in Yorkshire, called Burnt Yarley. You'll have to change schools but that's not going to be much of a
problem for you, is it?' Will murmured no, it wasn't; he hated St Margaret's. 'And it won't hurt for you to be out
in the open air a little more. You look so pale all the time.'
'When will we go?'
'In about three weeks.'
CHAPTER II
i
The move didn't happen quite as planned. Two days after Hugo's conversation with Will, quite without warning,
Eleanor broke her own rules and left the house in the middle of the morning and went wandering. She was
escorted home in the late evening, having been found weeping in the street where Nathaniel had been struck
down. The move was postponed, and for the next fortnight she was watched over by nurses and tended to by a
psychiatrist. His medications did some good. Her mood brightened after a few days - she became
uncharacteristically jolly, in fact, and dived into the business of packing up the house with gusto. On the second
weekend of September, the delayed move took place.
The journey from Manchester took little more than an hour but it might as well have delivered the two-vehicle
convoy into another country. With the charmless streets of Oldham and Rochdale behind them they wound their
way into open countryside, sweeping moorland steadily giving way to the steeper fells, whose lush green flanks
were here and there stripped to pavements of grim, grey limestone. The wind blew hard on the hilltops,
buffeting the high-sided van in which Will had asked to be a passenger. With map in hand he followed their
route as best he could, his eyes straying from the road they were taking to venture where the names were
strangest: Kirkby Malzeard, Gammersgill, Horton-in-Ribblesdale, Yockenthwaite and Garthwaite and
Rottenstone Hill. There was a world of promise in such names.
Their destination, the village of Burnt Yarley, was to Will's eyes indistinguishable from a dozen other villages
they'd passed through on their way: a scattering of plain, square houses and cottages built of the local limestone,
and roofed with slate; less than half a dozen shops (a grocer, a butcher, a newsagent, a post office, a pub), a
church with a small churchyard surrounding it, and a steeply humped bridge rising over a river no wider than a
traffic lane. There were, however, three or four more substantial residences on the outskirts of the village. One
of them would be their new house, he knew: it was the largest house in Burnt Yarley, so beautiful that according
to Will's father Eleanor had cried with happiness at the thought of their living in it. We're going to be very
happy there, Hugo had said, offering this not as a cherished hope, but as an instruction.
ii
The first sign of that happiness was waiting for them at the front gate: a plumpish, smiling woman in early
middle-age who introduced herself to Will as Adele Bottrall and welcomed them all with what seemed to be
genuine pleasure. She instantly took charge of the unloading of the car and the removal van, supervising her
husband Donald and her son Craig, who was the kind of sullen, thick-necked sixteen-year-old Will would have
feared an arbitrary beating from in the yard of St Margaret's. Here, however, he was a workhorse, eyes
downcast most of the time, as he lugged boxes and furniture into the house. Will was given a glass of lemonade
by Mrs. Bottrall and wandered around the house to survey it, coming back to the front now and
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