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He’d discovered Wylding Hall’s library tucked away in the oldest part of the house. I hadn’t ventured there yet.
    But Julian had. That’s how we got together. He was sitting outside beneath one of those massive oak trees, reading some massive book. I pretended to grab at it and he got very stroppy, so I apologized immediately. I was still getting to know all of them—I was still very much the new girl. Very conscious of being wrong-footed.
    Julian couldn’t have been sweeter, though: said he hadn’t meant to lash out at me. Just it was a very old book he’d found, something from the old Tudor library, and he wasn’t even sure we were meant to go in there. Apparently, he’d found the library the second day, on one of his pre-dawn rambles, and had been taking some of the books back to his bedroom to read.
    He was impressed when I told him I’d been reading Rimbaud and John Clare. You don’t know Clare? The mad poet who slept in hedgerows?
And little Wren that many a time hath sought
Shelter from showers in huts where I did dwell
In early spring the tennant of the plain
Tenting my sheep and still they come to tell
The happy stories of the past again.”
    I could quote him from memory. I think that’s when Julian decided he’d take me seriously.
    He had some ancient-looking volumes under his bed. Leather-bound. Some of them were quite small: the size of your hand. I remember feeling excited, thinking he was going to show me some weird esoteric thing he’d discovered, like an incunabulum or something like that.
    But it was just a paperback by Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and Profane .
    “Do you know this?” He held it in those big hands as though it were a butterfly he’d caught. “It’s brilliant. There’s two kinds of time, he says—sacred time and profane time. The outside, everyday world—you know, where you go to work, go to school, sort of thing—that’s profane time.
    “But things like Christmas or holidays, any kind of religious ritual or shared experience, like performing together, or a play—those take place in sacred time. It’s like this—”
    He grabbed a pen and drew on the inside cover of the paperback. A little Venn diagram: two intersecting circles.
    “—a circle within a circle. Do you see? This big circle is profane time. This one’s sacred time. The two coexist, but we only step into sacred time when we intentionally make space for it—like at Christmas, or the Jewish High Holy Days—or if something extraordinary happens. You know that feeling you get, that time is passing faster or slower? Well, it really is moving differently. When you step into sacred time, you’re actually moving sideways into a different space that’s inside the normal world. It’s folded in. Do you see?”
    I stared at him and shook my head. “No,” I said, then sniffed at his hair. “You been smoking already, Julian?”
    He frowned. He didn’t like it when you got on him about drugs. “Not yet. All right, what about this …”
    He scrabbled at his desk for a blank sheet of paper, and I just watched him. You’ve seen the photos, so you know how beautiful he was when he was young. But really, they barely captured him. He stooped so much of the time, you never saw how tall he actually was.
    He wasn’t a sylph—he was big-boned, long, lanky arms and legs, and that marvelous hair. Thick and straight and glossy: it felt like honey pouring through your fingers. He always wore the same brown corduroy jacket, a little short in the arms, so you could see his wrists. And his wristwatch: an old-fashioned watch that you had to wind every day. Expensive—I think he’d received it when he graduated from secondary school. Lots of fancy dials and second hands—is there something smaller than a second? If there is, Julian’s watch had a hand that measured that. He was always checking it, and I was always checking him . I could have stared at him all day. I did stare at him all day, sometimes, when we were