I did not scream. I would like to say that was courage, but my voice had simply stopped working. A brass lamp came on in the gallery above me, and a figure leaned out over the rail. Not Elliot. This man was older, perhaps sixty, with a long grey plait over one shoulder and a cardigan buttoned wrong by one hole. He had the look of someone who had spent decades among paper and been slowly turning into it: dry skin, soft voice, spectacles mended at the hinge with a twist of wire. Behind his head, in the beams, a row of bats unfolded their wings an inch, and folded them again. “Forgive me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’ve only waited a long time to say that, and I wanted to say it properly.” His voice had a strange music in it. An accent I couldn’t place, and under it, out of nowhere, the flat vowels of the town where my mother grew up. I had heard those vowels every day of my life. I had never heard them in a stranger’s mouth. “Who are you?” “Tomas Vey.” He came down the spiral stair slowly, one hand on the rail, left leg dragging a little. “I keep the upper stacks. The ones nobody reads. It suits me.” He stopped a respectful distance away, the way you stand near a skittish animal. “I knew your mother, Mira. We came the same October. She taught me most of the English I’ve got.” The slate loomed over me, enormous and silent. “She never told me about this place,” I said. It came out harsher than I meant. “Twenty-seven years. Not a word.” “No,” said Tomas, gently. “I don’t suppose she did.” He took me to a little room behind the great hall, one lamp, one table, two hard chairs, where I think the librarians ate their sandwiches. And he made tea. I’ll always remember that. In the middle of everything, he made tea, in a chipped brown pot, with the fussy care of a man performing a ritual. He put a cup in front of me and I held it with both hands and watched the steam, and the world slowly steadied. “I can’t tell you what I know,” he said. “I should say that at once. I’m a resident. You’ll have met a few. You’ve seen how it takes us.” “The tarts.” “The tarts.” A tired, wry smile. “It’s a small, very stupid cruelty, isn’t it? Of all the sentences it might have given us.” He turned his cup in its saucer. “But there’s a loophole. There always is, in the rules of a thing that’s trying to seem kind. The Season listens to what is spoken. It doesn’t read. And for reasons I’ve never understood, it respects the post.” “The post?” “A letter. Sealed. Addressed to one person by name, never to a crowd.” He reached into his cardigan, and the breath went out of me, because his hand came out holding an envelope. “Your mother wrote this on the last night of the Season in 1998, in this room. I’ve kept it twenty-eight years in a copy of Hardy’s Complete Works, because nobody has ever once wanted to read Hardy.” The envelope was yellow and soft with handling, the paper furred at the corners. Across the front, in a hand I knew better than my own, was a single line. For Mira-bird, if she ever finds her way here by herself. I could not touch it. “She said you’d come on the twenty-fifth of October in the year 2026,” said Tomas. “I asked how she could know. She said she’d seen it. I was to give you the letter only if you found her name on the slate with your own eyes. If anyone led you to it, she said, you’d never trust it.” His voice was soft. “She was clever, your mother. Clever and so terribly tired.” “How did you know I’d come now?” I said. “Why tonight?” He looked at the window. There was a bee on the glass. A fat gold honeybee, walking slowly up the pane in the middle of the night. “I keep hives on the roof,” he said. “We tell the bees everything here. Births, partings, deaths. It’s an old custom. If you don’t, they sulk, and leave.” He rubbed his thumb along his plait. “In March, the hives went silent. All twelve. A whole day, not a hum. And I knew. They only do that for one of ours.” A pause. “I took this out of the Hardy that morning and put it in my pocket. I’ve carried it ever since.” The bee reached the top of the window, turned, and began to come down again. I picked up the envelope. My thumb broke the seal without my telling it to. Mira-bird, If you are reading this, then you have done the one thing I spent my whole life trying to stop you from doing, and I am so proud of you and so frightened for you that I do not know which to put first. My name is Ilse Kessler. It was my name once. I changed it to Elsie when I came home, because I thought a new name might make me a new woman, and I was wrong about that, as I was wrong about most things. I am writing this on the last night of the Season, 1998. I am twenty-three years old and I am carrying you. I did not know that when I came. I found out on the third day, from a doctor in the town, and it changed everything. I chose Foresight. I want to tell you what it is, because no one told me, not properly. It is not a vision. It is not a crystal ball. It is a window with no glass in it, and the whole of tomorrow comes blowing through. I woke each morning knowing the day before it began. Every conversation. Every accident. Every small kindness and every small cruelty, a day before it happened. At first it felt like a miracle. It felt like being a god. Then I saw my own life. Not all of it. A single day. A day many years from now. I saw a girl of twenty-seven walking down a street lined with lanterns, with a scarf round her neck that had been mine. I saw her face when she saw the town. I saw her find a name on a slate. I saw her read this very letter in a small room with a brown teapot. And I saw what happens to her after. I will not write it down. Even now, even in ink, I cannot make my hand do it. But I saw it, and I knew that the only thing I could do was run. If I left Ashgrove, if I took you as far from it as the world would let me, if I never said its name, then surely the girl in the vision would never come. A future can be avoided. That is what I believed. That is the cruellest thing Foresight does. It makes you believe you can fight it. I could not. Here is what I learned in twenty-seven years, my darling, though I write it before I have lived them. You cannot unsee the day ahead. You cannot even look away from it. It only gets nearer, and you stand there with the whole of your love in your arms, and you watch it coming. I am sorry. I am sorry. I was so desperate to protect you that I never let you know the one thing that might have kept you safe. So I will tell you now, in the only way I can. Do not choose. Not Foresight. Not any of them. Whatever Calla Rue offers, whatever she promises, whatever she makes you feel, and she will make you feel everything you have ever wanted, say no. Say no and walk to the end of the road. I do not know the whole truth about this place. I know that the gifts are not what they seem. I know that what we give up does not vanish, that it goes somewhere, and that it is gathered. And I know there is something beneath the library, a place called the Hollow. I followed a sound to its door once, in my first week, and I turned back. I have never forgiven myself for turning back. If you have the courage I did not, go and see. At the third bell, on the last night. Do not tell Calla Rue. Do not trust the kindest face in the room. I love you. I have loved you since the third day. I have loved you since before you had a name. Mum P.S. The tea was always for you. I drank it every day of your life so that one day, when you found it waiting, you would know it was safe. I don’t know how long I sat there. The tea went cold. The lamp flickered. At some point Tomas got up without a word and laid a worn warm hand on my shoulder, then took himself off to the far corner and busied himself with a shelf, giving me what privacy a small room has to give. I read the letter again. And again. I traced her handwriting with my finger. At some point the bee came down off the window and walked slowly across the page, over the words I love you, and stopped, and sat there, tiny and gold, as if it were reading too. I let it. I held the paper to my face, and it smelled, so faintly I couldn’t be sure of it, of lavender. Her whole life. Twenty-seven years of cheap strong tea and humming in the kitchen and don’t wait to be asked, Mira. Every careful, watchful, loving thing she ever did had been aimed at one point in time. This one. This room. This night. And she had known. She had known, and never once let it show. What do you do with that? What do you do with a mother who gave you an ordinary childhood, knowing the whole time where it would end? I did not know whether I wanted to weep or scream. I think I did both, silently, with the letter flat on the table and my knuckles against my mouth. “She made me swear,” said Tomas, from the corner, not turning round. His voice wasn’t quite steady. “That night. I’d not speak of it. I couldn’t have anyway. But she made me swear it with my whole heart, and I did. And then I stayed here, Mira, when she left. I took the Belonging. I’m a coward. I couldn’t bear to be alone.” A breath. “I’ve waited twenty-eight years to give her daughter that letter. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done in this town that was mine.” “Thank you,” I said. It wasn’t enough. It was all I had. He nodded and said nothing else, and I understood he couldn’t. The Season had given him the tarts, and the post. I folded the letter along its old creases and put it inside my coat, against my heart, next to the photograph. Then I looked up at the little clock above the door. The long hand and the short hand stood together. I counted the strokes, and it took me a moment to understand what I was counting. It was almost the third bell. Not tonight. I had a day and a night left before the Turning. But somewhere deep in the building, far below the floor I sat on, I heard it begin: a low, slow, patient tolling that was not quite a bell and not quite a heartbeat. It came up through the stones, through the legs of my chair, through the soles of my feet. Overhead, in the beams, every bat in the library unfurled its wings at once with a sound like a page being turned, and the bee on the letter lifted off and flew straight for the door. I knew that sound. I had heard it once before. It was what I had followed into the trees on the bus. The pull behind my ribs. The hand laid flat against my back. Welcome, it said. Finally. Welcome. And Tomas Vey, in the corner, without turning round, whispered softly: “Mira. Whatever you do next. Please don’t go alone.” Get faster updates on g.com.
Chapter Six: The Man in the High Gallery
The Night of Names