“No, now. . .you . . . don’t talk. And let’s go back.”

•

The next day, toward four o’clock in the afternoon, Adelina and Herman were standing on the expanse of heath that overlooks the Severn estuary. The land—utterly empty, uninhabited, wavelike, covered in heather—stretched out of sight in every direction, except to the west, where the blue-green foliage of the Bristol Canal was shimmering. A fanfare of horns and trumpets burst out, abruptly, to their right.

“Those are the fox hunters,” said Adelina. “I have to wait until they’ve gone.”

They heard the galloping of the horses, the cries, even the jingling of the bits.

“But you won’t see them,” said Adelina. “They’ll pass by like shadows. What look to us like little ripples, from here, are actually slopes that drop into deep valleys and intersect each other. This huge plain looks flat, but it’s really crisscrossed with secret movements. My carts should be coming from over there, where evening’s turning the heather dark.”

They’d arrived here hand in hand. First, they’d encountered a solitary man, planted upright as a tree, who looked like he was waiting. He greeted them, then turned on his heels.

“Give me your hand,” Adelina said. “Soon we’re going to have to part.” After that, they walked in silence.

“The sound of those horns and trumpets,” said Herman, “moved me deeply, I don’t know why.”

“They were playing the opening bars of a Handel concerto.”

“I’ve never listened to much music,” he said. “You have heard,” she said, “the wind and the sea. Anyone who’s listened to the sounds of the elements has listened to music. Pitt knows how to play the harmonium. One evening, when he was playing some music by that very same Handel (a chorus from Theodora—‘Venus laughing from the skies’), my father said (sometimes he spoke to the farmhands who would spend the evening with us) . . . he called out to Bill, who was listening too, ‘I’m thinking,’ my father said to him, ‘about the field that runs down the hillside near the Worsleys’. We’ll have to sow it during a westerly if we don’t want the wind to make away with our seed.’ And Bill answered, ‘I was thinking exactly the same thing, sir.’ ”

“And so that music had drawn the two of them to the very same place,” Herman said.

“Yes, while I myself was being drawn to other places.” “I really do understand. Just like Handel, no doubt, had something other than the Worsleys’ hillside in mind when he was writing his music. Is that what you meant?”

“Exactly,” she said. “Listen, a minute ago it must have been a big, stout squire who blew on his horn. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he might have said, ‘if I have in mind to do anything but make a racket when I’m blowing on it.’ But he probably plays the horn in a philharmonic in Berkeley, or somewhere nearby, and that brilliant ensemble must have played the Handel concerto recently. When he wanted to make a racket for the foxhunt, up on his big draft mare, the melody came back to him. (Maybe it had something to do, as well, with these endless stretches of heather in bloom.) And the other hunters fell into unison, with their horns and trumpets, and Handel came and touched you. The fox must be scared out of its wits.”