Page 66 of Baron Bolt
The bar was where he had set it at eleven o’clock, seated in its brackets across the great doors.
He lifted it and stood it against the paneling.
Then he turned the key and drew the doors open.
The storm came into the hall to meet him.
Rain on the flags, wind bellying through the doorway and away up the stairwell with a sound like the house drawing breath.
He walked out into it and did not close the doors behind him.
He should go back and bar them.
The thought arrived once, an officer’s thought. The house stood open. The whole sleeping length of it. His mother. Lady Clarke. The servants.
Her.
Open to the night and whatever the night contained.
But he kept walking.
There was nothing out here worse than what had just walked out that door.
The rain had him soaked before he was off the steps. The gravel of the drive bit his bare feet. Then the grass took him, cold and drenched. Then the mud of the open park.
He walked into the wind with the water running off his jaw and down inside his open collar and over the seam in his shoulder.
Bareheaded.
Into the lightning instead of away from it.
He had done this before.
He had walked out of a dark place into a storm exactly like this one. Past caring. Obsessed with reaching Hartleigh. He returned to it because the open sky, murderous and howling and indifferent, was simpler than what lay behind him.
Then it had been a cellar of corpses at his back.
He had put a farmhouse behind him and steered by nothing but a dream of this house. Soft rain. Green meadows. Home.
Now it was Hartleigh behind him.
Warm. Sleeping. His to guard. Hers.
And the only difference between the two nights was the one that mattered.
Then, he thought he had left the monster behind him in the dark.
Now he knew he was the monster.
Lightning found him once more at the edge of the park. Flung his shadow out long and wrong across the flooded grass.
Quit.
The thunder walked away over the meadows.
In the space between that flash and the next, the dark came down over him entirely.
It took him.
