Chapter 104

The inn stood where the old hunting road gave up and became a sheep track, in a fold of the hills with a stream below it and a wood of stunted oaks above. We came on it in the evening on the second day, after a morning of rain that had finally broken the heat.

It had been a fine house once, long and low, of grey stone, with a carriage arch and a row of stables along one side. The stable roof had fallen in. Half the house roof had followed it. Elder had come up through the yard cobbles, and a rowan had rooted in the chimney stack and was doing well.

Over the arch, on a board gone silver with weather, there was a painted stag. When I let my eyes go on past where eyes stop, it was still a stag. Nobody had come here to be fooled.

“Hartsfall,” said Lucien. He sat at the bay at the arch and did not ride under it. “My father dated his letters from here, that winter. My mother read them aloud at supper. I used to think it sounded like a place in a song.”

“You were ne