I did not go down. Not that night. Tomas walked me back to Tallow Street himself, limping through the pre-dawn lanes with a lantern held out in front of us. Inside the glass, a wick no bigger than a thumbnail watched me pass with enormous, sleepy interest. At my door Tomas said, “Sleep. It won’t be any less there tomorrow.” Then he looked embarrassed to have said something so ominous, and added, “That was meant to be comforting.” It was, a little. I slept four hours in my mother’s tea-smelling room with her letter under the pillow, and when I woke the light through the window was thick and golden, and for one clean second I remembered nothing. I only lay in a warm bed in a town that smelled of bread and wood smoke, thinking: I am happy. Then it all came back. I lay with my arm over my eyes and let it. Elliot found me at the bakery. I had gone there because I needed a reason to be among people, and because Odalys had pressed a free cinnamon bun into my hand the first time I passed. I sat at a corner table with my coffee going cold. When Elliot slid into the chair opposite I didn’t say anything. I pushed the letter across the table. He read it twice. I watched his face, and I saw the moment he reached the line about the Hollow, because his whole body went still. “Foresight,” he said at last. “Of course. I never knew. She came seventeen years before I did.” He looked up. “Mira, I’m so sorry.” “You said you can’t tell me things. But you can read.” A crooked smile. “Reading isn’t saying. I’ve never been stopped from reading.” He folded the letter and slid it back as if it might bruise. “The Hollow. I’ve looked for it for eleven years. I know every inch of that building. The lowest level is a cellar full of old maps. There’s no door under it. I’ve checked the plans, and the plans don’t include one. I’ve checked the floor, and the floor is solid. And yet…” “The Toll,” I said. His head came up. “You’ve heard it.” “I felt it in my chair last night.” “Everyone who’s new feels it. And by the third night, they’ve stopped noticing.” He leaned in. “That’s the thing. The pull settles in and feels like contentment, and nobody ever thinks to wonder where it’s coming from. I noticed, once. Eleven years ago. And then I was given a gift that made it impossible to un-notice anything, and I’ve noticed it every hour since.” It was the most bitter thing I’d heard him say, and the most human. “Will you help me find it?” I saw the fear in his eyes and I saw him not let it win. “Yes. But not today.” “Why not?” “Because Calla is going to be at your elbow all day.” He glanced over my shoulder at the door. “And I think, if you’re clever, you’ll let her.” Before I could ask what he meant, the bell above the door jingled, and a voice behind me said warmly: “Mira. There you are. I hoped I’d find you.” What I remember most about that day is how lovely it was. I’ve gone over it so many times, hunting for the seam, the place where it should have felt false. I’ve never found one. That is the truth, and it’s the most important thing in this account, so I’ll say it plainly: in the daytime, Ashgrove was the kindest place I have ever been. Calla Rue took me round it herself. She didn’t hurry and she didn’t lecture. She walked beside me in the long green coat with her keys chiming softly, and she showed me everything. The clock-shop, where a tiny silver-haired woman with a lens strapped to her forehead let me wind a brass pocket watch of my very own and told me I could keep it. The bookbinder’s, where a man with huge gentle hands rebound one of the paperbacks from my shelf in green leather, for nothing, with my name in gold on the spine. The glasshouse on the hill, hot and green and dripping, full of every flower I had ever seen in a dream and a few I hadn’t. On the path to the glasshouse a white hare was sitting in the middle of the gravel. It did not run. It looked at me with one round amber eye, and I had the clear impression that it was deciding something. “Don’t mind her,” said Calla. “Hares keep to the crossroads. Between one thing and another. It’s said they carry messages across, and I’ve never known one to be wrong.” “What does she say?” “Oh, they never say.” Calla smiled. “They only turn up.” The hare watched us until we’d gone by. When I looked back, she was still there, and she had turned her head to follow me. We ate lunch at The Last Order. Fenwick, the landlord, a great booming man, sat us at the best table by the window and wouldn’t let me see the bill. He told jokes. I laughed at them. A small dark-haired girl came and asked shyly if I’d like to see her rabbit, and I said yes, and it was a perfectly ordinary rabbit, and I have never been so pleased. All the while, I felt it. The pull behind my ribs, the hand against my back. It didn’t ask me for anything. It only said, over and over, in the voice of everyone who had ever loved me: you are home. Somewhere in the afternoon I realised I hadn’t thought about the rent in six hours. A little later I realised I hadn’t thought about my mother’s death in six hours either, and the guilt hit me so hard it was nearly physical. Calla saw it. She saw everything. “Sit with me a moment.” We had come to a bench on the hill above the glasshouse. Below us the whole town lay spread out like a map: roofs, lanterns, thin blue chimney-smoke. The sun was low. It had been low all day, a long slow honey-coloured afternoon that never quite tipped into evening. “Elsie was happy here,” said Calla. I turned my head sharply. “You know.” “I’ve known since you stepped off the bus. You have her chin.” Her silver eyes were soft. “I should have said at once. I wasn’t sure how much you knew, and I didn’t want to frighten you.” “She wrote me a letter.” “Ah.” Calla smiled sadly, like someone who had expected nothing else. “Yes. I imagine she would have.” I didn’t tell her what was in it. That was the one thing I held onto, in all that golden day. I held onto it like a coin in a closed fist. “She came at twenty-three,” said Calla. “Frightened of everything, and funny, and so clever. She loved the library. She danced at the Turning until she cried from laughing. And then she saw her future, and it frightened her, and she ran.” “What did she see?” “I don’t know. Foresight is private. What a person sees is theirs alone.” It sounded so reasonable that a hard knot in my chest loosened a little. “I would never have kept her. Nobody is ever kept. She walked out of this town of her own free will, and I watched her go, and I was sad, as I am every time.” In the lantern on the bench beside us, the small ember-face flickered, and the flame went cold, clear blue. I didn’t move. I didn’t look at it. I kept my eyes on Calla’s face and smiled, as if I had noticed nothing at all. Nobody is ever kept. “Twenty-seven years she spent afraid,” said Calla gently. “I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. And what did she leave you? A letter telling you to be afraid, too.” I felt something in me flinch. It was a beautifully made argument, and I want to be fair to it. It was said with such tenderness, by someone looking at me with such weary love, that for a moment the whole structure of my mother’s warning wobbled in the gold light. But the flame in the lantern was still blue. “I’d like to think about it,” I said. “Of course.” She squeezed my hand and let it go. “You have until the Turning. Take all the time you need.” She stood and looked down at me. Something crossed her face, brief and strange, that I’ve never been sure I saw. It looked like envy. It looked like someone watching a person do something she had once wanted badly to be able to do. Then it was gone, and she was only Calla, kind and weary, keys chiming. “There’s a masked ball tonight,” she said. “Do come. You’ll love it.” I went. Of course I went. There’s a kind of loneliness that makes you a fool for any warm room. I told myself it was reconnaissance. I told myself I’d stay at the edge and watch. I wore the dress that had been hanging in my wardrobe that afternoon, a deep wine-red one in my exact size that I had not put there, and a silk mask with a single gold feather, and I looked at myself in the long glass for a full minute without recognising the woman in it. She looked like someone who belonged somewhere. The moon came up as I climbed the hill, enormous and the colour of butter, clearing the eastern ridge. The ballroom was at the top of the town, in the old hall, and the light that poured out of its doors spilled down the steps like something gold being tipped from a jug. Inside, hundreds of masked figures turned beneath chandeliers hung with real candles, while at the far end an orchestra of mismatched players struck up something that sounded like a waltz and a lullaby at the same time. And I stood just inside the doors with my hands knotted, and began, slowly, to notice the guests. There was a woman in a pointed hat and a long black skirt, with a broom. I thought nothing of it until she walked to the cloakroom, handed over the broom, and received a numbered ticket for it. There was a tall man in an old-fashioned opera cloak with a high white collar and a face like candle wax. Under the chandeliers he threw no shadow at all. When he saw me looking, he gave a small apologetic bow, as a person might for a stain on a tablecloth. There was a gentleman in a riding coat with a lantern-jawed head tucked under his arm. He caught my eye, tucked it more firmly, and said in a muffled, courteous voice, “I wonder, would you mind? Only for a moment. Collar.” And before I could say anything, he had handed me his head. It was heavier than it looked. It smiled at me. “Thank you so much,” said the head. I stood there with a stranger’s head in my arms, and a scarecrow leaned against the wall beside me, shedding straw onto the parquet; and a girl in a white sheet with two eyeholes floated past, at exactly the height of a girl in a sheet, and I said, because I had no better idea, “That’s a lovely costume.” The sheet stopped. It turned. A small, cold, deeply offended voice said, “It is not a costume.” Then the gentleman had his head back, and was bowing, and had gone. “Don’t ask,” said a voice at my elbow, “which ones are real, love. It’s rude. And the answer’s usually both.” Odalys was holding a tray of tiny iced cakes and wearing, I noticed, a pair of paper cat ears. She beamed. “That’s Mr Hallam’s head. He’s been losing it at this party since seventeen-ninety. We all think it’s rather sweet.” She lowered her voice. “The big lad in the wolf mask, over there by the punch? Do not compliment the mask. It growls.” I looked. A huge shaggy figure by the punch bowl was ladling cups of something dark and steaming with great delicacy, and I could have sworn the muzzle of his mask had just lifted off a real, white tooth. On the buffet table, between a pyramid of apples and a bowl of candied plums, a black cat was asleep with its nose in its own tail. Its eyes opened as I passed. They were not cat’s eyes. They were the colour of candle flame, and they followed me for three full steps, and then closed again, and I distinctly heard the cat sigh. Somewhere beyond all of it a skeleton in a good black suit was waltzing, with great correctness, with another skeleton in a lilac gown. They were not touching, since neither of them had anything to touch with. But they turned together in perfect time, like two parts of the same clock. It was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen. And I stood in the doorway of that ballroom and thought, quite calmly, that nobody here had asked me who I was. Not one. That was what Calla had meant. Nobody asks. That was when someone took my hand. I thought it was a dancer. I started to pull away. But then I saw the mask, a plain white one, and the scarf round his throat, and the lopsided, helpless way he was smiling under it. “Jonah.” “Mira.” He was grinning, glowing, his eyes huge behind the mask. “Dance with me. Please. I have to tell somebody and you’re the only one I trust.” He was a terrible dancer, all elbows, and he talked all the way through it, in a rush, the way people do when they’re carrying more than they can hold. “I did it. I took it. Today. Calla made an exception, because of my dad. She said the Season understands when time is short. I know you told me to wait, and I’m sorry, but I couldn’t, Mira. I couldn’t.” My heart gave a hard dull knock. “You took Foresight. Already.” “I did.” He was laughing and there were tears in his eyes. “And it’s the most beautiful thing. I saw my dad. I saw his last day. It’s Thursday, three days from now, and he isn’t scared, he isn’t in pain, he’s just asleep, and I’m holding his hand and I know exactly what to say. I’ve practised. I’m going to get it right.” I couldn’t speak. I could only hold his hands and move with him through the candlelight, while something cold began to open in my stomach. “Jonah. What else do you see?” The laughter slowed. The music went on, but the sound seemed to retreat from us, as if we were standing in a bubble in the middle of the room. “That’s why I wanted to find you.” He had stopped dancing. His fingers were tightening on mine. “I’ve been seeing a day ahead, like they said. Everything. Tomorrow I’m going to burn the toast. Pip’s going to cry about her brother. And tomorrow night…” He swallowed. “Mira. I saw you.” The candles guttered. All around us the dancers turned, and turned, and turned. Overhead, the first bats had begun to circle under the chandeliers, quick and soundless. “You’re in a place I don’t recognise,” said Jonah, in a small flat voice. “It’s dark and warm and it’s made of roots. All round you. Thousands of them, thick as my arm, white and wet. And you’re standing there with a little brass torch in your hand and your mother’s scarf round your neck, and somebody is asking you a question.” “What question?” “I can’t hear it. But I can see your face. And you say yes.” I stared at him. “You say yes,” he whispered. “And then…” His whole face crumpled inside the white mask. “Then it goes dark, Mira. I try to see the day after, and there’s nothing. Not black, not blank. Just nothing. As though there’s no day after at all.” I don’t remember the rest of the dance. I remember the music ending. I remember Jonah holding me by both arms and saying over and over, “Don’t say yes, whatever it is, promise me you won’t,” and me saying I wouldn’t, I promised, I promised. And I remember, as the crowd parted and applauded, looking across the glittering room and seeing, on a dais at the far end, a tall figure in a long green coat with her silver eyes fixed on me through a plain black mask. She was not smiling. She was nodding, slowly, once, as if something had gone exactly according to plan. Enjoying the story? Read on at NovelPing.
Chapter Seven: The Long Day
The Night of Names