The hedgerow leaned close, hawthorn and bramble pressed flat against the passenger window, and Barnaby watched the green blur with the careful attention of a man who had decided to say nothing.
Clementine's hands rested easy on the wheel, her fingers loose, her gaze set on some middle distance past the windscreen. The vehicle, an old maroon thing her father had coaxed through two decades and three overhauls, rolled along the chalk road at a pace that kept the engine turning without asking it to strain. Beneath the floorboards, that engine ran with a low thrum, a sound like a kettle left too long on the hob, and the thrum traveled up through the seat and settled into the bones of Barnaby's jaw.
It was, he supposed, a kind of music. A long-buried song brought up from some deep well of pistons and cranks. Clementine had said as much the night before, when she had come to the forge with her arms folded and her chin set. "She wants to see the crossing," Clementine had told him. "She says she will not sign anything until she has stood on the land. I would rather you were there when she does."
Barnaby had not asked why. He had known why. He had been at the council meeting in the back room of the Hare and Hounds when Mira Ashbrook's letter was read aloud, the spidery copperplate that spoke of options and considerations and a sum of money large enough to make the village forget its own name. He had watched the faces of his neighbors while the words went around the table, and he had seen the slow, terrible arithmetic of hope.
So he had come. He sat now in the maroon automobile with his cap on his knee and his silence between his teeth, and he watched the road unspool.
In the small rectangular mirror above the windscreen, he could see Mira Ashbrook.
She sat behind Clementine, her posture arranged with the kind of care that suggested she had been taught, very early, that how one sat was a kind of speech. Her traveling coat was dove gray, her gloves the color of bone, and her face carried the composure of a woman who had learned to keep her weather behind her eyes. A leather notebook lay open on her lap, and a pencil of silver and black turned between her fingers as if she were taking notes on the hedgerows or perhaps on the two people in the front of the car.
She had spoken only once since they had left the inn at Ashford. "The hedgerows are remarkably well kept," she had said, and Clementine had answered something about the tenant farmers and the autumn clip, and then the quiet had come back, and Barnaby had been glad of it.
He did not trust the quiet.
The road dipped toward a valley, and a brook caught the midmorning sun and threw it back in pieces. Somewhere out of sight, a rookery lifted its old complaint into the chalk air, and Clementine eased her foot off the throttle so the engine's voice could carry.
"You rebuilt this yourself?" Mira asked. Her tone was precise, each word placed like a pin in a cushion.
Clementine glanced toward the mirror. "Most of her. The block is original. My father found her in a barn outside Bristol, half-eaten by rust and very angry about it."
"She sounds like family."
Clementine's mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. "Something like that."
Mira made a small note in her book. The pencil scratched once, twice, and was put away. "You learned the work from him?"
"I learned most things from him." Clementine's drawl had softened further, the rasp at the back of her throat more pronounced when she spoke of the old man. "He used to say a map is a kind of promise. You draw a road, you are telling the fellow who comes after you that someone has already walked it and come back to tell about it."
"A surveyor, then."
"A cartographer. He made maps for the railways, before the railways stopped needing new ones. Then he made maps of the woods, the standing stones, the old ways. He said no one had asked him to. He said he had asked himself."
Barnaby heard the engine shift a half tone as the road steepened. He thought of the maps hanging in Clementine's front parlor, the ones she had not had the heart to take down. He thought of the smell of the parlor, of paper and pipe tobacco and the lavender she kept in the blue jar on the mantel. He thought of how she had stood at the kitchen table last winter and spread her father's debts across the wood like a hand of cards she could not put down.
He did not speak. The hedgerows slid past, and a gate opened onto a field of new wheat, and the field was the green of a struck match.
"You knew him," Mira said. It was not a question.
"I knew him," Clementine answered. "Everyone between here and the coast knew him. He measured the river three times because he did not trust it the first two."
There was the smallest pause. Then Mira said, "I have seen his work. The survey of the Marigold estate is in the British Archive. It is what brought me here, in fact."
Barnaby felt something shift in the car, a weight redistributed. Clementine's hands did not move on the wheel, but her shoulders drew back a quarter inch.
"Is that so," Clementine said.
"The survey, and the addenda. He made additions in his own hand. Notes about the wells, the orchard, the old millrace. He marked the places where the standing stones had been before the farmers pulled them down." Mira's voice was still precise, still smooth, but there was a new attention in it, the attention of someone who had come a long way to find a specific door. "He cared for the place."
"He lived there," Clementine said.
"He lived there. Yes."
Barnaby watched the road. A blackbird lifted from the hawthorn and crossed their path, and the car passed through the place where it had been. He thought of his own forge, the way the bellows had wheezed that morning when he had stoked it for a job he would not finish. He thought of the boy who had come with the message, Crumb, all knees and elbows and news, sent by Aldous from the crossing to say the automobile had been seen on the Bristol road.
Crumb had stood in the doorway of the smithy with his cap crushed in his hands. "They are coming," the boy had said. "Both of them. In the red car."
Barnaby had set down his hammer. He had untied his apron and folded it on the bench, and he had walked out to the gate, and he had stood for a long moment looking at the road, and then he had gone inside and put on his good coat, because Clementine had asked him to come and because he had decided he would.
He had not told her why he had decided. He had decided, and that was enough.
The road turned again, and a lane branched off to the left toward a farm whose chimney had not drawn in twenty years. Clementine took the right branch without signalling, and the engine settled back into its working thrum, and Barnaby let out a breath he had not known he was holding.
"May I ask," Mira said, "what you intend to show me at the crossing?"
Clementine was quiet for a moment. The road curved, and the hedgerows rose, and the light through the windscreen dimmed and then opened again.
"The land," Clementine said. "I thought you might like to stand on it."
"I have read the deeds."
"Yes. You have read the deeds."
There was a beat of quiet. The pencil turned once more between Mira's fingers, a slow rotation, and then it stopped.
"Miss Clementine," Mira said, and her voice had lost a half shade of its polish. "I have not come as a thief in the night. I have come because I believe I can do something useful with a piece of land that is, at present, doing nothing for anyone."
Clementine's jaw set. "The land is doing something."
"It is growing brambles."
"It is growing brambles and feeding the bees and holding the water when the river comes up. It is doing several things, and none of them are in your ledger."
Barnaby watched the road. He thought of Mira's letter, and the sum that had been named in it. He thought of the way the vicar's mouth had fallen open when the figure was read, and the way Aldous's hand had tightened on the back of his chair, and the way Old Tobias, in his corner by the window, had not looked up at all.
Old Tobias had simply looked into his glass. Old Tobias had simply gone on not looking up.
"The land belongs to you," Mira said. "I am not disputing that. I am simply offering an arrangement."
"I know what you are offering."
"Then you know it is a fair offer."
"I know it is a large offer," Clementine said. "Those are different things."
Mira made no answer. The pencil did not move. Barnaby could hear, very faintly, the creak of her gloves as her fingers tightened.
The road straightened, and a fingerpost appeared at the edge of a meadow, its white paint peeled by wind and rain. The post pointed three ways: left to Marigold village, straight on to the crossing itself, and right to a place marked only with the worn shape of a name no one could read.
Clementine took the middle way.
The lane narrowed, and the hedgerows rose higher on both sides until they met overhead in places, and the light through the windscreen went green and then gold as the sun moved behind a cloud and came out again. The engine's thrum found the walls of leaves and returned it as a low echo, and Clementine's hand moved on the wheel to take a bend she had taken a hundred times before, and Barnaby watched her hand and the wheel and the bend, and he said nothing.
Ahead, where the lane opened onto the crossroads, a figure stood in the road.
It was a girl, perhaps nine or ten, bare of the feet despite the chill of the morning, with hair the color of hay and a face so freckled it looked as if someone had sprinkled bran across it. She stood with one hand on her hip and the other shading her eyes, and as the automobile came into view she lifted that hand and waved it as if she were greeting a ship into harbor.
"Pelly," Clementine said, and there was something in her voice that had not been there a moment before.
She slowed the car. The engine dropped to a murmur, and the girl, Pelly, came jogging alongside the passenger door with a speed that suggested she had been waiting for some time and had built up a considerable store of things to say.
"She is here," Pelly said, breathless, to the window. "She came at first light. Aldous sent me to tell you, but you were already gone, so I came here instead, and I have been waiting, and Old Tobias says the standing stones are singing, which he says they do sometimes when the air is the way it is, and Crumb says he saw a fox with something in its mouth that he thinks was a ribbon, and your cousin Wren is up at the smithy and she says to tell you the bellows are split and Barnaby will have to come home and mend them."
The words came out in a single, unbroken flood, and Barnaby felt his mouth twitch despite himself.
"Tell me again," he said, "the part about the bellows."
Pelly grinned.
Pelly's grin widened, and she drew herself up to her full height, which was not considerable, and placed her hands on her hips.
"The bellows are split," she said, with great deliberation, as if she were reciting something sacred. "Wren says they are split from end to end, and Barnaby will have to come home and mend them, and she says also that if he does not come soon the fire will go out and then there will be no iron for the new hinge that the farrier needs for his stable door, and the farrier is in a mood about it because his horses are restless and one of them kicked a hole in the wall."
"Clementine," Barnaby said, without turning his head, "I believe we are being managed."
"We are absolutely being managed," Clementine said, and there was the ghost of a laugh in her voice, thin and tired, but present.
She put the car into gear, and they rolled forward, Pelly falling into step alongside the passenger door with the practiced ease of a girl who had long ago learned that automobiles moved at the speed of pedestrians if you asked them to. The lane opened out, and ahead the village of Crooked Taprel assembled itself around them in pieces: a stone wall, a row of cottages with chimneys leaking smoke, a crooked sign that swung on a single chain and read THE CROOKED TAPREL in letters that had been repainted so many times they had grown thick and soft as felt.
The inn sat at the heart of the village, a long low building of timber and plaster with a courtyard behind it that smelled of old straw and fresh rain. The moment the car came to a stop, before Clementine had even cut the engine, Pelly was around to the front of the vehicle, and Barnaby, moving with the slow deliberation of a man who had spent too many hours on bad roads, climbed out from the passenger side and came to stand beside her.
"Well then," he said, and looked at the automobile as if he were greeting an old friend. The paint was dull with dust, the brass fittings filmed over, the tires caked to a pale rufous color from the clay of the back lanes. "You have had a time of it."
Pelly reached up and laid her palm flat against the bonnet, and the gesture was so tender, so proprietary, that Barnaby felt something shift in his chest.
"She needs beeswax," Pelly said. "I can see it from here. The lacquer is crying out."
"It is not crying out," Barnaby said. "It is a car."
"It is crying out," Pelly said firmly. "Wait here."
She vanished into the inn through a side door, and there was the sound of her bare feet on the flagstones, quick as a drum, and then a clatter and a bang and her voice raised in shrill negotiation with someone unseen. Barnaby leaned against the fender and folded his arms and looked out across the courtyard, where a tabby cat sat on a water butt and washed its face with immense concentration.
"She is going to bring beeswax," he said. "I can feel it in my waters."
Clementine switched off the engine, and the silence that settled over the courtyard was sudden and deep, like the silence inside a church. She did not move for a moment. Her hands stayed on the wheel, and Barnaby saw the tendons rise along her wrists, the slight tremor in her fingers, the way her shoulders drew in toward her spine as if she were bracing for something.
"You have been driving since before first light," he said.
"I have."
"You should eat."
"I should."
Neither of them moved.
Then Pelly erupted from the side door again, clutching a tin of beeswax and a square of soft cloth, and behind her came a figure Barnaby had not expected to see so soon: Aldous, the innkeeper, a tall thin man with a face like a hatchet and hands that seemed too large for his wrists. He was carrying a bucket of water and a sponge, and he set about the front tire with the methodical air of a man performing a necessary sacrament.
"Inside," he said, without looking up. "Both of you. I have broth on the fire and bread that is still warm. The car will be here when you come out."
"She wants to be in the courtyard," Pelly said, and she had already begun to rub the beeswax into the headlamp in long, slow strokes, and the dull brass began to glow beneath the cloth like something waking. "She does not want to be on the street. The street is for horses and carts. She is too fine for the street."
"She is not too fine for anything," Barnaby said, but his voice had gone rough at the edges, and he did not trust himself to say more, so he bent and took the sponge from Aldous and began to wash the clay from the lower panels of the door, and the water ran brown into the dust, and the red of the paint came up beneath it, deep and warm as a wound.
Pelly worked with the focus of a surgeon. She circled the car, muttering to it under her breath, and Barnaby caught fragments: there you are, and hush now, and look at the state of you, and we will have you right, and once more around, and that is better. Clementine stood by the gate and watched them, and her face was very still, and her hands were clasped before her, and Barnaby did not look at her directly because he knew that if he did he would say something he was not yet ready to say.
When the beeswax was worked into every panel, when the brass shone, when the tires had been wiped down to a dark clean black, Pelly stepped back and tilted her head and considered the automobile with the air of an artist examining a finished canvas.
"There," she said. "Now she is herself again."
Clementine reached out, and her fingers brushed the curve of the front wing, and the wax was still warm from Pelly's hands, and she did not speak, but her mouth moved, and Barnaby saw her swallow.
"Inside," Aldous said again, more gently. "Both of you. There is broth."
They ate in the taproom, though the taproom was not yet open for the evening, and Aldous brought them bread and a thick soup of leeks and potatoes and a small heel of cheese that tasted of the cellars it had come from. Pelly sat cross-legged on the floor beside their table and ate an apple in great bites, and Crumb, who was Aldous's nephew and worked the stables, came in with a mug of cider and stood in the corner and watched them with his pale, watchful eyes.
Barnaby ate slowly. The soup was hot and good, and the bread tore in his hands with a sound like cloth, and he found that his shoulders had begun to unknot themselves, one muscle at a time, without his permission.
"The woman," Crumb said, from the corner, and his voice was soft and careful, as if he were speaking of weather or of illness. "The one from the city. She has been asking after you."
Clementine's spoon paused halfway to her mouth. She set it down with great precision on the rim of the bowl.
"Asking what," she said.
"Asking where you are. Asking when you will be back. Asking whether the land is sold." Crumb shrugged. "Asking things."
Barnaby watched Clementine. She did not look up. She studied the surface of the soup as if it were a map, as if she could read in it the shape of the road ahead.
"Thank you, Crumb," she said. "That will be all."
Crumb nodded and slipped out, and Pelly finished her apple and set the core on the table with the careful gravity of an offering.
"She sounds awful," Pelly said.
"She sounds efficient," Clementine said.
Barnaby said nothing. He knew Mira Ashbrook by reputation only, and reputation in these parts was a thing built of rumor and silhouette, but he knew enough to understand that a woman who traveled from the city with an offer to buy land was not a woman who arrived without knowing exactly what she wanted.
"Pelly," he said. "Where is Wren now?"
"At the smithy," Pelly said. "She is minding the fire. She said she would mind it until you come."
"Then I will go to her," Barnaby said. "The bellows will not mend themselves."
He stood, and his knees cracked, and Clementine looked up at him then, and her eyes were dark and very steady.
"Barnaby," she said.
"Aye."
"Be careful on the road."
"There is no road," he said. "It is a lane."
"All the same."
He touched the brim of his hat, and he went out.
---
The smithy stood at the far edge of the village, beyond the last of the cottages, where the land began to rise toward the dark margin of the Whispering Wood. Barnaby walked it in the late afternoon light, and the lane was quiet, and the only sound was the soft complaint of his boots on the hardened clay. Ahead, the wood rose like a wall of shadow, the trees pressed close, the branches knitted overhead in a way that made the boundary between forest and sky difficult to find.
He did not look at the wood. He had never been a man who looked at the wood.
Wren was inside, and the forge was cold, and she had wrapped herself in a shawl that was too large for her and was reading a book by the light of a single tallow candle. She looked up when he came in, and she smiled, and the smile was tired and glad and a little bit accusing, all at once.
"The bellows," he said.
"The bellows," she said.
She took him to the leather, and he saw the split at once, a long clean tear along the seam where the hide had dried and given way. He could mend it. It would take an hour, perhaps two. He set his bag down and took out his awl and his waxed thread, and Wren sat beside him and held the leather taut while he worked, and neither of them spoke, and the silence between them was a comfortable thing, a thing worn smooth with years.
When it was done he tested the bellows with a long, slow breath, and the air moved through them without a whisper of a leak, and Wren nodded.
"Thank you," she said.
"Thank you for minding the fire."
"There was no fire to mind. The bellows would not blow."
"Aye," he said. "Well. Now they will."
He stayed with her until the light failed, and then he walked back through the village in the dusk, and the windows of the cottages were lit one by one, and the smell of suppers came out to meet him, and the sky above the roofs was the color of a bruise, purple and yellow and fading.
---
Clementine did not sleep.
She lay in the small room at the top of the inn and listened to the timbers settle and the wind move through the eaves and the distant sound of voices from the taproom below, where Aldous had opened the doors and the fiddles had begun. She lay still for a long time, and then she rose, and she dressed, and she went down the stairs, and she took her chair from where it stood folded in the corner of the kitchen and she carried it out through the side door and into the courtyard.
The courtyard was silver with moonlight. The car stood where they had left her, the beeswax catching the light and throwing it back in soft glimmers, and Clementine set the chair beside the water butt and sat, and the wheels of the chair made a small sound against the flagstones, a soft rhythmic ticking that she listened to for a while with her eyes closed.
Then she opened her eyes, and she looked at the gate that led out to the town square, and she made up her mind.
She wheeled herself out through the gate and along the lane to the square. The square was empty except for the shadow of the war memorial and the sound of the fiddles from the taproom, which was louder here, and wilder, and the music came in waves through the open windows, reels and jigs and something slower that she did not recognize, something with a melody that bent and turned back on itself like a path through a wood.
She wheeled herself across the square, slowly, the chair moving over the cobbles with a soft constant murmur, and she stopped at the edge of the square where the lane gave onto the dark mass of the Whispering Wood.
The wood was very close here. The trees crowded right up to the low stone wall that marked the boundary of the village, and beyond the wall the dark was thicker, a dark that seemed to have weight and texture, a dark that smelled of moss and wet leaves and the cold mineral breath of deep places.
And from that dark, from somewhere among the trunks of the trees, there came a sound.
It was not the fiddles. It was not the wind. It was a ticking. A regular, rhythmic ticking, like the sound of a clock, like the sound of a heart, like the sound of something counting out the seconds of a measure she could not hear. It came from the left, and then from the right, and then from somewhere ahead, and then it faded, and then it came again, closer, faster, as if whatever made it were moving among the trees in a slow deliberate circuit.
Clementine sat very still in her chair. Her hands lay in her lap, and her breath came shallow, and the moonlight fell across her face and made her look older than she was, and younger, and very far away.
The ticking stopped.
The fiddles went on.
And then, from the heart of the wood, from a place so deep that the trees closed over it like water, there came a sound that was not a sound at all, but a feeling, a pressure, a low vibration in the bones of the chest, like the hum of a wire, like the note of a bell struck once and left to fade.
Clementine closed her eyes.
When she opened them, the moon had moved a hand's width across the sky, and the chair was cold beneath her, and the fiddles had stopped, and the village was silent, and the wood was silent, and she sat there for a long time before she turned the chair and wheeled herself back through the square and along the lane and through the gate and into the courtyard, where the car stood waiting, patient and bright as a held breath.
She did not go inside. She sat in the courtyard with the beeswax smell rising from the panels and the cold of the stone coming up through the wheels of the chair, and she watched the sky lighten by degrees, and she waited for the first bird to call.
When it did, she went inside, and she climbed the stairs, and she lay down on the bed, and she closed her eyes, and she did not sleep, and the ticking, she was certain now, had been counting her.