The Midnight Garden — Chapter 3: The Tithe
The Midnight Garden
The Midnight Garden — Chapter 3 of 12. New to the serial? Start with Chapter 1. This is a work of fiction intended for adult readers.
Chapter Three: The Tithe
October ended, and Elara did not.
That was how she had begun to measure things — not in days but in survivals. She had survived the discovery that her inheritance was impossible. She had survived learning that the man in her garden was older than the Bank of England. She was, at present, surviving the slower and more dangerous discovery that she looked forward to midnight the way other people looked forward to being warm.
She went every night now. She told herself it was fieldwork. She had a notebook to prove it — her own, slim and red, defiant among Ismay’s forty black ones — filled with observations no journal would ever print. Rosa spp., unregistered. Petal count variable. Responds to laughter (see 14th). Responds to grief (see 17th; do not repeat the 17th.)
Callan taught her the beds the way a man teaches something he is afraid of finishing. Slowly. In order. Here the night-scented stock, which wanted thanking twice. Here the white currants Ismay had planted the year the war ended, which had never once been picked, because — and he said this as though it were obvious — they were not ready yet. Here the east bed, which had died forty years ago in a single night and grown back wrong, its roses darker than the others, their scent beautiful and slightly grieving, like a hymn sung in an empty church.
“You said it doesn’t forgive,” Elara said, crouched at its border with her hands in the warm soil. “But it grew back.”
“Growing back is not forgiveness.” Callan knelt across from her, close enough that she could feel the heat of him competing with the heat of the ground, and lose. “It keeps the mark. Everything that happens inside these walls is still happening, somewhere under the mulch. A garden is just memory that learned to flower.”
“That’s not botany.”
“No,” he agreed. “It’s older.”
His hand moved beside hers, loosening the roots of a weed she’d have sworn wasn’t there a moment before, and their fingers touched — soil-dark, work-warm — and neither of them moved. The stock released its scent all at once, shameless. Three hundred and eleven years, she thought, and his breath still changed when her hand was under his. She filed the observation in the red notebook of her mind, in the section she had labelled, with clinical dishonesty, miscellaneous.
“Rule one,” he said quietly, not looking at her.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re lying to yourself. Inside the walls.” A rose above them opened with its soft, plush sound, eavesdropping. “It counts.”
She withdrew her hand, and if the garden sighed, she chose not to hear it. Rule one was becoming a problem. Rule one meant that every time she caught herself watching the line of his forearms, or the place where his collar opened, or the way he held whatever she brought him — bread, brambles, once an orange that had made him go quiet for a full minute — she had to either say so or leave. She had been leaving earlier and earlier. She suspected he knew why. She suspected the entire east bed knew why.
It was the first of November when the garden asked for something back.
She knew the moment she came through the silvered door that the mood had changed. The moonflowers did not turn to greet her. The warmth underfoot had banked itself low, like a fire being careful, and the light of the roses had drawn inward, each bloom cupping its own glow. Callan stood at the well, and for once he was not working. He was waiting, and he looked like a man who had rehearsed something and hated every draft.
“It’s Martinmas soon,” he said. “Old term day. Rents fall due.”
“I own the land, Callan.”
“You own the house.” He turned the well’s iron cup in his hands, around and around. “Nobody owns this. This is held. And what is held pays a tithe — one night a year, the garden takes instead of gives. Ismay knew. She paid it sixty times.”
Elara’s mouth had gone dry. “Paid it with what?”
“Whatever it asks. It’s never money. It is always something you would rather keep.” He set the cup down on the stone with exaggerated care, as though it might detonate. “A memory, one year. She let it take the sound of her mother’s voice — she told me afterwards she could remember the words, the kitchen, the smell of the bread, everything but the voice. Another year, the ability to cry. That one came back. Most things come back. Changed.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then you refuse.” He said it evenly, and the evenness was the frightening part. “The door will still open. The garden will still bloom. And every living thing you plant outside these walls, for the rest of your life, will die — and it will let you work out, slowly, over years, that it was not coincidence.” He looked up at last, and the grief in his face had won so thoroughly that the hunger was nowhere in it. “Your great-aunt refused, once. In 1986. It is why there is an east bed.”
The roses grieved gently in the dark, still singing their hymn, still keeping their mark.
“That’s why she wrote it twice,” Elara said slowly. “Feed the garden and it will feed you. It wasn’t gardening advice. It was terms.”
“Everything here is terms.” He came around the well, stopping the precise, maddening distance he always stopped, and the pale light lay along his throat, and her hands — her great-aunt’s hands — wanted, with an ache like frost coming out of the ground, to close that distance and be done. “Martinmas is the eleventh. You have ten days to decide. I would tell you to leave, Elara. I have been trying to make myself tell you to leave since the night the door let you in.”
“Why haven’t you?”
Rule one held him like a hand at the back of the neck. She watched him try to go around it and fail.
“Because the last time the garden took something from me,” Callan said, “it was the reason I could bear the wanting of things. And it has begun giving it back.”
The moonflowers turned then — all of them, smoothly, at once — but not toward Elara.
They turned toward the north corner, where the wall was oldest and nothing was planted and nothing had ever grown, and where, out of bare black earth, in the cold of the first of November, something pale had broken the surface and begun, unmistakably, to rise.
Callan went absolutely still.
“That’s not possible,” he said — the words she had spent three weeks learning not to say — and the garden, which dislikes lies, took a slow breath all around them.
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