that could not be ascertained through deductive reasoning, then why not other aspects of being? Why not magic?
It was an odd morning, the air close, almost sticky on the skin. There was almost no birdsong, as if there were insufficient oxygen from which to create trills and chirps. Andrew was moving slower than usual. After the unpleasantness at Rocky Valley, he'd moped around his cottage a bit and finally gone down to the Cobweb late Sunday afternoon. He wanted to talk to Flora, but it turned out that she'd gone off duty after the lunch crowd cleared out. So he sat at the bar and had a bag of salted crisps and couple of pints, then a couple more, then ordered a dinner of shepherd's pie and another pint, and finally wandered unsteadily home, collapsing into bed before eight.
“Gonna rain this afternoon,” Lee announced, apropos of nothing. “A lot.”
Andrew looked up at the milky-blue sky. “What makes you so sure?”
“I just know. Dad was gonna cut hay today, but I told him not to. He always listens to me about stuff like that.”
This sort of thing no longer surprised him. Lee seemed to live closer to nature than anyone, much less any child, he'd ever known. It was as if she occupied some sort of nether zone between the world of humans and that of animals and plants. More magic, perhaps. Or just the magic of childhood.
They stopped by the weir that had once fed water to the mill downstream.
“This is as far as I go,” Lee said.
“Got plans, do you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What kind?”
“Just out and about. You know, exploring.”
“Okay, kiddo. Thanks for the company this morning. And the advice.”
Lee smiled, turned, and skipped back the way they'd come. He watched her until she rounded a bend and disappeared. The girl was enough to make you believe magic was an everyday occurrence. Then he turned downstream to meet Jamie and Becky.
The new hedging crew had been at it for nearly four hours when the rain started. As had been the case the week before, it had taken only a couple of hours for the group to sort out their respective roles and settle into a steady rhythm as the new recruits gained skill and confidence. Stone by stone, section by section, the new hedge lengthened beside the car park along the bank of the River Valency. Jamie had been levering a particularly large grounder into place when one of the volunteers pointed out the cloud, like a massive black-and-blue bruise, that had appeared in the otherwise blue sky to seaward. The valley was so narrow, they hadn't seen it coming.
Jamie squinted at it for only a moment, laid down the iron pry bar he'd been working with, looked at his watch, and shouted, “Right, lads, time for lunch. Indoors, I should think. The Cobweb!”
The rain began as a mist. As they put tools in Jamie's van, it settled on the crew's dusty clothes so lightly that it was like dew on leaves. But by the time they'd hurried across the road to the inn and ordered drinks, the clattering hiss of raindrops on the steaming pavement outside could be heard even within the pub.
* * *
High up in the Valency valley, near the village of Lesnewth, which Andrew had walked through two days earlier, the rain gauge recorded that it was raining at the rate of nearly two inches per hour.
Jamie was sitting on a stool at the bar, chatting up Flora, who was wearing a deeply plunging, décolletage-revealing, knit blouse—in keeping, she would have said if asked, with the sultry weather.
“You mark my words,” Flora said as she leaned on her elbows opposite Jamie, “in fifteen minutes, this place'll be cheek-by-jowl. Here we are a seaside village, and everyone comes to walk the cliffs and see the harbor, but when the rain comes, everyone wants to be in the pub. You watch.”
“I don't know, Flo,” Jamie said. “Might be the scenery in here that draws 'em.”
“Go on, you dirty old man,” Flora protested, with a grin. She slipped off to attend to another customer, but not without giving the stone craftsman a lascivious wink.
And sure enough, in they came, tourists who'd been nosing about the harbor and the gift shops and had dashed up the street to shelter, ramblers in dripping anoraks who'd been out hiking the coast path, and passers-through who decided a shower was a good excuse to stop for a pint. In no time at all, the pub