The Midnight Garden — Chapter 11: The Thirteenth
The Midnight Garden
The Midnight Garden — Chapter 11 of 12. New to the serial? Start with Chapter 1. This is a work of fiction intended for adult readers.
Chapter Eleven: The Thirteenth
If the door ever refuses you, do not beg; it despises begging.
He had taught her that himself, in a week when he believed he was leaving instructions for after his own death, and now he stood on the wrong side of his own advice with the frost coming down, and did not beg. Elara knew it because she put her ear to the oak like a fool and heard, through three hundred years of silvered wood, a man breathing, and nothing else.
“Open it,” she said to the garden.
The lights did not move.
“Rule two. You ask before you take. So you can ask before you keep as well — that was the whole point of writing them. What do you want?”
It’s afraid, said Maren, from the path. She had not turned round; she was looking at the beds the way a woman looks at a room she is about to leave for good. Not of him. Of tomorrow. It heard me on the sea wall. I told it I was going, and I said the day.
And the garden, in the small voice, said: Give her back.
Elara felt the words land in the soil under her boots — not a demand, the way the old rules would have made it, but something worse, something that had learned to want out loud and had not yet learned what could be had. She said it. Not death itself. She is mine. Let her lie down in the north corner where nothing was planted and I will keep her better this time. I will keep her warm. Give her back, and he can come in.
“No.”
You have not asked her.
“I don’t need to. That isn’t a thing anyone can give you.” Her breath smoked. “She isn’t mine to give. She wasn’t his to give. She was never yours to keep — that was a promise, and we don’t do those any more, and you know it, because you ate it.”
The frost climbed a hand’s width up the west wall and stopped there, considering.
Then I will take nothing, said the garden, and it sounded so young that Elara nearly gave it the world. And he can stay out.
“You badly raised —” She stopped herself. She sat down on the cold rim of the well, the way she had on the night of the rules, and she was very tired, and she made herself speak the way you speak to something that has only ever been loved by prisoners. “Rule three. No promises in here; only gifts. You can’t have her. You can be given something, if she chooses, and you can be grateful, which is a skill, and which you will learn. Maren?”
The old woman came down the path slowly, and stood at the north corner, at the bare patch of black earth where she had been a rose for three centuries, and looked at it for a while as if it were a bed she had once slept in.
I’ll give you what I saw, she said. Not what I am. You may have the sea.
And she told it. The whole day, aloud, in the paper voice, walking the beds — the loch going past like a galloping horse, the viaduct, the shingle dragging out under her heels, the girl who called her madam, eleven chips — and the garden listened the way it had listened to nothing in three hundred and eleven years, without hunger, and one by one the moonflowers turned to follow her like an audience, and the frost on the west wall let go.
When she finished, the door opened.
Callan came in with the night on his coat and did not say a word about it, then or ever, and Elara loved him for that with a violence that surprised her.
Maren did not sleep. She sat by the well in every coat the house owned, with the postcard in her lap, and at the first grey she said, “Now,” and they took her out.
Not far. She would not go far. Outside the wall, on the moor side, where the stone was oldest and the moss thickest, she had them set her down with her back to the garden and her hand flat on the wall, the way you lay a hand on a horse’s neck, and she looked at the morning coming up over forty acres of nothing in particular, and was pleased with it.
“The thirteenth,” she said. “Seventeen hundred and fifteen. You were lying about there.” A tilt of the chin toward the beeches. “You were very rude to me.”
“I was dying,” Callan said.
“You were rude, and then you were dying, and I have never let you forget the order.” Her hand moved on the stone. Inside the wall — Elara felt it through the soles of her boots, through the moor, through the year — the garden was holding its breath. “Listen to me, both of you. Nothing gets kept. Not roses, not boys, not gardens. Things get tended, for a while, by whoever is standing nearest. That is the whole of it. I had forty years of tending and three hundred of being kept, and I am telling you from the far end of the arithmetic which one was living.”
The light came up. The moor went from black to brown to the dull gold it manages once a day in November, and Maren watched it arrive with her grey eyes open and her hand on the wall.
“There,” she said to the stone, quite kindly. “Now you’ve seen it too.”
And that was all; she did not say anything afterwards; she was simply, between one breath of the moor and the next, not in the borrowed body any more, and her hand stayed where it was on the wall because she had put it there on purpose.
Callan did not cry the way he had cried on Martinmas, with a weight coming off. He cried the way a man cries — badly, angrily, with his mortal shoulders, the first tears of his free life, on his knees in the wet grass with Maren’s old hand held against his face; and Elara let him, and the garden, on its side of the wall, went entirely dark, every bed at once, and stayed dark, and did not ask for anything.
He dug the grave himself. He would not let her help. Under the beeches, outside the north wall, in ground that had never been anybody’s — a mortal man with a spade and a bad back, all day, until the light went. He laid the turf back raised, because the garden dislikes a flat wound, and she saw him decide not to explain that, and understood that some instructions were not for after his death after all. They were for now.
Inside, in the north corner, nothing grew. Nothing had been planted there. Elara stood over the bare black earth at midnight and thought that it would probably stay bare, and that this was correct.
The garden had been dark for eighteen hours. She had begun to wonder whether it was dying again, the honest way this time, of grief; then the well warmed under her hand, one reluctant degree, and the voice came — not from everywhere. From close. From the ground at her feet, where a rose had once said a man’s name.
Stay, said the garden.
It was not talking to her. Callan stood at the sill with the door open beside him and the night on his coat, a man with nowhere he was bound to be for the first time in three hundred and eleven years, and the garden’s thousand lights came up around him, low, hearth-low, the way a house lights a window for someone.
Stay, it said again, and then — learning the word from somewhere, from a girl behind a counter, from a woman who had told it about the sea — please.
In three hundred and eleven years it had never once said please.
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