Mist curled off the moor and pooled in the crooked lane as Eilis Thornbury pushed open the door to Bramwell Quigley's apothecary. A bell the color of old bone gave a thin, brassy complaint, and the shop answered with its own: a sigh of glass jars, a settling of floorboards, the papery hush of herbs turning slowly in their drawers.
"Quigley?" she called. No reply. Only the building speaking around her in small domestic sounds, as though the shop itself had been holding its breath and could not quite stop.
The single room was long and narrow and smelled of camphor, dried sage, and something darker, faintly metallic, like the tang after a coin is held too long between fingers. Sunlight fell in a dusty wedge through the warped glass of the front window, catching motes that drifted with a patience no living creature possessed. Along the left wall, drawers climbed toward the ceiling, each labeled in Quigley's cramped, urgent hand: willow bark, valerian, feverfew, woundwort, ladies' mantle, devil's bit. To the right, shelves bowed beneath the weight of stoppered jars containing roots, powders, and things less easily named. A broom leaned in the corner. The stone floor was cool and uneven beneath her boots.
Behind the counter, a door of darker wood stood ajar, leading into the back room where Quigley dried his plants and did whatever it was Quigley did when customers were not watching. Through the gap, Eilis caught the warm orange bloom of a hearth and the shadow of the man himself, stooped, his bald pate shining as he bent over a worktable.
She cleared her throat. "Mr. Quigley. It is Eilis. From the Hall."
A grunt. A pause. Then his voice came, slightly muffled, with the particular cadence of a man who had been alone for some time and had grown unused to the alternative. "Then you had best come in, since you have already announced yourself to every bottle on the shelf. Mind the threshold. It lifts."
"It does."
"Aye." A small dry sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a cough. "Watch your step."
She stepped over the threshold, which indeed lifted slightly at the center, worn into a low arc by decades of shuffling boots. The back room was closer and warmer, lit by a fire and a single beeswax taper that gave the air a soft, golden weight. Bundles of dried herbs hung from the rafters in tied sheaves, their leaves brittle and whispering when she passed beneath them. A mortar and pestle sat on the bench beside a scatter of dark seeds. On a low shelf to her left, jars of rendered fats bore labels marked only with symbols she did not recognize.
Quigley straightened. He was a small man, narrow in the shoulders, with a fringe of white hair above ears that stuck out a little, and eyes so pale they looked like water held up against a window. He regarded her with the polite suspicion of a cat watching an unfamiliar shape through a pane.
"Thornbury," he said, and nodded once, as if confirming a suspicion.
"Quigley."
"I heard you the first time." He wiped his hands on a stained leather apron. "What brings the Hall down to my door at this hour? And I do mean this hour, Miss Thornbury. I keep my own time here."
"I came for chamomile. And sage. And if you have any willow bark dried and ready, I will take a measure of that. The kitchens are low, and the mistress has been asking."
He blinked, slowly. "Seraphine Holt." It was not a question, but it carried the shape of one. "She is well, then."
"As well as she ever is."
"Mm." He did not move toward the shop. Instead, he leaned against the bench and folded his arms across his narrow chest, the gesture making him look even more like a child in a father's coat. "Chamomile, sage, willow bark. That is a tidy little list for a kitchen low on stores."
"The Hall has been closed in places since the autumn. Some of the pantries have not been properly turned over. It is not neglect, it is only that there have been other matters."
"Ah." He tilted his head. "Other matters. The sort one does not put on a list." He held her gaze for a beat too long, then turned and ambled toward the connecting door. "Come, then. You will want to see what you are buying."
She followed him into the shop. He moved behind the counter with the ease of long acquaintance, his fingers finding drawers by touch. "Chamomile is here, sage is here, willow bark, willow bark..." He paused, considering a drawer as one might consider a face in a crowd. "Willow bark is not here. It is in the back. It is always in the back. I keep it separate, because the damp likes it too much." He disappeared through the doorway again.
Eilis took the moment to look around. She had been in here a handful of times before, always on errands, always attended. The shop had a quality she could not quite name, a kind of listening quality, as if the shelves were not merely holding their contents but attending to them. There was a small curio cabinet against the far wall that she had not previously noticed, half hidden between a stack of wooden crates and a tall, ticking clock. It was of dark wood, glass-fronted, and a small brass lock kept its door shut. Through the glass she could see a jumble of objects: a fossil in a shape like a clenched hand, a small framed portrait whose subject she could not see clearly, a coil of what looked like dried vine, and, laid flat on a velvet pad, a pressed spray of moor flowers, their colors faded to the blue of old bruises and the yellow of candle wax.
She stepped closer. The flowers were arranged with care, their stems crossed and pinned under tiny brass weights. Each one had been labeled, the tags curling at the edges, the ink faded but legible. Cross-leaved heath. Bog asphodel. Pale butterwort. The handwriting was Quigley's, the same cramped urgency she had seen on the drawers, but older, less certain. A date in the corner of the pad read 1871 . That could not be right. Quigley was not yet forty.
"See something you fancy?"
She turned. He was in the doorway, three paper parcels in his arms, his expression unreadable. "Your cabinet," she said. "I have not seen it before."
"No reason you should. It is not for selling." He set the parcels on the counter and began to tie them with slow, precise movements. "It is a private collection. Old things. Some of them are not old at all. Some of them are merely curious."
"The pressed flowers. The date. Eighteen seventy-one."
"Aye." He did not look up. "That is what it says."
"That cannot be right. You were not born then."
"No, Miss Thornbury. I was not." He finished the third parcel with a small decisive knot. "And yet there it is. Curious, as I said."
She held his gaze, waiting.
He sighed. It was a thin, resigned sound, as if he had been waiting for the question and had hoped to be spared. "They belonged to someone else. A relation. I keep them because I have nowhere else to keep them, and because they keep me. Is that an answer that satisfies?"
"For now."
"Good." He pushed the parcels toward her. "That will be sixpence for the chamomile, fourpence for the sage, and threepence for the willow bark. The willow bark I am selling at cost, because you did not flinch when I named it, and because Seraphine Holt is the sort of woman who knows what willow bark is for and does not require me to draw her a picture."
Eilis set the coins on the counter. He swept them into a drawer without counting. "And the music box," she said. "I heard one. On the moor. In the fog."
His fingers stilled on the drawer.
"I heard it," she went on, watching him, "a melody, tinkling, distant, as if coming from nowhere and everywhere. It stopped when the wind rose."
He drew his hand back from the drawer and rested it, palm down, on the counter. "Music boxes," he said, and there was a new carefulness in his voice. "There are a great many music boxes in the world, Miss Thornbury. Some of them play. Some of them do not. Some of them ought not to."
"Mine played."
He looked at her. The pale eyes were steady and a little sad, the way a physician's eyes are steady when the news is not good. "And where, exactly, did yours play?"
"Near the standing stones."
Something moved in his face. It was not surprise. It was more the confirmation of a fear long held. "Of course it did," he said softly. "Of course it did." He turned away and busied himself straightening a row of jars that did not require straightening. "There is a music box in the cabinet, you know. A small one. Inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It plays a tune. It has not played in some time." He paused. "But it does, sometimes, in certain weathers. When the fog comes up off the moor. When the air is thick and the pressure drops."
"You have heard it."
"I have heard it." He faced her again. "And so have you. And so, I expect, has Aldric Vane. He has been up on those stones more nights than I care to count, and he has come back with that look in his eye, the one that says he has heard a thing and wishes he had not."
Eilis felt the small tightening at the back of her throat that came when a name was spoken aloud. "Aldric Vane."
"Aye." Quigley's voice was almost gentle. "The man has theories about everything under the sun, and he will tell anyone who will listen. He told me, and I did not listen. He told Seraphine Holt, and she listened too well. He has been told to keep his own counsel, and he has not."
"You know him."
"I have sold him ointments. I have sold him nothing else, whatever he may say." Quigley moved toward the curio cabinet and rested a hand against the glass, his pale eyes on the objects within. "He comes in here and stares at this cabinet as if it owes him money. He asks questions. I do not answer questions. It is a rule I have made for myself and find very restful."
The small brass lock on the cabinet door glinted in the wedge of sunlight. The pressed flowers lay motionless on their velvet pad. And beneath them, set on a small wooden stand, was a music box perhaps the length of her palm, inlaid in a pattern that might once have been silver, now tarnished to the color of a winter sky. It was identical to the one she had glimpsed in the fog, or as identical as a memory and a thing can be when both have been touched by mist.
She drew a breath. The air tasted faintly of camphor and something older, the dust of years, the residue of decisions made and not unmade.
"Quigley," she said, "what is in that cabinet that makes Aldric Vane stand at your counter and stare?"
He regarded her. He was a small man, but he had a stillness in him that made the room seem larger than it was.
"Curiosities, Miss Thornbury," he said at last. "Only curiosities. And one or two things that would be the better for staying where they are."
She had no intention of accepting the dismissal. Not because she disbelieved him; the opposite, in truth. A man who warned you off a thing with that particular kind of quiet emphasis usually had his reasons.
"Curiosities," she repeated. "You keep a music box under lock and key, and you call it a curiosity."
"I keep many things under lock and key. People in this village have a habit of taking what is not theirs. Or perhaps they have a habit of leaving things and expecting me to look after them, which amounts to the same inconvenience."
"The music box," Eilis Thornbury pressed. "I saw one like it in the fog this morning. Out past the old road. It was playing."
Something altered in Quigley's face. It was not a flinch. He was not a man given to flinching. But the flesh around his eyes thinned, and the line of his mouth went a shade more severe, as though he were biting down on something between his jaws that he did not mean to release.
"You saw nothing in the fog this morning, Miss Thornbury. There was nothing there to see. The mist is thick along that road at this hour of the year, and it plays its own tricks."
"There were children," she said.
He did not ask her to repeat it. He simply nodded, once, as though she had confirmed something he had hoped would prove false.
"Then you had best sit down," he said, and the courtesy in his voice had gone a little flat. "And we had best speak of things that ought to have been spoken of months ago, when there was still time to be useful about it."
He drew a stool from behind the counter, not the comfortable chair by the stove, and placed it near the curio cabinet as if he wished her to sit where she could see the brass lock and the silvered music box and the pressed flowers that lay so still upon their velvet bed. He himself remained standing, his back to the wall of small drawers, his hands folded in a manner that managed to be both idle and watchful.
"Six months ago," Quigley began, "I employed an assistant. A young woman from the village, well-read, quick with her hands, the sort of person who can be trusted with powders and not to ask why the powders were ordered. Her name was Seraphine Holt."
He spoke her name the way one speaks the name of someone who has gone missing from a register, carefully, with a pause before and after as though the word itself might catch on something.
"She was good at her work," he continued. "Better than good. She had a memory for combinations and a steady hand for measuring. I had not had to dismiss her or caution her or speak to her about prying into matters that were not her concern. She understood, I thought, the arrangement."
"What arrangement is that?"
"That she should mind her own business and leave mine alone. Which is, Miss Thornbury, an arrangement I had believed the entire village had agreed to some years ago, until you walked into my shop and began asking questions about a man who does not like being asked questions."
"You have told me you do not answer questions. You have not told me why you will not answer them about Aldric Vane."
"Because," Quigley said, "he is a man who was here before me and will be here after me, and there are certain kinds of trouble that one does not invite by speaking of them at all."
She let the silence stretch a moment. The shop creaked at its joints as the wind pressed against the shutters. Somewhere in the village a dog began to bark, then stopped, as if it had been told to be quiet.
"Tell me about Seraphine Holt," Eilis Thornbury said.
Quigley inclined his head. His pale eyes dropped to a point somewhere near the music box, and he spoke to the cabinet as much as to her.
"She had been with me a little over a year. Her parents were dead. She lodged with the bell-ringer's widow at the far end of the lane. She was a careful girl, a serious girl. She had a way of looking at you when you spoke that made you feel you were being weighed and measured and found, on the whole, a little wanting. I did not mind. I rather preferred it to being liked."
He paused, and one hand rose to his chin, where a small white scar marked the place where a bottle had once slipped, or been made to slip.
"She began to notice things. I will not say when, exactly. Toward the end of last autumn. There is a season here when the light is thin and the mist comes early and people begin to look at their neighbours as if the neighbours might be hiding something. Seraphine began to ask questions."
"About Aldric Vane."
"About a number of matters. About the old road and what had once been at the end of it. About a child who had gone missing in the summer and was never found. About the music box." He gestured, a small movement of one finger, toward the cabinet. "She noticed the cabinet. She asked to see inside it. I refused. She asked again. I refused again. After the third refusal she stopped asking, which was worse, because it meant she had begun to think for herself."
"And you dismissed her."
"No, Miss Thornbury. I would that I had. If I had dismissed her, she would still be here to be dismissed, and the village would have one fewer grief to its name." He unfolded his hands and folded them again, a motion that had the texture of a habit. "She went out one evening in November. She told the bell-ringer's widow that she was going to call on a friend in the lower part of the village. She was seen walking toward the old road. She was not seen after that. Not by anyone prepared to speak of it, in any case."
"Not by anyone prepared to speak of it."
"There were rumours. You understand how villages are. The girl had gone off with a man. The girl had gone off to London to seek her fortune. The girl had fallen into the river, though the river has not water enough in November to drown a cat. The girl had done any of a dozen things that allowed the rest of the village to sleep soundly at night and look one another in the eye over the breakfast table."
He stopped. The dog barked again outside, a single sharp yelp, and then there was silence.
"The constable was sent for?"
"The constable is a man named Hoby, who is paid a small sum each quarter to keep the peace and who considers the keeping of the peace incompatible with asking questions of any of the older families in the parish. He made enquiries. He came to see me. He asked if I had dismissed Seraphine Holt. I told him I had not. He asked if I knew of any reason she might have left the village of her own accord. I told him I did not. He made a note of it in a book he carries, and he closed the matter."
"You are saying he did not investigate."
"I am saying that an investigation was opened and closed in the same afternoon, and that the only person who was asked to give an account of himself was myself, who had no account to give. There were no footprints at the end of the old road because the road was cobbled. There were no witnesses because the houses along it are empty. There was no body because," and here Quigley's voice thinned, as though it had been pared with a knife, "because if there had been a body, there would have been questions asked, and this village does not care to ask questions of the man who lives at the end of that road."
"Aldric Vane."
"Aldric Vane." Quigley spoke the name as though it were a thing with weight, which one sets down carefully because it cannot be set down carelessly. "He was the last person seen to speak with her, by the bell-ringer's widow's account. She was walking in his direction. He was seen, some hours later, walking back alone, with his coat wet to the knees as if he had been out in the heavy mist. He was asked, I am told, by a neighbour, whether he had seen the girl. He said he had not. The neighbour accepted the answer. The neighbour was not the sort of man to push the matter further."
"And you?" Eilis Thornbury said. "Did you accept the answer?"
Quigley regarded her for a moment with those pale eyes, and she thought, not for the first time since entering the shop, that he was a man who had long practice in choosing which truths to give away.
"I am an apothecary, Miss Thornbury. I am a man who understands that certain medicines, taken in the wrong quantity, will kill. I am a man who understands that certain people, pushed in the wrong direction, will not survive the pushing. I accepted the answer because I could not prove the question, and because in this village there is a particular kind of man who is not to be questioned without consequences, and I had an apprentice to consider, and a trade to keep, and a house that is paid for, and a life that I was not prepared to lose for the satisfaction of being right about something I could not demonstrate."
"And now?"
"And now the apprentice is gone, and the trade is kept, and the house is paid for, and the life continues in its accustomed fashion, except that in November last I heard a music box playing out past the old road, in the mist, and I have not been able to make myself go and look at what was playing it."
The shop was quiet. The wedge of sunlight had moved across the floor and now lay against the base of the curio cabinet, warm and ordinary, lighting the brass lock and the tarnished silver of the music box and the pressed flowers on their velvet bed.
"Quigley," she said, "what is in that cabinet that makes Aldric Vane stand at your counter and stare?"
"Curiosities, Miss Thornbury," he said at last. "Only curiosities. And one or two things that would be the better for staying where they are."
She had no intention of accepting the dismissal. Not because she disbelieved him; the opposite, in truth. A man who warned you off a thing with that particular kind of quiet emphasis usually had his reasons.
"Curiosities," she repeated. "You keep a music box under lock and key, and you call it a curiosity."
"I keep many things under lock and key. People in this village have a habit of taking what is not theirs. Or perhaps they have a habit of leaving things and expecting me to look after them, which amounts to the same inconvenience."
"The music box," Eilis Thornbury pressed. "I saw one like it in the fog this morning. Out past the old road. It was playing."
Something altered in Quigley's face. It was not a flinch. He was not a man given to flinching. But the flesh around his eyes thinned, and the line of his mouth went a shade more severe, as though he were biting down on something between his jaws that he did not mean to release.
"You saw nothing in the fog this morning, Miss Thornbury. There was nothing there to see. The mist is thick along that road at this hour of the year, and it plays its own tricks."
"There were children," she said.
He did not ask her to repeat it. He simply nodded, once, as though she had confirmed something he had hoped would prove false.
"Then you had best sit down," he said, and the courtesy in his voice had gone a little flat. "And we had best speak of things that ought to have been spoken of months ago, when there was still time to be useful about it."
She did sit. The bench was harder than it looked, the wood polished to a dull gleam by the passage of many pairs of trousers over many years. A small enamel clock on a shelf behind the counter ticked with the kind of mechanical patience that made her think of her father's study, and the thought sat strangely in her chest, neither welcome nor unwelcome.
Quigley moved behind the counter with the unhurried economy of a man performing a familiar ritual. He took down a bottle from a high shelf, the glass amber and unlabeled, and poured two measures into glasses that were clean enough to pass inspection but not so clean as to suggest any vanity. One he set before her. The other he kept.
"Bramble and something elder," he said, by way of explanation. "Not medicinal. Not yet."
Eilis Thornbury lifted the glass but did not drink. The liquid caught the light from the window and held it, a small captured sunset. Outside, the bell over the door gave a last tentative shiver and then was still.
"You spoke of the children," Quigley said. He had not taken a seat. He stood with his back half to the window, the light at his shoulder, and his face in a kind of comfortable shadow. "Tell me precisely what you saw."
"They were in the road. Four, perhaps five. Too many to count with any certainty, because the fog was moving. They were turning in a circle, slowly, and they were humming. Or singing. Something with a tune I did not know."
"Four," Quigley said. The word came out quieter than the rest. "There were four last winter. Always an uneven number would be the hope, but it does not seem to work that way."
"What does not work what way?"
He lifted his glass and finally drank. When he set it down, the line of his shoulders had settled, as though something he had been carrying had been set down on the counter between them.
"There is a piece of music," he said, "that has no name. My grandfather learned it from his grandfather, who learned it from his, and so on back into a time when the village was not yet a village but a place where a few people had pitched their tents because the spring water was good. The piece is not sung. It is not played on any instrument that I am aware of. It is hummed. And when it is hummed by a certain number of people in a certain arrangement, it has the property of opening what ought not to be opened."
Eilis Thornbury did not interrupt. She found that her hands had grown very still around the glass, and that her breath was coming in the shallow careful way one breathes when one is trying not to disturb something in the room.
"I do not say this lightly," Quigley continued. "I am a man of accurate habits. I do not believe in things I cannot weigh or measure, and I do not trade in rumor. But there is a thing that happens in this village in the late autumn, when the light fails early and the mist sits on the road like a cat on a sill, and that thing has a name and a pattern, and the name is the Hollow Song, and the pattern is that it takes."
"Takes what?"
"Children, Miss Thornbury. It takes children. Always children. Always an odd number, and always for a little while, and the little while has been getting longer of late."
The glass was warm in her hands, or her hands were warm around the glass, and the distinction felt suddenly important. She set it down on the counter because she did not trust herself to hold it without the tremor in her fingers becoming visible.
"How long is a little while?"
"Hours, in my grandfather's time. A night, when my father was a boy. Three days, the autumn before last. Five, this past week." He paused. "The children come back. That is the only mercy in the arrangement, and I use the word mercy with a certain reluctance, because they come back altered, and the village has not yet found a way to speak of that altering without making it worse."
She thought of Aldric Vane's face in the lamplight, and of the careful blankness he had worn like a coat. She thought of Seraphine Holt, whose name he had spoken as though the speaking of it were a private ceremony, and she understood at last that the blankness had not been indifference. It had been the particular blankness of a man who is holding something at a distance so that he can continue to function at all.
"Seraphine," she said.
"Was one of them," Quigley finished. "Fourteen years ago. She was gone for what the parish register calls a period of convalescence, and what her mother and I call the worst fortnight of our lives. She came back speaking of a place that was not the village and not anywhere else, and she has not been the same since, and there is no one in this village who has had the courage to say so to her face except her brother, and he says it badly."
Eilis Thornbury sat with that for a moment. The clock ticked. A cart passed in the lane outside, the wheels creaking on the damp ground, and the driver made some remark to his horse that was too muffled to make out but had the cadence of a man who was not in a hurry.
"The music box," she said, at last.
"Is a containment," Quigley said. "My grandfather built it, or had it built; the family history is a little vague on the point. It plays a single phrase, on a single note, and the phrase is the inverse of the Hollow Song. Where the one opens, the other closes. Where the one invites, the other refuses. It is not a cure. It is a lock on a door that ought not to have a key."
"And you keep it under the counter."
"I keep it where I can reach it in the dark," he said, "because the Hollow Song does not only sing in the late autumn. It sings when someone hums it by accident, or when a child hears it in a dream and cannot stop humming it on waking, and the only thing that has ever interrupted it in my experience is the music box, played at the correct moment, by a person who is not afraid of it."
He looked at her, then, with a directness that was not unkind but was not asking permission either.
"I am an old man, Miss Thornbury, and my hands are not what they were. I have kept this village from the worst of itself for forty years, and I am tired in a way that does not improve with rest. I do not say this to invite your sympathy. I say it to explain why I am going to ask you a question, and why I would like an honest answer."
"Ask it."
"The children in the road. The four you saw. They were turning, you said. Slowly. In a circle. When you came upon them, were they already arranged, or were they still finding their places?"
She thought back. The fog. The pale shapes. The movement that had been less like dance and more like the slow turning of weather vanes in a wind that only they could feel.
"Finding," she said. "I think they were still finding."
Quigley nodded. He reached under the counter, and when his hand came up again, the music box was in it. It was smaller than she had expected, and darker, and the brass that edged it was so tarnished it looked almost like wood. He set it on the counter between them with the care of a man setting down a sleeping child.
"Then we have a little while yet," he said. "Not much. But a little while. And there are things I can teach you in a little while, if you are willing to learn them quickly, and if you are willing to accept that what I am going to teach you will not make sense until it does."
Outside, the fog pressed against the window, and the bell over the door shivered once, although no one had entered. Eilis Thornbury looked at the music box, and at the old man's hands upon it, and at the glass of bramble and elder she had not yet drunk, and she made a decision that felt less like choosing than like recognizing something that had already been decided, somewhere, long before she had come to this village at all.
"I am willing," she said.
Quigley poured her a second measure, and this time she drank it, and the taste was sharp and sweet and very like the village itself, which was not, she was beginning to understand, the quiet and sensible place it pretended to be, but a place with a song in it, a song that had been waiting a long time for someone to learn to sing it back.