The Memory of Trees by F. G. Cottam Page A

take them as anything other than gory folkloric metaphors. They were a thousand years old, the stories. They were impossibly remote from the real world.
    Yet she wanted Curtis told about the mythic history of the place when it had been thickly forested. She wanted him told about the creatures abiding in its permanent twilight and the things legend insisted they had done.
    Her father would have spotted this flaw in her reasoning. He hadn’t pointed it out, as he would have in the old days. Instead, he had diverted her with some flattering guff about her distinguishing artistic status and heightened creativity. The cancer had mellowed him into this approach to verbal conflict. Where once there had been the ferocity of clashing wills, now there was gentle cajoling. It was just avoidance.
    She felt nostalgic for one of the blood and thunder rows between them of the old days. But to have one of those would mean her dad was getting better and he wasn’t and wasn’t going to. Those dramatic conflicts were a part of their shared past. The curtain had been drawn on them. The theatre was dark.
    She looked at the painting on the easel and sighed because she knew she couldn’t paint. She had told Tom Curtis the truth when she had told him that she painted only in natural light. What she’d actually done, she realized, was taken refuge in the studio to get away from Sam Freemantle because she found it so difficult to tolerate sharing space with the man.
    Curtis being around made things more endurable. It was one of the characteristics that she liked about him. But she knew that he was going back to London the following day to sort out his affairs before the start of the project proper. He’d be back before long. He was in his room now translating the challenge into practical terms and it was necessary. He was putting the wheels in motion and they were gigantic wheels that would turn slowly at first but gather unstoppable momentum really fast.
    Francesca went over to the pile of canvases leant against the wall and fingered through their stacked edges until she came to the representation of the knight from the stained-glass window in the church at Raven Dip. When she got the opportunity, she resolved there and then that she would inform Curtis of his real identity. She would tell him who he was and what it was said that he had done. That much at least, he surely had the right to know.
    Curtis worked till midnight. He wasn’t disturbed again. He slept soundly but rose just after six thirty, fully alert, rested enough but strangely eager to see how the tree he had planted had fared through its first night on this remote and secretive domain. The sun was just creeping over the eastern horizon as he zipped on his jacket and fired up a quad and set off westward, chasing his own shadow, towards Puller’s Reach and the edge of the new world he was now involved in creating.
    Fog had rolled in off the sea. It lay opaque in a low bank in front of him. It was uniform in its density, the low sunlight unable to pick holes or fissures in it anywhere so that it gave the impression of being solid. It was unmoving, like it had settled there forever, obscuring the land, making a sudden, lurching trap of the cliff edge for anyone blundering into it.
    Curtis didn’t blunder. He ditched the bike before the fog bank enveloped him and felt his way into a grey and uniform universe that felt damp and cold on the skin and smelled intensely of the sea. It whitened the ground under his feet, the blades of grass dim and petrified. He held out his own hand and looked at it: the flesh was pale, corpse-like and indistinct, a memory summoned from a sinister dream, right there in front of him.
    For no reason he could have rationalized, he began to feel a chill of foreboding. He told himself it was the silence imposed by the mist, which deadened sound, as mist is apt to. He told himself it was the chill and the fact that, unable to see what it was he might share the