Read Online Restless by William Boyd - Free Book Online

the constant melancholy hoot of owls – but she felt unafraid: just another night denizen trying to rest. In the small hours before dawn, she woke, needing to relieve herself, and moved to the river bank, where she lowered her trousers and shitted into the fast water. Now she could use her toilet paper, taking care to bury it afterwards. As she walked back to her sleeping-tree she paused and stood and looked about her, surveying her moon-dappled grove with the twisted grey trunks of the trees in a rough circle around her like a loose, warped stockade, the leaves above her head shifting drily in the night breeze. She felt strangely otherworldly, as if she were in some kind of suspended dream state, alone, lost in the remote Scottish countryside. Nobody knew where she was; and she didn't know where she was. She thought suddenly of Kolia, for some reason, her funny, moody, serious younger brother, and felt her sadness come over her, fill her for a moment. She was consoled by the thought that she was doing all this for him, making some small personal gesture of defiance to show that his death had not been for nothing. And she felt, also, a reluctant, grudging gratitude towards Romer for pushing her towards this. Perhaps, she considered, as she settled down between the embracing roots of her tree, Kolia had talked to Romer about her – perhaps Kolia had seeded the idea that she be recruited one day.
    She doubted she would sleep anymore, her brain was too active, but as she lay back she realised that she was as alone as she had ever been in her life and she wondered if this, also, was part of the exercise – to be completely and utterly alone, in the night, in an unknown wood, beside an unknown river, and to see how you coped – nothing to do with scouting or ingenuity at all, just a way of throwing you back on yourself for a few hours. She lay there, imagining that the sky was beginning to lighten, that dawn was imminent, and she realised she had felt calm all night, had never felt fear – and thought that perhaps this was the real dividend of Sergeant Law's game.
    Dawn came with surprising rapidity – she had no idea what the time was: her watch had been taken from her – but it seemed absurd not to be up and about as the world awoke around her, so she went to the river, urinated, and washed her face and hands, drank water, filled her water-bottle and ate her remaining cheese sandwich. She sat on the river bank, chewing, drinking, and again felt more like an animal – a human animal, a creature, a thing of instinct and reflex – than she had in her entire life. It was ridiculous, she knew: she had spent one night out in the open, a balmy night at that, well clothed and sufficiently fed: but for the first time in her two months at Lyne she felt grateful to the place and the curious induction she was being put through. She headed off downstream with a steady, measured, comfortable pace but in her heart she was experiencing both a kind of exhilaration and a liberation that she had never expected.
    After about an hour she saw a metalled single-track road and climbed up from the river valley. Within ten minutes a farmer in a pony and trap offered her a lift to the main road to Selkirk. From there it was a two-mile walk to town and once in Selkirk she would know exactly how far away she was from Lyne.
    A holidaying couple from Durham gave her a lift from Selkirk to Innerleithen and from there she took a local taxi the remaining few miles to Lyne. She ordered the taxi to stop half a mile from the gates and, paying off the driver, circled round the foot of the hill opposite the house so she could approach it from across the meadows, as if she'd just been out for a pre-prandial stroll.
    As she approached the house she could see that Sergeant Law and the Laird were standing on the lawn, looking out for her as she came in. She opened the gate on the bridge over the small stream and strode up to meet them.
    'Last home, Miss Dalton,'