The Steps at Millgate Cutting

The Steps at Millhope Cutting

The steps had always been there, weathered oak silvering in the damp Somerset air, though Cordelia couldn't recall anyone mentioning who had built them or when. They ascended from the quiet country lane where she walked, rising through a tangle of elder and bramble—seven uneven treads that seemed to sink deeper into the earth each spring, as if the ground itself were slowly swallowing them whole.

She had walked this route countless times since moving to Millhope Farm, yet today something felt different. The afternoon light fell strangely through the canopy above, dappled and thick as honey, and the familiar scent of wild garlic carried an undertone she couldn't place—something like woodsmoke and rain-dampened wool.

Cordelia paused at the bottom step, her hand resting on the rough bannister that someone had fashioned from a fallen branch. The wood felt warm beneath her palm, almost alive. Above her, the steps disappeared into shadow, leading to the forgotten field where, somewhere beyond, the old railway cutting lay—where trains had once carried wool and dreams between the mill towns of the north and the ports of the south. Now only remnants remained, she knew, though she rarely climbed up to explore them.

She had come here to think, to escape the weight pressing upon her shoulders. The divorce papers lay unsigned on her kitchen table, David's careful handwriting requesting her to "be reasonable about the cottage." Twenty-three years reduced to property settlements and pension divisions. The garden she had cultivated, the hedgerows she had learned to read like old friends—all of it negotiable, apparently.

As her foot touched the second step, climbing upward, the quality of light shifted—becoming somehow thicker, more golden, as if filtered through older air. The distant motorway traffic that usually provided a constant undertone to country life simply ceased, leaving behind a profound quiet. A thrush began to sing with startling clarity, its notes pure and uncompeted, falling into silence that felt deep enough to hold secrets.

By the fourth step, Cordelia could smell coal smoke drifting down from above.

By the sixth, she could hear the rhythmic chuff of a steam engine.

On the seventh step, at the top, she stopped breathing entirely.

The field before her was no longer overgrown but well-trodden, bordered by hedgerows that had been laid in the old style, their pleached branches forming living walls that hummed with bees. The air tasted of 1943—sharp with the tang of carbolic soap and the sweetness of sugar beet, underlaid with something indefinably warmer, more hopeful than the world she had left seven steps below.

A figure emerged from across the field, walking with the easy gait of someone who belonged entirely to this place and time. He wore a collarless shirt rolled to the elbows and carried a canvas satchel across one shoulder. His hair caught the light like barley in late summer.

"You look lost," he said, and his voice held the soft burr of Gloucestershire with something else beneath it—Polish, perhaps, or Czech.

"I think I might be," Cordelia replied, surprised to find her voice unchanged despite everything else that had shifted around her.

He smiled, and she noticed the way it started in his eyes before reaching his mouth. "I'm Tomasz. Though the locals insist on calling me Tom."

"Cordelia."

"Like the daughter in Lear? The honest one?"

She nodded, touched that he would know this. David had never understood why she treasured her name despite its unwieldiness.

Tomasz gestured across the field. "I was heading to the signal box. I work the late shift there." He fell into step beside her as they walked across the open ground. "But I like to come up here early when the light is good. There's something about the way this place holds the day, don't you think?"

The signal box. Cordelia remembered reading about it in the local history group's pamphlets—demolished in 1963, they'd said, when the line was finally closed. Yet she could see it now in the lower ground beyond the field's far edge, its windows reflecting the afternoon sun like watchful eyes. The railway cutting itself lay down there, hidden by the field's gentle slope.

"Are you from around here?" she asked.

"Kraków, originally. Though that feels like someone else's life now." He glanced at her sideways. "The war scattered us like seeds, didn't it? Some took root in strange soil."

They walked in companionable silence until they reached a small pond, hidden in a depression in the field, surrounded by willows. Tomasz stopped at its edge, his hands clasped behind his back. "I come here most days before my shift," he said quietly. "The evening light on the water... it reminds me of home."

"Poland?"

"No," he said, and his smile was soft with loss. "Home as it could be. Home as I hoped it might become."

Cordelia understood. She had spent years trying to make Millhope Farm into something it wasn't—trying to force David's practical nature to bloom into something more romantic, more rooted. But you couldn't make someone love a place they merely tolerated, any more than you could make them love the version of yourself that belonged entirely to that place.

"I should be getting back," she said, though every part of her wanted to stay, to watch the light change on water that perhaps existed in both times, or neither.

"Will you come again?" Tomasz asked. "Tomorrow, perhaps? The evening light is particularly fine this time of year."

"I'd like that."

He nodded towards the steps, just visible at the field's edge where she had emerged. "The path remembers," he said. "Even when everything else changes, the path remembers."

Cordelia descended the seven steps slowly, feeling the world shift and resettle around her with each downward movement. By the time she reached the bottom, back at the familiar lane, the distant motorway resumed its electric hum of twenty-first-century urgency, and the quality of light returned to its familiar, thinner cast.

But the scent of woodsmoke lingered in her hair.

That evening, she made herself a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table, the divorce papers before her. David's handwriting looked small and cramped, his carefully practical language a world away from the warm burr of Tomasz's voice. She thought of the signal box, demolished decades before she was born, and the pond she had never seen but somehow knew existed up in that forgotten field.

The path remembers.

She pushed the papers aside, unsigned.

For three weeks, Cordelia climbed the steps each evening as the light grew golden. Sometimes Tomasz was there waiting at the top; sometimes she found him down by the signal box, checking the great mechanical levers that controlled trains she could hear but never quite see. They talked about books—he was working his way through the English poets, trying to understand this strange country that had claimed him. They talked about the war, about displacement and the curious alchemy by which strangers became family. They never talked about the impossible nature of their meetings.

"I keep a garden," she told him one evening as they sat beside the pond, watching moorhens navigate between the lily pads. "Or I did. My husband says it's impractical—too much work for two people."

"What do you grow?"

"Anything that will thrive. Herbs, mostly. Some vegetables. Flowers that seed themselves year after year." She paused. "He says I spend too much time making it beautiful and not enough making it useful."

Tomasz was quiet for a long moment, his fingers trailing in the water. "In Kraków, my mother had a garden smaller than this pond. She grew everything—food, flowers, herbs for medicine. When people said it was too much work for one woman, she would say, 'Beauty is always useful. It's just not always obvious how.'"

That night, Cordelia dreamed of a garden where past and present grew side by side, where the roses her grandmother planted climbed frames built by hands that had learned their craft in a different century altogether.

On a Tuesday in late September, she climbed the steps to find the field empty. The signal box stood dark against the evening sky, its windows reflecting nothing. Even the sound of the trains had faded to a whisper that might have been wind in the leaves, or memory, or wishful thinking.

She waited until full darkness fell, then descended the steps alone.

The next evening, and the next, brought only the overgrown field she had always known, the one that led to crumbling remnants and a depression where modern drainage ditches had long since replaced any pond that might once have reflected the changing light.

But on Friday, as she stood hesitating at the bottom of the steps, she heard footsteps on the gravel lane behind her. She turned, heart racing, expecting—hoping for—

"Cordelia?"

The man walking towards her was tall, silver-haired, with the easy gait of someone comfortable in the countryside. He carried a canvas satchel much like the one she remembered, though this one bore the logo of the local rambling association.

"I'm sorry," he said, coming closer. "I don't mean to startle you. I'm Tomás—with an accent, my grandchildren insist on reminding me. I've seen you walking here most evenings."

Tomás. Not Tomasz, but close enough to stop her heart.

"I was just heading home," she managed.

"Ah, the farm up the lane? I heard the owners might be... well, that there might be changes coming."

She studied his face in the fading light. The bone structure was familiar, the way he held his head when thinking. But his eyes were different—sadder, perhaps, or simply older in the way that comes from decades rather than displacement.

"You're not from around here originally," she said. It wasn't a question.

He smiled, and the expression began in his eyes exactly as she remembered. "Gloucestershire, born and bred. Though my grandfather came from Poland after the war. Settled here, worked the railways until they closed the line. Strange to think of trains running through here, isn't it?"

"Not so strange," Cordelia said softly.

They stood together at the foot of the steps, and she found herself telling him about the garden, about David and the divorce papers, about the peculiar way the evening light seemed to hold memories in this particular place. He listened without judgment, occasionally offering observations that felt both new and familiar.

"My wife passed away three years ago," he said, leaning against the wooden post that marked the steps' beginning. "Cancer. We had forty years together, raised two children in the cottage just past where the old signal box used to stand—up in the field there." He gestured upward. "She always said this path had a way of bringing people together when they needed it most."

He looked up the steps, then back at her. "There's a pond up in that field. Hidden from the road. Margaret and I used to bring the children there for picnics. The evening light on the water... it's quite something."

Cordelia's breath caught. "I'd like to see it."

"Would you? Tomorrow, perhaps? We could climb up together. The forecast promises a fine evening."

That night she sat at the kitchen table with a different set of papers—these ones advertising the cottage for sale, David having grown impatient with her delays. She thought of Tomasz, young and displaced and hoping that strange soil might become home. She thought of Tomás, weathered by decades but still finding beauty in the evening light on hidden water.

The path remembers.

Some stories, she realized, were larger than the people who lived them. Some loves were patient enough to wait for the right season, the right light, the right willingness to believe in the possibility of home.

She pushed David's papers aside and reached for her phone instead. There were things to cancel, plans to change, a life to rebuild in the shape of her own choosing rather than someone else's practicalities.

Outside her window, the seven weathered steps led upward into darkness that might hold anything at all—past, present, future, or simply the patient certainty that some paths, once walked, are never truly left behind.

In the morning, she would tend her garden. In the evening, she would climb the steps with Tomás to see the light change on water that had reflected stars and stories for longer than any of them could remember.

Some endings, she thought, were really beginnings wearing different clothes.

The steps would remember. They always had.