The House at Meridian: What The Cemetery Holds

The hedge had swallowed the path.

Adelaide Cole stood at the back of Meridian House, where the kitchen garden surrendered to something older and far less tended. Ivy climbed the stone wall in thick, ropy clusters, and beyond the last bed of rampant rosemary, a gap gaped in a privet hedge that should have been trimmed decades ago. She pushed a branch aside with her forearm. The wood was cool and slightly damp against her skin, smelling of green decay and the sour tang of last autumn's fallen leaves rotting beneath new growth.

She had come out for air. The parlour had grown close, and Cassius Greer's questions sat in her chest like stones she could not cough loose. She needed to walk, to let her hands forget the shape of the Blackwood documents spread across the dining table. So she had gone round the side of the house, past the rain barrel and the broken cold frame, and now here she was, prying open a wound in the grounds she had never known existed.

Through the gap, the light changed. Not brighter. Thinner. The kind of pale, slanted light that finds its way under heavy cloud and refuses to warm anything it touches. Adelaide stepped through, snagging her sleeve on a blackthorn spine, and stopped.

The cemetery sat in a hollow of the land, a shallow depression cupped by low mounds and the curving backs of overgrown yew trees. No fence separated it from the rest of the grounds. No path led down into it. One simply stepped off the ordinary world and into something that had been deliberately forgotten.

Twenty-three headstones. She counted them twice because she did not believe the first count.

Most were simple upright slabs of grey local stone, weathered to the colour of old pewter, leaning at slight drunken angles where the soil had shifted beneath them. A few were smaller, lower to the ground, the kind made for children. One was a cross. Only one bore any carving at all: a lamb at the foot of a tiny marker, its eyes worn smooth by weather and time. The rest were plain. Severely plain. The plainness of people who had wanted no ornament, only a name and a date and an end to the matter.

Adelaide walked down the slope, her boots sinking slightly into ground that gave too easily, as though the earth beneath the grass was not entirely settled. A faint scent rose from the soil, loamy and sweet and unsettling, the smell of a place where things had been buried in haste. Or in quantity.

She stopped before the nearest stone and crouched, brushing moss from its face with her thumb. The grit caught at her skin. Beneath the green, the inscription was still legible, carved in the careful hand of someone who had taken little pleasure in the task.

Thomas Blackwood. Born 1844. Taken by the house, March 1847.

She moved to the next. A woman this time, the letters smaller, as though the stonemason had been running out of patience or paper.

Eliza Blackwood, née Harte. Taken by the house, March 1847.

The third.

Infant Blackwood. Stillborn. Taken by the house, March 1847.

Adelaide stood very still. Her pulse thudded in her ears, a sound too loud for the silence around her. She looked down the row, then across, letting her gaze travel stone by stone. Every date fell between the spring of 1847 and the autumn of the following year. Every single one.

She walked among the markers, counting under her breath now, touching each one briefly with her fingertips as she passed, the way she might brush the spine of a book she was about to pull from a shelf. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. The lamb-carved one made twenty-three.

The ages, where they were recorded, ran from the stillborn infant at one end of the small plot to a man of seventy-six at the other. Grandfather. Grandmother. Mothers. Fathers. Daughters. Sons. A whole family, or the remains of one, packed into a single year's span and the early months of the next.

Every stone bore the same five words.

Taken by the house.

Adelaide pressed her hand flat against the granite of the nearest upright marker. It was cold, colder than the air should have allowed, and the chill travelled up her wrist and into her forearm as though the stone were drawing warmth from her rather than the other way round. She pulled her hand back and looked at her palm. The skin there was pale, bloodless for a moment, before colour crept back into it.

A blackbird called somewhere in the yew. The sound was sharp and ordinary and it steadied her enough to read the rest of the inscription she had touched. Beneath the phrase that repeated on every stone, in smaller letters, someone had added a line. Only here. She had to lean close to make it out.

May the Lord forgive what was done.

Adelaide straightened. The hollow felt smaller than it had a moment ago, the yew trees pressing closer, their dark needles thick overhead. The light had not changed. She was certain of it. But the sense of the place had, as though the ground had noticed her noticing it.

She had grown up in this house. She had played in its corridors as a child, had traced the patterns in the wallpaper with her fingertip while her father worked at his desk. She had never known this plot was here. The back garden, the kitchen garden, the orchard beyond the wall, the paddock where her mother had kept a donkey she had loved more than her daughters. All of those she remembered. None of them included this hollow, this congregation of stones, this small fenced-off grief.

But the house did remember. Adelaide could feel it now, a faint pressure at the back of her skull, the same pressure she had felt last night when she had stood in the upstairs hallway and listened to the silence that should not have been there. The house knew she had come. The house had been waiting.

She crouched again, this time at the cross. It stood at the centre of the plot, slightly taller than the upright stones, the iron fixings at its base orange with rust. The carving on it was more elaborate than the rest, though still spare. A name. A date. The same phrase. And beneath it, in letters larger than the rest, a single word.

Adelaide.

Her own name. Her exact name, spelled the way she spelled it, with the small soft d in the middle that her father had fought her mother over, the gentle a at the end that her mother had insisted on because she had loved the sound of it. Adelaide Blackwood. Born 1823. Taken by the house, June 1847.

Her hands had gone cold. She stood up slowly, her knees aching from the crouch, and stepped back from the cross. The other stones watched her with their blank, moss-eaten faces. None of them moved. None of them needed to.

A woman with her name had died here. A woman with her exact name, born into this family, buried in this plot, taken by this house, seventy-six years before Adelaide Cole had drawn her first breath in the bedroom above the kitchen.

The blackbird called again. Adelaide did not answer it. There was nothing in her throat that could shape itself into a sound. She turned and walked up the slope, her boots slipping in the soft earth, and did not look back until she had forced her way through the gap in the privet hedge and stood once more in the kitchen garden with rosemary brushing her ankles.

Behind her, the hedge settled. A single ivy leaf, dislodged by her passing, drifted down and came to rest against the toe of her boot. She kicked it away and walked quickly back towards the house, the stones still printed on the inside of her eyelids, the name still shaped in her mouth, the phrase still ringing in her ears like a bell struck once and left to fade.

Taken by the house.

Taken by the house.

The kitchen door was open. She had left it open. She was certain of it. And yet, as she approached it now, she saw that the door had swung shut on its own. A faint line of cold air leaked from beneath it, sliding over her bare wrist as she reached for the handle.

From somewhere deep in the house, beyond the empty kitchen and the cold range and the corridor that led to the parlour, a voice spoke her name. It was not her aunt's voice. It was not Cassius Greer's. It was soft and far away and full of an old, tired sorrow, and it said only one word.

Adelaide.

She closed her hand on the door handle. The brass was warm.

was warm. That was the wrongness of it. In a house with a dead range and curtains drawn against the light, in a kitchen that had not seen a fire since she could not remember when, the handle should have been cold. It should have been cold the way the doorframe was cold, the way the flagstones beneath her boots were cold, the way every surface in Meridian House seemed to breathe out a chill that settled in the bones and stayed there.

But the brass was warm. Warm as skin. Warm as though someone had just released it.

Adelaide did not open the door. She stood with her hand pressed flat against the metal, feeling the heat bleed through her palm, and she thought of the blackbird and the stones and the name she could not say. She thought of her father's hands, the way they had looked the morning he did not wake, folded on the quilt as though he had meant to fold them. She thought of her mother's face when the telegram came, and of Harriet's voice on the telephone a week later, saying only that she had to come home, that there were things to settle, that the solicitor was asking for her.

She had not wanted to come. She had built a life in London with its clean streets and its ordered rooms, its galleries and its presses and the particular silence of a city that did not care whether you lived or died. She had told herself that Meridian House was a place she had survived, not a place she belonged to. She had told herself a great many things, and none of them had been true.

The door opened under her hand. Not because she pushed it, but because it was ready to be opened, as though the house had been waiting for her to decide.

She stepped inside.

The kitchen was exactly as she had left it. The range was dark. The kettle sat where she had set it that morning, still empty. A loaf of bread, the one she had bought in the village yesterday, stood on the table in its paper bag, and beside it lay the key to the cellar, the one she had found in the drawer and put down again. The room smelled faintly of cold ash and lavender and something else beneath, something older, something that had no name in any language she knew.

She crossed to the table and stood looking down at the bread and the key. Her reflection stared back at her from the black window glass, paler than she had any right to be, her hair loose around her shoulders the way her mother had always worn it. She had not braided it that morning. She had not thought to.

"Adelaide."

The voice came again, from the corridor this time, from the direction of the parlour, from the place where the house folded in on itself and the light from the windows could not quite reach. It was soft, and it was far away, and it carried with it the particular exhaustion of someone who had been speaking for a very long time and had grown tired of being heard.

Adelaide did not answer. She was learning, in this house, that to answer was to invite. To answer was to stand in the doorway of a conversation that had been waiting a hundred years to begin.

She picked up the key instead. It was heavier than it should have been. The iron was black with age, and the wards were cut in a pattern she did not recognize, not the simple wards of a household key but something more intricate, more deliberate. She slipped it into her pocket and walked towards the corridor.

The parlour door was closed. She had left it open that morning, she was almost certain of it, and yet here it stood, the dark wood swollen slightly in its frame, the brass handle tarnished to a deep brown. She did not touch it. She walked past, her boots loud on the boards, her breath held in her throat.

At the end of the corridor, a door stood ajar that she had not seen before. It led, she knew without being told, to the back stairs, the ones that the family had used in her grandmother's day, the ones that came down into the kitchen garden near the old well. She had not seen this door open since she was a girl. She had believed it had been sealed.

She went through it. The stairs were narrow and curved, and the air was close, and somewhere above her a step creaked as though someone had just crossed it.

She climbed.

At the top, a door gave onto a passage she half remembered. It ran along the back of the house, above the kitchen, past the linen cupboard and the box room and the small room where her father had kept his papers. She followed it. At the far end, a narrow door opened onto a flight of stone steps that led down, she knew, to the yard behind the stables and from there to the path that ran along the side of the kitchen garden and out through the gap in the yew hedge to the family cemetery.

She did not want to go. Every part of her that was sensible and sane and still capable of ordinary thought was telling her to turn back, to sit at the kitchen table with her hands folded until the light came back and the village woke and she could telephone Harriet and say that she could not do this, that she would sell the house to whoever would take it, that she would give it away for nothing.

She went down the steps. The air grew colder. The stone was slick under her boots, and she smelled moss and wet earth and the faint green sweetness of rotted yew. The sky, when she emerged into the yard, was the colour of old pewter, and the wind had dropped, and the silence was so complete that she could hear the blood moving in her ears.

The cemetery lay beyond the wall. She knew the way. She had walked it often as a child, holding her mother's hand, stopping at the angel with the folded wings to lay a daisy at its feet. The gate was iron, and it stood open, and the hinges did not creak as she pushed through.

She counted the graves as she went. Her grandfather, a tall grey stone with the family motto cut into the base. Her grandmother, beside him, smaller, the letters already softened by the weather. Her father, the newest stone in the row, the dates still sharp, the marble still pale. She paused there. She did not read the inscription. She knew what it said. She had chosen it herself, in a shop in London, standing with her hands in her pockets while a man in spectacles waited for her to speak.

Beyond her father, the stones grew older. The inscriptions faded. The dates climbed backwards into a century she had only ever known through stories. Blackwood, Cole, Blackwood, a name half worn away that might once have been somebody's daughter.

And then she stopped.

The grave stood at the edge of the family plot, half shaded by a yew whose branches hung so low they brushed the surface of the stone. The stone itself was tall, perhaps five feet, of grey granite, and it bore a single name in deeply cut letters.

ELEANOR BLACKWOOD.

Below the name, the dates. Adelaide bent to read them. The birth was 1841. The death was two months ago. She stared at the numerals. They were unmistakable. Two months. Not two years, not two centuries. Two months. The month Adelaide had returned to settle her father's affairs. The month the solicitor had telephoned to say that there were complications, that there was an aunt in the gatehouse who refused to leave, that the Blackwood line had not ended with her grandmother after all.

But the stone was wrong. The stone was terribly wrong. The granite was weathered to a dark silver, and the edges were rounded, and a crack ran down through the centre of the name from the top of the stone to the ground, a crack that had been there for years, for decades, long enough for a thin line of moss to have taken root in its depth. The stone looked as though it had stood through a hundred winters. It looked as though it had stood through more than she could count.

Adelaide knelt. Her knees pressed into the wet grass, and the cold came up through her skirt and met the cold that was already inside her, and she put her hand flat against the granite. It was warm. The same warmth as the door handle. The same warmth as living skin.

She snatched her hand back.

Beside the grave of Eleanor Blackwood, half hidden by the trailing yew, lay a smaller plot. There was no stone above it, only a flat slab of granite set into the earth, and the surface was unmarked save for one thing. A name, etched into the stone in letters that looked fresh, that looked as though they had been cut only yesterday with a careful hand.

ADELAIDE.

The date beside the name was 1847.

Adelaide stared. The wind stirred the yew branches, and a few drops of water fell from the leaves onto the slab, darkening the letters. ADELAIDE. 1847. Her name. The year before she had been born. A hundred and seventy-six years before.

And beside her name, half concealed by a tuft of grass that had grown up over the edge of the slab, there was another name. She could not read it clearly. The letters were worn almost smooth, and the earth had crept up over the lower portion, and the yew shadow fell across it at an angle that made the inscription difficult to discern. She bent closer. She brushed the grass aside with her fingers, feeling the cold wet of it against her skin.

The name began with an M. She was almost certain of it. A long name, perhaps two words, perhaps a surname and a given name, the kind of name that belonged to the old families, the kind of name that was spoken in full at funerals and never shortened in company. The second word was clearer than the first. It might have been Blackwood. It might have been something else. She could not be sure. The letters seemed to shift under her gaze, not because they moved but because her eyes refused to settle on them, sliding away as though the name itself did not wish to be read.

She stayed kneeling for a long moment. The blackbird had followed her, or perhaps a different blackbird, a cousin or a twin. It sat on a branch of the yew above her head and watched her with one bright eye, and it did not sing.

Somewhere in the house behind her, a door closed. The sound carried clearly across the yard, across the wall, across the rows of the dead. Adelaide did not turn. She kept her eyes on the stone, on her own name cut into the granite, on the date that should not have been possible.

ADELAIDE. 1847.

The slab was warm beneath her hand when she touched it again. The same warmth. The same impossible warmth.

And in the silence, from somewhere very near, she heard the soft sound of someone breathing.

The breathing stopped. Then it started again, closer than before, somewhere in the brambles at the foot of the wall, somewhere in the tangle of thorns where no one could stand upright without being torn.

Adelaide did not move. Her hand remained on the warm granite of her own stone. Her knees ached against the cold ground. She waited, the way one waits in the last moments before a storm breaks, with the peculiar alertness of a body that knows it has already been seen.

The air was still. The yew leaves did not stir. The blackbird above her kept its silence, its small head turned toward the wall as though it, too, had heard.

Then the wind came.

It rose without warning, a sudden breath from nowhere, from beneath the earth itself, and it was cold, colder than the morning had been, colder than the frost that had silvered the grass when she first stepped out of the house. The wind moved through the brambles and the wind did not move the leaves of the yew. It passed through Adelaide's hair and lifted the hem of her skirt and carried with it the smell of turned earth, of chalk, of something older than either, something that smelled like the inside of a sealed room that had been closed for a very long time.

And from within that wind, from somewhere inside the briars, she heard her name.

"Adelaide."

Not spoken. Whispered. Not by a man. Not by a woman. By a voice that had no throat to shape it, no tongue to give it tongue, only the faintest suggestion of sound, like a memory of speech recalled after years. The voice was not unkind. It was not kind. It was simply there, the way the wind was there, the way the cold was there, present without intention, without source, without end.

She rose. Her legs were stiff. Her hand left the warm granite reluctantly, and the moment it did, the warmth vanished, and the stone was only stone, and the date cut into it was only a date.

"Adelaide."

Again, from the briars. Closer now, or perhaps no closer at all, only more clear, as though whatever spoke had decided that once was not enough and meant to be heard a second time.

She stepped away from her own grave. She turned toward the gap in the hedge, the same gap she had come through when she first entered the churchyard, the dark green mouth in the wall of yew that led back toward the kitchen garden and the lawn and the long gray flank of Meridian House.

She walked. The wind walked with her, inside her clothes, against the fine hairs of her forearms, beneath the collar of her coat. She did not look back. She fixed her eyes on the gap in the hedge and she walked toward it, counting her own steps as a way of measuring the distance, a way of keeping the rising panic leashed to something as small and countable as numbers.

One. Two. Three. The gap grew no closer. Four. Five. The hedge on either side of her remained the same height, the same density, the same dark gleam of yew needles catching what little light the overcast morning allowed. Six. Seven. Eight. The gap should have been ahead of her. It was not ahead of her. It was behind her.

She stopped.

She turned.

The gap was behind her. She had walked past it. She had walked through the churchyard and out the other side and into a corridor of hedge she had never seen before, a passage that curved, that bent, that doubled back on itself like a folded ribbon. The yew pressed close on both sides. The path beneath her feet was no path at all but a strip of beaten earth and dead leaves, and it led, she realized now with a slow tightening in her chest, back toward the wall, back toward the brambles, back toward the stone.

"Adelaide."

A third time. Softer. Almost a sigh. Almost a prayer.

She walked again. She took the path that seemed to lead away from her marker. She counted her steps again. When she had counted fifty, she stopped and looked up, and she was standing beside her own grave.

The slab lay at her feet. ADELAIDE. 1847. The yew threw its shadow across the inscription. The blackbird watched her from its branch with one bright, unblinking eye.

She took a different path. She turned left this time, where the hedge was thinnest, where a strip of gravel suggested the original line of a walkway long overgrown. The gravel crunched beneath her boots. The wind followed her, no colder than before, no warmer, constant now as a companion. She counted. When she reached a hundred, she stopped.

Her stone was beside her. ADELAIDE. 1847. The shadow of the yew had moved with the morning sun, but the angle was the same, and the blackbird, she was almost certain, was the same blackbird, and it watched her from the same branch.

She did not panic. She had lived long enough in the world to know that panic was a luxury she could not yet afford. Instead she stood very still and let her breathing slow and looked at the hedge and at the sky and at the back of her own hand where a small scratch from a bramble had begun to bead with blood.

She tried a third path. She tried a fourth. She tried walking backward with her eyes closed and then opening them only when she had taken what felt like thirty paces. Each time the result was the same. Each time she arrived, without error and without variation, at the foot of her own stone, as though the churchyard had folded itself into a single small room with her marker at its center and every exit bricked up.

The wind hummed. It did not cease. It had begun to feel, after a while, less like wind and more like breath, the slow measured breath of something vast and patient that had all the morning and all the afternoons after to do with her as it pleased.

"Adelaide."

A fourth time. The voice was closer. She could almost feel it against her ear, although when she turned her head there was nothing there, only the dark needles of the yew and the thin pale thread of the path and the endless repetition of her own name cut into stone.

She sank down at the foot of her marker. She sat with her back against the cold granite of its base and drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them and made herself as small as she could. The wind moved over her like water over a stone. The blackbird hopped down from its branch and landed on the earth three feet from her boot and stood there, head tilted, watching her.

"I know," she said.

She did not know to whom she spoke. Perhaps to the blackbird. Perhaps to the voice in the briars. Perhaps to the house behind her, where Cassius Greer sat at a desk covered in his father's papers and Harriet lay in her bed with her eyes on the ceiling and Eleanor Blackwood in her gatehouse turned the pages of a Bible she had read a thousand times.

"I know," she said again, and her voice was steadier than she had expected, although her hands were not steady, and her teeth wanted to chatter, and the warmth of the stone pressed through the back of her coat against her shoulder blades as though someone stood behind her with a hand laid flat against her spine.

The wind did not answer. The voice did not speak. The blackbird ruffled its feathers and settled, head tucked, on the cold earth, as though it had decided to wait.

Adelaide closed her eyes. She let her head fall back against the granite. She felt the warmth of it through her hair. She thought of her father in his study with the door closed. She thought of Harriet on the stairs with her face turned to the wall. She thought of Eleanor Blackwood and her careful grief and her Bible. She thought of Cassius Greer and his long careful silence. She thought of the date 1847 and what it might mean, what it could not mean, what it must mean if she were to be honest with herself, which she had not yet been, which she would have to be if she were to leave this churchyard, if she were to walk out through the gap in the hedge and across the lawn and back into Meridian House and pick up the pen she had left on the hall table and finish the work she had come here to finish.

The warmth against her shoulders did not fade. The wind did not cease. The blackbird did not fly.

She opened her eyes. She looked up at the sky. The overcast had thinned at the edges, and through a rent in the clouds a thin blade of sunlight fell across the far corner of the churchyard, across a corner she had not noticed before, across a small stone half hidden in the long grass, smaller than her own, older, its inscription worn to almost nothing.

She rose. She walked toward it, and the wind walked with her, and when she reached the stone and knelt and brushed the grass away, she saw that the name upon it was not her own.

It was Mercy.

MERCY BLACKWOOD. 1898.

The warmth beneath her hand, when she laid it on the granite, was the same warmth as before.