The brass bell above the village hall door had not stopped ringing since Pell Overholt's broad palm seized its leather tongue, and the sound carried across the cobbles with the insistence of a rooster who had mistaken the hour.
Inside, the hall smelled of lamp oil and damp wool and the faint vinegar tang of bodies pressed close in a room never meant to hold so many. Willow Greave stood at the back, her shoulders against the cold plaster, watching the room the way her grandmother had taught her to watch a river: for the place where the current bent.
The river in question was the Hollowfern, which for three mornings now had flowed the wrong way up the valley, brown water carrying with it the uprooted turfs of the peatworks' southern bank and depositing them, with the quiet malice of a misplaced letter, in the village's drinking-water cistern. The cistern keeper, a stooped woman named Bessa Tamm, had begun the meeting by setting a sodden turf on the mayor's table and saying nothing.
Mayor Pell Overholt surveyed the turf as one might survey an unfamiliar dish at a foreign table. He was a man who had grown into his position the way bread grows into a stale loaf, slowly and with a certain resigned density. His waistcoat strained. His smile strained further.
"Friends," he began, and the word arrived so coated in warmth it took a moment to notice there was no substance beneath. "Friends, neighbors, ratepayers. We are met, as ever, to address the small concerns of our small and beloved village."
"Small," repeated Fenna Underhill from the second row. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. "The river has reversed its course, Pell. The fish are walking upstream on their fins. And your turnips."
She gestured. On a side table, arranged on a clean white cloth as if for a harvest display, sat six turnips. Each one bore, in its swollen crown where the sprout ought to emerge, a row of small, sharp, enamel-white points. They looked like the smiles of children who have heard a joke no one else has. They looked like teeth.
"These," said Fenna, "are not small."
Overholt's smile held. It was a smile that had been practiced in mirrors, polished by use, and could survive the entrance of a small armed force. "My dear Fenna, the soil of the Hollowfern peatworks has always produced vegetables of, shall we say, character. I recall the winter of '07, the carrots with the unfortunate resemblance to..."
"The teeth," said Fenna, "are inside the turnip. They are arranged in a jaw. They bite."
A murmur moved through the room, the sort of murmur that begins as doubt and ends as something else. Willow felt it against her shoulders, a small shift in the room's weight. The lamp flame in the nearest sconce bent sideways, though there was no draft.
"I have consulted," Overholt continued, with the careful patience of a man laying bricks over a pit, "the most learned authorities available to me in the district. The river's reversal, while unusual, may be attributed to the recent works undertaken at the southern bank for the improvement of drainage. A temporary measure. Quite reversible."
"The southern bank works," said Cosmo Quill from somewhere near the door, his adenoidal voice cutting through the murmur with the precision of a paper knife, "were undertaken without the requisite permits from the Crown Inspector of Peatlands."
Overholt's smile flickered. It was the first time Willow had seen it do so.
"Young Cosmo," Overholt said, turning with his palms open as if presenting the boy to the room. "Always so diligent in his paperwork. I commend the thoroughness of the junior clerks of this parish. It is, as they say, a virtue."
"The permits," Cosmo said, and his voice was faster now, the words tumbling over each other like coins from a torn purse, "would have required an environmental impact assessment. Which would have noted that the southern bank sits atop an aquifer. Which feeds the Hollowfern. Which feeds, I believe, the village."
A silence opened, the kind that has a floor you can drop things down.
Willow watched Overholt's hands. They were large, soft, well-kept hands, the hands of a man who had never turned a turf in his life. They had gone very still at the wrist, the way a cat's tail goes still before the pounce.
"Quite right, quite right," Overholt murmured, and the warmth was back, thicker than before, as if the silence had only seasoned it. "The diligent Mr. Quill raises a procedural point. I shall, of course, look into it. Retroactively. After we have addressed the matter at hand."
He turned back to the room. He was good at turning back to rooms.
"The matter at hand," he said, "is the well-being of this village. Our beloved Hollowfern. The good people who, in their trusting way, have placed me in a position of some modest responsibility."
"You placed yourself," said a voice from the back. It belonged to Renwick Vellum, who had come in late and stood with his arms folded and his hat still on, which in Hollowfern was a statement so deliberate it bordered on sedition. Beside him, his brother Pol Vellum leaned against the wall with the boneless ease of a man who considered most upright postures a personal insult.
Overholt chose not to hear. He had, Willow had noticed, the enviable ability to discard sentences that did not serve him, the way a housewife discards burnt crusts.
"I have, in my possession," Overholt said, and here his hand went to the inside pocket of his coat, where a folded paper resided with the air of something both secret and impatient, "a small volume. A book. Belonging, in fact, to the late and much lamented Miren Beckford, whose memory I am sure we all hold..."
He paused. He was, Willow realized, watching the room for the name's effect. He was gauging.
It worked. The name worked. The room's murmur changed register, dropping into a lower key. A woman in the third row made a small sound, half breath, half word. A man near the window removed his cap. Willow felt her own chest tighten around the name, around the way it still lived in the village like a stone at the bottom of a well.
"Belonging," Overholt continued, softer now, and his voice had taken on the gentle solicitous tone he reserved for grieving widows and recalcitrant tax defaulters, "to Miren Beckford, who was taken from us, these many months past. A small book, bound in pale leather, found among the effects of the peatworks' southern she'd, which had been, I am given to understand, a place she sometimes visited."
He did not produce the book. He let the room imagine it. He was, Willow had to admit, very good at his work.
"The book," he said, "contains, among other things, certain observations. Concerning the river. Concerning the soil. Concerning the behavior of root vegetables."
The turnips grinned from their cloth.
"I have, of course, no intention of acting upon the ravings of a young woman whose mind was, as the kindest among us will acknowledge, somewhat given to fancy. But I felt the council should be aware. In the interest of transparency. In the interest of the village."
He opened his palms again. There it was, the openness, the wounded openness, the openness that dared you to strike it.
Fenna Underhill rose from her seat. She was a small woman, and her rising did not, in itself, constitute a threat. But she had a way of rising that suggested the chair had been the only thing restraining her.
"Pell," she said. "What did the book say about the turnips?"
Overholt blinked. It was a small blink, a blink that in another man might have been involuntary. In Overholt, Willow suspected, it was a tool.
"It spoke, I believe, of omens. Of signs in the soil."
"And the river?"
"Of disturbances in the water."
"And what," Fenna asked, and her voice had gone very quiet, very careful, the way a person handles a thing that might detonate, "did it say happens after the omens?"
The room waited. The lamp flames waited. Even the turnips, those small toothed things, seemed to wait.
Overholt sat down. He did it gracefully, the way he did everything, with the studied ease of a man who had rehearsed the act of sitting down in front of a looking glass.
"It spoke," he said, and his voice had lost, for the first time, its lacquer, "of a binding. And of an unbinding. Of an old agreement, broken. And of a price, come due."
The room exhaled. Willow, against her wall, felt the exhale pass through her, cold at the edges.
"An old agreement," Fenna repeated. "Between whom?"
But Overholt had recovered himself. The smile was back. The warmth was back. He spread his hands, the great soft hands, and said, "Between this village and that which lies beneath it, I should think. But one must not take such things too seriously. The Beckford girl was a romantic. She saw portents in puddle water."
"You found her book in your peatworks she'd," said Cosmo Quill. "Her book. In your she'd. How did it come to be there?"
A silence fell that had edges.
"I have no idea," said Pell Overholt, and he smiled, and the smile held, and the meeting, as meetings do, began to fracture along the lines of who could bear to look at that smile and who could not.
The silence that followed Overholt's smile had the texture of spoiled meat.
Fenna Underhill did not look away from him. Her hands lay flat on the table, palms down, the fingers spread and very still, as though she were holding down something that wanted to rise.
"Mr. Overholt," she said, and her voice had the particular gentleness of a woman choosing her words the way a surgeon chooses a blade, "this meeting was called to discuss disturbances. The river has changed. The bog has changed. The cattle have changed. My sister-in-law's goose laid an egg with no shell and wept when it was taken. We did not come here to be charmed."
"Charmed." Overholt's eyebrows rose. "I am not sure I take your meaning, Mrs. Underhill."
"I think you do."
The lamp threw their shadows long across the boards, two dark shapes leaning toward each other like disputants at a wake.
It was Cosmo Quill who spoke next, and he spoke too quickly, the words tumbling out with the breathless quality of a man who has been saving them and cannot keep them in another moment.
"I should like to say," he said, and cleared his throat, and started again, "I should like to say, for the record, that the book in question was not in the peatworks she'd in any proper sense. It was in the peatworks she'd in the sense that, that is, certain papers come into the hands of certain clerks in the course of their duties, and those papers are not, strictly speaking, supposed to be removed from the office, but are removed, sometimes, for the purposes of, of copying, or reference, or." He stopped. Drew breath. "Or other purposes."
Overholt turned his head toward Cosmo Quill with the slow precision of a man watching a window he had believed closed swing open in a draft.
"Cosmo," he said, "my dear fellow. What are you about?"
"Nothing," said Cosmo Quill, and his voice cracked on the nothing, on the single syllable, as though the word itself were a stone in his throat. "Nothing at all. I only wished to clarify the location of the, the item in question. For the, the record."
"The record," Overholt repeated.
"Yes."
"Of which there is no record."
"There could be," said Cosmo Quill, and swallowed again, "if one were to keep one."
The room shifted. It was the shift of a congregation when the sermon turns toward a member of the congregation, when the general becomes the specific. Every face in the room turned, by degrees, toward Cosmo Quill, and Cosmo Quill, who had been trying very hard to occupy as little space as possible, seemed to grow smaller in his chair, his shoulders rising toward his ears, his hands disappearing into his lap.
"Out with it, Quill," said a man near the door, one of the smallholders, his face creased like a brown leaf. "What are you saying?"
Cosmo Quill looked at the man. He looked at Fenna. He looked at Overholt, and his gaze could not rest there. He looked at his own knees.
"I am saying," he said, and his voice had gone very small, "that I have seen certain papers, in the course of my duties at the peatworks, which suggest that the operations at Hollowfern are not, are not strictly, are not in fact." He paused. Drew breath. Started a third time. "That the drainage of the upper moss has proceeded in advance of any license from the Crown, and that the timber cut from the Beckford property was timber for which no record of purchase exists, and that there are letters, letters in the factor's own hand, regarding a, a sum of money, paid to a person unknown, on a date subsequent to the disappearance of Miren Beckford."
The silence that followed was not the silence of before. The silence of before had edges. This silence had a floor, and walls, and a ceiling, and a door that had been shut for a long time and was now, very slowly, swinging open.
Overholt did not smile.
This was, in itself, remarkable. The smile had been his constant, his signature, his instrument. Without it, his face was a different face altogether. It was the face of a man who had been handed, in a public room, in front of witnesses, a thing he had not expected to be handed. It was the face of a man calculating the cost.
"My dear Quill," he said, and his voice was still warm, still polished, but there was a grain beneath it now, a roughness, like silk drawn over a rasp. "You have been working too hard. The peat season is a strain upon us all. I think perhaps a few days' rest."
"I have not been working too hard," said Cosmo Quill. "I have been reading too carefully."
It was, in that moment, the bravest thing anyone in the room had ever heard Cosmo Quill say. It was also, by the look of him, the most terrifying. His hands had come out of his lap and were now gripping the edge of the table, and the knuckles of those hands were white, and there was a tremor in them that he could not, try as he might, suppress.
Fenna Underhill laid her hand, very lightly, upon his wrist.
"Steady, Mr. Quill," she said.
"I am steady," said Cosmo Quill, in a voice that suggested he was anything but. "I am perfectly steady. I have been steady for three years, Mrs. Underhill. Three years of copying things I should not have copied. Three years of pretending I had not seen what I had seen. Three years of being afraid to open my mouth in this village for fear that what came out would be the truth, and the truth would be the end of me."
"No one here wishes to be the end of you, Mr. Quill," said Fenna.
"Mr. Overholt does," said Cosmo Quill, and then he looked at Overholt, and the look was the look of a man who had decided, at last, that the cost of silence was greater than the cost of speech.
The room drew breath.
Overholt rose. The act of rising was, as his sitting had been, graceful, and yet there was something else in it now, something of the cat when the cat has been seen, and there is no longer any point in pretending to be asleep.
"Gentlemen," he said. "Ladies. I see that this meeting has taken a turn which I can only describe as irregular. I propose that we adjourn, take a little refreshment, allow tempers to cool, and reconvene at a later date when, perhaps, we may all approach these matters with the, the cooler heads that they require."
"The heads in this room are as cool as they are going to get," said Fenna. "Sit down, Mr. Overholt."
He did not sit.
"This is a public house," he said. "I am a guest in it. And I will not be detained."
"Detained," said the smallholder near the door, and spat into the rushes. "Listen to him. Detained. As if he was the one in custody."
"I am not the one in custody," said Overholt, and his voice had lost its warmth entirely now, and what remained was the polished thing beneath, the lacquer with the lacquer stripped away, the bright metal of a man who has decided that charm is no longer the instrument of choice. "I am the factor of the Hollowfern peatworks. I am a man of business. I am accountable to my principals in the city. And I will not be detained in a village pub by a, a woman, and a clerk, and a pack of peat-cutters with, with bog fever in their heads and old wives' tales in their mouths."
The word woman landed in the room like a stone thrown into still water. The rings went out. Fenna's hand, still on Cosmo Quill's wrist, did not move, but the tendons of her arm stood out, suddenly, as though she were holding something back.
"You will watch your tongue in this house," she said, very softly.
"I will watch my tongue where I choose."
"You will watch it here."
The two of them looked at each other across the table. The lamp flames guttered. A draught, from somewhere, moved along the floor, and the rushes sighed.
It was the barkeep who broke it. He was a heavy man, with a heavy face, and he came around the bar with a cloth in one hand and a matter in the other, and he said, in the voice of a man who has broken up a hundred brawls and means to break up a hundred more, "There will be no trouble in this house. There has never been trouble in this house. And if there is trouble in this house tonight, it will be the last trouble the man who starts it ever has in this house, for he will not be welcome in it again. Is that clear, Mr. Overholt?"
Overholt looked at the barkeep. The barkeep looked at Overholt.
"It is clear," said Overholt, after a moment, and he sat down. The grace was gone from the sitting. It was the sitting of a man who had been put in his place, and who knew it, and who was already, in the back of his mind, calculating the cost of the putting.
Fenna withdrew her hand from Cosmo Quill's wrist. The young clerk let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for some time. The smallholder near the door muttered something under his breath that might have been a prayer or might have been a curse, and was probably both.
"Now then," said Fenna, and her voice was once again the voice of a woman presiding, a woman in charge, a woman who had held this village together by the simple expedient of refusing to let it fall apart. "We have heard a great deal tonight. We have heard of disturbances in the soil, and in the water, and in the bog, and in the cattle. We have heard of a book, and of papers, and of payments, and of a young woman who walked out onto the moors and did not come back. We have heard enough, I think, to know that this village has a trouble, and that the trouble is not a trouble that can be set right with a meeting and a glass of ale."
She paused. The room listened.
"What is needed," she said, "is someone to look into it. Properly. Without fear and without favor. Someone who can be trusted to go where the trouble is, and to come back, and to tell us what she has found."
The room shifted again. It was the shift of a congregation when the sermon turns toward a member of the congregation, when the general becomes the specific. Every face in the room turned, by degrees, toward the corner where Willow Greave sat, and Willow, who had been trying very hard to occupy as little space as possible, felt the weight of every one of those gazes settle upon her like a hand laid on her shoulder.
She did not look up. She looked at the grain of the table beneath her fingers, at the whorls and the small knots, at the place where a previous table had been joined to a previous table in a previous century.
"Mrs. Greave," said Fenna Underhill, and her voice was not unkind, but it was not a voice that permitted refusal. "Your grandmother was the hedge-witch of this village for forty years. She knew the moors as I know my kitchen. She knew the moss. She knew the river. She knew the things that live under the moss and in the river and in the air above the moors when the mist is thick."
Willow's mouth was dry. The ale in her hand was warm and flat and tasted of nothing.
"She cannot speak for herself," said Fenna. "She has not spoken for herself for many years. But her books are here, and her knowledge is here, and her blood is in you, whether you wish it or no. There is no one else in this village who can do what must be done. There is no one else who knows what you know, even if you do not yet know that you know it."
"What," said Willow, and her voice came out smaller than she had intended, a scrap of a thing, a thread of a voice, "what must be done?"
"You must go," said Fenna Underhill. "You must go to the places where the disturbances are. You must look at them. You must listen to them. And you must come back and tell us what you have seen and what you have heard, and what, if anything, can be done to set the village right again."
The lamp threw Willow's shadow long across the floor, a long dark shape that reached almost to the door.
"I am a cartographer's apprentice," she said. "I am not a hedge-witch."
"No," said Fenna. "But your grandmother was. And her mother before her. And her mother before that, back to a time when this village was not yet a village, but only a few huts on a wet hill. The knowledge does not vanish because we do not speak of it. It waits. It waits in the blood, and in the bone, and in the part of the mind that knows things before the mouth can give them names."
Willow looked up, at last, from the grain of the table. She looked at Fenna. She looked at Cosmo Quill, who met her gaze with a look of such naked sympathy that she had to look away. She looked at Pell Overholt, who was watching her with an expression she could not read, and did not want to read.
She thought of Miren Beckford, who had walked out onto the moors and not come back.
She thought of the book in the peatworks she'd.
She thought of the rabbit in the bog, and the fish in the river, and the goose that had wept.
She thought of her grandmother, in the cot behind the house, with her hands folded on the quilt and her eyes open to nothing.
"All right," she said.
The two words fell into the room like two coins into a well.
"All right," she said again, and this time her voice was steadier, though her hands were not. "I will go. I will look. I will listen. But I am not my grandmother. I do not know what she knew. I may come back and have nothing to tell you."
"Then you will come back and have nothing to tell us," said Fenna. "And that will be something too. That will be the truth, at least, in a village that has had very little of it lately."
She rose. The meeting, such as it was, was over.
Willow sat for a moment longer, in the warm and empty room, with the lamp throwing her shadow long across the boards, and the taste of the flat ale still in her mouth, and the weight, settling into her bones, of the thing she had agreed to do.
Cosmo Quill was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs.
He stood in the narrow passage between the parlour door and the front step, with his hat in his hands and his face arranged into an expression of patient inquiry, as though he had been standing there for some time and had had ample opportunity to compose himself into something resembling an ordinary human being. The lamp from the parlour threw his shadow up the wall behind him, thin and trembling slightly with the draft from the street.
"Miss Greave," he said, when she had nearly walked into him. "I wonder if I might have a word."
Astrid stopped. She had been thinking, in the woolly way that one thinks when one has agreed to something terrible, about the shape of the journey ahead of her, and the weight of the satchel she would need to pack, and whether Fenna had meant it about the money or whether that had been a kindness too, and so she had not seen him until he spoke, and now she stood very close to him in the passage, and could smell the ink on his fingers and the dust of the ledgers and, beneath both, the faint and particular scent of paper that had been stored too long in a damp place.
"Mr Quill," she said. "I thought you had gone."
"I had nearly gone," he said. "And then I thought I had not. And then I thought I had better not, because there is a thing I ought to say, and it will not keep, and I am not at all certain that I shall have the courage to say it twice."
She looked at him. He was a small man, she saw now that she was paying attention, with shoulders that curved toward each other as though he had spent a long time hunched over desks, and eyes that were the pale blue of a winter sky seen through dirty glass, and hands that were ink-stained to the wrist and trembling slightly, though whether from the cold or from some interior agitation she could not tell. He had the look, she thought, of a man who had been frightened for a long time and had grown so used to the fright that he had forgotten what his face was supposed to do without it.
"Come in," she said, and opened the parlour door, and let him past her into the room.
He sat in the same chair he had sat in before, at the end of the table nearest the lamp, and he put his hat on his knee, and he looked at her with the expression of a man who is about to say something that costs him.
"The Ledger," he said.
She sat down across from him. The lamp was between them, and the flat ale was still on the table, and the smell of the lamp oil and the dust and the old wood was all around them, and outside the wind had risen a little and was moving the shutters of the parlour window with a soft and rhythmic knock that was almost, but not quite, the rhythm of a human hand.
"The Ledger of the Moors," she said. "Yes. What of it?"
"It is damaged," he said. "The spine. You saw it, I think, when Fenna took it from the chest. The leather is cracked along the length of it, and the stitching has given way in three places, and the boards are starting to separate from the text block. It has been a long time since anyone who knew what they were about has touched it, and a longer time since anyone who cared has bothered to mend it."
"I saw," she said.
"I am a bookbinder," he said, and the word, in his mouth, had the particular weight of a thing that has been said before, to himself, many times, in the dark. "I was trained in London, in a shop in Clerkenwell, by a man named Halloran who had very large hands and very small patience and who taught me, among other things, that a book is not a thing but a promise, and that to let a promise fall apart is a kind of murder, though not the kind that gets you hanged."
He paused, and looked at his hat, and looked at the lamp, and looked at the table.
"The Ledger of the Moors," he said, "is a promise that has been falling apart for a long time. And I would like to mend it."
Astrid looked at him. The wind knocked at the shutters. The lamp guttered slightly and then steadied.
"Why are you telling me this?" she said. "Why not tell Fenna? She is the one who took it from the chest. She is the one who carried it across the village in the rain. She is the one, I think, who would understand what you are offering."
"Fenna," he said, and smiled, and the smile was a thin and careful thing, "would say yes, and thank you, and would not ask what the mend would cost her. And I would mend the Ledger, and she would be grateful, and the gratitude would sit between us like an unpaid debt, and I would spend the rest of my life wondering whether she had understood what she had agreed to, and whether I had been honest with her, and whether the honesty had been the kind that helps or the kind that merely salves the conscience of the person offering it."
He stopped. He looked at her. He had, she saw, the courage of a man who has decided to be afraid of the right thing.
"I am telling you," he said, "because you are the one who is going to walk out onto the moors. And I would like to mend the Ledger before you go. And I would like to do it for nothing, in coin, if you will do something for me in return. A favour. A favour I will not name now. A favour that may be nothing, or may be something, depending on what you find out there, and on what becomes of the Ledger, and on what becomes of me."
Astrid sat very still. The wind knocked at the shutters. The lamp steadied itself again, and the shadows in the room lay down, and the smell of the lamp oil was strong and warm.
"A favor you will not name," she said.
"A favor," he said, "that I will name when I know what it is. When I know whether the thing I am afraid of is the thing that has happened, or some other thing, or nothing at all. A favor that may turn out to be a small thing, like carrying a letter, or a large thing, like keeping a secret, or a terrible thing, like telling the truth to someone who does not want to hear it. I do not know. I cannot know. And I would rather ask you, who are leaving, and may not come back, than ask Fenna, who is staying, and will."
He had not, she noticed, looked away from her. The courage, such as it was, was holding.
"Mr Quill," she said. "I do not know what you are afraid of. I do not know what you have done, or what you have not done, or what you have seen, or what you have chosen not to see. I do not know whether you are a good man who has done a bad thing, or a bad man who has done a good thing, or a man who has done neither and is simply afraid of the dark, as all the rest of us are afraid of the dark, in our various ways."
"I do not know either," he said. "That is, in part, the trouble."
"Then I will tell you what I will do," she said. "I will let you mend the Ledger. I will carry it with me when I go, if Fenna is willing, because I think it belongs out there, on the moors, in whatever weather there is, and not in a chest in a parlour where no one reads it. And when I come back, if I come back, you may name your favor, and I will hear it, and I will tell you, then, whether I will do it."
She paused.
"I will not promise more than that."
He looked at her for a long moment. The wind knocked at the shutters. The lamp threw their shadows long across the boards.
"That is more than I deserve," he said, "and exactly what I hoped for."
He rose, and put on his hat, and stood for a moment in the warm and lamplit room, and she saw that his eyes were bright, though whether with tears or with the lamplight she could not tell, and did not ask.
"I will come for the Ledger in the morning," he said. "Before the post. Before the cart. Before anyone else is awake to wonder why the bookbinder of the village is up and about at an hour when bookbinders are not usually up and about."
"Thank you, Mr Quill," she said.
"Thank you, Miss Greave," he said, and went out into the dark, and she heard his footsteps on the path, and then the gate, and then nothing but the wind.
She sat for a while in the empty room. The lamp burned. The flat ale cooled. The smell of the ink on the table, where Quill's hat had rested, was faint and particular, and would be gone by morning.
She thought of Miren Beckford, who had walked out onto the moors and not come back.
She thought of the Ledger, and the favor, and the morning.
She thought of the rabbit in the bog, and the fish in the river, and the goose that had wept.
She rose, and put out the lamp, and went up the stairs in the dark, and the house settled around her like a hand, and the wind moved in the thatch, and somewhere, out beyond the village, the moors waited.