The Last Hill
Chapter One
Emily Ashworth had been asleep, though she would have denied it. The car had left London a long time ago, when the streets were still grey and full of other people’s mornings, and it had carried her south, and south again, until the houses gave way to hedges, and the hedges to fields, and the fields to a green country whose name she did not know.
Somewhere along the way they had stopped at Bodiam, and had tea, and her father had said the castle was older than anything in London. Emily had looked at it, and thought only of how very far she was from home, and how much further she was still to go.
In her lap she held Daisy’s doll. Her little sister had pressed it into her hands at the station, without a word, and then had turned and hidden her face in their mother’s coat. Emily had understood. A piece of home was to travel with her, whether she wished it or not. She had not let go of it since.
The lane grew narrower, and the trees closed over the top of it, so that the light came down green and moving, and for a while there was only the sound of the wheels, and the wood going by. And then the car climbed one last gentle hill, and Emily, waking, looked up, and there it was.
A grand, rambling house of many tall windows, standing amid a great sweep of parkland thick with ancient trees, a towering cedar keeping watch over the sweep of the drive. The late sun lay long and gold across the grass, the way it does in Kent in September after rain, and at the very gate an enormous elm stood with its arms out over the road, as though it had been waiting a great while, and did not mind.
Her heart leapt clean up into her throat.
St Elowen’s was real.
She had seen it in a photograph, once, small and grey and folded into a letter, and had not quite believed in it, the way one does not quite believe in a place one has only been promised. But here it was, whole, and larger than any promise, with its hundred windows catching the low sun, and a thread of smoke going up straight from a chimney into the still air, and somewhere among all those roofs a tower, taller than the rest, with a single high window that seemed, even now, in the last of the daylight, to be keeping a small and steady watch of its own.
Emily did not know yet that she would come to love it. She only knew, in that first moment on the hill, that she wanted, more than she had ever wanted anything, to belong to it.