both free in the way she was painting and oddly compelled—like a dog on a very long chain, free to move or bark as it wished, but nonetheless constrained by the limits of the chain. She suspected this storm of paint arose from her nightmare, from anger, from fear. But it also felt weirdly like a premonition, a vision not so much of the anguish of the past as of the present and future. As if a threat were cresting high above her, as if getting it on the canvas would freeze it there, perhaps. She didn't know. She wasn't trying to know. She was just painting with an intensity and at a speed she had never experienced before. As if her life depended on it.
Sometime around three o'clock, she put her brush down. It wasn't because she was tired, though she was exhausted, or that she was hungry, though she was famished. It was just done. Whatever it was, it was finished. She stared at it as if waking from a dream. She'd never painted anything this fast before, or this strange. It was as if she'd been taken over by some spirit and she was merely its instrument. She was shocked by the violence of the work, but also exhilarated. She shrugged at the work in amazement, called to Randi, and headed off to the Cobweb to celebrate. She just made it through the door when the sky opened up and fat raindrops fell like diamonds through the slanting afternoon sunshine.
* * *
Jamie had seen it coming.
“All right, you lot,” he'd called out as the first drops splattered the dusty ground, “get the tools in the van and your sorry selves to the pub; you've been reprieved!” He watched them finish their work and gather the equipment, laying it out neatly on the bed of the big van. Though there was still another twenty yards or so of hedge still to be laid, what they'd built looked clean and solid. And he'd turned his crew from a group of clumsy amateurs into skilled craftspeople—proper hedge layers who, by and large, he'd be proud to work beside. It was always like this at the end; he hated to let them go. Ever since his wife of forty years died—what, five years ago now—his students had been his family. In between courses, without their company, he felt bereft, holing up in his ancient house up on the moor, drinking whisky and reading Shakespeare—the plays, not the love sonnets. The sonnets were too painful.
Now here they were, this latest lot, shambling in from the street, sweaty, dirty, smiling, their shirts pockmarked with raindrops.
“Flora, my dear, sweet lass,” he called to the barmaid after they'd muscled their way through the crowd of tourists who were also sheltering from the shower, “drinks for my crew, on me.” This was met with a chorus of dispute from his students, but the teacher prevailed, and when their glasses were delivered, he lifted his in a toast.
“You're ugly as sin, every last man of you—the ever-lovely Becky, of course, excepted—but you're Cornish hedgers now, by God, and damned fine ones!” He knew he was lying about Casehill. That bloke would never give up his mortar crutch, though Jamie hoped he'd appreciate the craft a bit more. But as to the rest, he knew he'd succeeded. Especially with this American chap. The rest of them had become skilled, but this one had gained more than skill. Something about the fellow had changed, sometime during the third day. At the beginning, Andrew was a blur of excess motion. Jamie would watch him walk back and forth between the hedge face and the rock pile, lifting, carrying, and then returning stone until he found something he thought was perfect. And sometimes it was, but often it wasn't. Then, somewhere along the line, he'd got it: got that perfection, if it could be attained at all, was the product of the whole, not a requirement of each piece; got it that the essential oddity, almost the absurdity, of hedge building was endeavoring to make straight lines out of wildly irregular chunks of rock; got it that the mystical heart of the craft was visualizing the whole even as you're working with just a small part—that the stone in your hand is the hedge. And so is the next one, and the next. They're just waiting for you to find them, to give them a home.
Nicola sat on a stool in