across the grain

by uzwi

After that, the great dark charcoal-coppices drew her in: Bosle, Swiney and Leasow; Factory, Workhouse and Suicide. These old woods, draped over the mess the 18th Century made, were warmer than the exposed dip slope; their labyrinthine topography of track and knoll, prolapsed limekiln and pennystone spoil hill, sprawled away silent and dark to the edge of the Gorge, where every winter on the scarp one more beech tree levered itself out of the mud and leant tiredly into the catch of its nearest neighbour. Across the grain, syke to syke, Victoria’s progress–if that’s what it could be called–was by short steep uphill struggle leading inevitably to a kind of exhausted, cautious slither down the other side. Her arms windmilled. She was lost. She did not feel entirely in charge of herself. Eight deer ran past her from nowhere, down a narrow salient between two overgrown rock quarries. All she could do was watch as they flickered away, in and out of the trees, pale in the moonlight, on some business of their own. Enchanted yet anxious, a London woman in a lot of mud, she wandered about all night until the sinister half-light at the hour before dawn brought her to the edge of the woods again; from which she looked out this way and that.

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