She keeps painting. Her hair, her arms, and her uncontrollably shaking hands are freckled with it: drops she can’t rub off. I did nothing wrong, she thinks. She paints. She’ll do this all night if she has to.

5. “The Applicant”

CHAPTER FIVE

“The Applicant”

AUGUST 12, 1961

3 CHALCOT SQUARE, LONDON

The southwesterly wind blows in from the Atlantic over England’s West Country, cooling and condensing as it gathers itself and rises in legendary mist up the raw granite plateaus and heathered hills of Dartmoor. The historic mining of Dartmoor has all but ceased: the extraction of alluvial tin and copper ore, the mining of arsenic and lead. Before the mines, there were abbeys, and before that, Romans and hill forts; before that, stone huts, stone circles, stone cists. Stones tell the story of Dartmoor; the acidic soil dissolves paper and pottery and bone.

In August, the last of Dartmoor’s wild ponies are ready to foal on the upland heaths of the moor. In a few weeks, they’ll be drifted into herds by farmers on bicycles. The colts and old ponies will be sent to market, to be sold as pets or slaughtered. The rest, those deemed sturdy enough to resist the extreme winter weather, will be turned out on the grassland commons for another year. They graze now among the still, wind-etched faces of tors in the flat light of a sunless Sunday afternoon, shaggy coated and immensely gravid, their soft whiskered muzzles tickled by lichen and milkwort, by purple moor grass, the ends of their long, blowing tails wicking up the green damp.

North and east as the crow flies beyond the moorlands, following the wet pastures along the river Taw, past a scant handful of half-timbered Elizabethan villages wedged into an aimless valley lush with oak and rowan and hazel trees bearded in moss, past hillsides studded with Scottish Blackface sheep and wall-eyed cows, over an arched stone bridge that spans the river, up near the crest of a curving cobbled lane in one of the bleaker of Devonshire’s hamlets is an imposing, half-stone house situated almost in the shadow of a thirteenth-century church, the church, in turn, dominated by a monumental yew. Once a manor, then a vicarage, the run-down house is roofed with thatch in which generations of starlings have noisily reared their annual young under the eaves. Seven hundred years ago, the first thick walls of this house were settling in the red Devon loam; they’re settling still, groaning with the effort to stay upright on their boggy West Country rise. They’ll have to: The house’s titled sellers have guaranteed it to stand for another twenty years. It needs paint and new plumbing. They’ve called in a woodworm service, too.