She shifted her weight, thinking. ‘I am not quite sure how to count time here.’
I frowned. ‘In what way?’
She was quiet for a while, and I thought I’d exhausted my opportunity for the day, but then she spoke.
‘Imagine a spinning disc. The edge and the centre revolve as one, do they not? And yet the edge seems to move so much faster, to cover so much more ground in the same time. That is like me, here. I am at the centre of time, and you are out there, moving as I do, yet hurtling across so much more ground.’
I thought of the Schloss with its anomalies, the door to last Tuesday and the room perpetually in summer in the kitchen.
‘Is that why time works strangely in the castle? Are we too close to the source?’ There was more I wanted to know – what of the maid in the kitchen? Why did she walk the castle at night? – but she had told me so much already, I would not tax her patience.
‘That is how I understand it. The castle has been steeped in time and magic for too long, it takes on a life of its own here. The world bends around the wheel like a heavy weight. You will have seen it in the fabric of the castle, the way rooms shift and space does not obey the natural laws of the earth. Time affects everything, the earth, the seasons. What is it but a way to measure the world around us? And can we not measure time by the world? Time, space, they are two sides of the same coin.’
I thought of the way time was visible in the strata of a cliff face.
‘I can keep the flow of time smooth beyond these walls, but here it is like how from a distance the sound of a bell comes from one clear direction, but stand directly inside it and the sound is all around you, no clear direction, only an overwhelming excess of noise.’
A sick feeling spread over me.
‘Does that mean you will live forever?’
Her lip curled in disgust. ‘I certainly hope not. I age.’
I furrowed my brow. ‘But you age far slower than me.’
‘I must have faith that this will come to an end one way or another.’
I let the unfinished thought lie between us. I knew she understood me.
I might give her my whole life, and yet for her it might be no more than a year taken off her sentence of solitude.
b
I came up with a new scheme for my life at the schloss: turning it into something resembling a home. I started with the great hall. The collapsed remains of the grand staircase still lay where they had fallen; we would need a team of people with ropes and chains to haul the great trunk beams away. I wrote letters to Munich and Nuremberg enquiring about tapestry cleaning and repairs, walked the perimeter with Wolf, dictating an ever-growing list of tasks: cracked flagstones, crumbling mortar, a smashed window, kingdoms of spiders and woodlice in the soft, rotting corners.
The vast crag of limestone that thrust up through the floor was quite another matter. It bisected the room like a wave rising to curl at the crest, brutal and unforgiving and inhuman. I circled its length three times, taking in the chiaroscuro flecks, the divots and runnels worn into its face when it had still been the exposed top of the spur, beaten and lashed by rain and wind and snow. It was a wild thing brought into the heart of the castle.
I loved it.
It would be a crime to break it up to flatten the floor, as would it be to grind down its harsh edges and polish it to an animal softness. No, it must be left as it was. All I would do was clean it.
So I did, the Witch coming to sit a little distance away with her ledgers monitoring the flow of thread and time, to watch me in amusement as I painstakingly worked my way along the rock with a soft cloth and bucket of warm soapy water, dabbing away centuries of smoke and oil and dust and mud to reveal the pale stone beneath. I could hardly say it glowed in its raw, matt form, but it was beautiful to me, a wide white line like the dash of a paintbrush through a gloomy landscape.
The Witch ran her hand over the stone, a complicated expression fracturing the porcelain of her face, then she came to me, ran the same hand along the shape of my jaw, my cheekbone, my brow, and she kissed me so lightly I could have imagined it.
b
A few weeks later and new flagstones had been set, walls repointed, the detritus from the fire cleared and the vast, crumbling tapestries carefully rolled up between crepe paper and taken away to be restored. The Witch and I sat in the walled garden, bare feet stretched out in the sun. The herbs were coming in well, and my little bed of peas and peppers and round fat cabbage heads. We were sorting through a box of flints I had found in one of the rooms on my survey, when Wolf came from the kitchen. Drying her hands on the cloth tucked into the waist of her apron, a stony expression was on her face.
The Witch stilled at once. ‘Again?’
Wolf nodded.
The Witch got up, dusting the back of her skirts where she’d been sat on a rock. The urgency in her voice and the slowness of her movements were an unsettling mismatch.
‘What do you mean, “again”?’ I asked, but they both said nothing and went into the kitchen. I hastily repacked the flints, covering them with a piece of hessian, and followed.
I found them in the scullery, watching a maid washing dishes. My frown deepened.
