As our final day ended, the sky blushed pink—a parting gift, I thought. Lizzie had made a picnic of cheese, bread and Mrs. Lloyd’s sweet cucumber pickle. She laid it on the lawn beside the cottage.

“God is in this place,” she said, without shifting her gaze from Wenlock Edge.

“Do you think so, Lizzie?”

“Oh, yes. I feel him more here than I ever have in church. Out here it’s like we’re stripped of all our clothes, of the callouses on our hands that tell our place, of our accents and words. He cares for none of it. All that matters is who you are in your heart. I’ve never loved him as much as I should, but here I do.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“I reckon it’s the first time he’s noticed me.”

For a very long time, neither of us spoke. The sun broke through a long brushstroke of cloud and came down over Wenlock Edge and the Long Mynd behind it—one was like a shadow of the other.

“Do you think he’ll forgive me, Lizzie?” It was barely more than a thought, but I knew I’d spoken the words.

Lizzie stayed silent, and the Long Mynd finally made a memory of the setting sun, leaving a landscape of blue hills. When she got up and went into the cottage, I realised it was not God’s forgiveness I cared about; it was hers. I imagined her dilemma. She wanted to reassure me, but couldn’t lie with God’s face turned on her.

The drone that had been filling my ears since She was born, the shade that had been drawn over my eyes, the dull feeling in my arms and legs and breasts—they lifted all at once. I could hear and see and feel with an intensity that stole my breath and frightened me. I shivered, suddenly cold. There was the faintest smell of coal smoke and the sounds of birds calling their own to roost, their songs as clear and distinct as church bells. My face was wet with loss and love and regret. And woven through it all there was a thread of shameful relief.

Lizzie came out with a rug, crocheted in all the colours of an autumn wood. She wrapped it around my shoulders and weighed it down with her solid arms.

“It’s not his place to forgive you, Essymay,” she whispered into my ear. “It’s no one’s but yours.”

November 1907

Lizzie and I stepped from the train. We put our cases down and pulled the collars of our coats higher against the November chill. Shropshire had been our Indian summer, and Oxford felt like winter. As we waited for a cab to take us to Sunnyside, I had to remind myself that behind the hard stone of all the buildings, a river flowed.