Rain struck the windows of the Penning mail coach like handfuls of gravel thrown by an angry child. Margot Halloway pressed her forehead to the cold glass and watched the hedgerows blur into smears of blackthorn and bramble. Beside her, a leather valise dug into her hip. Inside that valise, wrapped in a chemise that smelled of lavender and mothballs, lay a brass key and a notebook full of sentences her grandmother had never seen fit to finish.
The village of Larkspur announced itself in fragments. A stone gatepost, listing to one side. A fingerpost sign so weathered the lettering had surrendered to the moss. A pair of magpies, hunched on a gate, watching the coach with the bright, appraising eyes of jurors. The driver, a man whose name she had already forgotten, muttered something about the road being soft and slowed the team to a crawl. Margot did not answer. She was listening to the rain, and to something beneath the rain, a hush that seemed to belong to the place itself, as though the village were holding a finger to its lips.
The coach stopped in a small square of cobbles outside a building whose frontage bore the faded gilt of the words POST OFFICE. The driver set down the step. Margot gathered her coat tighter around her shoulders, accepted her valise, and stepped down into weather that tasted of iron and old leaves. The coach pulled away at once, as though it had been waiting for the excuse, and she was left alone with the square and the downpour and the sound of water drumming on a tin awning across the way.
A bell over the door of the post office gave a thin, defeated clink when she entered. Inside, the air smelled of ink, sealing wax, and something drier, paper, perhaps, or dust that had been undisturbed for a long time. Behind a counter of scarred oak stood an elderly woman, her silver hair pinned in a knot so tight it seemed to hold her entire face in place. She looked up from a sheet of letters and regarded Margot over the top of a pair of wire spectacles.
"Margot Halloway," the woman said, before Margot had opened her mouth. Not a question. A confirmation, delivered with the calm of someone who had been expecting her for some time and was annoyed that the coach had chosen this particular hour to arrive.
"Mrs. Craven," Margot said, because the name had arrived in her mind as though it had always lived there, summoned by the smell of the shop and the look of the woman behind the counter.
Eunice Craven set the letters down with the precise displeasure of a schoolmarm. "I had your grandmother's letter on the mantel for three weeks. I kept telling the fire not to touch it, but the fire does as it pleases. Sit down before you drip on my floor."
Margot sat. The chair was wooden, and the wood remembered every person who had ever sat in it. She placed the valise on her knees and felt, through the leather, the hard little geometry of the key.
"Your grandmother," Eunice said, lowering herself into a chair behind the counter that creaked like a small boat, "was a woman who believed a thing could be kept safe by never speaking of it. I told her otherwise. I told her the village has ears like a fox and a memory like a stile. She did not listen."
"She is dead," Margot said, and was surprised at how thin her own voice sounded against the drumming of the rain.
"Yes," Eunice said. "And she left you the house. Which is why you are here, dripping on my floor, instead of anywhere sensible."
Margot opened her mouth, then closed it. She had prepared, on the journey, several polite and orderly sentences. They had evaporated somewhere between the gatepost and the door. She produced, instead, the notebook from her valise, the one with the unfinished sentences, and laid it on the counter between them.
Eunice looked at it as one might look at a small, suspicious animal. She did not touch it. "I have not seen that book in nineteen years," she said. "I had hoped the river took it."
Margot's fingers tightened on the leather cover. "The river?"
"You will want tea," Eunice said, rising with a creak of her own joints. "And you will want to take off that coat. I have a towel behind the counter that has dried worse things than you." She disappeared through a door that led into a back room, and Margot heard the clatter of crockery, the hiss of a kettle already warm, the small domestic music of a woman who had been waiting to perform these acts for some days.
Left alone with the notebook, Margot turned it over in her hands. The cover was soft with age. The initials on the front had been worked in green thread, long since faded to the color of pond water. She had carried it in her valise for three hundred miles. She had not opened it since the morning the solicitor's letter had come, white and judicial on her breakfast tray, informing her that she was now the owner of a house in a village she had not seen since she was a child.
The notebook fell open at a page near the middle. The handwriting was her grandmother's, the careful slanted script of a woman who had been taught penmanship by someone who believed penmanship was a moral quality. The sentence began: "If you are reading this, then the key has done what the river could not." The sentence stopped. Below it, in a different ink, another attempt: "The house on Wren Lane does not forget. It is not able to." That sentence also stopped. Below that, a third, the ink pressed so hard the pen had scarred the paper: "Do not open the drawer in the north room until you have learned to count."
Margot heard Eunice's tread returning and closed the notebook.
"Two sugars," Eunice said, setting a teacup before her with the decisive clatter of someone laying down a card. "I remember you took two. You took them when you were eleven and I imagine you still take them. Some habits are not habits, they are architecture."
Margot wrapped her fingers around the cup. The warmth was a small mercy against the chill that had settled into her shoulders. "You remember me."
"I remember everyone. It is the post office's curse. Sit now. Drink. Tell me what the solicitor did not put in the letter, because solicitors put very little in letters that is worth the ink."
Margot told her. The house on Wren Lane. The key. The grandmother, dead in her chair by the window, the solicitor said, with the look of a woman who had been listening for a footstep and had mistaken the last silence for a visitor. The funeral, attended by Margot alone, in a village three hundred miles from where the body actually lay, the grandmother having had the foresight or the cruelty to die in the county town so that no neighbor would have the satisfaction of laying her out. The notebook, delivered separately, by a courier who would not say who had sent it, only that he had been told to leave it at the lodgings and to take no answer back.
"He took no answer back because there was none to take," Eunice said, as though this settled a matter of long-standing dispute. She sipped her own tea, noisily, the way country women sip tea when they have things to say and mean to say them between swallows. "Your grandmother sent for you once before. Do you remember?"
"I was not sent for. I was sent away."
Eunice's mouth thinned. "That is the same verb, in her book. She had a small vocabulary and she used it hard. You were a girl. Your sister was a girl. Your mother was a woman who had begun to notice things she ought not to have noticed, and your grandmother decided the noticing had to stop. So you were sent to school. So your sister was kept. So your mother stayed here, in the house on Wren Lane, and did not leave it again until the day she was buried."
Margot set her cup down. The china rattled against the saucer. "My mother died in this village."
"Your mother died in that house. There is a difference, though the village pretends there is not. The house on Wren Lane has a memory for its dead, Margot. It has a memory for everything. It is the kind of house that counts."
"Counts?"
Eunice looked at her then with the full weight of her attention. The wire spectacles caught the gray light from the window. "Your grandmother wrote that word in the notebook, did she not. Count. You saw it."
Margot did not confirm. She did not need to.
"The arithmetic of this village," Eunice said, lowering her voice as though the walls had ears of the specific kind she had warned of, "is not the arithmetic you learned at school. Things are added here. Things are subtracted. And the house on Wren Lane keeps the ledger."
Margot's fingers found the key inside the valise. The brass was warm from her body. "I was told the house was empty."
"It is empty of people. It has never been empty of other things. Your grandmother lived in it alone for nineteen years because she knew better than to put anyone else inside it. She put me in it once, when the chimney caught, and I will not go in it again." Eunice set her own cup down and folded her hands. "I will tell you what I told the solicitor, who did not listen, because solicitors are paid not to listen. The house is yours. You may do what you like with what is yours. But the drawer in the north room is not yours. The drawer in the north room is the house's. And the house does not forget."
The rain struck the window harder, as though taking Eunice's words as a cue. A gust shook the tin awning across the square with a noise like a tin drum being beaten by a child who did not know the tune. Margot sat very still. The notebook lay between them on the counter, closed, its cover dark with damp.
"How did my sister die," Margot said. She had not meant to ask it yet. The question had been waiting in the back of her throat for nineteen years, and it chose this moment to step forward.
Eunice did not startle. She had, Margot realized, been waiting for the question. "In the house," she said. "On Wren Lane. In the north room. In the drawer." She raised a hand. "Not in the literal sense. In the sense that the house keeps. Your grandmother would not let anyone take Agnes's body from the house for three days. She sat with it. She wrote in that book. She counted. When they finally came to take your sister for burial, the coffin was lighter than the men expected. Your grandmother had put something in with her, or taken something out. Agnes's mother, your mother, would not say. Your grandmother would not say. The ledger, as far as I know, has never said."
Margot looked at the notebook. She thought of the sentences her grandmother had begun and not finished. She thought of the third sentence, the one pressed so hard it had scarred the paper: Do not open the drawer in the north room until you have learned to count. She thought of Agnes, who had been kept while Margot was sent away, who had stayed in the house on Wren Lane and had not come out of it alive, and whose name was in the notebook, somewhere, in ink that had faded to the color of pond water.
"The key," Margot said. "My grandmother left me a key."
"Yes," Eunice said. "She left you the key to the front door. She did not leave you the key to the drawer. The drawer does not have a key. The drawer has a count." She paused, and her voice softened, which made it worse. "When you are ready, I will walk you up to the house. I will not go in. I will stand in the lane and I will wait until I see a light in the kitchen window. And then I will go home and I will put the kettle on, because that is what one does in Larkspur when a Halloway has come back to the house that does not forget."
Margot nodded. She did not trust her voice. The rain drummed on. The tin awning beat its tuneless rhythm. The bell over the door gave another thin clink as the wind found a new way in. Margot Halloway sat in the post office in the village of Larkspur with a dead grandmother's key in her hand and a notebook full of unfinished sentences, and she waited for the rain to show her the way to Wren Lane.
The rain showed her the way to Wren Lane, but slowly.
Eunice walked at a pace that left no room for doubt. Her boots were worn smooth at the heels, and she set them down with the deliberation of a woman who had walked the same stones so often that the path had worn into her legs as much as the ground. Margot followed a half step behind, the collar of her coat turned up, the key in her right hand, the notebook in the inside pocket of her coat where it sat against her ribs like a cold hand. The lane was narrow and unlit. There were no streetlamps. There were no streetlamps in Larkspur, Eunice had explained at the post office, because the council had voted against them in nineteen sixty-three and had not voted on them since, and the dark was a thing people had made peace with, the way one made peace with an elderly relative who took up too much room in the kitchen.
They passed the schoolhouse with its blind windows. They passed the chapel with its leaning spire. They passed three cottages in a row, each one darker than the last, and at the end of the row there was a gap where a cottage had been and was not anymore. Margot did not ask. Eunice did not volunteer. The rain drummed on her hat and on Margot's coat and on the lane, which was not paved but only packed earth and gravel, and the sound of it was the only sound, and it was a sound like a hand tapping on a door that would not open.
At the corner of Wren Lane, Eunice stopped.
"Here," she said. She pointed with her chin.
Margot looked.
The house was set back from the lane behind a low wall of grey stone. There was a gate, and the gate was shut. Beyond the gate there was a path, and beyond the path there was a step, and on the step there was a door. The door was painted the colour of dried blood, which is to say it was the colour of the paint that had been on the door when she was a child, which is to say it had not been repainted in thirty years. The windows were dark. The garden was overgrown. There was a tree at the side of the house that had grown up against the wall and had not been cut back, and its branches pressed against the upstairs windows like fingers. The chimney was intact. The roof was intact. The house, Margot observed with the part of her mind that still functioned like a governess's, was structurally sound. It was only empty. It was only the house on Wren Lane where her grandmother had lived alone for thirty years and where her sister had not come out of alive.
"The key," Eunice said. "You have it."
Margot took it out of her pocket. It was a Yale key, old, the teeth worn down by use. She held it in her palm and looked at it and then at the gate.
"Will you come in with me?" she asked.
"No," Eunice said. "I told you at the post office. I will stand here. I will wait. I will watch for the light in the kitchen window. When I see it, I will go home." She paused. "You have the notebook?"
"I have it."
"You have the count?"
"I don't know what the count is."
"No," Eunice said. "You don't. Not yet."
Margot looked at her. Eunice looked back, and for a moment her face was the face she had worn at the post office when she had pressed the rowan into Margot's palm, which is to say it was the face of a woman who knew something she was not going to say. Then she looked away, down the lane, towards the village, where the rain was still falling and the dark was still dark and no one was walking.
"Go on," Eunice said. "Before the rain gets worse."
Margot opened the gate. The hinge shrieked. She walked up the path. The gravel crunched under her boots. She reached the step. She put the key in the lock. The lock turned. The door opened inward, into a dark that smelled of damp and dust and something else, something that was not rot but was older than rot, something that had been in the house when the house was built and would be in the house when the house was pulled down. She stepped in. The door closed behind her, on its own, with a soft click.
She stood in the hall. She could not see. She could hear the rain on the roof, above her, and she could hear the house, which was not silent but full of small sounds: the creak of boards settling, the tick of a pipe somewhere in the walls, the soft sigh of air moving through rooms she could not see. She reached out and her hand found the wall, and the wall was cold, and the plaster was rough under her fingers, and she stood for a moment with her hand on the wall of the house on Wren Lane where her sister had lived and died and not been found for three days.
Then she remembered the torch. She had brought a torch. It was in her coat pocket, the left pocket, beside the notebook. She took it out and switched it on. The beam was white and thin and it cut through the dark of the hall like a blade. She saw the stairs, going up. She saw the door to the front room, closed. She saw the door to the kitchen, at the back, also closed. She saw the coat hooks on the wall, three of them, one of which still had a wooden hanger on it, the kind her grandmother had used, the kind with the notches for the straps of a coat that was no longer there. She saw the floor, which was bare boards, and the boards were dusty, and in the dust there were no footprints.
She was the first person to come into this house in three years. She was certain of that. The dust was undisturbed. The air was undisturbed. The house was exactly as her grandmother had left it, because her grandmother had left nothing to chance, not even her own death, and the house had been waiting, the way Eunice said it would.
She walked to the kitchen door. She opened it. The kitchen was small and square and the window above the sink looked out onto the back garden, which was dark, and there was nothing in the garden she could see, only the suggestion of shapes, of hedges, of the tree she had seen from the lane, whose branches now pressed against this window too. She shone the torch around. The stove was there, the old stove, the one her grandmother had cooked on. The table was there, the pine table, scarred with knife marks and ring marks from a hundred cups of tea. The dresser was there, with its three shelves of plates and bowls, all of them clean, all of them put away with the care of a woman who had known that no one was coming to use them but who had not been able to leave them in the sink. There was a chair at the table. There was only one chair.
Margot sat down.
She put the torch on the table and the beam shone up at the ceiling and lit the room from below, which made it look like a room in a dream, or a room in a play, or a room in a house that was not quite a house anymore. She took the notebook out of her pocket and put it on the table in front of her. She took the key out of her other pocket and put it beside the notebook. She looked at them. The notebook was the colour of pond water. The key was the colour of old iron. The torchlight made them look like artefacts from another century, which they were, in a way, because everything in this house was from another century, and she was the only thing in it that was from this one.
She opened the notebook.
The first sentence was in ink that had gone brown. It was her grandmother's hand, small and neat. The second sentence was in the same ink. The third sentence was pressed deep. She read them again, here, in the house they had been written in, and the reading was different. The first sentence, the counting one, sounded different in the room where the counting was supposed to be done. The second sentence sounded different in the house where the lock had been. The third sentence sounded different in the house where the drawer was, somewhere upstairs, in the north room, waiting.
She turned the page. There were more sentences. Some were in her grandmother's hand. Some were in her mother's hand, which she recognised from the letters she had kept, the letters her mother had written to her from the house on Wren Lane when Margot had been sent away to be a governess and Agnes had been kept. Some were in Agnes's hand, which she had not seen in fifteen years, and which she recognised the way one recognises the face of a stranger one has seen in a dream. Agnes's hand was large and untidy, the letters leaning to the right as if they were falling over. Agnes's hand had been the hand of a girl who had been kept while her sister had been sent away, and who had not come out of the house alive, and who had written in this notebook, somewhere, in ink that had faded to the colour of pond water.
She read her mother's sentences. They were short. They were about the lock, mostly, and about the count, and about the drawer, and about the room. They were written in the flat voice of a woman who had been told what to do and had done it and had not questioned it, because her own mother had told her, and her mother before that, and so on back to the beginning of the count. Her mother had not questioned the lock. Her mother had not questioned the count. Her mother had gone into the north room and opened the drawer and done what was in the drawer and come out again, and had not written down what was in the drawer, because what was in the drawer was not to be written down.
She read her grandmother's sentences. They were longer. They were about the lock, and the count, and the drawer, and the room, but also about other things, about the village, about the chapel, about the schoolhouse, about the lane, about the rain, which fell on Larkspur as it fell everywhere, and which her grandmother had watched from the kitchen window for thirty years, alone, with the notebook and the key and the count, waiting for the day when the door would open again and someone would come in who had been sent away.
She turned more pages. She came to the back of the notebook. There were a few pages left, and on them there was more of Agnes's hand. The sentences were not about the lock, or the count, or the drawer. The sentences were about Margot.
Margot read them.
The first one said: Margot has gone away. The second one said: Margot will not come back. The third one said: Margot does not know what I know. The fourth one said: Margot will come back when she has learned to count. The fifth one said: I am in the north room. The sixth one said: I have opened the drawer. The seventh one said: I cannot close it. The eighth one said: I cannot count to twenty. The ninth one said: I am not going to count to twenty. The tenth one said: I am going to count to nineteen. The eleventh one said: That is enough.
Then there was no more of Agnes's hand. The pages after that were blank.
Margot sat at the table in the kitchen of the house on Wren Lane with the torch shining up at the ceiling and the notebook open in front of her and the rain on the roof above her and the key on the table beside the notebook and the rowan sprig in her coat pocket, which she had not yet taken out, and she read the last sentence her sister had written in this house, in this notebook, in this hand, fifteen years ago, and the sentence was: That is enough.
She did not know what it meant. She knew what it did not mean. It did not mean that Agnes had stopped counting because she had finished. It meant that Agnes had stopped counting because she had decided to stop, because nineteen was enough, because the count was not a thing one had to finish but a one was a thing one could choose to end, and Agnes had chosen, in the north room, with the drawer open, in the house on Wren Lane, to end it at nineteen.
Margot put the notebook down. She put her hands flat on the table. She breathed. The rain drummed on. The torch flickered, then steadied. The house was quiet around her, the way a house is quiet when it is waiting to see what she will do next. Eunice was at the gate, in the rain, watching the kitchen window for a light, and there was a light, because of the torch, and Eunice would see it, and Eunice would go home, and the kettle would go on, because that was what one did in Larkspur when a Halloway had come back.
Margot stood up. She picked up the torch. She picked up the notebook. She did not pick up the key. She left the key on the table, where it lay in the beam of the torch like a thing that had been put down a long time ago and had not been picked up since.
She walked out of the kitchen and into the hall and to the foot of the stairs. She looked up. The stairs went up into dark. The dark was the same dark that had been at the top of the stairs when she was a child, the dark she had been told not to go into, the dark that Agnes had gone into and not come out of. The dark was waiting for her, the way the house was waiting, the way the drawer was waiting, the way the count was waiting.
She put her foot on the first step.
The stairs held her weight the way stairs hold the weight of someone who has not climbed them in a long time, with a faint creak at the third step and a deeper groan at the seventh, and Margot climbed them slowly, one hand on the banister, the other holding the torch out in front of her so that the beam swam up the wall and across the landing and into the dark at the top.
The landing was small. Three doors. The bathroom, which was to the left. The north bedroom, which was to the right. And the third door, the one at the end, which was the door to Agnes's room, which was the door that had been closed since Agnes died, which was the door that Margot had not opened in three years.
She went to the bathroom first. She put the torch on the edge of the sink and ran the tap and the water came out brown at first, then clear, then cold, and she cupped her hands under it and drank. The water tasted of iron and old pipes and the faint ghost of something floral, lavender perhaps, or rosemary, something her mother had put in the linen drawers. She drank again. She splashed her face. She looked at herself in the mirror above the sink, and the face that looked back was her mother's face, or Agnes's face, or her own face, or all three at once, and she did not look away.
She dried her hands on the towel that hung from the ring. The towel was stiff with age and smelled of nothing. She picked up the torch and went back to the landing and stood for a moment with her hand on the handle of the north bedroom door.
She opened the door.
The room was cold. The room was very cold. The torch beam found the bed, made up with the grey counterpane, the pillow still dented from the last head that had lain there, the eiderdown folded at the foot because Agnes had always folded it at the foot, even in summer, because she said the weight of it on her chest made her feel held. The window was shuttered. The wardrobe stood against the far wall, its doors closed, a faint line of lighter paint where a mirror had been removed. The chair was in the corner. The book was on the chair. The book was Agnes's book, the one she had been reading, the one with the cracked spine and the dried flower between the pages, and the flower was still there, pressed flat, brown at the edges, a scabious perhaps, or a cornflower, something from the garden, something Agnes had picked and put between the pages because she picked things and put them between pages, because she was that kind of girl, because she was Agnes.
Margot did not touch the book. She stood in the doorway and looked at the room and the room looked back at her and the room was empty, because Agnes was not in it, because Agnes was in the ground, because Agnes was nineteen, because Agnes had chosen, in this house, to end at nineteen.
She closed the door. She stood on the landing. The third door was in front of her. The third door was the door to the room that had been Agnes's since she was a girl, the room at the back of the house, the room that looked out over the garden, the room that had the window seat, the room that smelled of paper and ink and the faint sweet rot of the wisteria that climbed the wall outside. The door was closed. The door had been closed for three years. The door was the door she had come up the stairs to open.
She put her hand on the handle. The handle was cold. The metal was cold the way metal is cold when it has not been touched in a long time, cold the way the key in the drawer had been cold, cold the way the house was cold, cold the way everything in this house was cold because no one had been here to warm it, because she had not been here, because she had been in the cottage on the moor, because she had been hiding, because she had been counting.
She opened the door.
The room was not empty.
The room was full of Agnes.
The bed was made. The eiderdown was folded at the foot. The pillow was plumped. The curtains were drawn back, and the moonlight came in through the window and lay on the floor in a pale square. The wardrobe was open, and inside it hung the clothes that Agnes had worn, the grey dress, the blue dress, the green dress with the torn hem, the cardigan with the missing button. The dressing table was set out as Agnes had set it out, the brush, the comb, the hand mirror, the pot of rouge that Agnes had used on the nights she had gone out with the boys from the village and come back with the taste of cider on her breath. The book was on the bed, open, face down, the way Agnes had always left books, as though she had just stepped away for a moment and would be back in a moment to pick it up.
On the dressing table, next to the brush, there was a piece of paper. The paper was folded in half. The paper was not old. The paper was new, or newer than the rest of the room, the edges crisp, the fold sharp, as though it had been put there recently, as though it had been put there by someone who had been in this room since Agnes died.
Margot crossed the room. She did not breathe. She did not make a sound. She stood in front of the dressing table and looked at the paper and the paper looked back at her and the room was quiet, the way a room is quiet when someone is listening, the way a room is quiet when someone is waiting to see what she will do next.
She picked up the paper. She unfolded it. The paper was a map.
The map was hand-drawn, in pencil, on a piece of paper that had been torn from a notebook. The lines were Agnes's lines. The hand was Agnes's hand. The hand was the hand that had written the count, the hand that had written the entries, the hand that had been nineteen when it stopped. The map was a map of Larkspur. The map was a map of the village as it had been when they were girls, the church at the centre, the lanes radiating out, the houses marked in small squares, the pub marked with a cross, the green marked with a circle. Every building was there. The vicarage. The schoolhouse. The smithy. The post office. Eunice's house. The Halloway house. The cottage on the moor. Every building was there, and every building was clear, and every building was whole, except one.
One building was blackened out.
The building that was blackened out was the church.
Margot stared at the map. The black was thick, layered, pressed into the paper so that the fibres showed through, as though Agnes had gone over the shape of the church again and again with the flat of the lead, as though she had wanted to make sure the shape was gone, as though she had wanted to make sure no one could see what was underneath. The black was the black of the key, the black of the drawer, the black of the thing that had been put down a long time ago and had not been picked up since.
Beneath the blackened shape, in small letters, in Agnes's hand, there was a word.
HUSH.
Margot read the word. She read it again. She read it a third time, and the word did not change, and the word was HUSH, and the word was a command, and the word was a warning, and the word was a plea, and the word was the last word Agnes had written, or one of the last, or the only one that mattered, and the word was on a map of the village, and the map was on a piece of paper, and the paper was on the dressing table, and the dressing table was in Agnes's room, and Agnes's room was in the house on Wren Lane, and the house on Wren Lane was in Larkspur, and Larkspur was the place where Margot had come back to, because Agnes had called her, because the drawer had been opened, because the count had started again, because the key was in the drawer, because the key was a key to something, because the something was in the church, because the church was blackened out, because the word beneath the black was HUSH.
She put the map down on the dressing table. She put her hands flat on the wood. The wood was smooth. The wood was cold. The wood was the wood that Agnes had put her hands on, the wood that Agnes had rested her elbows on while she brushed her hair, the wood that Agnes had sat at while she wrote in her book, the wood that Agnes had touched on the last night of her life, or one of the last nights, or the night that mattered.
Margot looked at the room. The room was full of Agnes. The room was a shrine. The room had been kept. The room had been kept by someone, by Eunice perhaps, or by the woman who had come in to clean, or by the ghost of Agnes herself, or by the house, which had its own memory, which had its own way of holding the things that were left behind. The room was a museum of a girl who had been nineteen, and the girl was not in it, and the girl was in the ground, and the girl was in the drawer, and the girl was in the count, and the girl was in the map, and the girl was in the word, and the word was HUSH.
Margot folded the map. She put it in the pocket of her coat. She did not pick up the brush. She did not pick up the comb. She did not touch the book on the bed, or the dress in the wardrobe, or the eiderdown at the foot. She turned off the torch. The room went dark. The moonlight lay on the floor in a pale square, and the square did not move, and the room was quiet, and the house was quiet, and the village was quiet, and the word in her pocket was HUSH.
She went downstairs. She went through the kitchen. She left the key on the table. She left the notebook on the table. She left the torch on the table. She went out the back door and into the garden and through the gate and into the lane. The rain had stopped. The air was wet. The stars were out, faint through the clouds, and the village was dark, and the church was at the centre of the village, and the church was blackened out on the map, and the word beneath the black was HUSH.
She walked down the lane. She passed the cottage. She passed the green. She passed the pub, which was closed, which was dark, which was quiet. She passed the schoolhouse, which was shuttered, which was silent, which was waiting for the morning, when the children would come, when the bell would ring, when the day would begin. She walked to the centre of the village. She stood in front of the church.