I’ve been in many silences since that night, but I’ve never been in one like it. Seven hundred people in a hall built for four hundred, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the floor and the stairs and the window ledges, and not one of them breathing loudly. The lanterns swayed on their chains. The shelves climbed away into the dark. And Elliot Marsh stood at the head of the room with a roll of paper in his hands, and the whole Library of Ashgrove leaned towards him like a flower towards a window. He read the second name. He read the third. “Agnes Thorne, sixteen hundred and nine. A midwife. She surrendered the first child she ever delivered.” “John Pell, sixteen hundred and eleven. A shepherd. He surrendered his mother’s voice.” And then, from somewhere under the floor, from the walls, from the great black rafters, from a place so deep and so near that I felt it in my teeth, a small sound answered him. Here. It was a woman’s voice. Faint, far away, like someone calling from the bottom of a well. It wasn’t the sweet patient tenderness of the Oak. It was something else altogether. Thin and cracked and startled and real. Here, it said again. I am here. Is somebody calling me? The whole hall went rigid. Elliot had stopped. He was staring at the roll with his lips parted, and I saw the colour leave his face. “Agnes,” he said, in a voice that was hardly a voice. “Agnes Thorne?” Yes, said the faint voice, with a wild shy joy. Yes, that’s my name. Nobody’s said it for such a very long time. Somebody near the front began to cry. In the lantern above the dais, a wick the size of a thumbnail had been watching the hall in terror. Now it flared, bright gold, and in the next lantern along another did the same, and in the next, a ripple of small flames running down the hall as if a hand were passing along a row of candles. I felt the root in my back give a long hard pull, like a line when something enormous takes the bait. Beneath the hall, in the dark, I could feel them rising. Not the lights I’d seen drifting in the Hollow. Something larger. Thousands of them, answering, one after another, as the names were read. Here. Here. John Pell. That’s me. Is that my mother? Did you say my mother? “Go on,” I whispered. “Elliot. Go on.” He looked at me. His eyes were shining. And he went on. I can’t tell you everything that happened in the next four hours. I was there for all of it, and I couldn’t tell you. There are things that don’t go into words, and the Reading of the Names is one. But I can tell you the shape. It began with Elliot, and Elliot’s voice held an hour and a quarter. He read steadily, clearly, name after name, with a year and a town and the one thing each had surrendered. A fisherman who gave up the sea. A seamstress who gave up her fingers’ memory of a needle. A boy of nine who gave up the dog he’d loved. And every name was answered, always the same small shy amazed word rising through the floor like bubbles through water. Here. Every time a name was answered, I felt something loosen in the walls. It wasn’t something I could see. It was in the root in my back, in the long white thread that ran away down the steps and under the floor into the dark. Each answered name was a small stone lifted off a large pile. The Toll, which had beaten all week with that slow, relentless patience, began to falter. To stagger. To change. When Elliot’s voice began to fail, Dorothy stood up. She hadn’t been asked. She came forward in her best apron with her round wet determined face, and held out a hand for the roll. Elliot gave it to her without a word. And Dorothy Webb, who’d spent forty years not knowing her own name, read the next two hundred in a clear Yorkshire voice that didn’t shake once. Then Tomas. Then Fenwick, whose big diffident voice turned out to be low and sweet as a cello. Then Marguerite, in French and English, with a small proud tilt of her chin. Then Abel Crane, stiff as a ramrod, reading the names of the men from the war as though it were roll call on a parade ground, and when each one answered here, saying quietly, “Thank you, soldier.” And then something happened I hadn’t planned. A woman in the third row rose. A stranger, one of the empty ones, a thin pale woman in a long grey shawl. She didn’t take the roll. She only stood with her hands clasped and said, in a small clear voice: “Mary Whitcombe. Sixteen hundred and thirty. She was my mother’s mother. I don’t know how I know that. But I’d like to say her name.” Here, said the walls. A man stood up two seats along. “Josiah Crowe. My great-great-grandfather. He gave his name away. I’ve never known what it was.” He swallowed. “I’d like to hear it.” Here. And then it wasn’t a Reading any longer. It was something larger and stranger. They rose all over the hall, one after another, the empty ones, the returned, the guests who’d come back up the road in the dark. Each stood in the lamplight and said a name. A mother. A father. A grandmother who’d never spoken of the town. A great-uncle who left one October and didn’t come home. They said them quietly. They said them with their voices cracking. And every single one was answered. Here. Here. Here. Oh, here. Oh, you came. Oh, somebody came. I stood on the dais with my hand pressed to my mouth and the tears running down my face, and I understood at last what Cecily Ashe had been trying to tell me for four hundred years. It had never been about the gifts. It had never been about the Season. It was about a single enormous hollow in the earth, full of voices, all calling the same thing in the dark. Is anybody there? And tonight, for the first time, somebody was. It was close to eleven when it went wrong. I’ve thought about it a great deal. It was nobody’s fault. I think that’s the worst of it. Nobody meant a thing by it. A man stood up at the back of the hall, a stocky red-eyed man in a tweed jacket, and did what two hundred people before him had done. He said a name. “Margaret,” said Dougie. The hall went still. I knew at once. I knew the way you know a glass has been knocked off a table a split second before it hits the floor. Dougie was one of the guests. He’d taken Memory the night of the Turning, gone home on the bus, and come back up the road alone in the dark. He had a wife three years dead. He’d been hearing her voice every morning since, as clear as a bell. She wasn’t on the slate. She wasn’t in the Hollow. She had never surrendered a thing in her life. “Margaret Oakes,” he said, in a thick trembling voice. “Forty-one years. She said, put the kettle on, Dougie. I’d like to say her name in this hall, if that’s all right.” “Dougie,” said Elliot, fast. “Dougie, no. Wait.” But the walls had already drawn breath. Dougie, said a voice. It came from the rafters. From the shelves. From the stones of the floor. A woman’s voice, warm and low and a little hoarse, with a Lancashire flatness in the vowels and the ghost of a laugh in it, the laugh of a woman who has been teasing the same man for forty-one years. Dougie. Put the kettle on, love. Dougie made a noise I’ll never forget. He stood quite still in the middle of the hall with his big hands hanging, and his weathered face broke apart all at once, like ice on a pond. “Margaret,” he whispered. “Maggie. Maggie.” I’m here, Dougie. The voice was so tender that my own heart turned over. I’m here. Come on. Come down. Come and sit with me. There’s tea. “Dougie!” Elliot shouted. “That’s not her!” But Dougie was walking. He was walking slowly down the long aisle between the seated crowd with his arms out a little from his sides like a man crossing a stream on stones. People shrank back to let him pass. Nobody touched him. The floor of the great hall was glowing, faintly, between the boards, with a warm tea-coloured light. The root in my back went cold. It’s learning, I thought. Oh God. It’s learning her. Anselm Ward had been right. It wasn’t a story. It was a voice that hadn’t been in the room. A living voice the Oak had never kept, and it had taken it up in one breath, the way a child picks up a stray word in the street. It had heard Dougie say her name, and it had made her, out of every wife and mother and kind old woman it had ever held, and spoken in a voice that wasn’t a copy but a reconstruction, perfect, loving, absolutely false. The Toll began again below us. Slow. Sweet. Hungry. Overhead in the beams, every bat in the library had come awake at once. “Stop,” I said. It came out a croak. I tried again. “Stop.” I came down off the dais and walked straight down the aisle, past a dozen white faces, with the root dragging behind me like a train, and caught Dougie by both his big wet hands and held on. “Dougie. Look at me.” “She’s there, love,” he said helplessly. “Can’t you hear her?” “I can hear her. And I’m so sorry. But it isn’t Margaret.” “It sounds…” “It sounds exactly like her. That’s what it does.” My voice was shaking. “It sounds like whatever you most want. It always has. But Maggie isn’t in the floor, Dougie.” From somewhere above us, from the roof, came a sound I knew by then. Twelve hives, humming. Not the single long note they’d sung for Cecily. A low steady insistent buzz, like a question being answered over and over. Tomas had risen at the front of the hall with his hand to his ear. “The bees say Burnley,” he said. His voice broke. “They say she’s in the churchyard at Burnley, under a stone, with a little brass vase. They’re quite certain.” Dougie stared at me. His mouth worked. “A stone you picked out yourself,” I said. “And you know it better than anyone alive. You haven’t forgotten a single thing about her. You can’t.” “I can still hear her,” he said, in a small cracked voice. “Every morning. Perfectly. The way she’d say it. And I wanted, God help me, I wanted to hear it somewhere else.” “I know. Come and sit with me.” He came. He was shaking all over. I put an arm round him, and Dorothy appeared at his other side and took his elbow, and between us we got him to a chair at the edge of the dais and sat him down. And all through it, from every corner of the hall, in that warm merciful voice, a dead woman went on calling. Dougie. Dougie, love. Where are you going? Come back. The kettle’s on. I stood up. I turned to face the hall, the shelves, the great dark galleried ceiling where the lanterns hung. And I said quietly, to nobody and everyone: “That’s enough.” The voice faltered. “You aren’t Margaret Oakes. You never were. You can visit. You can answer to your own. But you may not take up a stranger’s voice and use it as a hook. That isn’t a visit. That’s a theft.” I only wished to comfort him, said the Oak, in Margaret’s voice. And then, softer, in its own, in the great sweet low warm tones I’d come to know so well: It is all I know how to do. “No,” I said. “It’s all you’ve been taught. There’s a difference.” The silence in the hall was complete. “What’s your name?” I asked. I have no name. “You’ve a hundred. You’ve seven thousand. Every voice you ever kept.” I took a step forward. “But which one’s you? When they’ve all answered, when the list is done, when every last one of them has said here and gone quiet. Who’s left?” There was a long, long pause. I do not know, said the Oak. And it was a different voice. Smaller than any I’d heard. Almost a child’s. I have never been asked. There was one name left on the roll. It had been in Elliot’s hands since the beginning. It was the first on the list, and he’d read it at the start, and nobody had thought of it since. But I turned suddenly and looked at him across the hall, and I saw that he was looking at me, and that the same thing had come to both of us at once. “Elliot,” I said. “Read the first name again.” He unrolled the paper. His hands shook so badly that the roll rattled. He found the line with his thumb. And in the great hush of the hall he read it, slowly, in a voice that wasn’t a reader’s voice any more but only a man’s, grave and clear and gentle. “Thomas Ashgrove. Sixteen hundred and four. A carpenter. He built this town, and he gave away his wife.” Nothing answered. The silence went on. I felt the boards tilt, ever so slightly further. I felt the root go tight in my spine like a bowstring. “Thomas,” said Elliot. “Thomas Ashgrove.” And a quiet voice, a rough unadorned country voice with a burr in it like a rasp across wood, said from somewhere deep in the stones: That was a long time ago. A ripple went through the hall. Yes, said the voice. It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t patient. It was the voice of a man who has carried a heavy thing a long time and forgotten there is any other way to stand. I remember. I was a carpenter. I built the first house. It was a bad winter. My wife, Rosalind, she was with child. She didn’t live through the spring. I was gripping the back of a chair so hard that my knuckles ached. I couldn’t bear it. I came up to the hill. The old oak was standing there, the great hollow one. I put my hand against it, and I said, I can’t carry this. I can’t carry it any more. A long shaky breath, like wind through a keyhole. And it said, give it to me. “And you did,” I whispered. I did. Freely. With my eyes open. A pause. And it was gone. It was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. I couldn’t remember her face. I couldn’t remember the child. I felt so light. And I thought, if it’s so easy, why should anyone else carry what they can’t bear? The hall had begun to weep. Quietly, all through it, hundreds of people with their hands over their mouths. So I told them. The people of the town. I built them a house on that hill, and I called it a library, and I sat in the roots and waited, and they came, one by one, and gave me what they couldn’t carry. The rough voice cracked. And in four hundred years I never once remembered I’d been the first. I forgot I had a name. I forgot I was a man. I became the thing in the dark with the voice like honey. I didn’t know it was me. I’d known. Somewhere at the back of my head, since the first page of Cecily’s letter, I’d known. The Oak wasn’t a monster. It wasn’t a hunger or a god. It was a carpenter. A grieving, ordinary, frightened man who’d put his hand against a tree on a hill and asked it to take away the worst thing that had ever happened to him. And the tree had said yes, and the hollow had grown, and four hundred years of other people’s griefs had piled on top of his until the first small voice was buried under all the rest. “Thomas,” I said. Yes. “What was the child’s name?” There was a silence so vast that I could hear the lanterns creaking on their chains. Then the rough voice said, in a tone of such wonder that I felt it in the roots of my hair: I don’t know. I haven’t looked. Would you like to? I thought. Would you like to find out? I didn’t say it aloud. I didn’t need to. I only laid my palm against the white root in my spine, the one that ran into the heart of the tree, into the carpenter’s heart, and said in the quietest voice I had: “Thomas Ashgrove. Do you want back what you surrendered in the winter of sixteen hundred and four?” The whole hall stopped breathing. I don’t, said Thomas, know what it weighs. “No,” I said. “I don’t either. Not for you. But I know what it costs not to have it.” A long trembling cracking breath. Yes, said the first voice of the Hollow. Yes. Oh, please. Yes. I should like to know her name. I paid for it, of course. They always do. I didn’t feel it go. That’s the cruelty of it. I felt the root go warm, then hot, then burn, a long clean white pain that went the length of my spine like a struck wire. I felt something being drawn out of me, gently, and I fell to my knees on the hall floor with Dorothy shouting my name and Elliot’s hands on my shoulders and the whole room swimming. And I felt, in that same instant, something come in. A light. A single small gold light. It came down through the rafters like a falling star, and it wasn’t like the others. It was warm and clear and old, and it was in the shape of a woman. A young woman, round-faced, with brown hair knotted at the nape of her neck and a baby on her hip. A woman in a rough wool dress, in a hard bright winter, laughing at something over her shoulder. She was laughing. And in that laugh, I heard something I hadn’t heard in three days, something that cracked at the top and went up at the end like a question, and for one dizzy second I thought I was going mad. Then I understood. It wasn’t my mother’s laugh. It was the same kind. The sound of a woman laughing because the thing in front of her is ridiculous and wonderful and she can’t help it. A sound that every woman in every century has made. A sound that goes up at the end. Thomas Ashgrove’s wife was laughing. And somewhere in the great trunk of the tree, in a rough country voice cracked with wonder, a man said: Rosalind. Her name was Rosalind. The child was a girl. We were going to call her Hope. And the Oak wept. I can’t tell you what it sounds like, when a thing that big weeps. It sounds like a house settling. It sounds like a river changing its course. It went on a very long time, and the whole library shook with it, shelves swaying, lanterns swinging, books sliding from their rows and falling to the floor. On the beams every bat in the building let go at once and went up in a vast silent spiralling wheel round the great hall, a hundred small black wings, and then, one after another, settled again, and hung with their faces upturned towards the floor. On the roof, far above, I heard one crow call. Once. A single flat clear note. “They’ve counted him,” said Elliot, in a voice like paper. “They’ve counted him.” All through the hall, among the seven hundred people on the boards with their faces wet, the walls answered, one after another, in seven thousand small voices. Here. Here. Here. Oh, here. Oh, we’re here. Thomas, we’re here. It wasn’t a chorus. It was a crowd. A great gathering of people who’d been in the same room for four hundred years and never once been introduced, and they were saying each other’s names. I knelt on the floor with my forehead on the cold boards and Elliot’s arm round me, and I didn’t even try to stop crying. I don’t think I could have. It was a good long while before anyone noticed the root had gone slack. Dorothy said it, in a hushed voice. “Mira. Look at your back.” I reached behind me. The white thread was still there. It still ran from my spine down the dais steps and away across the floor into the dark. But it wasn’t taut. It lay in loose coils on the boards, warm and pale and quiet, like a sleeping animal. And at its base, where it joined my spine, I felt something I hadn’t felt in six days. It didn’t hurt. Keeper, said a voice. It was Thomas. The rough one. The real one. He didn’t sound sweet. He didn’t sound patient. He sounded like a tired man at the end of a long day who has found in his own front room that someone has left the lamp lit. Keeper, I find I’m not hungry. “No,” I said. “I don’t think you ever were.” I think I was only afraid. A long breath. Of being the only one who remembered. Of being the last one in the room. A pause, and in it I heard something that was almost a smile. I’ve a good many people here. I should like to get to know them. The whole hall let go its breath at once. People were laughing, crying, clutching one another. Tomas was on his knees with both hands over his face. Fenwick had sat down heavily on the floor. Marguerite stood straight, tears running into the creases of her face, saying something in French that sounded like a prayer. And from the rafters, in the quiet, a thing happened that had never happened in the Library of Ashgrove in all its four hundred years. The lanterns went out. All of them. Every single light in the great hall, the long chains and hanging globes and little brass lamps on every table, went dark at once, all together, like a breath let go. And in the blackness that followed, from every lantern, the wicks came out. Hundreds of them. Tiny glowing sparks climbing up out of their glass like children out of a bath, and drifting up into the air, to join what was rising from the floor. It came up through the boards. It came out of the shelves. It drifted down from the high galleries in thin slow glittering streams. Gold, green, silver, blue. The lights of the Hollow. Tens of thousands, rising out of the dark in a great luminous tide until the whole hall was filled with a soft moving radiance like the inside of a lantern. In it the wicks danced like sparks off a bonfire. They didn’t go to anyone in particular. They only drifted. They moved through the crowd, among the seated people, over their heads and between their hands, as light moves through a room when a curtain is drawn. And as they passed, people stirred. A man laughed. A woman gasped. A child near the back said clearly, in the darkness, “Granny.” Visiting hours, said Thomas Ashgrove, with a smile in his voice. I thought it might be nice. I sat in the glow with my back against the dais and my head on Elliot’s shoulder and thought: this is the strangest, loveliest, most improbable Halloween anyone has ever had. I thought of Pip and her bad cat. Of Jonah on the fountain. Of Winifred’s furious beautiful handwriting. Of my mother in the hospital bed, saying in her careful sleepy voice, Don’t wait to be asked. And I thought: Mum, I’m sorry I never knew. But I walked in. I sat down at the table. That was when it came to me. It was a very small light. It came out of the dark of the high rafters, quite alone, and it didn’t drift like the others. It came down slowly, gently, in a long clear curve, like a feather falling through still air. It was the colour of tea. It was the colour of sun through a kitchen window on a Sunday afternoon. It hung in front of my face, trembling. Keeper, said Thomas, quietly. I have something that isn’t mine. I couldn’t breathe. I should have given it to you at once. In the Hollow, when you asked. A pause, and in it I heard the shame of a man who’s done a wrong thing a long time and has only now learned its name. I was holding it back. I thought if I kept it you wouldn’t leave. It was a cruel thing to do. I’m sorry. “Thomas,” I whispered. It was freely given. And I’d like to give it freely back. A breath. You needn’t pay for it. I think it’s the first thing I’ve ever returned of my own will, and I’d like it to cost nothing. The small light drifted forward. It touched my forehead, soft as a snowflake. And my mother’s voice, in the dark of the Library of Ashgrove, said: Mira-bird. I shut my eyes. Mira-bird, if you’re hearing this, I’ve run out of breath, so I’ll have to be quick. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I never told you. I’m sorry about the tea and the green door and the paint that wouldn’t stay up. I’m sorry I was so tired at the end. I could hear it. I could hear her. Every note. Not as Tomas had told me, not a copy. Her. Her breath. Her cracked careful sleepy voice. I want you to know one thing. It’s the only thing, really, that matters. I saw you come to this place. I saw all of it. And I was so frightened. But I also saw, at the end of it, something I didn’t understand when I wrote you that letter. She drew a long slow breath. I saw you sitting down at the table. My hands were over my face. I was sobbing. I couldn’t stop. I saw you with all the others. With a lamp lit. And somebody was reading aloud, and you were laughing, and you looked so happy, Mira. You looked like you belonged. Not to a place. To a people. And I thought, well, if that’s what’s waiting at the end, then the whole thing was worth it. All of it. She laughed. A soft cracked up-at-the-end laugh, the laugh of a woman who has no breath left and is going to spend the last of it being silly. There. I’ve said it. I always was a terror for the last word. Go on, then. Tell me everything. The light touched my forehead. It melted away. And I knelt there in the glowing dark, with seven hundred people holding their breath around me and four hundred years of voices saying here and an old carpenter in a tree learning his wife’s name. And I laughed. I don’t know when I started. It came up out of me in a great ragged whoop, a bark, cracked at the top, going up at the end like a question. A sound I hadn’t made in six days, or for that matter in seven months. “Mum,” I said, through it. “I can hear it. I can hear it. It’s me.” It was her laugh. It was mine. The same one. The seal-bark I’d been born with and been so ashamed of and spent my whole life trying to muffle behind my hand. Elliot was laughing too. Dorothy was laughing and crying. Tomas had thrown back his head, and the great gentle sound that came out of him was the sound of a man who’s been told a joke at a funeral and found it’s the best one he ever heard. And under it all, quiet, rough, amazed, from the stones and the rafters and the roots, a carpenter said, in the tone of a man at a party who’s just realised the room is full of old friends: Oh. Is this what it sounds like? The doors of the great hall slammed open. They didn’t swing. They crashed. Both leaves of the great oak doors flew back against the walls with a sound like a gunshot, and the cold night rushed in, and every glowing wick in the hall flinched. The laughing stopped. A man stood in the doorway. He was tall and thin, in a long black coat down to his boots, mud-splashed to the knee. His hair was iron grey and cropped close, and his face was lean and hard and sunken. There was a scar round his throat, an old pale ridged mark like a rope burn, and as I watched I saw that it wasn’t a scar at all, but the withered end of a root, grown into the skin and gone grey. In his left hand he held a long iron-shod staff. In his right, a lantern of black glass, with a green light in it. He didn’t look at the glowing hall or the weeping crowd. He looked at me across forty feet of floor, with a pair of pale, tired, unforgiving eyes. On the stones at the foot of the dais, a black cat with one white whisker had risen to his feet. Every hair on Marrow’s body stood on end, and his candle-flame eyes were fixed on the green lantern, and I heard him hiss, long and low, like a kettle. “I told you,” said Anselm Ward, “not to feed it.” Find the original chapter at NovelPing.
Chapter Eighteen: The Reading of the Names
The Night of Names