She carried only a torch for guidance—no phone, no music, no distractions. Just the noise of her feet on the pavement until she turned off the road and onto the narrow gravel path that curved back and forth along the spine of the Tor.
Vera used to grin in the darkness when the wind pushed at her back, feeling like some greater force carried her onward. She didn’t believe that anymore. It was only wind, whining in her ears as it whipped by, no longer an omen of good to come. Indeed, its mere sound was a harbinger of remembering what she had lost.
She inhaled a ragged breath, powerless to stifle the rising memory. That sound. It was like the day two years ago when she’d rushed into the university library. Only then, the whistling wind came with flashing lightning in its wake.
It had stormed mightily. She’d scarcely heard thunder like it before or since. There hadn’t been many other people there, so Vera weaved through the halls and bookshelves, quietly singing to herself while she waited for the rain to slow.
She hadn’t even seen the young man sitting on the floor with his back against the wall (probably because she was so used to no one ever noticing her) until he called out as she passed by, “Do you take song requests?”
She’d stumbled to a stop and spun around to face him. It was the first time Vera met him, though she would come to know him so intimately: Vincent. He smiled without glancing up from the sketch pad on his knees. Over the next two years, Vera delighted in calling him Vincent-not-Van Gogh, the artist who had both ears. His hair even had a shine of red to it under the brightest sunlight.
As she urged her feet up the Tor’s steepest section, Vera saw that whole day play out in her mind, like the memory was in fast-forward or like time didn’t exist at all. How she’d stopped to talk to Vincent, then spent hours poring over his sketches. It was late evening before either realized that the storm had long since ceased. When they left, they went for a pint (which became three) before he walked her home. Vincent kissed her cheek as he bid her goodnight.
They didn’t go many days without seeing one another after that. She’d loved Vincent fast, and he loved her well in return.
He had now been dead for four months.
The taste of love lost was cruel, and the permanence of Vincent’s death left her shattered.
These days, her run was less pursuit of wonder and more fleeing from feeling; a desperate attempt to escape the pain of his loss and her own guilt at how she could have stopped it.
It was a fifteen-minute jog on her slowest days. St Michael’s Tower, the marker of her destination and the lone structure on the Tor, loomed as a vague dark mass in the pre-dawn light. The tower was nothing more than four stone walls with no roof overhead. If she’d kept jogging when she reached the Tor’s level top, she would have continued straight through an open arch doorway on one side of the tower and out another opposite, where it opened to a terrace the size of a back garden with a geographical compass right in the middle. It looked like a round stone bench, but on closer inspection, the silver disk at its center had fine arrows etched into it, pointing in all directions. They marked the bearings for what an observer would see if they could look far enough: twenty-five miles north to Bristol (where Vera had gone to university), eleven miles southeast to Camelot (yes, the one of legend), seven miles southwest to Somerton … and on.
More days than not, there were others in town who craved to shake the shackles of mundanity on the Tor at daybreak. Today, there was no one else.
Vera walked past the tower, thoughtlessly trailing her fingers along the stones as she always did out of a visceral pull to connect with the ancient things around her. She looked westward toward the ruins of the Glastonbury Abbey, remembering the time during a school trip there when her primary school teacher scolded her for touching every ruin within reach. It wasn’t light enough to make out the town a mile or so down the lane. She couldn’t see the abbey ruins from here anyway. The impressive stone columns of a once grand cathedral were tucked away right off the High Street, nestled so tightly that it was another spot of astonishment for visitors. One moment a traveler had their eyes glued to their phone for directions, and the next they rounded a corner, looked up, and had their breath taken away by the scope of the ruins.
When Vera’s fingers found the corner of the tower, they lingered there for a breath longer. With minutes to spare before the sun’s daily miracle, she took off her shoes and socks and tucked them next to the tower’s base while she ventured out onto the grass and wiggled her bare toes on the cool, dew damp ground.
It was barely a stone’s throw to her favorite seat in the house. Almost exactly between St. Michael’s Tower on one end of the Tor and the large stone compass on the other, there was a perfectly smooth patch of grass for sitting and watching the day begin. According to the compass, she faced legendary Camelot, included in the list for tourists, yes; but locals believed the legends more fervently than anybody else.
It was clear by now with only one, maybe two minutes left before daybreak, where the sun would first appear. Vera trained her eyes on the glowing spot, hardly daring to blink. It was a perfect sunrise day. No clouds to block the view, yet thick mists had gathered low, surrounding the Tor. They would burn away within hours, but when the mist packed in densely, it was like a blanket laid over the valley that held the moment suspended, containing it for an extra second. She held her breath, knowing the first eyelash of sun was on the edge of fluttering into view.
And there it was.
There were taller mountains and more stunning landscapes, but Vera would be hard pressed to believe there was another sunrise quite like this one anywhere in the world.
She stayed for the whole thing until the sun had cleared the horizon, and it worked to buoy her soul. At least for a moment. Then she gathered her shoes, touched the tower one last time, and jogged back the way she came.
If she’d turned to look as she passed the old White Spring temple at the foot of the hill, she might have seen the cloaked man standing in its doorway. He’d arrived inside the temple the moment the sun crested the horizon, and he would be gone, Vera with him, by the time night fell.
Vera never intended to work at the hotel. Her parents had been the George and Pilgrims’ proprietors all her life, and she’d practically lived there even before she actually moved into the innkeeper’s quarters after graduating from university last spring.
While her mother Allison tended to guests, six-year-old Vera had colored by the fireplace in the pub. When her father Martin swept through the guest rooms, perpetually racing to change linens in a record time, nine-year-old Vera searched for hideouts and hidden passageways. In lodgings built in the sixteenth century, a wandering child was bound to find all sorts of secret spots tucked away.
Vera returned to the hotel with just enough time to shower and get dressed for her many daily roles. She pulled her hair into a low ponytail and decided that was good enough. Tidy and nice. Her features were attractive and even, nothing markedly off-center or unconventional: average-sized nose, standard lips, normal-length eyelashes, unevenly wavy brown hair. Pretty, but not extraordinary.
She was embarrassed to admit it, but there’d been a time when being unnoticeable had bothered her. Now, after losing Vincent, moving through life without drawing attention was a relief. The sphere of her world had gotten very small, and it was the simplest way to press on in the space of loss. And her little innkeeper’s quarters, so outside what she’d planned for herself, brought comfort. If she could keep her mind from drifting to him, she’d be fine.
