Dawn had not yet decided what it wanted to be.
Pru Bellamy stood on the threshold of the post office, one hand on the doorframe, the other clutching a chipped enamel mug of tea gone cold. Beyond the crooked rooftops of Thornwick, the sky held that bruised grey colour it wore most mornings in late October, neither bright nor dark, just uncertain. Mist clung to the lower edges of the Thornwood like something trying to hide.
She had been sorting the morning's first delivery when the bell at her waist jangled, a brass thing her mother had worn and her mother before that, and the sound was so unexpected at that hour that she nearly dropped the letters. Nobody rang the postmistress's bell before six. Nobody in Thornwick, anyway.
A boy stood at the window, red-haired and breathless, his school satchel hanging half off one shoulder. Tom Veil, the blacksmith's youngest, eleven years old and built like a question mark.
"Miss Bellamy," he said, before she could greet him. "Come quick. Old Hettie's in the wood. Something's happened to her garden."
Pru set down the letters. She did not ask what Tom meant by something, because Tom was the sort of boy who would have told me exactly what he saw, and he had not. That omission told her more than his words.
"Where in the wood?"
"The edge. Where the big thorn grows. The one that looks like a hand."
Pru nodded. She knew the place. Everyone in Thornwick knew the place. It marked the boundary between the cultivated lanes and the deeper wood, and old Hettie Marlow had kept her plot of ground there for as long as anyone could remember: a tangle of hollyhocks gone to seed, a stubborn rose, a row of cabbages that always bolted before they could be eaten. Hettie's Garden, the children called it, though Hettie herself would have called it something rather less affectionate.
"Wait here," Pru said. "I'm going to fetch my coat."
"I can come with you."
"You can go home to your breakfast and tell your father you'll be late for the forge."
Tom looked as though he might argue, then thought better of it. He shifted the satchel onto his shoulder and vanished down the lane, his footsteps swallowed by the mist.
Pru pulled her coat from the hook by the door, a green wool thing with a missing button she'd been meaning to replace for three weeks. She considered, briefly, the wisdom of going alone to the edge of the Thornwood before full daylight, and decided that the wisdom of the thing mattered less than Hettie Marlow lying in it.
She locked the post office door behind her and set off.
The lane from the village to the wood's edge was no great distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile, but at that hour and in that mist it felt longer. Pru's boots left dark prints on the path, and the hedgerows on either side sweated with dew that soaked through to her stockings by the time she had gone a hundred yards. Somewhere ahead, a blackbird started up and stopped, as though it had been startled by something it preferred to forget.
She thought of Mira Hawthorn.
She had been meaning to go to Mira's cottage on the lane behind the chapel. There was something about her uncle's death that Pru could not quite leave alone, and Mira, who had inherited the place and the questions it carried, seemed to be the only other person in Thornwick who felt the same way. Pru had left a note tucked under Mira's door two evenings before, suggesting they walk together to the boundary stones at the week's end, and she had not yet heard back.
Now, as she rounded the last bend before the wood, Pru pushed the thought aside. There would be time for Mira later. There was only this: the wet grass, the smell of turned earth and old leaves, and the shape of Hettie Marlow's plot coming into view through the thinning mist.
The garden was ruined.
That was the first thing she noticed, before she saw Hettie herself. The hollyhocks had been broken off near their roots, their tall stalks lying across the cabbages in a tangle. The rose had been torn from its trellis, and its roots, pale and ragged, stuck up out of the soil like something that had been dragged out by force. The neat rows of winter greens had been churned, the dark earth thrown in heaps against the path.
And there, at the edge of the plot where the cultivated ground met the wild undergrowth of the Thornwood, lay Hettie Marlow.
She was on her back, her arms flung out, her white hair coming loose from its pins and trailing into the dirt. Her old woollen shawl, the brown one she wore in all weathers, had been pulled half off her shoulders. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were the colour of old paper. Beside her, the largest of the boundary thorns rose out of the earth like a clenched black hand, and around its base the ground was churned in the same way as the garden, the same way as if something had been struggling there.
Pru knelt in the wet grass and put two fingers to Hettie's throat.
A pulse. Faint, but there.
"Hettie," she said. "Hettie, can you hear me?"
No response. Hettie's breathing was shallow, the kind of breathing that does not know it is being observed.
Pru looked around. The mist was lifting slowly, the grey of the sky beginning to warm at its edges, but there was no one else in sight. The lane behind her was empty. The wood ahead was silent, which was not, in her experience, a good sign. Birds had gone quiet in Thornwick before, when something was watching from the trees.
She considered running back to the village for help. She considered staying where she was. The decision was made for her when Hettie's hand moved, a slow curl of fingers, and her lips parted.
"Don't," Hettie whispered.
"Don't what?"
"Don't go."
Pru leaned closer. Hettie's breath was sour, and under that, something else, something she could not name, something green and faintly bitter, like the smell of a crushed stem.
"Don't go into the wood."
"Hettie, what happened here? Who did this?"
Hettie's eyes opened then, not fully, only partway, the irises a faded blue and not quite focused. She looked at Pru as if she were trying to remember who Pru was, or as if she were trying very hard to forget.
"The garden," Hettie said. "The garden. It's not mine. It was never mine. They let me have it because I could be trusted."
"Trusted with what?"
Hettie's hand tightened on Pru's wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong.
"Listen to me. I haven't time. The one who did this, she came out of the wood before midnight. I heard her on the path, and I went to see, and she was standing at the thorn when I came round the hedge. She wore a green cloak and she had no face I could see, only a kind of brightness where her face should be, and when she saw me she came at me with a hoe."
"A hoe? Like your garden hoe?"
"Yes. She took it from where I had left it. She used it on the roses first. I watched her. I couldn't move. I tried to shout and I couldn't make a sound."
Pru looked at the rose, at its torn roots, and back at Hettie.
"And then she came at you."
"She came at me. I don't remember after that. I woke in the dirt."
Hettie coughed, a dry rattling sound, and her eyes closed again. Her grip on Pru's wrist had not loosened.
"You must tell Mira Hawthorn," she said, and her voice had dropped so low that Pru had to bring her ear almost to Hettie's lips to hear. "She is the only one who can understand. Her uncle knew. He knew about the garden. He drew it, once. He drew it in his book, with the thorns around it, and he wrote a name in the margin that I have not been able to read."
Pru's mouth was dry.
"What name?"
"Ask her. She has the book. She won't know what it means, but you will. When she shows it to you, you will."
Hettie's hand relaxed at last, though whether from exhaustion or from something else, Pru could not tell. Her eyes remained closed. Her breathing steadied a little.
Pru sat back on her heels and looked again at the ruined garden. The mist had lifted enough now that she could see further along the edge of the wood, and there, perhaps thirty yards in among the trunks, she caught a glimpse of something green, a colour too vivid for late October, a green that seemed almost to glow against the grey bark of the trees.
She blinked. The green was gone. Whether it had moved or whether her eyes had tricked her, she could not say.
She stayed where she was, kneeling in the churned earth with the cold tea of her morning still on her breath and the brass bell at her waist silent, and she waited for the sun to come up properly, and for Mira Hawthorn to come down her lane.
Pru heard the cottage door before she saw who had opened it. The hinges groaned the way they always did, a long complaint of untreated iron, and then the boards of the porch creaked under a careful, measured tread.
Mira Hawthorn came down the lane with her satchel over one shoulder and her uncle's walking stick in her hand. She wore the grey wool coat she had owned since she was twenty-four, and her dark hair was pinned back in the practical knot she always used for walking the wood. She paused at the gate when she saw Pru kneeling in the churned earth of Hettie's flower bed.
"Good Lord," Mira said, very quietly. "What has happened here?"
Pru stood. Her knees ached from the cold ground. "She collapsed," Pru said. "I found her just now. I think she has been out here since before first light."
Mira came through the gate and knelt beside Hettie the way Pru had done, though more slowly, easing herself down with the careful deliberation of a woman whose own joints had begun, in the last few years, to protest the English weather. She put two fingers to the side of Hettie's throat and counted, her lips moving without sound.
"Her pulse is steady enough," Mira said. "But she is cold. We need to get her inside."
"She won't go," Pru said. "I tried. She keeps saying she has to tell you something first."
Mira looked at her, and then she looked back at Hettie's face. Something in the older woman's mouth tightened.
"What has she told you?"
Pru hesitated. The brass at her waist was silent and growing colder against her hip. The morning smelled of wet earth and the particular sourness of turned soil, and somewhere down by the brook a thrush had begun to sing, industrious and indifferent.
"She said her bulbs had been replaced. The ones she keeps under the stone near the wall, the prize moonflowers. She says someone put blackened stones in their place."
Mira said nothing.
"She said something wrong beneath the soil."
Still Mira said nothing. She was looking at the place where the bulbs had been buried, the small crater in the turned earth where the stones sat in a neat row, their surfaces dull and faintly greasy. Her hand came up to her mouth. Then it went to the leather satchel at her side, and she unbuttoned the flap with fingers that were not quite steady.
"I think," Mira said, "that we had better wake her."
Pru touched Hettie's shoulder. "Mrs Marlow."
No response. Pru tried again, more firmly. Hettie's eyelids fluttered but did not open.
"Mrs Marlow, Mira Hawthorn is here. Please."
The eyelids lifted. The eyes beneath them were not the eyes Pru had seen ten minutes earlier. They were still sharp, but the sharpness had shifted register; whatever fever or exhaustion had glazed them before had cleared, and what remained was something harder to meet. Hettie looked past Pru and found Mira, and the corner of her mouth moved in a way that might have been a smile or might have been a grimace.
"There you are," Hettie said. Her voice was thin but precise. "I knew you would. I told Pru to send."
"She said you had something to tell me."
"I have several things to tell you, child. I have been saving them up, the way one saves eggs against a bad winter, and I find I have not the breath to tell all of them. So I shall tell you the most important, and you shall listen very carefully, because I shall not have the breath to say it twice."
Mira drew the satchel closer to her hip. "I am listening."
"My bulbs have not been replaced with stones." Hettie's gaze had not moved from Mira's face. "My bulbs were never there. They were taken out before they were planted, by hands that came in the night. The stones you see were put there to make the hole look right. To make a person think that something was always meant to be there. But I planted those bulbs in nineteen sixty-three, and I have tended them every autumn since, and I know what is in that bed the way I know the lines in my own hand."
"What was put there instead?"
Hettie closed her eyes. When she spoke again her voice was smaller, and Pru had to lean in to catch the words.
"Something that ought not to have been put anywhere near this garden. Something that came up out of the soil when it was opened, and lay in the sun for a moment, and was taken away."
"Took away by whom?"
Hettie's eyes opened. "If I knew that, child, I should not have needed to send for you."
Mira was very still. Pru, watching her, saw her free hand close around the head of the walking stick until the knuckles went white.
"Tell me about the drawing," Mira said.
For the first time Hettie looked uncertain. "How did you know there was a drawing?"
"My uncle drew it. He drew a garden that does not exist any more. He told me he had drawn it from memory, but I do not think he had. I think he had drawn it from something he had been shown, in a place he would not name. He drew it in the back of his sketchbook, the one he kept in the locked drawer of his desk. He drew the walls, and the thorns, and the path, and the bed in the centre. He did not draw the plants. He said he had not been able to see the plants clearly."
"He could not have done."
"Why?"
Hettie drew a breath that shuddered on the way in. "Because the plants were not the sort one sees with the eye. They were the sort one sees with the other sense, the one that opens when one is very young and closes again when one is taught not to use it. I saw them once. I was seven years old. I was brought to the garden by a person who has been dead for fifty years. I have never spoken of it until today."
Pru found that her own breath had gone shallow. The thrush down by the brook had stopped singing, and in the silence she could hear the faint ticking of the brass bell at her waist, as though it had warmed enough in the morning air to remember its purpose.
"The bulbs," Mira said. "They were not bulbs. They were seeds. The seeds of something that was meant to grow in that bed."
"Yes."
"And someone has taken them."
"Yes."
"And put something else there in their place. Something that ought not to be."
Hettie did not answer. Her face had gone the colour of the mist above the brook, and her grip on Pru's wrist had slackened again, though Pru was no longer certain she was holding it at all.
Mira stood. The motion was unhurried but deliberate, the motion of a woman who has decided what to do before she has moved to do it. She took the walking stick in both hands and set its iron point into the soil of the ruined bed, three inches from the row of blackened stones, and pressed.
The soil resisted for a moment, then gave. The iron slid in to the hilt. Mira's face did not change.
"We need to take her inside," Mira said. "We need to make a fire, and put the kettle on, and get Mrs Carrow down from the farm to sit with her while we go to the cottage."
"The cottage?"
"My uncle's cottage. The sketchbook is in the locked drawer, the way I told you. If Hettie has been telling the truth about the rest of it, then what he drew is what we are looking at. And if he wrote a name in the margin that she could not read, then I need to see it, because I think I can."
Hettie's eyes had closed again. Her lips moved. Pru bent close.
"He knew," Hettie murmured. "He knew, and he would not tell me. He said it was not his to tell. He said the name would have to wait until the right person came to ask for it."
"What name?"
"The one in the margin."
Pru sat back. Mira was already moving toward the cottage, the walking stick in one hand and the satchel in the other, and Pru could see by the set of her shoulders that the careful, measured tread she had come down the lane with had changed into something quicker and less even, the stride of a woman who has at last been told what she has been waiting to be told.
Pru knelt again and slipped an arm beneath Hettie's shoulders. The brass bell at her waist gave one clear, solitary note against the morning air, and then fell silent.
The cottage door stood ajar when Mira reached it. She stopped on the threshold and listened, the way she had learned to listen in the months since her uncle's death, for the particular silence of a house that knows it has been entered by someone who did not mean to be seen.
The latch lifted without a creak. She drew the key from her pocket and held it between two fingers, the way one holds a coin found in a pocket, uncertain whose hand last touched it.
The kitchen was cold. The grate held the grey remains of a fire she had banked three days before, and the kettle sat where she had left it on the hob, with a fine dust on its blackened belly. She crossed to the dresser and took down the small tin in which she kept her uncle's effects that were too personal to be looked at in company. The tin was dented in one corner, and the lid stuck for a moment before it gave with a soft metallic sigh.
Beneath a folded letter and a pair of reading spectacles, she found the sketchbook. It was bound in dark green cloth, the colour of pond water, and its spine had cracked along two places where it had been opened too often. She carried it to the table and sat, and laid it flat, and opened the cover.
The first page bore a single drawing in her uncle's careful hand. It was a sprig of bog myrtle, the leaves rendered in three shades of green and the catkins in a yellow so pale it was almost white. Beneath the drawing he had written, in his small precise script, the Latin name and the date, and a single line in English: Found beside the old green road, where the stones come up out of the ground like the tops of a row of black fingers.
She turned the page.
The second drawing was of the standing stones themselves, rendered in the same careful hand but with a different quality of attention. The lines were heavier. The shadows were thicker. She counted the stones. Seven stood upright in a rough arc, with three more lying on their sides as if they had fallen in some long ago night of storm, or in some less explicable act of violence. Beyond them, in the middle distance, she had drawn the cottage, with smoke rising from the chimney, and a figure standing at the gate.
The figure was a woman in a long dress, with her hair tied back. She had no face. Where the features should have been, her uncle had drawn only a faint oval of shadow.
In the margin, in pencil, he had written a single word. The letters were very small, and they had been written with a hand that had trembled.
Mira bent close. She did not need to bring the copper key from her pocket to make the comparison. The word was the same word that was engraved on the flat of the key, in the same style of script, in the same faint and ancient hand.
Vergier.
She said the word aloud, to hear it in her own voice, and the cottage gave back no echo. The kettle ticked once on the hob, as the metal cooled. The dust on its belly shifted, and settled.
She sat for a long moment with the sketchbook open before her, and did not turn the page. She was thinking about the key, and about the way the iron had slid into the soil of the ruined bed as if the ground had been waiting for it. She was thinking about the word on the key, and the word in the margin, and the figure with no face at the gate of the cottage in the picture, and the smoke that rose from the chimney of a house that had no one to light a fire in it.
She was thinking, with a small cold weight at the base of her stomach, that the figure in the drawing was not her uncle. The proportions were wrong. The dress was wrong. The hair was wrong.
The figure was a woman, and she was standing at the gate of a house that was not yet hers.
Mira closed the sketchbook. She laid her palm flat on the green cloth, and felt, through the weave of the binding, the faint raised ridge of the copper key she had left on the table beside the tin. The two objects lay side by side, and the weight of the key, and the weight of the book, seemed to her, in that moment, to be exactly the same.
She rose, and crossed to the door, and stepped out into the lane.
The morning had brightened while she had been inside. The fog had lifted from the lower ground, and the sky above Thornwick Wood was the pale blue of a winter noon that has decided, after some hesitation, to commit to being clear. Pru was still kneeling beside Hettie in the ruined garden, and she looked up as Mira approached, and her face was the face of a woman who is trying very hard to be brave and is not quite succeeding.
"She has gone off again," Pru said. "I cannot rouse her."
Mira knelt. She took Hettie's wrist between two fingers, and counted. The pulse was there, faint but steady, the beat of a heart that has been beating for a very long time and intends to go on. Hettie's skin was cold, but her face, in the pale light, had the translucent quality of old paper held up to a window.
"We must get her into the cottage," Mira said. "She cannot lie here."
Pru nodded. She did not ask how they would manage it, and Mira did not offer to explain. They each took an arm, and between them they lifted Hettie from the ground, and Hettie's head lolled back against Mira's shoulder with a weight that was surprisingly slight, the weight of a woman who has eaten little for a long time and has lived mostly on memory. Her bonnet had come untied, and her white hair fell across her face in two thin wings.
They carried her between them up the path, through the gap in the hedge, and into the lane. The brass bell at Pru's waist struck once against the iron latch of the gate, and gave its clear, solitary note, and fell silent. Hettie's lips moved against Mira's collarbone, but no sound came out.
They laid her on the settle in the kitchen, with the worn horsehair blanket drawn up to her chin, and Mira went to the grate and rebuilt the fire from the remains of the old one, and Pru put the kettle on, and the two of them worked in the small bright space of the kitchen without speaking, the way people work who have known each other long enough that speech is no longer necessary.
When the kettle had boiled and the tea had been poured and set to steep, Mira drew the settle closer to the fire, and sat on the low stool at Hettie's feet, and waited.
Hettie opened her eyes.
The first thing she saw was the ceiling of Mira's cottage, with its dark beams and the line of cobweb that ran from beam to beam like a thread of silver. The second thing she saw was Mira's face, bent close, and beyond it Pru's face, more distant, framed in the doorway.
"Where," Hettie said.
"In my uncle's cottage," Mira said. "You are quite safe."
Hettie's eyes moved across the ceiling, taking in the beams, the cobweb, the place where the thatch met the wall. Then she said, in a voice that had gone thin and reedy but had not lost its edge, "I have not been in this room for thirty years."
Pru, in the doorway, drew in her breath. Mira did not move.
"You knew him," Mira said.
"I knew him." Hettie's gaze came back to her face. "I knew your uncle, and I knew his uncle before him, and I knew the woman who stood at the gate of this house the day before your uncle was born, and I knew what she left for him in the soil of the garden, and I have known for thirty years that the key was in the wall above the lintel of the church porch, and I have said nothing, because it was not my place to say."
Mira reached into the pocket of her coat and drew out the copper key. She laid it on the settle, on the worn blanket, within an inch of Hettie's hand.
"This key," she said.
"Yes."
"And the word on it."
"Vergier."
"And the word in the margin of the sketchbook."
"Yes."
Mira drew breath. The fire ticked in the grate. The kettle, removed from the hob, ticked once more on the stone of the hearth, and was silent.
"Tell me," she said.
Hettie closed her eyes. When she spoke again, her voice had taken on the cadence she had used in the schoolroom, the measured pace of a woman accustomed to being listened to, and to being obeyed.
"In the year that your great-grandfather was a boy," she said, "there came to Thornwick a woman whose name was recorded in the parish register as Marguerite Vergier. She came from France, and she had with her a child of about seven years, and a single trunk, and a key of copper such as this one, which she carried on a ribbon round her neck. She took a cottage at the edge of the wood, and she lived there quietly, and she worked as a seamstress, and she paid her way, and she asked nothing of her neighbours, and she was, by every account, a good woman."
She paused. The fire settled in the grate. A log fell inward with a small dry sound.
"In the autumn of her second year in the village," Hettie said, "she took sick, and she died, and the child was taken in by the family at the farm. The key she had carried was buried with her, in the garden of the cottage, in the bed where she had grown her herbs. The trunk she had brought with her was placed in the church porch, and there it remained for thirty years, until the day a boy named Edmund Hawthorn, who was not yet a man, opened it, and found inside it a single folded paper, on which was written a name, and a date, and a single line in a hand he could not read."
Hettie opened her eyes. She looked at Mira, and her gaze was steady.
"The name in the trunk," she said, "was the name of the woman who had stood at the gate of the cottage on the day your great-grandfather was born. The name on the paper, and the name on the key, and the name in the margin of the sketchbook, were the same name."
"Vergier."
"Yes."
"And the line."
Hettie looked at the fire. The flames were small and steady, and the wood was of a kind that burned without spitting, and gave off a fragrance of pine.
"The line," she said, "was this: She had come to ask forgiveness of the man she had wronged, and she had died before she could ask it, and the key she had carried was the key to the room in which he kept what she had come to take from him."
Pru, in the doorway, gave a small sound, like the drawing in of breath through teeth. Hettie's gaze did not move from the fire.
"Your uncle found the key in the porch," she said, "where I had placed it, the year before he came to live in the cottage. He found it, and he did not speak of it to me. He found the trunk in the church, and he read the paper, and he drew what he drew, and he wrote the name in the margin, and he came to me one evening in the autumn, and he asked me what I knew of the woman Vergier. And I told him what I have told you. And he said nothing. And three months later he was dead."
Mira sat very still. The copper key on the settle caught the light from the fire, and threw a small bright reflection onto the beam above her head, and the reflection moved as the flames moved, and was gone.
"Who," Mira said, "was the man she had wronged?"
Hettie looked at her. The firelight was in her eyes, and the cold of the morning was still in her cheeks, and the expression on her face was not unkind.
"That," she said, "is a question you will have to ask of someone other than me."
She closed her eyes, and did not open them again, and after a moment Pru came into the room, and knelt beside the settle, and took Hettie's hand, and held it, and did not speak.
Mira sat on the low stool, with the copper key on the settle and the sketchbook in her satchel and the cold weight at the base of her stomach that had been there since she had opened the tin, and she looked into the fire, and did not speak either.
Outside, the morning went on. The fog had lifted from the lower ground, and the pale sun of winter lay on the lane, and on the hedge, and on the ruined garden of the cottage, where the iron of the walking stick still stood upright in the soil of the bed, three inches from the row of blackened stones, where the earth had closed over the key that had been buried there for a hundred years, and where, in the small hours of that morning, a woman had stood at the gate, and had not spoken, and had been seen by no one.
In the kitchen of the cottage at the edge of Thornwick Wood, the fire burned, and the tea cooled in the pot, and the copper key lay on the worn blanket within an inch of Hettie's folded hand, and Mira Hawthorn sat on the low stool, and looked into the flames, and did not ask her question aloud, because she knew, with a certainty that sat in her chest like a stone, that the answer was already in the sketchbook in her satchel, on the page she had not yet turned, in the hand of a man who had been dead for three months, and who had left her, in the green cloth binding of his last book, the name of the one who had come to the gate at the edge of the wood to ask forgiveness of the man she had wronged, and who had not, in the end, been willing to ask it of him in his own lifetime.
The fire settled. The kettle ticked. Pru held Hettie's hand. And Mira, at last, reached for the satchel, and drew out the sketchbook, and opened it, and turned the page.