Since my first novel, The Light Between Worlds, released two years ago, there’s one character I’ve been asked about by readers on a regular basis.
Tom Harper.
Born into a farming family in the Yorkshire Dales and sent to expensive schools by a wealthy uncle, Tom is a bit of a fish out of water. So he gravitates quite strongly to the novel’s other fish out of water, Evelyn Hapwell, a girl caught between two worlds. Sensitive and poetic yet also deeply practical, Tom’s been a reader favorite since the beginning, and everyone wants to know how he fares after being parted from Evelyn without any answers as to what happened to her.
I’ve always known Tom is alright. Tom is the sort of person who makes his own life alright, and the lives of those who are lucky enough to grow close to him. But I’ve never really known what to say to readers about him, beyond “he’s fine, he’ll land on his feet.”
Until now.
Because as it turns out, if enough people ask the same question over and over my brain will keep working on it, quietly, in the background, and eventually come up with an answer.
So here, dear readers, is a little glimpse at what happens to Tom. It’s not a particularly spoilery piece, if you haven’t read The Light Between Worlds, but I think your understanding and enjoyment of it will be greater if you have 🙂 Either way, I hope you like the following.
WINTER BETWEEN WORLDS
A Light Between Worlds Short Fiction
There was a certain stillness that fell over the Yorkshire Dales on winter nights. The quiet sank down to your bones, untangling knots and righting old wrongs. It cut to the heart of you, leaving silence there as well, until you were no more than shadow and breath. And then, when you’d come to the very end of yourself, the lowing of a cow or bleating of a ewe or distant puttering of a lorry would cut through the calm and remind you that you were alive, in a world full of ordinary and astonishing things.
Tom had always loved the cold, clear breadth of winter nights in hill country—the way the sky hung so thick with stars that the Dales themselves seemed, vaguely, to shine.
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone, he thought automatically to himself as he ducked out of the kitchen and into the chilly outdoor air.
It had been a year of changes—even the farmyard hadn’t escaped untouched. Electric light shone, warm and yellow, from the open door of the barn. Tom stopped for a moment and surveyed the prospect with satisfaction and a touch of pride. He’d paid for the update himself, with some of the money he’d been left by poor Uncle Morris. His parents and Meg had been dead set against it, but Tom had insisted—he’d felt worse over Uncle Morris going than he expected to, and needed to do something that felt good and right and productive with what he’d been given.
There was still enough left over for school anyhow, though after a term Tom thought less of Oxford than he had of St. Joseph’s, even. But this was what Uncle Morris had wanted for him, so he’d see it through to the end. Jamie and his friend Arthur were at the same college and made it bearable, for the most part, and on the less bearable days, there was Ella to write to.
Stuffing his hands into his pockets and hunching his shoulders, Tom glanced along the lane. He could just see the lights from the Sutcliffe farm, down in the valley, and wondered idly what Ella might be doing. Overseeing the chaos of her younger sisters clearing away the supper dishes, perhaps, or brushing her black hair while one of the younger girls regaled her with a story from school. He was certain of one thing—Ella Sutcliffe would not be standing out in the cold, sentimentally staring up the hill towards the Harper farm. That wasn’t her way. She was practical and good and boundlessly generous and she felt, to Tom, like home. He liked her immensely. Might more than like her, if he gave himself half a chance.
But it was early days yet, and Tom had grown a bit cautious when it came to his heart.
Carrying on to the barn he looked up and down the center aisle, ensuring all was well. The cows had been milked by Meg and his father several hours back, and stood in their places, dozing or placidly chewing mouthfuls of hay from their racks. A jet-black barn cat blinked slyly at him from where it lay, paws tucked beneath it on one of the loft steps. Time for lights out.
The night comes in on little cat feet, Tom thought to himself, smiling at the misquote. Flipping the switch beside the door, he plunged the barn into deep shadow.
And hesitated.
Down at the aisle’s far end, one of the smaller doors stood open. It looked out onto nothing—only empty hills to the north that stretched for bare miles between the village and the farms of Edgethorn, and the market town that came next. A shiver ran through Tom—of cold and anticipation and something he didn’t fully understand.
Moving quietly down the aisle, he stopped on the threshold of the open door. Not far away—only ten paces or so, at the edge of the hilltop—stood a familiar and impossible figure. Her back was to him and moonlight gleamed on her fall of golden hair. The vision had a dream-like quality about it, for hadn’t Tom conjured up this meeting in his mind a hundred times? Yet it had never been quite like this. Never at home, outside the familiar environs of the barn. Never on a winter’s night, but always in a summer forest. And the Evelyn of his imagination was aloof or fey by turns, whereas this Ev spun on her heel and went wide-eyed at the sight of him, letting out a strangled gasp.
“Oh, Tom,” she managed to say, and then one or both of them moved—Tom couldn’t be sure which—and they were holding tight to each other, as if they’d never let go. She smelled of woodlands and longing and other worlds, his Evelyn, and he would not have broken the quiet between them for anything.
So they stood together for a very long time, until she spoke first.
“I was thinking of you,” Evelyn said, face pressed to his thick wool jumper, her words coming out slightly muffled. “I was thinking of you and hoping so hard that you’re alright. It’s winter, back—back home, and I still get a bit downcast in winter, and I’ve been feeling ever so badly about you. About not saying goodbye. You have been alright, haven’t you Tom?”
“I am now,” he said roughly. “But Ev, what…”
His voice trailed off. He wanted to ask a hundred questions; so many that they all crowded together at the back of his throat and refused to be spoken. Looking at her, he didn’t suppose it mattered. She’d always been a step apart from the rest of the world—even if she gave him answers, he might not understand.
And anyhow, Ev had asked him something first.
Had he been alright, not just in this moment, but in the one before? Maybe not entirely, but he’d been getting there. It took time—he’d needed years to feel himself again, after losing his brothers in the war. Now it wasn’t just Ev’s absence throwing him off balance either—there was poor fussy old Uncle Morris who he’d thought little of in life, and now found himself unaccountably missing in death. Losing someone wasn’t the sort of thing you stopped feeling, it seemed, no matter how often it happened. But you did learn the shape of it. Learned that grief came and went in waves, that it got better just when you thought it might never fade.
I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all.
“I’m going to be alright,” Tom said with nod. “I’m not quite there yet, but I think it’s just around the corner. What about you, though, Ev? I don’t have to know where you’ve gone, or what happened, but I wish you could tell me that you’re alright, too.”
“I am.”
As Evelyn spoke she stepped back, out of the circle of his arms, and smiled. There was a softness and a gentleness about her, a fragility, that he remembered well. But she wore it better now. She stood carefully, mindful of her own borders and difficulties, whereas before she’d so often seemed anguished and unsettled, as if beneath her skin there lay nothing but splintered glass.
Evelyn glanced down the slope of the hill to where a copse of trees shook and swayed in a sudden wind. Shadows skittered about between the trees, dancing, colliding, forming the ghostly shapes of hinds and harts.
“You’re sure you’re not unhappy?” Tom asked desperately, because already, it felt as if she was slipping away. As if he’d blink and find her gone. And he realized, with a sudden pang, that this was the thing he’d been waiting for. To know that Evelyn Hapwell, wherever she was, was not unhappy, but glad. If he could be certain of it—certain down to his soul—he could get back to the business of living again. Back to being whole. “Promise me you’re not, Ev. I hated knowing you were unhappy before.”
She looked at him, and the force of her gaze ran through Tom like fire and water. She was as he remembered and imagined now—no longer just a golden-haired girl, but something untouchable and unknowable. At once too little and too much for him to hold onto.
“I swear it,” she murmured, her voice the low music of a November wind. “I swear it on the sun and the moon and the trees and the Great Wood’s own guardian. I’ll always be caught between places, and carry more joy and more sorrow than most. But I’m not unhappy, Tom. Not anymore.”
“Well, that’s all I’ve ever needed to know,” he said simply.
Crossing the little distance between them, Evelyn pressed a kiss like gossamer to his cheek. He caught a last hint of the scent of her, of old leaves and rich earth and briny air. Then she turned and made her way down the hill, and when she’d got halfway, he knew he ought not watch her leave. That it was not meant for him to see the manner of her going. Tom shut his eyes like a child, and waited.
When he looked again, Evelyn was gone.
Overhead, the stars carried on shining, passionless and white and pure. A frigid breeze went mourning over the heather, and one of the cows sighed heavily from within the barn. Tom took his hands from his pockets and blew on them, and thought of the impossible and of the ordinary, and how he believed, quite fiercely, in both.
He’d had the one tonight already, and found himself in want of the other.
It was a quarter hour’s walk down the lane to the Sutcliffe farm, and that was fine, because Tom wanted the cold and the still and the movement of his own two feet to clear his head. He set a brisk pace, and by the time he stood on the Sutcliffes’ doorstep, was red-cheeked and a little breathless.
His knock set off an explosion indoors—a chaos of barking dogs and gleeful children, and then the door swung open and Ella Sutcliffe stood before him, small and black-haired and merry.
“Do you want to take a walk with me?” Tom asked in a rush, before he could lose his nerve. It wasn’t that he’d never kept company with Ella before, but he hadn’t done it like this—hadn’t ever come to her when he needed someone with him, to help make sense of the strangeness and wonder of living.
Ella tilted her head to one side and frowned, as if pondering the request.
“With you?” she said doubtfully, but there was already a smile in her eyes and at her edges. “Of course. Wait here while I get my things.”
She was back in less than a minute, wrapped up against the cold, and when she slipped her arm through Tom’s it was comfortable, so comfortable, as if they’d always been this way. He liked that. He liked comfortable and worn-in and familiar, just as much as he liked the unknown and inexplicable.
“Penny,” Ella said, when they’d gone a short way down the lane in silence.
Tom frowned. “I was thinking…I was thinking of spaces between people. Not yet a breach, but an expansion, someone called them once. Like we never really lose each other. We just grow, and end up capable of holding onto more. I don’t suppose I make much sense.”
“Not always,” Ella answered honestly. “But I like your nonsense anyway, Tom Harper.”
“Do you really?” he asked in surprise, looking down at her. She was tidy and bright-eyed as a robin in a hedgerow, and every bit as quick and fine a thing.
“Yes.” Ella reached up with one gloved finger to tap his nose. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
A stiff gust of wind chose that moment to rush down the hillside and whirl about them, bringing a scattering of frost with it.
Ella shook her head. “Frosty wind made moan, indeed. Though truth be told, I never mind hill country on a bitter night—my Gran used to say the longer the dark, the lovelier the stars. Isn’t that pretty? And don’t the Dales just shine, with the snow and the moonlight on their peaks?”
“They do,” Tom agreed. And though there were parts of him that would always remain untouchable and unknowable, at once too much and too little to be spoken of or shared, he felt, in that moment, both known and understood.
