The Midnight Garden — Chapter 12: The Choosing
The Midnight Garden
The Midnight Garden — Chapter 12 of 12, the final chapter. New to the serial? Start with Chapter 1. This is a work of fiction intended for adult readers.
Chapter Twelve: The Choosing
A year is a long time to a garden and nothing at all to a hill, and Elara Voss spent it learning the difference.
Midwinter, says the red notebook, in handwriting steadier than it had any right to be. Thanked the well. C. showed me: iron cup, three swallows, no speech, set the cup down with the handle towards the water. “It despises begging,” he said, “but it is a fool for manners.” Ground warmed 2°C by my estimate. He has a cold. He is astonished by the cold. He has had it for four days and speaks of it as an event.
He was astonished by most things that winter, and she wrote them down, because someone should. That sleep took eight hours and could not be refused. That a kettle would boil without being asked. That his hands, which had been warm as August for three centuries, now needed gloves, and that gloves were a thing one lost. He read Ismay’s forty journals from the first to the last, slowly, with his lips moving over the lunar tables, and when he reached the sixtieth June he closed the book and went out and stood at the north wall for an hour in the sleet, and came back in, and did not say anything, and she did not ask.
The door stood open all winter. That had been the garden’s doing, not theirs. The morning after Maren, they had found it propped wide onto the moor and it had stayed that way, and the frost came in, and the snow, and the garden let them. Learning weather, Elara wrote. First time in 311 years. Moonflowers furious. Stock, as ever, wants thanking twice.
In March a white rose came up through the moor.
Not inside the wall. Outside, under the beeches, on the raised turf, where nothing had been planted and nothing had been asked for — one stem, one bloom, luminous, the deep improbable white of a thing that has decided to exist. Callan found it at dawn and came and got her out of bed without a word, and they stood over it in their coats while the garden, on its side of the stone, kept a silence that was very nearly tact.
“It has never given anything outside its own walls,” he said.
“It has never had anyone outside its walls it wanted to give to.”
Rosa spp., unregistered, she wrote. North wall, moor side. Nobody planted it. Nobody will pick it.
June, and strawberries. She ate the first one on the bench where her great-aunt had sat for sixty years telling a rose about the world, and she said, to nobody in particular, “Sixty-one,” and the garden was too pleased to answer.
July was the currants.
She had not gone near them. Nobody had gone near them since 1945; they were not ready yet, and she had inherited that along with the horsehair chairs. But on a hot still evening with the door open onto the moor and the moonflowers just beginning to think about it, the garden said, close and shy, Ready, as though it had been asked, and she went to the old bushes by the east bed and found them hanging in strings — white, translucent, lit from inside like small lamps, more of them than a bush that size had any business holding.
“Ismay planted these the year the war ended,” Callan said behind her.
“Which war?”
“That was what I asked her.” He took a string between his ruined careful fingers and did not pick it. “She said the one that mattered was not over yet. She said we would know.”
They picked them together, on their knees in the warm dirt, and ate them from their hands. Sour, and then, a moment behind, sweet.
Martinmas came down like a lid, the way it always had, and this time there were stars.
She stood at the well at midnight in a coat over a nightdress, because rules for a garden must be kept in whatever you happen to be wearing, and the garden turned every face it had toward the centre, and the man beside her had his hands in his pockets like anyone.
“Rule one,” Elara said. “A keeper who chooses it, every Martinmas, at the well, out loud, and free to say no.” She let the cold have her breath. “Rule two. It asks before it takes. So ask.”
And the garden — young, and a year older, and learning — said: Stay?
Not to everywhere. To her.
“Yes,” she said. “This year. Ask me next year.”
The ground warmed. Not the blaze of the night of the rules, nor the June that had come at midnight in November; something steadier and altogether less impressed with itself — a garden that had been told yes and had, for once, believed it.
Then the voice came again, and it was not talking to her.
Stay?
Callan took his hands out of his pockets.
“It’s not my rule,” he said. “I am not the keeper. I am a man with a spade and a cold and no claim on you.”
It is my rule, said the garden, with a sliver of its old vastness, and I am asking.
He looked at Elara. Rule one had never let go of him, walls or no walls; she watched him search himself for a lie and fail to find one.
“I have said one thing to this ground in my life,” he said, “and it cost three hundred years. So hear the difference. This is not sworn. It is not a promise. It is not for keeping.” He put his cold hand flat on the rim of the well beside hers. “I stay because I want to, and I could go, and I know the door, and I know the way to the sea. That’s a gift. It asks nothing back.”
The well overflowed once, deliberately, like a cup raised.
She wrote the rest down at dawn, sitting on the sill of the open door with the moor going gold in front of her and June at her back, and the white rose under the beeches catching the first of the light, and the ink dried while she was still deciding what to call it.
Rosa spp., unregistered, she wrote. Asked. Answered. Both of us.
And underneath, in a hand that had finally recovered its composure:
Not kept. Tended.
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