The moths came first. I had not noticed them before. They rose off the terrace stones around Winifred’s bench, pale and soft and the colour of cold ash, a dozen at first and then two dozen, each the size of a postage stamp. They did not flutter. They settled, one by one, on her hair and her shoulders and the knuckles of her hands, as if she were a lamp they had been waiting for. Winifred went on smiling. She did not brush them off. Calla Rue crossed the terrace without hurrying, and the crowd opened for her the way water opens for a boat. She knelt in front of the old woman in her pine-green coat and took both her hands, moths and all. “Winifred. You’ve overtired yourself. Come now.” “The gooseberry tarts,” said Winifred pleasantly, “are the best in the valley.” “They are. We’ll have one sent up.” She flicked a hand, and the moths lifted off in a grey cloud, resentful, and drifted away between the lanterns. “Ash moths. Don’t mind them. They gather round anyone who’s carrying something heavy.” She looked up at me. “Mira, would you help me? She’s lighter than she looks, but the steps are steep.” I did not move. “What did you do to her?” Calla’s face did something I was not prepared for. It tired. In the lantern light her silver eyes looked like the eyes of a nurse at the end of a double shift, and for a second she did not seem to know what to say. “Nothing,” she said at last, more quietly. “She’s not well. She hasn’t been for a long while. People who have lost something decide the world must be to blame, and Ashgrove is a very easy thing to blame.” “She said the Hush took her daughter.” “She chose the Hush. Eyes open. I told her to choose slowly. I tell everyone.” She stopped, and started again, and I had the odd feeling that she was picking her way across the sentence like someone crossing a stream on stones. “You’ll hear a good many accounts of this town before the Season turns, Mira. Some will be sad. Some will be frightening. When you hear one, ask yourself who benefits from your believing it.” It was such a clever thing to say that I couldn’t see what was wrong with it. It took me hours. By then she was gone. She got Winifred to her feet. The old woman went with her like a lamb, smiling, stick tapping on the stones. At the top of the steps Winifred turned her head and looked back at me. The smile did not change. But her eyes did. For one second they were sharp and desperate and entirely her own, and her lips shaped two words without a sound. The slate. Then the crowd closed behind them, and the fiddle started up again, as though nothing had happened at all. I did not go to the slate straight away. I’m not proud of it. I was frightened, and I told myself I was being sensible. I lay down in the beautiful bed under the beautiful quilts for as long as I could bear it, which was not long. An hour or so after midnight I gave up and went down to the street. The lanterns were still burning. Nobody seemed to put them out. From inside each one, a tiny face watched me go by. Somewhere ahead a bakery had its lights on, and the smell of baking bread came up the lane, warm and yeasty and unbearably kind. On the kerb outside the clock-shop, with his chin on his knees and his new scarf trailing in a puddle, sat the boy from the bus. “Hey,” I said. “You’re up early.” “Haven’t been to bed.” His eyes were red-rimmed and bright. “Pip and I have been talking for hours.” “Pip?” “The girl with the red hair. Pippa. She’s from Leeds.” He smiled, lopsided and helpless. “She’s brilliant. She wants Belonging. She says she’s never had a home that wasn’t somebody else’s. I told her I’d visit.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I’m Jonah, by the way. I’m taking Foresight. I’ve decided.” My stomach turned over. “Jonah. Wait. There’s something you should hear.” To his credit, he listened. I sat on the kerb beside him and told him all of it: Elliot and his sister’s voice, Winifred and Ruth, the white lines on the slate. I told it plainly, the way I’d explain a drug interaction to a nervous customer at the pharmacy. I said every gift seemed to have a price, and that the price seemed to be the exact thing a person wanted most. He was quiet for a long time. “What did you want, then?” he said. “Before you got here?” “I don’t know.” It was true. “I do.” He looked at his shoes. “My dad’s in a hospice. He’s got about four months. I sit with him every night and I can’t tell if I’m doing it right. If I could see how it goes, just a day ahead, I’d know what to say.” His voice cracked. “That’s not a trick, is it? That’s just wanting to love someone properly.” I had no answer. It was the most reasonable thing anyone had said to me since I left the city, and every instinct I had told me it was the exact shape of the hook. “I’ll be careful,” said Jonah. “I promise.” In the lantern above his head, the tiny ember-face flinched, and the flame went from gold to a cold, clear blue. He didn’t see it. I did. I knew then that nothing I’d said had landed. He’d listened the way you listen to a weather forecast for a place you’re not going. That was when I started to be afraid in earnest. Not of Calla. Of how easy it was. The library, in the small hours, was a different creature. I let myself in by the tall doors, which swung open without a sound. A few scholarly figures hunched over tables in pools of lamplight, none of them looking up. The lanterns on their chains had dimmed to a deep amber, and the shelves rose into the dark above me like the walls of a canyon. The slate hung where it had hung before. I stood in front of it for a long moment with my heart knocking against my ribs. There was a brass-railed ladder fixed to the wall. I took a breath and began to climb. Up at the top, I found them. Chalk mice. There were dozens, none longer than my finger and all the colour of old plaster, scurrying along the edge of the frame with their whiskers dusted white. One was squatting on a letter B with a stub of chalk in its paws, carefully going over the stroke. Another was nibbling at the foot of a 7 with great concentration. They did not look at me. They looked like the most diligent clerks in the world, and I would have found them adorable if I had not been so cold. I began to count. Elliot was right. You had to be looking. The first line was a hair of white against the black, through a name that said Bartholomew Pike, 1904, and I only saw it when a lantern swung and the light slid across it. I moved down. Agnes Whitcombe, 1921, struck through. Dr R. Lennox, 1936, struck through. Then long stretches with nothing at all. Dozens of names, hundreds, with no mark. The clean names. The ones who had stayed. It was dreadful in a quiet way, that long unbroken column, like looking at a graveyard in which nobody had been allowed to die. I went on, year by year, down through the war decades, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties. Winifred Aldous, 1987, one of three, a pale line through it so thin that my throat tightened to see it. The rest of the year, clean. The lines grew rarer as the years came closer to my own. Whole years went by with nothing. I understood, climbing down with my palms damp on the brass, that leaving was getting harder. Or that fewer people were choosing to stay awake. It was somewhere in the nineties that I noticed the mouse. It was sitting on the frame beside the board, watching me. Not working. Watching. Perfectly still, with its chalk-stub held against its chest like a candle. It looked, I thought, a little anxious. And it was not looking at the names. It was looking at my hands on the rungs, and then, with a tiny jerk of the head, at a place lower down the slate. I followed its gaze. Nineteen ninety-four. Nothing. Nineteen ninety-six. A single line, through a man named Tobias Hale. Nineteen ninety-eight. I stopped. It was one name among a dozen, in the same flowing hand as all the rest. I would have missed it, except that the letters seemed to pull at my eye like a hook in water. Ilse Kessler. And through it, so faint it was almost a trick of the light, a single line of white. The ladder rail was cold under my hands. I could hear the slow ticking of the library clock, and under it something thudding in my ears that I realised was my own blood. Ilse. My mother’s name was Ilse. She had given it up in the end, the way people give up things that cost more than they’re worth. She went by Elsie all my life. She said Ilse sounded like a woman with a better life. Nobody at the funeral had even known it. But I had seen it on a form once, in a shoebox, when I was sixteen and hunting for my birth certificate. Ilse Margarethe Kessler. I’d asked her about it. She laughed, a little too quickly, and said, “Old name. Foolish girl. Put it back, Mira-bird.” Mira-bird. The room tilted. I shut my eyes, and I saw her, thin as paper in the hospital bed, her fingers curled round mine: Don’t wait to be asked. And I saw the card on the counter at Dunmore’s, and Calla Rue in the lantern light, saying warmly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world: your room has been waiting since the spring. Not the spring of this year. The spring of 1999. The spring before I was born. “Oh,” I said, to nobody, to the dark, to the silent rows of books. It came out small and cracked. “Oh, Mum. What did you do?” The mouse on the frame made a tiny sound, something between a squeak and a sneeze, and bolted. It ran straight up the slate and vanished into the shadows near the ceiling. A moment later, in the high gallery above me, something moved. A soft dry sound, like pages turning in a room where there was no wind. Then a voice, quiet and familiar and patient, said from the top of the stacks: “I wondered how long it would take you to find it.”
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