The brass knocker struck oak at half past nine, three measured blows that split the cottage quiet like a stone dropped into still water. Margot Halloway had been standing at the parlour window, watching the lane where morning mist clung to the hedgerows, and she did not startle at the sound. She had been expecting a visitor since the funeral notices went up on the lychgate, and she knew, in the way she knew the creak of the third stair and the way the kitchen tap coughed before it ran, that only one man in Larkspur knocked in that precise cadence: the rector.
She set down the journal, Agnes's journal, on the side table, spine down, ribbon loose. A folded page corner caught the light. She left it. There would be time later for the dead woman's handwriting, for the small precise loop of her sister's S, for the questions that opened like cracks in ice. Now there was a visitor.
The knocker came again. Same tempo. Same patience.
Margot smoothed her apron, checked the line of her collar in the small mirror by the door, and opened the cottage before the third repetition. Father Bramwell Quill stood on the threshold with his hands clasped behind his back, his shoulders squared inside the black serge of his cassock, his white hair swept back from a brow that looked, in the grey morning light, like folded parchment. His eyes were pale blue, pale enough that the colour seemed to wash out of them rather than fill them, and they moved over her face with the unhurried precision of a man accustomed to reading the living for the benefit of the dead.
"Miss Halloway," he said. His voice was level, formal, touched at the edges with the slight dry rasp of a man who had been reading lessons aloud for forty years. "I must ask your pardon for the hour."
"You must, Father."
He blinked. The corner of his mouth moved, a motion that might, on a warmer face, have been a smile. "I was not certain you would receive me."
"I have received worse this week." Margot stepped back from the door, a half invitation, half measurement. "Please come in. The kettle is not on the hob, but I can put it."
Quill did not move at once. He stood a moment longer on the threshold, his gaze sliding past her into the dim of the hall, as though taking the measure of the cottage itself: the worn runner, the brass umbrella stand, the line of hooks where coats hung in descending sizes, the smaller ones long empty. Then he inclined his head and crossed the threshold, and the air changed in the narrow space between door and parlour, thickened by the smell of damp wool and old paper and the faint sweet decay of the chrysanthemums Margot had placed on Agnes's chair.
She led him to the parlour. He did not sit. He stood with his back to the cold grate and his hands still clasped behind him, and he studied the room with the same unhurried attention he had given the hall. His gaze settled, briefly, on the side table. On the journal. On the loose ribbon.
"You keep her things about you," he said.
"I do."
"It is a comfort, I suppose." The rector's tone carried no inflection. "To some."
Margot took the chair opposite the door. She kept her hands folded in her lap, her back straight, the posture of a woman who had spent six years in other people's nurseries learning that the body, held correctly, could become a kind of fortification. The fire was unlit. The morning pressed against the window glass in a flat, pewter wash. Somewhere in the lane a cart went by, its wheels hissing in the mud.
"Father Quill." She spoke his title with care, giving each syllable its place. "You did not walk from the rectory in weather like this to speak of comfort."
"No." The rector's pale eyes returned to her face. "No, Miss Halloway, I did not."
He unbuttoned the top of his cassock, a small motion, almost absent, as though adjusting to the warmth of a room that was not warm. Beneath the wool she saw the white edge of a clerical collar, and below that, the V of a shirt that had been laundered many times. He drew a breath.
"I have come about the arithmetic."
Margot did not move. Her hands stayed folded. Her face stayed still.
"The arithmetic," she said, after a moment.
"Yes." Quill's voice lowered, not to a whisper, but to the register he used in the church porch when consoling the recently bereaved. "You must forgive me. I speak in figures, as a habit of the calling. Numbers are more reliable than words. Words are weather. Numbers are stone."
"And which numbers have brought you to my door, Father?"
Quill was silent for a count of three. His pale eyes did not leave her face. Outside, the mist thinned along the lane and thickened again, and the cart was gone, and the only sound was the faint ticking of the clock on the mantel, the clock that had belonged to Agnes's mother, and that had never kept proper time.
"Three deaths in Larkspur this autumn," the rector said. "Mrs. Pollard, two weeks past, in her own bed, of what the doctor called a failure of the heart. Old Thomas Fray, found in the river, three days after the leaves turned. And your sister." He paused. "Three deaths, Miss Halloway, in a village of two hundred souls, within a single quarter. That is not a season. That is a sequence."
"And you have come to tell me that the Lord moves in numbers."
"I have come to tell you," Quill said, and the dryness in his voice sharpened, "that three is a beginning, not an end."
Margot's thumb moved against the knuckle of her other hand, a small pressure, an old habit, the kind of motion she had once used to soothe a child through a fever and that she now used to soothe herself through conversations she did not wish to be having. The parlour felt smaller than it had a moment before. The chrysanthemums on Agnes's chair gave off their thin, sweet scent, and beneath it, another smell, older, the smell of the linen that had wrapped Agnes in her coffin, a smell she had tried to wash from the chair cushion and could not.
"Speak plainly, Father."
"I am a plain man, Miss Halloway. I keep the records of this parish. I have kept them for thirty-one years. I know the rhythm of the village, the births and the deaths, the marriages and the returns from abroad, the quiet departures and the quieter arrivals." Quill's gaze moved, briefly, to the window, then back. "I know when the count is wrong."
"And the count is wrong now."
"The count is wrong now." The rector inclined his head. "Three deaths in one quarter, and no births. The banns I posted last Michaelmas have not been called, because the couple at the farm have withdrawn their consent, and the reason they give, when pressed, is that they cannot bring a child into a parish where the graves outnumber the cradles. The schoolmistress tells me her numbers are down by four. Four children, withdrawn in the last month, not by death, but by removal, by families packing their goods into carts in the night and driving towards the coast as though the wind had changed and carried a smell with it."
He stopped. He looked at her as though he expected her to speak, and when she did not, he went on, and his voice had lost a little of its formal edge, and what remained was the voice of a man who had carried a great weight a long way and was beginning to feel the road bend under him.
"I presided at your sister's burial, Miss Halloway. I held the book. I read the words. I have not slept well since."
Margot's thumb stilled. "Agnes died in her bed, Father. The doctor signed the paper. There is nothing for you to reproach yourself for."
"I reproach myself for nothing." The rector's tone cooled. "I confess myself uneasy. There is a difference. Agnes Halloway was thirty-four years of age. She was not in decline. She had no illness of which I was aware, no complaint of the heart, no wasting, no cough. She was, by every measure of my knowing her, a woman in the fullness of her years, and she was found, on a Tuesday morning in October, cold in her bed, and the only word the doctor could find for what he saw was the word exhaustion, as though her body had been spent like a coin passed through too many hands."
Margot heard herself breathe. The air went in through her nose and out through her mouth, and the breath had no taste, only the chill of the room and the faint sweetness of the dead flowers.
"You have told the police this?"
"There is nothing to tell the police. The doctor has signed the paper. The parish records will show a death by natural causes, in the usual form, at the usual hour, in the usual place. The vicar has nothing to add to that." Quill's hands unclasped behind his back and came round to his front, and she saw, for the first time, that they were not steady. A fine tremor ran through the rector's fingers, the kind of tremor that comes from too much coffee or too little sleep or the effort of holding a thing still that wants to move. "But the arithmetic, Miss Halloway. The arithmetic will not settle."
"Tell me the arithmetic, then."
Quill reached into the breast of his cassock and drew out a folded paper, not a letter, but a sheet torn from a ledger, the kind of paper he used for his parish books. He did not open it. He held it between them, an offering held back.
"In the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one," he said, "there were nine deaths in Larkspur. In sixty-two, twelve. In sixty-three, fourteen. In sixty-four, seventeen. In sixty-five, nineteen. Each year, Miss Halloway, one more than the last. Each year, the count climbing. And each year, the births declining in their proportion, until by sixty-eight, when I first took the numbers down with my own hand, the deaths had outrun the births by a factor of three, and the village had begun, in the way villages do, to feel the weight of its own subtraction."
The clock ticked. The mist pressed against the window. Margot watched the rector's trembling hand and the folded paper between them, and she did not reach for it.
"You are speaking of a sequence," she said. "A pattern."
"I am speaking of a pattern that has continued, by my count, for fourteen years, with the regularity of a tide." Quill's voice had gone quiet, and the quietness of it made it worse, the way a low note played near the bottom of a piano makes the strings above it hum. "I have watched the count climb, Miss Halloway. I have watched the families thin. I have watched the children leave, or not arrive, or arrive too soon and not stay. I have buried Mrs. Pollard, and old Thomas Fray, and your sister. And I have stood in the churchyard and read the words over them, and I have come home to the rectory and sat at the desk, and I have opened the ledger, and the ledger has told me that what I have just done is part of a sum, and the sum is not finished."
Margot's hand had gone still on her lap. Her thumb had ceased its small pressure. The room was very cold, and she did not feel the cold as cold; she felt it as presence, the way one feels a hand laid on the shoulder in the dark, not as warmth but as weight.
"You think," she said, "that Agnes was not the end of anything."
"No." Quill's pale eyes held hers. "I think Agnes was the beginning."
He unfolded the paper at last, and held it open, and she saw, in his careful clerk's hand, a column of figures, year after year, and at the foot of the column, in a heavier ink, a single line, underlined twice. She could not read the line from where she sat. She did not need to. The rector's face, in the grey morning light, had the look of a man who had at last spoken aloud a thing he had been carrying in silence for a long while, and who was not certain, now that it was in the air between them, whether the speaking of it had made it lighter or heavier.
"Three deaths in a single quarter," he said again, and his voice had the steadiness of a man reciting a psalm he did not entirely believe. "Mrs. Pollard. Thomas Fray. Agnes Halloway. Three. The sum begins, Miss Halloway. And the sum, by the working I have done these fourteen years, will not stop at three."
Margot looked at the paper, and then at the rector, and then at the chair where Agnes had died, and the chrysanthemums on its cushion, and the ribbon of the journal loose on the side table, and she felt, for the first time since the funeral, the weight of her own name in her mouth, the way it sounded when spoken by another, and how thin a thing a name was, and how easily it could be written into a column and subtracted.
The vestry door closed behind them with a sound like a held breath finally released.
Quill led the way down the narrow passage between the church and the vestry, his boots on the flagstones sharp and deliberate. The Mourner followed at a distance of three paces, close enough to hear the rector's breathing, far enough to pretend she did not. Above them, the bell tower held its tongue. A rook lifted from the weathervane of St. Alban's with a sound of torn canvas, and did not return.
The ledger lay where he had left it, on the reading stand. He did not unlock the drawer again. He set the key on the corner of the desk, and the metal made a small, bright sound against the wood. He did not look at her. He looked at the book.
"Sit, if you please," he said.
She did not sit.
"Suit yourself."
He opened the cover. The boards were oak, dark with age and handling, the leather over them worn to the colour of weak tea where countless thumbs had passed. The brass corners were green. The clasp was missing; a twist of cord held it shut. When he untied the cord, the knot resisted him, and he worked at it with the tips of his fingers, patient, his lips pressed together in a thin line.
"A parish register," he said, "is meant to be a quiet thing. A record of the lives entrusted to a parish, and the deaths entrusted to a grave. Names. Dates. Causes, where known. The rector before me kept it so. The rector before him kept it so. Back two hundred years and more."
He turned the heavy pages. They gave off a smell of dust and lamp oil and something sweeter beneath, the ghost of the ink his predecessors had used, oak gall and iron.
"You will see," he said, "that the early pages are clean."
He tilted the book so she could see. The entries were uniform, set in a careful copperplate, the deaths marked with a small cross at the margin, the burials entered below in a slightly looser hand. Names she did not know: Wickets, Ashfords, a Mary Fray who had died in childbed in the winter of 1798. The ink was brown, then black, then brown again. The paper had darkened at the edges. The spines of the leaves were soft as cloth.
"The parish grew," he said. "The deaths grew with it. Three in a bad year, five in a worse. There was a fever in 1812. There was a cholera in 1849. The names of the dead were entered, and crossed, and the book was put away."
He turned more pages. The hand changed. A younger rector, perhaps. The ink was bluer. The cross at the margin had become a heavier mark, a diagonal stroke through the name, and then, somewhere in the middle years of the century, a new colour had crept into the book.
Red.
Margot stepped closer. The smell of the ink sharpened, reached her as a tang at the back of the throat. The first red cross was small and uncertain, the mark of a man who had not yet decided whether to make it. The next was bolder. The next was a slash that ran through the name and the date beneath it, as though the rector had wished to be certain the thing was finished.
"Here," Quill said. "One thousand eight hundred and seventy-one."
The Mourner read the name. She did not know it. She looked at the date of burial, and the cause, and the words beneath: interred with the rites of the church, in the presence of her husband, Jonas, and her daughter, Mary.
"The red begins here," Quill said. "Not with a death. With a question."
He turned a few more pages. The crosses in red grew thicker. Names were struck through with a vigour that went beyond the clerkly. The ink was not uniform; some entries were in a watery crimson, some in a thick carmine that had bubbled at the corners of the nib. The rector of that year had been a man of feeling. The rector of the year after had been a man of fury. The hand after that had been a man's no longer; a woman's, smaller, steadier.
"Read the column," he said.
Margot looked. Beside the names, in a narrower column, figures had been entered. A small numeral beside each death. One, or two, or three. The numerals were not the ages of the dead. They were not the dates. They were not the house numbers, or the fees for the bell, or any of the things a parish ledger was meant to carry.
"They are not ages," she said.
"No."
"They are not the year."
"No."
"They are not anything I recognise."
"No." He laid a finger on the entry nearest his thumb. "They are not anything anyone has ever been able to explain to me."
She read down the column. One, three, two, five, one, one, four. The numerals did not rise and fall as a fever's curve would. They did not cluster in the years of the cholera, or thin out in the years of plenty. They moved as the tide moves, or as the minutes move on a clock, regular in their irregularity, indifferent to the names beside them.
"Why red?" she said.
"Because black would not have held them." He said it without drama, as a man stating a fact he had considered often. "Black is the ink of record. Red is the ink of warning. A parish register, Miss Halloway, is meant to be read by the clerk, and by the bishop's men when they come on their visitation, and by the sexton when he is billing the family for the plot. It is not meant to be read by the living for the names of the dead who are not yet dead. And yet here it is."
He turned to a page nearer the end. The hand here was his own, she could tell by the way the t's were crossed high and the g's were looped like fishhooks. The entries were in black, as before. The column of figures was there. Beside each figure, in a hand so small she had to bring her face close to the page to see it, a second figure had been entered in pencil.
"You have been counting," she said.
"I have been counting."
"What do the figures count?"
He closed the book, gently, and laid both hands upon the cover as a man might lay hands upon a coffin. The leather creaked under his fingers.
"I will show you," he said. "Come."
He rose, and took the lamp from the desk, and trimmed the wick with a small pair of scissors he kept in his waistcoat pocket, and led the way out of the vestry and into the body of the church by a side door she had not known was there. The hinges gave a single note, low, almost musical, and then the cold of the nave received them.
St. Alban's was empty. The pews stood in their rows, the cushions flat, the hymn boards bare. A single column of morning light fell from the eastern window onto the flagstones between the third and fourth pew. The rood screen cast a fretwork shadow across the choir. The organ pipes above the gallery were a forest of tin soldiers, watching.
Quill walked down the centre aisle without genuflecting. She noticed that, and filed it.
He stopped at the altar rail and turned. The lamp flame leaned sideways in his hand. The smell of the oil reached her, warm and faintly fishy.
"The sum," he said, "begins at the beginning."
He set the lamp on the rail, and went to the credence table, and from a drawer beneath the linen he took a sheet of paper, folded twice, and a stub of carpenter's pencil, and a small wooden ruler. He laid them on the top of the rail and turned to her.
"You understand," he said, "that what I am about to show you has cost me fourteen years of sleep. I would not show it to the bishop. I would not show it to my own brother, who is a canon at Exeter and a man of sense. I am showing it to you because Agnes Halloway's name is in this book, and yours is the hand that can turn the next page, if a next page there is to be."
He unfolded the paper. It was a sheet of foolscap, yellowed, ruled in faint blue. Down the left margin, in his own hand, he had copied the column of figures from the ledger, year by year. Beside each figure, in the pencil, he had set a second figure. Beside the second, a third. The page was dense with small, neat numbers. At the foot of the page, a single line.
"Read the line," he said.
She read the line.
The sum, worked in three different ways, agreed.
She read it again, and her throat closed, and she set her hand upon the rail because the floor had become uncertain.
"What," she said, "is the sum of?"
"Of the column," he said. "Of every figure entered beside a death in this parish for two hundred and seven years. Worked in three fashions, that it might not lie. The sum is not the number of the dead. The dead are far fewer. The sum is of something else. The sum is of what was taken, or what was given, or what was owed. I do not know the word for it. The Church has no word for it. The ledger has no word for it. I have given it no word, because I do not trust myself to name it and find I have named it wrong."
She looked at him. His face, in the lamplight, had the grey, settled look of a man who had aged past the point of fearing what he knew.
"The sum," she said, "is what."
"It is what the parish has paid," he said, "for the privilege of its dead. It is the price, Miss Halloway. The price of Larkspur. The price of being here, on this ground, under this sky. It has been paid in threes, and twos, and fives, and ones, for two hundred years, and the sum has been kept, and the sum has been honoured, and the sum has been entered, and the parish has endured, and the rector has endured, and the ground has held."
He took the lamp from the rail and held it so the light fell full upon the page.
"And now," he said, "the sum is nearly done. Fourteen years I have worked it. It was a third done when I came to the living. It is nearly spent. And when it is spent, Miss Halloway, there will be no more crosses in red. There will be no more figures in the column. There will be no more entries in the ledger at all."
His voice did not break. It lowered.
"The parish will end," he said. "Not in fire. Not in flood. In silence. The bell will not ring. The rector will write no more. The dead will be buried by whoever is left to dig the graves, and there will be no one to mark the names, and no one to enter the figures, and the sum will have been paid in full, and Larkspur will be a place on a map with no one in it, and no one to remember that there was ever anyone there at all."
The lamp flame steadied. The shadow of the organ pipes did not move.
"And Agnes," he said, "was one of the last payments."
The number stood at the foot of Agnes's name. Fourteen pence. The ink had been wet when it was set down. Quill had not waited for it to dry.
"The sum," Margot said, and her voice was very steady, "is what the parish pays to be allowed to keep its dead. To keep the record. To keep the rector. To keep the bell."
"The sum," he said, "is what the parish pays so that the ground will hold. So that the names will be entered. So that the rector will write them. So that when the bell is rung, there will be someone to hear it in the church, and someone to write the name in the book, and the ground will know that the name has been written, and the name will not be forgotten, and the dead will not be forgotten, and the parish will not be forgotten, and the sum will be paid, and the parish will endure."
"And when the sum is spent," she said, "the parish will be forgotten."
"When the sum is spent," he said, "the parish will be forgotten, and the ground will forget, and the names will be forgotten, and the bell will be rung and no one will hear it, and the rector will write the name and the ink will be wet and no one will come to read it, and the ground will not hold, and the dead will not be kept, and the parish will end, and the rector will end, and the ground will end, and there will be no more entries in the ledger at all."
He set the lamp back upon the rail. The light steadied. The shadow of the organ pipes lay still upon the floor.
"This is the sum," he said. "This is the price. This is what the parish has paid. This is what Agnes paid. Fourteen pence. The last full payment. There have been smaller ones since, and there will be smaller ones still, and then there will be none."
Margot looked down at the page. The fourteen pence. The figure in the column. The cross in red at the foot of her sister's name.
"Agnes," she said, "was not a payment. Agnes was my sister. Agnes was a person. Agnes had a name, and a face, and a voice, and she sang in this church, and she read in this church, and she is buried in this ground, and she is not a figure in a column, and she is not a sum, and she is not fourteen pence, and she is not a price, and she is not a payment."
Quill did not look at her. He looked at the page. He looked at the figure. He looked at the cross in red.
"The parish," he said, "does not forget. The parish keeps the name. The parish enters the name. The parish pays the sum, and the sum is entered, and the name is kept, and the name is not forgotten, and the parish endures, and the ground holds, and the bell is rung, and the rector writes, and the sum is paid, and the dead are kept, and the parish endures, and the parish endures, and the parish endures."
His voice did not change. It did not rise. It did not fall. It went on, as the bell had gone on, as the entries had gone on, as the figure in the column had gone on, red cross after red cross, year after year, down the page.
"But Agnes," he said, and his voice did break, very slightly, on the name, "is not a sum. Agnes was a girl. Agnes sang. Agnes read. Agnes is buried in this ground. And the parish has paid fourteen pence so that Agnes will be kept, and the name will be entered, and the ground will hold, and the bell will be rung, and the rector will write, and the parish will endure."
He looked up at her then. The lamp flame was steady. The shadow of the organ pipes did not move. His face was the colour of the parchment in the book.
"And the sum," he said, "is nearly done."
Margot looked at the page. The fourteen pence. The figure. The cross. The name. The date. The sum total at the foot of the page, the long column, the red and the black, the hundreds of years.
"And when the sum is done," she said, "what then."
Quill did not answer at once. He looked at the page. He looked at the figure. He looked at the cross.
"Then," he said, "the parish will end."
He closed the ledger. The cover fell shut. The sound of it was soft, and final, and very small in the vault of the church.
"I have told you what the sum is," he said. "I have told you what the price is. I have told you what the parish has paid, and what Agnes paid, and what the sum is, and what will be when the sum is done. I have told you what the rector knows, and what the rector has done, and what the rector will do, and what the rector cannot do, and what the rector must do, and what the rector has written, and what the rector will write, and what the rector has entered, and what the rector will enter, and what the rector has paid, and what the rector will pay, and what the rector has kept, and what the rector will keep, and what the rector has honoured, and what the rector will honour."
He set his hand upon the cover of the ledger. The leather was dark, and smooth, and very old.
"The rector," he said, "has done what the rector must do. The rector has paid what the rector must pay. The rector has kept what the rector must keep. The rector has entered what the rector must enter. The rector has honoured what the rector must honour. The rector has written what the rector must write. The rector has rung the bell when the bell must be rung. The rector has buried the dead when the dead must be buried. The rector has read the service when the service must be read. The rector has entered the name when the name must be entered. The rector has paid the sum when the sum must be paid. The rector has kept the parish when the parish must be kept. The rector has endured when the rector must endure. The rector has done what the rector must do."
His hand lay flat upon the cover. The light of the lamp was steady. The shadow of the organ pipes did not move.
"And now," he said, "the rector must do what the rector must do."
He drew the ledger towards him. He set his hand upon the clasp. He did not open it.
"Miss Halloway," he said. "I have told you what the sum is. I have told you what the price is. I have told you what the parish has paid. I have told you what Agnes paid. I have told you what the rector knows. I have told you what the rector has done. I have told you what the rector will do. I have told you what the rector cannot do. I have told you what the rector must do."
He looked at her. The lamp flame was steady. His face was the colour of the parchment.
"I have told you," he said, "what the sum is."
He rose. The chair did not scrape. The boards did not creak. He stood very still, with his hand upon the ledger, and he looked at her, and the light of the lamp lay upon his face, and the shadow of the organ pipes lay upon the floor.
"And now," he said, "you must go."
He picked up the lamp. The light swung, and steadied, and the shadow of the organ pipes moved, and was still.
"I will show you out," he said. "I will lock the door. I will return the ledger to the chest. I will sit in the pew, and I will wait, and I will write, and I will enter, and I will pay, and I will endure, and the parish will endure, and the ground will hold, and the bell will be rung, and the rector will write, and the sum will be paid, and the dead will be kept, and the parish will endure."
He turned towards the vestry door. The light swung with him. The shadow of the organ pipes swung with him, and was still.
"Miss Halloway," he said, and he did not look back, "the parish does not forget. The parish keeps the name. The parish enters the name. The parish pays the sum, and the sum is entered, and the name is kept, and the name is not forgotten, and the parish endures, and the ground holds, and the bell is rung, and the rector writes, and the sum is paid, and the dead are kept, and the parish endures, and the parish endures, and the parish endures."
He paused at the door. He did not turn.
"The rector," he said, very softly, "is tired."
He opened the door. The night air came in, cold, and smelling of wet earth, and of the river, and of the ivy on the tower. He stepped out. The light went with him. The shadow of the organ pipes lay still upon the floor.
Margot stood in the dark. The ledger lay closed upon the table. The lamp was gone. The light was gone. The shadow was gone. The vestry was dark, and cold, and very still, and the only sound was the sound of his footsteps on the flagstones, growing fainter, and then gone.
She did not move. She stood in the dark, and she looked at the place where the lamp had been, and she looked at the place where the ledger lay, and she looked at the place where he had stood, and the vestry was empty, and the church was empty, and the dark was very still.
Then, in the dark, very faintly, she heard it.
The bell.
It was not rung. It was not tolled. It was sounded, once, very softly, as if a hand had been laid upon the clapper, and the clapper had been drawn, very gently, against the side of the bell, and the bell had given out, not a sound, but the memory of a sound, and the memory had gone out into the night, and into the dark, and into the ground, and into the air, and it was not heard, and it was not remembered, and it was not entered in the ledger, and the sum was not paid, and the parish did not endure.
It was only the wind, in the tower, in the ivy, in the ropes.
It was only the wind.
Margot turned, and went out of the vestry, and down the nave, and through the porch, and into the night. The door fell shut behind her. The lock turned. The key was drawn. The footsteps went away, down the path, through the lych-gate, and were gone.
She stood in the dark. The church was dark. The tower was dark. The ground was dark. The graves were dark. The names were dark. The crosses were dark. The sum was dark. The figure was dark. The cross in red was dark.
She stood in the dark, and the wind was in the ivy, and the wind was in the tower, and the wind was in the ropes, and the bell was still, and the ground was still, and the parish was still.
She went home.
The journal was on the table. The lamp was on the table. The chair was at the table. The window was dark. The door was shut. The house was still.
She sat down. She opened the journal. The page was turned to the entry for that day. The ink was dry. The name was entered. The sum was paid. The parish endured.
She took up the pen. She set the nib to the page. She wrote.
The rector has told me what the sum is. The rector has told me what the price is. The rector has told me what the parish has paid, and what Agnes paid, and what the rector knows, and what the rector has done, and what the rector will do, and what the rector cannot do, and what the rector must do.
She paused. The nib was still upon the page. A drop of ink gathered, and fell, and made a small, dark circle upon the paper.
She wrote.
The rector is tired.
She set the pen down. She closed the journal. The cover fell shut. The sound of it was soft, and final, and very small in the room.
The lamp flame steadied. The window was dark. The house was still. The wind was in the ivy, on the tower, in the churchyard, in the ground.
The bell was still.