The hearse had gone, and in its wake the silence of Blackwood Hollow settled back into the streets like pond water closing over a dropped stone.
Maren Voss stood on the flagstone path outside Quill and Sons, Funeral Directors, and let her handbag strap cut into her shoulder. The strap needed replacing. She had been meaning to replace it since March. Beyond the funeral home's tall windows, the last copper edge of sun bled along the fells, and the shopfront glass held her back to her in two versions: one tired, one thinner than she remembered.
She pushed the door open. A brass bell, hung crooked on a leather strap, gave one thin note.
The scent met her first. Lilies, yes, and the sharper green of cut stems in their buckets behind the curtain, but underneath that, threading through the cold air, came pine resin. Fresh. Bitter. The unmistakable breath of green wood recently sawn. Someone had built the coffin from a living tree.
She knew that smell the way she knew her own pulse. She had cut enough green pine in her life to recognise the sap still weeping in the grain.
A man in a charcoal waistcoat stepped from behind the curtain. He was not young. His beard was trimmed to a neat point, and his cufflinks were onyx. He inclined his head the way undertakers do, a motion that pretends to warmth while confirming grief.
"Miss Voss. He has been prepared as your sister requested. Open coffin, as is the custom here. I am Mr Quill. We have spoken by telephone." He gestured toward the chapel at the corridor's end. "He looks peaceful. He looks very much himself."
Maren nodded. Her throat felt lined with that pine resin taste, almost peppery, as though she had been chewing spruce needles. She followed him down the narrow hall, her boots quiet on the carpet runner, and she did not ask the question she had been holding for two days on the train north. She had written it in a notebook and crossed it out, written it again and crossed it out again, until the page looked like a bruise.
She stopped at the chapel door.
Iris was already inside, sitting on the front pew in a black dress that did not belong to her. Iris did not own black dresses. Iris owned cardigans in colours Maren could not name, and one good coat, and a pair of boots she had resoled three times. The dress had been borrowed. Maren could tell by the way it pulled slightly across Iris's shoulders, and by the hem, which had been taken up with hasty stitches.
Iris looked up. Her face was white. Not pale. White, the colour of paper held to a window.
"You came," Iris said.
"You asked me to."
"I asked you three times."
"I counted."
Iris almost smiled, and the almost was worse than the absence.
The coffin stood on a low bier at the front, wreaths banked on either side, more wreaths than Maren had expected from a man she had thought friendless in the village. There was a spray of white chrysanthemums from the Women's Institute. There was a sheaf of something with wild garlic smell from the Allotment Society. And there, at the foot, a single long branch of yew, tied with black ribbon, bearing a card in Iris's careful hand.
Maren stepped forward.
Her father lay in the pine coffin. His hands were folded on his chest, his reading glasses tucked into his breast pocket, his watch still ticking. She could hear it from a foot away. She had not known watches were kept ticking. She had thought that was a thing of films. His hair had been combed back from his brow, and his face, stripped of its usual weather, looked both older and younger than the man she remembered. The hollows beneath his cheekbones were deeper. The lines around his mouth, where a smile had rarely lived, were softened, as though someone had taken a thumb to wax.
He looked like her father. He looked nothing like her father.
She breathed in. Pine resin. Lily pollen. The faint dry tang of embalming fluid, which smelled, she decided, exactly like a greenhouse in January, when the paraffin heater had run low.
Iris appeared at her elbow. Iris's hand found the crook of Maren's arm, fingers cold through the sleeve of her jacket.
"He fell in," Iris said. The words came out quickly, the way Iris always spoke when she was frightened. "He fell in the pond. He was checking the water iris. He had his waders on and he slipped on the stone at the lip. The coroner said it was an accident. He said there was no alcohol. He said Jonas Voss was a careful man, and careful men sometimes fall."
"How many times have you said that sentence?"
"Eleven. To myself. To the police. To Mrs Pell in the post office. To anyone who will listen."
Maren looked at the coffin. Pine. Green-cut pine. The lid was propped at the back, the grain running in long rivers of pale gold, the knots dark as old blood. She had built cold frames from less handsome wood.
"Who built this?"
"Quill's apprentice. He's a joiner from over Cropton way."
"He cut a living tree for it."
Iris blinked. "I asked for pine. I didn't specify."
"Most pine coffins are kiln-dried stock. This is not. This was felled within the week. The sap is still wet in the heartwood." Maren touched the rim with one fingertip. A bead of resin rose to the surface, amber as November light. She drew her hand back.
"It is what it is," Iris said, in the small voice she used when she was out of her depth and pretending not to be.
Maren did not answer. She looked at her father.
His hands. She could not stop looking at his hands. They had been the largest part of him, broad across the palm, the fingers spatulate at the tips, the nails always a little darkened with loam no matter how many times he scrubbed them. He had held seedling trays in those hands. He had turned soil. He had once, in a fit of rare temper, pulled a trespassing boy out of the glasshouse by the scruff of his anorak and set him down on the gravel path so gently the boy had not understood he had been moved. Those hands now lay on his chest like folded linen.
"Where is his ring?" Maren said.
Iris stiffened. "What?"
"His signet ring. He never took it off. He said it was the only thing his father gave him that wasn't a debt."
"It must be at the house. He wouldn't have been wearing it to check the pond. He had his waders on. The welts come up past the knee."
"He wore it in the bath."
"Then maybe it slipped off in the water. The police took his clothes. They took everything. They bagged his pockets at the scene."
Maren turned her gaze on her sister. Iris met it. Iris had their mother's eyes, grey, set a fraction too close, and when she was cornered, a faint tremor came into her lower lid. It was there now.
"You have not been sleeping," Maren said.
"Have you?"
"No."
"Then don't."
The chapel door opened. Mr Quill returned with a small leather folder, which he set on the edge of the pew.
"The order of service is ready for proof," he said. "Your father specified readings in his own hand, some years ago. I have them here. They are rather, ah, particular. I wondered if you wished to substitute."
He opened the folder. Inside lay two sheets of paper, ruled, covered in her father's cramped writing. She would have known that hand anywhere. The downstrokes of the g's looped low, almost to the line beneath. The capital J was a strict little mast.
Iris leaned in.
Maren read.
Read at my funeral, if I am to be read at all, and not before:
From the journal of H. Voss, 1923: "A garden is a record of its keeper's patience. When the keeper is gone, the record continues, but no one can read it. The new keeper must begin again, and call it learning."
And this, from the same, two pages later: "I have found a plant today that I cannot name. It is not in any of my books. I will not press it. I will let it grow, and watch what it does."
Maren stared at the second passage. The ink had been pressed hard, the letters carved into the paper. She turned the sheet over. The back was blank.
"He wanted this read," Iris said quietly.
"He wrote it to be read by me," Maren said.
Mr Quill, who had been listening with the trained neutrality of his trade, tilted his head a fraction. "The journal in question, Miss Voss. Do you know where it might be?"
"I know where it should be. In the study, in the cabinet with the brass fittings, behind the seed trays."
"It was not among his papers at the house. His solicitor has confirmed only documents of title, the deeds to the Shrike's Garden, and a small folder of correspondence. The journal itself appears to be missing."
Maren folded the sheet and put it in her handbag, beside the notebook with the crossed-out question.
The chapel grew darker. Outside, the copper rim of the sun had slipped behind the fells and the windows had gone the colour of slate. Mr Quill moved along the wall and turned up three lamps in brass sconces, and the light fell on the coffin with a slant that made the pine grain seem to move.
Her father's watch ticked. She counted twelve beats before she spoke.
"I want a moment alone with him."
Iris hesitated. "Maren."
"A moment, Iris."
Iris went out, and Mr Quill went out, and the door closed with a soft click, and Maren was alone with the dead man who had taught her to graft.
She did not speak. She stood at the head of the coffin and looked down at his face. She listened to the watch. She listened to the silence of Blackwood Hollow pressing against the windows, the held-breath silence of a place that knew more than it would say.
Then she reached out and lifted his right hand from his chest.
It was cool. The skin had the firm, waxy feel of an apple left too long in a bowl. She turned the hand over. The palm was clean. Too clean. Her father's palms had never been clean. She had seen them on a hundred summer evenings, the lines black with compost, the creases at the wrist ringed with green.
She set the hand back in place, exactly as it had been.
She looked at the ring finger. Bare. A pale band of skin where the sun had not reached for thirty years.
She looked at the watch. She wound the crown half a turn and the ticking steadied, then resumed.
She looked at the inside of the coffin lid, where someone had carved a small mark at the top corner. A letter. A V, or perhaps the lower half of an A. She could not be certain in the lamplight.
She closed her eyes. The pine resin smell was strongest here, sharp enough to make her sinuses prickle. It was the smell of the Shrike's Garden when she was eight, when her father had felled a storm-damaged Scots pine by the lower wall and sawn it into boards in the yard, and she had carried the offcuts to the boiler house in armfuls that smelled of Christmas and sawdust.
She opened her eyes.
"You did not fall," she said, very quietly, to no one.
She straightened the lapels of her jacket, turned, and walked out of the chapel. Iris was waiting in the corridor with her arms folded tight across the borrowed dress. Mr Quill stood at his post by the curtain, hands clasped.
"We will return in the morning," Maren said. "For the service. I will want to see the house tonight."
"You have not been to the house," Iris said. It was not a question.
"No."
"I thought perhaps you would go straight there."
"I am going to the house now. After I have walked."
"Walked where?"
"Around."
Mr Quill cleared his throat. "The village will be closed by ten, Miss Voss. Curfew, since the autumn. The hotel will still be serving, if you require supper."
"I will not require supper. Thank you, Mr Quill."
She took her coat from the stand in the hall, a grey wool with the lining half torn at one pocket. The brass bell gave its one thin note as she went out.
Blackwood Hollow at dusk was a village of pulled-down blinds. The chemist was dark. The post office was dark. A tabby cat sat on the windowsill of the closed tearoom and watched her pass with the unimpressed gaze of something that owned the place. A single light burned in the upstairs window of the King's Head, and another in the vestry of St Cuthbert's, where, by the look of the shadows moving behind the glass, a choir was practising. The hymn tune drifted faintly across the square, the alto line wobbling on the sustained notes, the bass uncertain where to come in.
She crossed the square and took the lane that ran along the back of the properties, where the gardens ended in stone walls and the walls ended in the start of the fell. She walked until the lane became a path, and the path became a track, and the track gave out at a five-bar gate that overlooked the valley.
Below her, half in shadow, half in the last green of the evening, lay the Shrike's Garden.
She gripped the top bar. The iron was cold. She could see the roofs of the outbuildings, the long glasshouse with two of its panes starred, the brick chimney of the cottage. Beyond the cottage, hidden from this angle but she knew exactly where it lay, was the pond. The lip of stone where the water iris grew. The place where Jonas Voss had, according to the coroner, slipped.
A figure stood on the path that led up from the gate.
She had not heard him approach. He was in shirtsleeves despite the cold, his jacket slung over one arm, his hair the kind of fair that went copper in low light. He had a leather satchel across his chest and a small hardback book in his free hand, open, as though he had been reading while he walked and only looked up when he heard the gate creak.
He raised a hand. Not a wave. A greeting, modest, the gesture of a man who knows he is trespassing in spirit if not in fact.
"Miss Voss," he said. "I am sorry to find you here, but not sorry to meet you. I am Declan Ashworth."
She did not move. The wind had changed, and it brought her the scent of him now, not cologne, something sharper, the chalky smell of paper and ink and, beneath that, the green tang of fresh walnut ink, which she had not smelled since her last year at horticultural college.
"You have been painting," she said.
He blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Gal nuts. You have crushed them. Walnut ink, in a binder. You have it on the cuff of your shirt, and on the knuckle of your left hand." She nodded toward the book. "And you are carrying a botanical illustration folio that smells of it."
He looked down at his cuff. A faint smile came and went. "Horticulturists," he said. "Dreadful creatures. We illustrators cannot hide a thing."
"Why are you on my father's land?"
"I have a letter from him. Written last April. He invited me to come and make drawings of three particular specimens in the Garden. He said they would not be in flower long, and he was not certain of the second growth. I wrote back to confirm. He did not reply. I came anyway, last week. I arrived on the day he was found."
"And you have stayed."
"I have stayed at the inn. I have asked, in the correct channels, for permission to continue the work. Mrs Pell in the post office sent me to Mr Quill. Mr Quill said I must speak to the family. I am speaking to the family."
Maren looked at him. His face was open. Too open. The openness of a man who has rehearsed it. But his eyes, in the failing light, were the colour of unripe sloes, and they did not waver.
"You have a letter," she said.
"I do."
"Then you may walk down with me now and show it to me. But you will not enter the house until I have spoken to my sister. You will not approach the glasshouse. You will not go near the pond."
He inclined his head. The gesture was different from Mr Quill's. It carried a suggestion of genuine deference.
"I will wait at the gate for as long as you require," he said.
They walked back through the village in silence, the choir still practising behind the vestry glass, the alto wobbling, the bass now finding its entry two beats late. The tabby cat had moved to the chemist's sill. It watched them pass.
Maren's hand in her coat pocket closed around the folded sheet of her father's writing. The two passages from the journal pressed against her knuckles. A plant I cannot name. I will not press it. I will let it grow, and watch what it does.
She had a great deal of watching to do.
Declan stopped at the mouth of the inn's car park. The gravel there was pale in the failing light, almost white where the last of the sun came sidelong over the chemist's roof. His boots shifted on it as he turned to face her, and the small bones of his face were sharp against the colour of the sky.
"One moment," he said. "Before we go further."
He reached into the inner pocket of his coat, the green one with the bone buttons, and produced a folded sheet of paper that was not his own. It was creased along three lines, the kind of fold a thing gets when it has been carried in a back pocket or a wallet for a week. He held it out to her across the narrow span of gravel between them, and his fingers did not tremble.
"The coroner's preliminary," he said. "I was given it this morning, by way of the post office. Mrs Pell thought I ought to see it before I saw you."
Maren did not take it immediately. She looked at his hand, at the paper, at the shape of the letter beneath his coat where her father's writing still lay. The wind off the moor had risen a little and was pushing at the loose edge of the sheet, lifting it like a tongue.
"Why you?" she asked.
"I asked for it. I made a point of asking. I find that a stranger, in a small place, is sometimes granted small permissions that a neighbour is not. People are curious about strangers. They want to see what a stranger will do with a thing."
She took the sheet. The paper was warmer than she had expected. It had been against his chest for some time.
The first thing she read, at the top of the page in the block capitals of a stamped form, was the conclusion.
CAUSE OF DEATH: CARDIAC ARREST, SECONDARY TO PRE-EXISTING HYPERTENSION.
Her father had had no hypertension. He had walked the upper terraces of the Shrike's Garden every morning of his life since he was twenty-six. He had eaten oats and blackberries and the bitter greens from the south wall. He had been, to Maren's knowledge, examined by a doctor twice in forty years and found, both times, to be a man who would very likely outlive his own children.
She read on.
Below the conclusion, in the smaller, more careful hand of the examining physician, were the observations. She turned the page over. There were photographs, black and white, clipped to the second sheet. She did not look at them yet. She read the words first, because words were what she could argue with, and because she did not trust herself yet to look at what was beneath them.
BILATERAL CONTUSION, WRISTS, CONSISTENT WITH MANUAL RESTRAINT. COMPRESSION FRACTURE, HYOID BONE, ANTERIOR ASPECT. SUBCUTANEOUS HAEMORRHAGE, LEFT TEMPLE, APPROX. 3 CM. NO WATER PRESENT IN LUNGS OR UPPER AIRWAY.
She read the last line again. No water present in lungs or upper airway.
The pond had been three feet deep at its centre in midsummer. In October, after the rains, it would have been nearer five. A man found face down in five feet of water, in October, with no water in his lungs, was a man who had not drowned.
The wind gusted. The paper flapped in her hand like a small wounded thing. She smoothed it against her thigh with the heel of her palm.
"The hyoid," she said. Her voice came out flat, the way it did when she was very still inside. "Who breaks a hyoid by accident?"
"No one," Declan said.
"Who," she said, and stopped, and began again. "Who has been told this is a heart attack?"
"The county coroner. The family. I expect the post office, by now, in its own way."
"And you."
"And me. Yes."
She looked at him. The sloe eyes were not moving. His hands were in his pockets, and she noticed that the right one, the one that had held the sheet, was slightly curled at the fingers, the way a hand curls when it has been holding something heavy and has only just let it go.
"You have not given this to the police," she said.
"I have given it to you."
"That is not the same thing."
"No. It is not. But you are the daughter. And I am, at present, a man without a wife or a sister or a vote in this parish, and I have been told, by way of the post office, that any further questions I ask of the proper authorities will be answered by being asked to leave the inn."
She folded the sheet, badly, not along the original creases. She slid it into the other pocket of her coat, the one that did not contain her father's writing. The two documents lay against her ribs, one over each lung, like a pair of cold hands placed there by someone who had not meant to be tender.
"The funeral," she said. "When is it?"
"Tomorrow. Eleven o'clock. The ironwood grove, at the south of the garden."
"Who arranged it?"
"Iris. Your sister."
Maren said nothing for a long time. The village choir had stopped. The vestry windows were dark, and through them, faintly, she could see the candles being snuffed, one by one, in the small hands of the children who had carried them. Each snuff made a tiny orange flare and then nothing.
"Walk on," she said.
They walked on.
She did not ask him to come to the funeral in the morning. He did not ask to be invited. When they reached the lychgate at the edge of the lane that ran down toward the Shrike's Garden, he stopped and took off his hat and stood there until she had passed through without him.
She heard, behind her, the small sound of the hat being put back on.
---
The funeral was held at eleven the next morning, in the ironwood grove at the southern edge of the Shrike's Garden. The grove was so called because of the three trees at its centre, each one a stump of something older than the house, each one black as wrought iron and twice as heavy when felled. They had not been felled. They had been allowed to die on their feet, and their grey skeletons stood among the yew and the holly, and the names of the dead of the village had been carved into their trunks for two hundred years. The carvings had weathered into the wood. They looked less like names and more like scars.
The wind was from the north. It carried the smell of wet bracken and, faintly, of the peat smoke from the village chimneys, and beneath both, the colder mineral smell of the pond somewhere to the east of where she stood. The sky was the colour of unbleached linen, and the light on the grove was flat, and the shadows of the ironwoods lay on the ground like something spilled.
Maren stood at the back of the small gathering and did not approach the grave until the vicar had finished reading.
There were perhaps twenty people. She did not know half of them. The half she did know were the ones she had hoped not to see: Mr Quill, in a tie he had clearly bought for the occasion; Mrs Pell, in a hat with a short veil that kept catching on her chin; the postman, who had brought the letter that had brought her back, and who was now looking at the ground as though he wished he had never been born.
Iris stood at the front, between the vicar and the grave. She was wearing the dark green coat their mother had been buried in, the one with the silver buttons that had never polished properly. She had grown into it, or it had shrunk onto her. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that the bones of her temples showed through the skin. She did not look round.
Maren had not seen her in three years. The last time they had spoken, on the telephone, Iris had said, Come home, and Maren had said, It is not my home any longer, and Iris had hung up. There had been no message after. There had been no letter. There had been, until the postman's brown envelope, only the long silence of two people who had once shared a bedroom and could not now share a sentence.
The vicar read the committal. The earth was thrown. Maren watched the clods fall onto the lid of the coffin, one after another, with the dull sound of wet bread falling into a barrel. She did not look at Iris. She looked at the clods. She could feel her sister not looking at her in return, the
the weight of it heavier than any earth, the whole afternoon pulling tight between them like a wire that neither of them had the courage to cut or knot.
Maren stood with her hands at her sides. She had brought no flowers. She had not known what to bring. The garden, her father's garden, had been full of flowers that no one would let her pick in time. The florist in the village had wanted her to choose something white, and she had refused, and the florist had looked at her in the way that people look at difficult women, the way that Maren's father had looked at difficult women, and Iris, and the vicar himself now, with his soft mouth set for the committal. White was for weddings. White was for innocence. Her father had been neither married again nor innocent, and Maren did not feel that she had to pretend otherwise in front of a hole in the ground.
When it was done, the people drifted. Some came to her. Some came to Iris. None came to both. Maren received Mr Quill's handshake, which was damp and brief. She received Mrs Pell's murmured condolence, half-swallowed by the hat. She received the postman's averted gaze, which lingered longer than any of the others, and which she returned with a small nod that meant, You did what you had to do, and meant also, I will not punish you for the doing of it.
Iris did not come to her. Maren did not go to Iris.
The two sisters stood on opposite sides of the grave, each with her hands folded, each watching the mound of fresh earth settle into itself. The clay of the Shrike's Garden was heavy with rain and old roots. It did not settle cleanly. It shifted and resettled, as though reluctant to be still.
A man Maren did not know stepped out from among the mourners and crossed the grass towards her. He was tall, brown-haired, with a coat the colour of wet bark and a collar turned up against the wind. He walked as though he knew the ground, and not by looking at it. He had a small leather case under his arm, the kind illustrators carry, and a scar through one eyebrow that lifted when he smiled.
Miss Voss, he said. I am very sorry for your loss. My name is Declan Ashworth. I had the honour of corresponding with your father.
Maren looked at him. He did not look away. Most people, when caught looking at her in a graveyard, would soften their gaze or step aside. He did neither.
Correspond, she said.
Letters, he said. About a particular specimen. A pitcher plant, I think he called it. The Shrike's Strangler. He had been drawing it from my sketches, and I had been taking notes from his notes, and so on. We never met in the body.
The phrase caught her. She heard in it the small, particular pleasure her father had taken in the oddities of language. In the body. As though friendship were a kind of haunting.
He is in the body now, she said, and was sorry for the cruelty of it as soon as she had spoken, but the man only inclined his head, as though he had expected her to say it.
I am staying at the Hare and Hen, he said. If there is anything I can do, anything at all, you will find me there. I came down for the funeral. I would have come for the garden, but the funeral seemed the better reason.
Maren did not answer. She watched him walk away, his boots leaving clean prints in the soft earth, and she thought, without knowing why, of the way her father had walked out of rooms when he had said the wrong thing, slowly, without looking back.
When she turned, Iris was standing beside her.
She had not heard her sister come. Iris moved like that, even now. She had always been able to cross a room without sound. As a child she had startled their father at his desk, and he had laughed, which he never did at anything else.
He wrote to me too, Iris said. Three weeks before. I did not tell you.
Maren said nothing. The wind moved the trees behind the churchyard, and somewhere a bell rang, though it was not the hour for bells.
I did not want you to come home for a letter, Iris said. I wanted you to come home for him. When he died, I did not know which was the right thing to do. So I did both, and neither, and now he is in the ground.
Maren looked at her sister. Iris's face had changed. There were new lines beside her mouth, the kind that come from keeping the mouth shut for years. There was a small mole at her jaw that Maren had not remembered, or that was new. There was the green coat, with its silver buttons that had never polished properly, and which their mother had worn to her own mother's funeral, and which Iris had worn to this one, so that the three women of the family were now linked in wool and silver and the long habit of not speaking.
You should have told me, Maren said.
Yes, Iris said. I know.
I would have come.
I know that too. That is partly why I did not.
Maren almost laughed. Almost. The feeling of it moved in her chest like a small animal stirring. She had not known her sister had any such calculation in her. She had thought Iris only impulsive, only the way she had always been, all quick decisions and quick retreats.
I am not going to forgive you for it, Maren said.
Iris nodded. She did not ask to be forgiven. She had never asked for anything, which was, Maren realised now, a kind of asking, repeated so often it had worn into the wood.
They stood together in the churchyard. The mourners had gone. The grave-diggers were not yet come to finish their work. The mound of earth held the shape of the spade that had made it.
Come home, Iris said, and this time Maren did not say no.