April, 1921.

There were better reasons for coming home, Alan supposed, than Father’s funeral. Standing on the platform of the Linwood Hollow railway station, he waited until the train had chugged its way around the bend, then turned towards the village and took a deep breath of the crisp Yorkshire air. He held it in his lungs, letting Yorkshire diffuse into his being, then expelled the air and, with it, all his previous cares.

It was just past dawn on a clear spring morning, the Monday a week after Easter. The yellow buds were thick and heavy on the gorse, as though someone had spilled an industrial quantity of Colman’s mustard over the countryside, and their scent, reminiscent of coconuts, made Alan’s nostrils twitch. For the past two years, he’d told anyone who’d listen that it was the other way around, that coconuts gave off a scent reminiscent of gorse — of the Yorkshire moors, of home.

Yes. There were better reasons for coming home.

Linwood Hollow was nestled in a bowl-like depression in the land, likely the crater of some prehistoric meteor strike. Alan imagined the event as occurring in the dead of night: a flash of light in the heavens, and then a bolt of flame descending into the wild, primeval world below. The ground shook at its impact, clods of earth thrown up into the air as dust settled over the trembling greenery. Then, in the silence, a barren hole where once there had been a verdant forest, slowly turning verdant itself over the ensuing millennia. The jungle gave way to the moors; tightly furled yews twisted up from the ground within the crater, while clumps of gorse and heather spread along its slopes. And then, in time, came man: first the Celtic Britons coming up from the south to meet the Picts to the north, and then the Danes landing on the coast to the northeast.

Gazing across the valley as it was now to Linwood Hall, that haphazard, mediaeval jumble of crooked stone walls gathered on the opposite ridge, Alan was struck by a queer sense of familiarity: not the expected familiarity of a man returned to his childhood home, but the familiarity of a parallel experience. After two years of archaeological study in Peru, he’d come to look on his own home with an archaeologist’s eyes, or a historian’s. He saw Linwood Hall as it first began: a hastily constructed military outpost as William the Conqueror harried the north. An inferior brother of Pickering Castle to the south, it consisted of a roughly square keep with an assembly ground surrounded by a wooden palisade and a short tower, Father’s study in the present day, from which the sentries then could oversee the valley. He saw the wooden palisades begin to decay before being shored up and eventually replaced with stone, under Edward I; the assembly ground became a courtyard, the keep expanded in size, and the tall tower, the Camelot of Alan’s childhood, rose up from its centre. Ivy crept over the stone as the fortress fell into disuse. The Wars of the Roses swept by, and then Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, uniting the white rose of York with the red rose of Lancaster in the House of Tudor and gifting, under some obscurely related agreement, this bowl of land and this crumbling fortress to Sir Robert Linwood. The keep expanded still further, turning into the country residence of today. Income from the attached land enabled Edward Linwood, a hundred and twenty-five years later, to obtain a letter patent from King James I, cementing the family’s place as baronets of Linwood.

Edward begat John, John begat William, William begat . . .

Alan descended from the train platform and planted his feet flat against the earth, willing this litany of the Linwoods to flow up from the ground and into his blood. Their deeds flickered in his brain like candle flames as their names flashed by. Thomas. Lawrence. Alan.

He saw the house crumble again in some distant future. The short tower, Father’s study, slid down the cliff into the valley below, the roof caved in — the tall tower remained standing because, even in Alan’s wildest flights of fancy, he could not bear to see Camelot fall.

Man would come again to wonder at this ancient edifice, long after Alan himself was no more than a single stone in a built-up wall of Linwoods. They would wander the roofless halls and emerge onto the broad terrace still clinging to the side of the cliff, and they would look out across the yew-choked valley to where the railway station once was — much as Alan himself had once looked out from Machu Picchu to the distant Urubamba. They would feel, as he did, the cold weight of the centuries bearing down on them, and the ghosts of ancient generations plucking at his sleeves to draw him back.

He could not mourn for what had yet to pass. Nor, he told himself with a sudden fierceness, could he rightly mourn for what had already passed. No. Not if he was truly a part of that litany. History lived on because he lived on. One day he’d pass the torch to his successor, and history would live on still.

Repeating all this to himself, Alan tightened his grip on his suitcase and began his descent into the valley.

Next Chapter: Roger