“Harold said it sounded wonderful,” said Winifred. “That’s the first thing you should know. That’s the sentence that told me what I’d done.” She was looking at the dancers, not at me. The lanterns made small gold moons in her clouded eyes. “I’ll start earlier. I was not a stupid woman, Mira. People assume that about those of us who fall for this place. I was a bookkeeper. I could find a missing penny in a ledger of four thousand lines. But I was unheard. There’s a difference, you know. Being quiet is a choice. Being unheard is a condition, like damp in a wall. You can say a thing clearly, and say it three times, and the room closes over it like water over a stone.” I knew exactly what she meant. I had worked the late shift at Dunmore’s for three years and could not remember one time anyone had asked what I thought. I kept quiet. I told myself it was a choice. “I married a good man. I won’t hear a word against Harold. But he liked to be certain and I liked to be right, and over the years we arrived at an arrangement. He talked and I managed. When we disagreed, I lost. Not out of cruelty. The disagreement just slid off him.” Her mouth twitched. “And then we had Ruth.” Her voice changed on the name. It did not break. It gentled, the way a hand does near something that bruises. “She had my chin and, God help her, my habit of being right. By nine she was arguing with her father at supper and by twelve she was arguing with me. And I’m ashamed to tell you I was too tired to enjoy it. I used to lie in bed thinking, I would give anything for one person in this house to listen to me for five minutes without a fight.” The back of my neck prickled. “The card came in October of 1987, in with the gas bill. I thought it was a prank from the girls at the office. I went anyway. I was thirty-one and had never done one thing in my life for no good reason.” “They put it to us exactly as they put it to you. Four envelopes. Choose slowly. And I did. I walked those streets for six days and spoke to every resident who would speak to me, and every one of them was so happy. That’s what decided me, in the end. How could a gift that makes people so happy be a bad one?” She turned the old card over in her fingers as if checking it for something she had missed. “I chose the Hush.” Calla Rue had named it from the table. When you speak, everyone listens, and no one argues. I had thought it a lovely thing. I had thought it might be the one I’d choose myself. “It was the most extraordinary night of my life. Calla Rue laid a hand on my forehead, and something settled, like a bell being hung in a tower. She said, ‘Speak.’ I said, ‘Thank you,’ and every head in that hall turned, and every person stopped breathing to hear what I would say next.” She was quiet. “I wept. I had never been listened to like that.” “What was it like afterwards?” “Wonderful,” said Winifred. “For three weeks it was wonderful.” “Three weeks? I thought the Season was only a few days.” “Nine days by the calendar. I lived twenty-two of them.” Her eyes were level and sharp. “Time bends here, child. Nobody tells you that. A day can be a day or a week or a month, depending on how badly the town wants you to stay. I got home and found I’d been gone nine days and had aged twenty-two.” Someone passed with a tray of glasses. She waited until they had gone. “I made the mistake of going home.” “It was raining. Harold was at the gate with an umbrella, because he had rung the station and known when I’d be in. I said, ‘Harold, I have to tell you where I’ve been.’ And he said, ‘Of course, love.’ “So I told him. All of it. The lanterns, the library, the gifts. It was madness, and I knew it was madness, and I stood there and waited for him to say so. I wanted him to say Winifred, have you lost your mind? I would have adored it. “He listened to every word. He nodded. When I’d finished he said, ‘That sounds wonderful, dear. You must have had a marvellous time.’” She pressed her lips together. “That was the whole conversation. It went on being the whole conversation for thirty-nine years. “It took me a month to work out what I’d done. If I said the sky was green, they said, ‘Quite green, dear.’ If I said something cruel, they said, ‘You’re right, I’m sorry.’ I told the woman at the grocer’s to go to the devil, as a joke, and she went. She walked out of her own shop and sat in her car in the car park and wept.” “You could have just stopped,” I said. “Been careful.” “Oh, I tried. I stopped giving orders. I only made conversation. And do you know what happens to people who only ever hear yes? They stop talking. Why would you offer an opinion to someone who’ll agree with all of them, even the ones that contradict each other?” She drew her stick closer across her knees, like a woman hugging herself. “Ruth stopped first.” “She was thirteen. A mouthy little thing. Fiery. We’d fought about her hair and her homework and her friends. And one evening that autumn she said, ‘Mum, I don’t want to go to school tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘All right.’ Just like that. The Hush had settled over the house like snow. “By fifteen she’d stopped arguing about anything. She sat about the house like a lamp turned down. I’d ask what she wanted for her birthday and she’d say, ‘Whatever you think, Mum.’ I used to lie awake and listen to her moving about her room and think, where has my daughter gone?” She said it so evenly. I have since learned that this is what grief sounds like when it has had a long time to practise. “She never left home. Then, eight years ago, she said yes to a man I’d never met and went to live in a house I’ve never seen, and she doesn’t answer my letters. I don’t think she disagrees with me. I think she doesn’t know what a real conversation would feel like. I took that from her before she was old enough to know she had it.” “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. It came out thin and useless. “Wasn’t it?” She gave me a small, dreadful smile. “I chose it. They’re careful about that. A true gift, freely given. They never take anything you don’t hand over yourself.” The fiddle had stopped. Somewhere a drum was beating a slow patient rhythm. “I tried to give it back,” she said. “Every October for thirty-nine years. But the road doesn’t open for the likes of us. I had to unlearn the whole thing. I had to stop wanting to be heard, truly, in my bones, before the Season would let me in again.” “And now? Can you give it back?” “I believe so. If I can find Calla Rue, and say the right words, and bear the price. And Ruth might start to argue with me again.” Her hands tightened on the stick. “I’d give the rest of my life for one single row with that girl.” She leaned closer. I smelled lavender and tea and old wool, so like my mother’s scarf that my eyes stung. “Listen. I was out in the world for thirty-nine years working this out. The first night I came back, I stood in front of that slate in the library, and I counted. Of the thirty-one people who came in 1987, do you know how many have a line through their name?” “No.” “Three. And they weren’t the happiest or the cleverest or the bravest. They were the three who chose, and then stayed awake to what they’d chosen. Everyone else, everyone with a clean name, stayed. They’re out here tonight in good waistcoats, handing out tarts.” I thought of Odalys, her smile hanging in the air. “They aren’t prisoners. That’s the cleverness of it. No walls, no locks. The gift holds you. Every gift is a hook, and every hook is baited with the one thing you can’t bear to be without. Belonging, because it’s a house that won’t let you leave. Memory, because it’s a past that won’t let you forget. And if you do leave, you lose the very thing you came for.” “Then why would anyone stay?” “Because it feels like home. It feels like the only home that ever really wanted you.” I sat still, with my mother’s scarf crushed against my mouth. I did not remember lifting it there. “And Mira.” Her grip on my wrist was far stronger than her small frame ought to have allowed. “There’s something else. I’ve spent thirty-nine years finding it out, and it’s the one thing the residents can never say, because the whole town is built to hide it. It isn’t about the gifts. The gifts are only the…” She stopped. I waited. I thought she was catching her breath. But her hand had gone slack on my wrist, and when I looked up into her face, the floor of the world tilted. Her eyes were open. Her mouth was still shaped for the next word. But the lines had smoothed from her forehead, and her face had settled into something mild and bright and pleasant, like the face of a woman at a village fair. “The gooseberry tarts in the Tallow Street bakery,” said Winifred Aldous, in a high sweet voice that was not hers, “are the best in the valley. You really must try one.” “Winifred?” She smiled at me. A lovely smile. An empty smile. And on the far side of the terrace, framed in the glow of a hundred lanterns, with her silver eyes fixed on us and one pale hand raised in a polite and friendly wave, stood Calla Rue.
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