The torchlight was blinding; Ben’s eyes too weary to adjust. Muscles burned as he lifted himself onto the grass. The farthest reaches of space couldn’t be as cold nor as dark as that tiny tract of land in that moment. He padded towards where they had seen the man. Ben’s light shivered like a white sheet in a hurricane. If the villagers had found them, then they now watched on with an impossible stillness.

Ben’s lungs were a bellows exploding fog with every wheeze. Even with Chloe’s parka, the cold was as relentless as a thousand lashes. He stepped closer to the far field. His light reached like a ghostly arm across its white grass, waving from side to side, swiping through the darkness, but there was no one there. The field was empty.

8

Alec snapped the book closed. He held it in thought, brushing his palm over its binding, listening to the passage of time – the measured beat of the grandfather clock, its weights and pendulum a model of routine and tradition. His eyes had moved from word to word, and pages had turned, but the man’s thoughts were elsewhere. He laid the book on his lap and looked to the logs, never so alive than as they were now in death, ablaze and blackening. Coal burned better, of course, and it fathered more heat. But it was by far too quiet and Alec liked to hear the wood crack.

His high-backed chair was set at a comfortable range from the hearth, with its cabriole feet sunken deep into the rug. Undisturbed since it first found its footing. Over the years its burgundy leather had dulled, especially across the arms where Alec’s hands were prone to fidget.

The study was the largest room in the house, and the one where Alec spent most of his days and all his nights. As the leather of his chair had shaped itself around him, he had moulded himself around the world as best he could. He understood its parameters, their reasons, and ramifications. In much the same way that a house cat comes to realise why it’s called a house cat and why it will never be like the other felines outside its window. Different lives, different rules. From his solitary perspective, Alec’s life could, in private, masquerade as normal. He gleaned some pleasure from this. To fantasise that he lived and enjoyed his days as other men might have had wont to do.