The hire carriage rattled down the lane between hedgerows so tall they blotted out the sky, and Charlotte Ashworth pressed her palm against the cracked leather of the seat, steadying herself as the wheels found yet another rut. Dust drifted through the open window, catching the late afternoon light in golden flecks that settled on her dark traveling dress and on the single portmanteau wedged at her feet. The leather of that case bore the marks of her journey: a water stain near the handle, the scuff of being hauled onto a train at Manchester, the faint impression of her own thumbprint in the grime of its buckle.
She was twenty-six years old, and she had not set foot on this road since she was seven.
Outside, the hedgerows gave way to a low stone wall, then to iron gates standing open against a stand of beeches. Beyond them, the pale facade of Thornfield Hall emerged from its collar of ivy, its windows catching the sun like so many half-closed eyes. The driver slowed the horse without being asked, as though the place itself demanded a certain quiet. Charlotte heard her own breath catch, and she smoothed her skirt with fingers that trembled only a little.
A figure waited on the gravel sweep before the house. A woman, tall and broad, her white hair pulled back under a clean cap, her apron so stiff with starch it might have stood on its own. Mrs. Pennywhistle. The name surfaced from a place deeper than memory: a hand offering a biscuit, a laugh like warm bread, the smell of lavender polish on a polished banister. Charlotte felt her throat tighten.
The carriage halted. The driver climbed down and reached for her portmanteau, but Mrs. Pennywhistle was already there, waving him off with a proprietary flap of her hand.
"Give over, Fred Malthouse, I've not lost the use of my arms yet. Miss Ashworth, love, give me a moment to look at you."
Charlotte stepped down onto the gravel. The crunch of it beneath her boots brought a rush of something she had not expected: a scent of crushed thyme, carried on the warm air from the walled garden somewhere behind the house. It was such a small thing, and it opened a door she had kept locked for nineteen years.
"You've your mother's mouth," Mrs. Pennywhistle pronounced, after a long study. "And her trick of standing with her weight on one hip when she's thinking. Come along, then. He's asked for tea in the small parlour, but I've told him you'll want to wash the road off your hands first. You will, won't you?"
"I should like that very much," Charlotte said, and her voice sounded younger than she had hoped.
Mrs. Pennywhistle took her arm with the careful authority of a woman who had guided many a guest up that same path. The gravel gave way to flagstones, the flagstones to the cool dimness of a stone-flagged entrance hall. A grandfather clock ticked somewhere at the back of the house, steady as a heartbeat.
"He doesn't bite," Mrs. Pennywhistle murmured, as they passed a closed door. "Not above the ankles, anyway. And he's had all his letters about the garden, so don't think you'll have to start from the beginning. He knows what he wants. He just doesn't always know how to ask for it."
Charlotte almost laughed. The sound surprised her, and she covered it with a small cough.
The small parlour was at the back of the house, its windows looking out over a stretch of lawn that ended abruptly in a tall brick wall, weathered and patched with lichen. Beyond that wall, Charlotte could see the tops of fruit trees, and, climbing the far side of the wall itself, a mass of pale blooms she recognized even at this distance. Wisteria. She had read of it in her mother's notebooks, seen it sketched in faded ink, but she had never smelled it on the air.
The man standing by the mantelpiece turned as she entered. He was perhaps a decade older than herself, tall and lean, dressed in a dark coat that had seen better days. His hair was swept back from a high forehead, and his face had that particular quality of being handsome and serious at the same time, like a portrait by someone who disapproved of smiling.
"Miss Ashworth." Edmund Thornbury inclined his head. His voice was lower than she had expected, with a roughness at the edges, as though the words had to climb over something to get out. "Thank you for coming. I know the journey is not a small one."
"I was glad of it, sir. I have wanted to see this place for a long time."
Something moved behind his eyes, a flicker of caution or curiosity, she could not tell which. He gestured to a chair near the window, and she sat, smoothing her skirt over her knees. Mrs. Pennywhistle appeared with a tray, set it down with a faint clatter, and withdrew, though Charlotte suspected she had not gone far.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The clock ticked. Outside, a blackbird sang three notes and fell silent.
"You are a botanist," Thornbury said, at last, settling into the chair opposite. It was not a question.
"I trained at the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Chiswick, and I have spent the last four years cataloguing rare plant collections in the north of England and in Scotland. My specialty is the restoration of historic gardens where the original planting plan has been lost or overgrown."
"And you are an amateur cartographer."
"I have been known to draw a plan or two, sir, yes."
"Show me."
He had risen, and was pulling from a drawer in the writing desk a number of papers, old and new, which he spread on the table between them. Charlotte leaned forward, her heart quickening despite herself. There, in faded ink, was a plan of the walled garden, dated in a flowing hand she did not recognize. Beside it, a more recent survey in pencil, the lines uncertain, the measurements obviously estimated. And beneath that, a folded letter, its seal broken.
"Your man in London sent these," Thornbury said. "I had understood from his note that the records were lost."
"Most of them are, sir. The fire took the main archive. But your steward was kind enough to send what remained in the muniment room."
She reached out and touched the older plan with one fingertip. The paper was soft with age, and the ink had feathered in places where moisture had reached it over the years. The plan showed the walled garden divided into four quarters, each labeled in that same flowing hand: Roses, Conservatory, Cut Flowers, Orchard. A small building at the center was marked, simply, The Arbour.
"I know this hand," Charlotte said, and her voice had gone very quiet. "I have seen it before."
Thornbury looked at her. He had the gift, she thought, of being able to wait in silence until another person had run out of things to say. She had known men like that, in London, but they had used the silence as a weapon. This man seemed merely patient.
"It is the hand of my aunt," she said, at last. "Isabelle. My mother's sister. She disappeared from this house when I was a child. No one ever told me what became of her. I came here hoping to find out."
The clock ticked. A log shifted in the grate, sending up a thin curl of smoke. Thornbury did not look away.
"I knew your mother slightly," he said. "Before her marriage. My father and hers had some business together, I believe, though it was never entirely clear to me what. I was away at school for most of it. I returned to the district only after her death."
"You have lived here long, then?"
"All my life, save for those years. I am the last of the Thornburys, and Thornfield has been in the family since the time of the third George. There was once a great deal of money, and a great many people. Now there is mostly the house, and the garden, and a great many unpaid bills."
He said it without bitterness, as one might describe the weather. Charlotte felt a stab of something she was not ready to name. She looked down at the plan on the table, tracing the line of the wisteria along the wall.
"I should like to begin tomorrow," she said. "If that is acceptable."
"It is more than acceptable. I will have Mrs. Pennywhistle show you the garden before breakfast, if you are willing. She knows where the keys are kept, and she has opinions about almost everything inside the walls."
"She always did."
Thornbury looked at her sharply, and she realized she had spoken without thinking. She had been a child of seven, the last time she had stood in this entrance hall, holding the hand of a woman who was no longer alive. Mrs. Pennywhistle had been the one to bring her down the stairs, that final morning, when her mother had already been taken away in a carriage that was not a hearse, because the family could not afford a hearse. The recollection arrived without warning, and with it, the scent of lavender polish, and the sound of a clock ticking, and a child's confusion, and a grief so large she had not known what to do with it.
She had learned, since then, what to do with it. She had folded it up, and put it away, and gone on with her work.
"I will be ready at seven," she said, and she lifted her teacup with a hand that was perfectly steady.
Thornbury inclined his head, and rose, and pulled the bell for Mrs. Pennywhistle. The older woman appeared almost at once, as though she had been waiting just beyond the door. She ushered Charlotte out of the parlour and along a corridor lined with portraits, the eyes of a dozen Thornburys watching them pass.
"You've given him a turn," Mrs. Pennywhistle said, in a low voice. "I could see it. He doesn't like being surprised, Edmund. Likes his world in a certain order, if you take my meaning. And here you come, the little girl from the photograph in the hall, grown up and talking about Aunt Isabelle as though butter wouldn't melt."
"I didn't mean to startle him."
"I know you didn't, love. That's why it'll do him good. Now. Your room is the one at the back of the house, the one with the window that looks over the garden wall. I've put fresh water in the jug, and there's a fire laid, though I dare say you won't need it. Your mother always liked that room. Said it was the only place in the house where you could hear the river."
Charlotte stopped walking. Mrs. Pennywhistle stopped too, and looked at her with an expression that was both tender and a little wary, the look of a woman who has kept a great many secrets and is not sure, even now, which ones to set down.
"Did she?" Charlotte said.
"She did. Now, then. Supper at half past seven, in the dining room, just the two of you, if that's agreeable. The master has asked for cold meat and a salad, and I've taken the liberty of adding a treacle tart, because I know what the women of your family do for treacle tart."
"Thank you, Mrs. Pennywhistle."
"That's all right, love. Welcome home."
Mrs. Pennywhistle turned and walked away, her starched apron rustling, and Charlotte stood alone in the corridor, with the painted eyes of the Thornburys looking down at her from their gilt frames. She felt the weight of the house settle on her shoulders, and beyond the wall, in the garden she had not yet seen, the wisteria was beginning to glow in the last of the afternoon light, a pale promise of something half remembered, half invented, waiting to be found.
The garden door was swollen with damp, and Charlotte had to put her shoulder to it before the hinges gave. She stood for a moment on the threshold, letting her eyes adjust, and the smell of it came to her in a single, slow breath: wet stone, rotting wood, the green sweetness of things growing unchecked. It was the smell of her childhood, though she had not known that until this moment, and it caught at the back of her throat in a way that was not quite grief and not quite joy.
She stepped down onto the flagstones. The path was barely visible beneath a carpet of moss and self-heal, and the box-edged beds had long since lost their geometry, swallowed by cow parsley and nettles as tall as her waist. A stone urn lay on its side near the sundial, brimming with rainwater and a single drowned frog. The wisteria had climbed past the roofline of the house and was now colonising the chimney pots, its trunk as thick as a man's thigh, its bark corrugated and grey. Charlotte tilted her head back to follow it upward, and the pale clusters of blossom trembled above her like a held breath.
She had brought her sketchbook and a small box of pencils. She set them on the sundial's flat top, where the bronze dial was still legible beneath a skin of lichen: Hora fugit, carpe diem. The hour flies, seize the day. Her mother had loved that sundial, had pointed it out to her once when she was very small, and Charlotte remembered now the exact cadence of her mother's voice, half laughing, half serious, as she had said, "Your Aunt Isabelle put it there, you know. She was terribly fond of Latin quotations. Terribly fond of a great many things."
Isabelle. The name opened a door in Charlotte's mind that she had not realised was closed. Isabelle, her mother's younger sister, who had lived at the house before Charlotte was born, who had painted watercolours of the garden and gone away one summer and never come back. Charlotte had been told, in the careful way that children are told things that the adults do not wish to discuss, that Aunt Isabelle had gone to France, and that she had been very happy there, and that she did not wish to be written to. The story had a lacquered surface, and Charlotte had never tried to scratch it.
She crossed to the wisteria and began to draw.
Her pencil moved in quick, confident strokes. The trunk first, the way it twisted against the wall, the way the bark split into long, fibrous ribbons. Then the branches, arching out over the path in a vaulted canopy, and finally the blossoms, each one a small, trembling comma of light against the grey of the stone. She drew for perhaps twenty minutes, and in that time the garden grew quieter around her, as if it had decided to let her work without interruption. A blackbird began to sing from somewhere inside the yew hedge, and the frog in the urn gave a single, contemplative croak.
When she stepped back to look at what she had done, she noticed the trellis.
It stood at the far end of the path, almost lost in a thicket of elder and ivy. It was older than the wisteria, or at least it looked older, its wood gone silver and spongy, its cross-pieces warped and partially collapsed. She had not drawn it. She crossed the path and pushed the ivy aside with both hands, and the smell of it was sharp and resinous, almost medicinal.
The trellis was anchored at its base by a square of dressed stone, set flush with the ground. Charlotte knelt, brushing away the dirt with her fingers, and found that the stone was not solid. It shifted when she pressed it, the way a loose tooth shifts in the socket, and when she worked her fingers into the crack and pulled, it came away in her hand, light as a biscuit. Beneath it was a hollow, lined with moss, and inside the hollow was a bundle of papers tied with a faded green ribbon.
Charlotte sat back on her heels. The ribbon crumbled at her touch, and the papers came loose in a soft cascade, smelling of lavender and something older, a papery, sweet decay. They were letters. She could see that at once, folded into careful rectangles, and the handwriting on the topmost one was large and sloping, the loops of the ascenders extravagant, the ink a brownish sepia that caught the light.
She did not open them at once. She sat with them in her lap, turning them over, feeling the weight of them. The garden was very still. The blackbird had stopped singing, and even the wisteria seemed to hang motionless, its blossoms fat and heavy with the approaching dusk. Charlotte could hear her own breathing, and the faint, distant sound of Mrs. Pennywhistle's radio from the kitchen, a treble melody that might have been Vaughan Williams.
She unfolded the first letter.
"My dearest," it began, and the hand trembled slightly on the page, "the lilies are out again, and I thought of you all morning. I thought of you while I was cutting them, and while I was arranging them in the blue jar, and while I was standing at the window watching the wind move them. I do not know what it is about lilies that makes me think of you, except that you are both, I think, a little too beautiful to be safe, and a little too white, and a little given to drooping when the weather is unkind. I am not, I hope, given to drooping. I am given to writing you letters I cannot send, which is a different thing, and worse."
Charlotte read it through twice. The handwriting was not her mother's. It was looser, more theatrical, with a faint leftward slant that spoke of a hurried hand. The ink was the same brown as the ribbon, and the paper was thick and creamy, the sort of paper that is made for keepsakes. She turned it over. On the back, in a smaller, more businesslike hand, was written: "To I. from the same. June 12th, 1953."
1953. Charlotte tried to do the arithmetic and found that she could not, not here, not in this garden. 1953 was a year before she was born, a year before her parents had married, a year when her mother was a girl of nineteen or twenty, and Aunt Isabelle was presumably still living at the house, still painting her watercolours, still not yet gone to France.
She unfolded the second letter.
"My dearest, it rained all day yesterday, and I sat in the conservatory and read Keats and thought of you. I have been thinking that there is something dishonest in the way I love you, because I cannot say it out loud, and I cannot write it in a way that anyone else would recognise, and yet I write it anyway, in these letters that I fold up and put away, as if I were posting them to a country that does not exist. I think sometimes that you know, and I think sometimes that you do not, and I do not know which of these is worse. The lilies are drooping."
She unfolded the third.
"My dearest, the gardener has cut back the wisteria, and I am angry about it. It was not his place. Nothing here is his place. He does not understand that the wisteria is the only thing in this house that is allowed to grow as it pleases, because it is the only thing that does not belong to anyone. Or perhaps it belongs to both of us, in a way that I shall not put into words. The lilies are out again. I have stopped cutting them."
Charlotte read all of them. There were seven in total, and each one began with the same two words, "My dearest," and each one mentioned the lilies, and each one was signed with the same initial: I. The dates ran from June of 1953 to September of that same year, and the last letter was shorter than the others, and the hand was less steady.
"My dearest, I am going away tomorrow. I do not know for how long, and I do not know where, exactly, only that it is somewhere I have never been, and that you are not coming with me, and that I am not, when I come to think of it, coming with you either. I have left the letters in the usual place. I do not expect you to read them, but I expect that you will, and I expect that you will understand, and I expect that you will forgive me, or not, as you see fit. The lilies are finished for the year. I shall think of you in October."
She did not sign even her initial this time. There was only a small drawing in the margin, a quick, careless sketch of a lily, the petals falling open.
Charlotte sat for a long time with the letters in her lap. The dusk had thickened while she read, and the garden was full of the small, attentive sounds of things preparing for night: a mouse in the undergrowth, a moth against the glass of the greenhouse, the slow, almost inaudible creak of the wisteria as it settled against the wall. The sundial's bronze face had gone the colour of old honey, and the shadow of the dial pointed due east, toward the river, toward the part of the garden she had not yet explored.
She gathered the letters together and tied them with what was left of the green ribbon, and she put them back in the hollow stone, and she put the stone back in its place. She did not think about why she did this. She only knew that they had been kept here for a reason, and that the reason was not hers to overturn. She would have to find another way in.
She stood up, brushing the dirt from her knees, and looked at the trellis. From this angle, in this light, she could see that the wood of the cross-pieces was carved, in places, with small, careful marks. She could not make them out in the fading light, but she could feel them under her fingertips as she traced the lower bar: letters, or numbers, or perhaps a pattern, worn almost to nothing by the weather and the years. She made a note in her sketchbook, in the careful, slanted hand that had been her father's, to return in the morning, when the sun would be in the east, and the carvings would cast their small, legible shadows.
She closed the sketchbook, and picked up her pencils, and walked back up the path toward the house, and the wisteria let her pass without a sound. Behind her, in the hollow stone, the letters lay in their dark, sweet-smelling nest, and waited, as they had waited for thirty years, for someone to come and read them properly, in the right order, in the right light, with the right heart.
The house did not feel empty, as she approached it across the lawn. That was the strange thing. Empty houses have a particular quality, a held-breath quality, as though the air itself is waiting for someone to come back and explain why it has been left alone. But Ashworth Manor, in the last of the evening light, felt inhabited. It felt as though someone had only just stepped out of the kitchen door, or down from the upstairs window, and would return at any moment, dusting flour from their hands, or closing a book they had been reading in the library. The curtains stirred in a room on the first floor, though there was no breeze to stir them. A door, somewhere at the back of the house, closed softly, with the precise click of a latch settling into its keeper.
She stopped at the foot of the kitchen steps and looked up at the small, square window above the door. It was dark, but not black; there was the faintest suggestion of candlelight behind the glass, or perhaps of firelight, a warm and flickering suggestion that someone was in there, someone who had lit a lamp against the coming of the dark.
She did not knock. She opened the kitchen door, as her mother had taught her to open any door in any house, with the handle first and then a push, never a pull, and she stepped into the warm, floury, onion-smelling dark of the servants' passage.
"Mrs. Pennywhistle?" she said, and her voice sounded very small in the stone-flagged corridor. "It is Charlotte. I have come back from the garden."
There was a silence, and then the sound of a spoon being set down on a ceramic dish, and the soft shuffle of feet in thick woolen stockings, and the kitchen door at the end of the passage opened onto a square of golden light, and in that light stood the housekeeper, with her cap slightly askew and a wooden spoon in her hand.
"Well," said Mrs. Pennywhistle. "I was wondering when you'd come in. I heard you going out, hours ago. I thought you'd got lost in the wilderness."
"I nearly did," Charlotte said. "The garden is much wilder than I remembered."
The housekeeper looked at her for a moment, with the careful, measuring look of a woman who has served a family for forty years and knows when they are telling the truth and when they are not. Then she stepped aside, and Charlotte went into the kitchen.
It was exactly as she remembered it. The same dresser, with its rows of blue-and-white china. The same long table, scrubbed almost white with years of soap and elbow grease. The same copper pots hanging from the beams, green now with verdigris but still bright where they caught the fire. A kettle was singing on the hob, and there was a plate of buttered scones on the table, still warm, and beside it a small glass of something amber and fragrant that smelled of elderflower and bitter almonds.
"Sit down," said Mrs. Pennywhistle, in a tone that did not admit of argument. "You look as though you've seen a ghost. You look as though you've seen three ghosts and a couple of fairies for good measure. Eat a scone before you fall down."
Charlotte sat. She took a scone, and broke it, and the steam rose from it in the cool kitchen air, and she ate, and the taste of warm butter and currants was so exactly the taste of her childhood that she had to close her eyes for a moment to keep from crying.
"There," said Mrs. Pennywhistle, sitting down opposite her with her own cup of tea. "That's better. Now. Tell me what you've found."
Charlotte opened her eyes. The housekeeper was watching her over the rim of her cup with an expression of mild, professional interest, the expression of a woman who has heard every story in the world and is prepared to hear one more.
"I found the garden," Charlotte said. "The one beyond the wisteria. The one with the dial."
"Ah," said Mrs. Pennywhistle. She set her cup down. "So she did get the garden planted, after all."
The words were so quiet, and so matter-of-fact, that Charlotte almost did not catch them. But she did catch them, and she looked up.
"You knew about the garden?"
"I knew your aunt had plans for it," the housekeeper said. "I knew she'd had the stones brought down from the old quarry, and the topsoil carried up in baskets. I knew she'd had the dial ordered from London, or was it York? I can never remember. A sun-dial, she said, with a gnomon that would cast the proper shadow at the proper hour. She was very particular about the hour. But I never saw it finished. I was called away to my sister's, that summer. The summer of the year she disappeared. By the time I came back, the garden was overgrown, and your mother had put the lock on the gate, and that was that."
"Why did she put the lock on it?"
"Because she was a sensible woman," Mrs. Pennywhistle said, "and she did not want anyone going in there and falling into the old well, or cutting themselves on the broken glass, or, more to the point, asking questions about a dead woman that no one in the village was prepared to answer."
Charlotte set down her scone.
"Mrs. Pennywhistle," she said. "Is my aunt dead?"
The housekeeper looked at her for a long moment. Then she sighed, and pushed the plate of scones a little closer to Charlotte, as though to fortify her.
"That," she said, "is a question your mother never asked me, and your father never asked me, and I have been waiting these thirty years for someone in that family to ask me, and I will tell you what I know, which is not very much, and what I suspect, which is rather more, and what I believe, which is something else entirely. But first," she said, and she held up one finger, "you must promise me one thing."
"What is that?"
"You must promise me," the housekeeper said, "that you will not go into the east wing."
Charlotte blinked. "The east wing?"
"Your uncle's wing," Mrs. Pennywhistle said. "The part of the house he keeps to himself. The part where he does his work, such as it is. The part where the doors are locked and the curtains are drawn and no one is permitted to go, not even me, and I have been the housekeeper of this estate for forty years and I have a key to every other door in the place."
"I did not know there was an east wing," Charlotte said.
"There is," the housekeeper said. "And you are not to go in. That is my condition. Promise me, and I will tell you what I know about your aunt, and you can do with it what you will. Break your promise, and I will put you out of this kitchen and you will never set foot in this house again. Do we understand each other?"
Charlotte looked at the housekeeper's face. It was a kind face, but it was also a face that had made itself hard, over the years, in the service of other people's secrets.
"I promise," she said. "I will not go into the east wing."
"Good," said Mrs. Pennywhistle. She poured more tea for both of them, and sat back in her chair, and folded her hands in her lap, and began.
"Your aunt Isabelle," she said, "was not, in my professional opinion, a happy woman. She was clever, and she was kind, and she was beautiful in a way that made people stop in the street to look at her, but she was not happy. She had been a widow before she was twenty-five, and she had no children of her own, and she had married your uncle Harold for reasons that I will not go into, because they are not my business and they are not yours, but the marriage was not a love match, and I think she found the house very quiet, and very cold, in the winter. She found the garden, and the garden found her, and she spent most of her time out there, even in the rain. She drew it. She mapped it. She wrote about it. She kept a journal, in a hand so small I could barely read it, in which she recorded the blooming of every flower and the fruiting of every tree, and the position of the sun at noon, and the position of the moon at midnight, and what the birds sang at dawn, and what the wind smelled of in October. She was, in short," the housekeeper said, "a little bit mad, in the way that all the best people are a little bit mad. She saw things other people did not see. She heard things other people did not hear. And she had, I think, a lover, though I never caught her at it, and she never confessed to me, and I never asked."
She paused, and sipped her tea.
"And then one day she went into the garden in the morning, and she did not come back for lunch, and she did not come back for dinner, and when they went to look for her, she was gone. The gate to the walled garden was open, and her shoes were on the path, and her hat was on the seat by the dial, and that was all. No body. No note. No sign. Your uncle Harold said she had run off with her lover. Your mother said she had fallen into the well. The village said she had been taken by the fairies, which is what the village says about everything it cannot explain. And your grandfather said nothing at all, because he had died that spring, and could not be consulted."
Charlotte was sitting very still. The kitchen fire crackled. A log shifted in the grate, and a little shower of sparks went up the chimney.
"I have my own opinion," Mrs. Pennywhistle said. "I do not usually give it. But you have asked, and I will tell you. I think your aunt Isabelle is not dead. I think she is not alive, either, in the ordinary sense of the word. I think she went into the garden one morning in June, and she found something there that she had been looking for all her life, and that something took her in, the way the sea takes in a swimmer who has gone out too far. The garden, you see, was not an ordinary garden. It was a garden that had been made, very carefully, by someone who knew what they were doing, and your aunt had made it more so, over the years, with her drawings and her maps and her little rituals. And I think, though I cannot prove it, that the garden had got to the point where it could take care of itself, and of her, and that what is in there now is not a wilderness at all but a garden in a state of perfect, unattended bloom."
She finished her tea, and set the cup down with a small, decisive click.
"That is what I believe," she said. "You may make of it what you will. But you are not to go into the east wing, and you are not to go into the garden after dark, and you are to take your boots off at the door, and you are to be in this kitchen by ten o'clock every night, or I will know the reason why. Do we understand each other?"
"Yes, Mrs. Pennywhistle," Charlotte said.
"Good," said the housekeeper, and she stood up, and began to clear the tea things. "Now go up to your room. Your old room, with the blue curtains. I have had it aired. There is a fire laid, and a hot brick in the bed. And in the morning," she said, and she paused, with her back to Charlotte, and her hands on the cups, "in the morning, if you want to go back to the garden, you may. But you are to take the key to the east gate, and you are to give it to me when you come in. And you are not to open the door to the east wing. Not for any reason. Promise me again."
"I promise," Charlotte said.
"Then goodnight," said Mrs. Pennywhistle. "And God bless you, child. And God bless your aunt, wherever she is."
She went out of the kitchen, and up the back stairs, and along the dim landing to the room with the blue curtains. The fire was lit, and the hot brick was in the bed, and the room smelled of lavender and old paper and the particular, indefinable scent of a house that has been closed up for a long time and is only now beginning to breathe again.
She undressed, and put on her nightgown, and brushed her hair, and got into bed. The hot brick was wonderful against her cold feet. She lay for a while, looking up at the ceiling, and listening to the house settle around her, the small creaks and sighs of old timber adjusting to the night.
She thought of the garden, and the dial, and the hollow stone, and the letters tied with green ribbon. She thought of her aunt, who had been beautiful and clever and a little bit mad, and who had walked into a garden one morning in June and never come back.
She thought of the key, which was now in her pocket, and which she had not yet told Mrs. Pennywhistle about.
She thought of the east wing, and the doors that were locked, and the curtains that were drawn, and the master of the house who rarely ventured there.
She turned over, and pulled the eiderdown up to her chin, and closed her eyes.
In the garden, the wisteria stirred in a wind that was not there. The gnomon of the dial caught the last, faint light of the rising moon, and the shadow it cast pointed due west, toward the house, toward the blue-curtained room, toward the woman in the bed who was listening, with her eyes closed, to the sound of her own heart, and the sound of the house, and the sound, very faint and very far away, of someone, or something, walking in the walled garden among the roses.