The Midnight Garden — Chapter 9: Over the Wall
The Midnight Garden
The Midnight Garden — Chapter 9 of 12. New to the serial? Start with Chapter 1. This is a work of fiction intended for adult readers.
Chapter Nine: Over the Wall
In three hundred and eleven years the door had let a great many things in. Nobody had ever asked it to let something out.
Elara thought about that the whole way down the path, with Maren’s hand folded light as a bird on her arm and Callan on the old woman’s other side, walking too close, the way people walk beside something they expect to drop. The garden had come back overnight in a rush — June everywhere, the air thick and green and frankly smug about it — and every bloom they passed turned to watch them go.
You are walking me like a coffin, Maren said. Both of you. Stop it. I have been a shrub for three centuries. This is a promotion.
“You have been human for nine hours.”
And I have wasted two of them being carried.
At the wall Callan stopped a pace short of the silvered oak, and Elara watched three hundred years arrive in a man’s face all at once.
“It has no lock,” she said.
“It has never needed one. It knows who is permitted.” He was looking at the door the way she had once seen him look at weather. “In all that time nobody has asked it to let anything out.”
So she laid her palm flat against the wood, the way she had on the first night, and nothing happened at all.
The garden held its breath. She felt it do it — the whole walled acre, from the wet black beds to the roses on the west wall, drawing in and holding, the way a child holds still because it believes the holding is what decides things.
“Rule two,” Elara said, to the air. “You ask before you take. So ask.”
And the garden, in the small voice it had used since Martinmas, the one that made her chest ache, said: When?
“Three days. I’m coming back.” She kept her hand where it was. “That isn’t a promise, because we don’t do those any more. It’s only true, and you can taste it.”
The door swung outwards onto the moor.
Maren went first, because she would not be argued out of it. One grey boot over the sill, then the other, and she stood in the wet November grass with three hundred years at her back, and for a moment nothing happened at all.
Then the wind came off the moor and took her hair, and she made a sound Elara would not manage to write down afterwards, though she tried twice in the red notebook.
“Oh,” said Maren.
Inside the walls her voice had always come with soil in it, rusty and doubled, a thing the garden spoke through. Out here it was only a voice — thin, Scottish, sixty-odd years old, and belonging to nobody but her.
“It’s cold,” she said, delighted. “It is properly cold. Nothing has been cold in three hundred years.”
Callan had not moved.
He stood at the sill with the door open beside him and his hands loose at his sides, and Elara understood, with the awful clarity she usually reserved for three in the morning, that this garden had been the entire size of the world to him since a year he had never once said aloud.
“Take your time,” she said.
“I have had,” said Callan, “a great deal of time.” And then, because rule one lived in him even with the walls at his back: “I am frightened.”
“I know.”
He put out his hand. She took it. On the first night his hand had been warm as turned earth in August; this morning it was cold — an ordinary, unremarkable cold, the cold of a man who wants gloves and hasn’t got any — and it was the finest thing she had ever held.
He stepped over.
For a while he only stood there breathing unwalled air, looking back at the wall from the outside, where it was — she watched him notice — merely a wall. Grey stone. Moss. Shorter than the beeches.
He laughed, that ruined sound. “It’s small.”
“Most things are,” said Maren, “from outside. Now feed me. I have gone three centuries without breakfast and I am told the world has moved on.”
The world, in the event, took about an hour to undo her.
The electric light went first. Elara flicked the kitchen switch out of plain habit, and Maren went so still that Elara thought something had happened to her heart; then the old woman crossed to the bulb, held her palm beneath it, and waited for a heat that never came.
“Where is the flame?”
“There isn’t one.”
“There is always a flame.” Maren turned her hand over in the light, studying the shadow of her own fingers like a woman reading a bill she intends to dispute. “Hm,” she said, with enormous suspicion.
The tap undid her more quietly. Water, as much as she liked, indoors, without a bucket or a well or one word of thanks owed to anybody. She ran it over her wrists until Elara turned it off. Sugar in her tea made her sit down; sugar, she said, had been for weddings and funerals, and she had attended more of one than the other. Elara noticed, and did not think about, the shape of the old woman’s hands around the cup.
Then the journals.
She had not planned it. She went to the study for a blanket and came back with the blanket and, because it lay open where she had left it on the night everything changed, the notebook for 1974. Maren saw the handwriting first and went quiet. Then she saw the page.
Ismay had been a meticulous woman with a soft pencil, and on the left-hand side, beneath a lunar table, she had drawn the white rose of the north corner as a woman: grey-eyed, sharp-chinned, glancing back over her shoulder.
Maren looked at it for a long time.
“She gave me a kinder mouth than I had,” she said at last. “She was always better at hands.”
“Three days,” Elara said, when the tea was gone. “Tell me what you want in them.”
Maren counted on her fingers, and the counting was steady.
“The sea. I have heard it my whole life and never once seen it; the wall was in the way. A train — your aunt told me about trains for sixty years and I have decided to be unimpressed in person. And I want to buy something. With money. And have a stranger put it in a bag and hand it to me and call me madam, as though I were anybody at all.”
“That’s the easiest list anyone has ever given me.”
“It is the only list I have ever been given,” said Maren. “Everything else was terms.”
They left at ten. Callan sat in the back with one hand flat on the seat beside him, learning sixty miles an hour with the grim courtesy of a man in a strange church, and the moor went by grey and streaming, and Maren watched the world the way other people watch a fire.
At the cattle grid at the end of the track Elara got out to work the gate, and when she climbed back in the old woman took her hand.
Not for help. To look at it. She turned it palm up, then down, traced the long second knuckle and the square of the nail, and stopped her thumb exactly where Elara’s own thumb always stopped: on the small white scar from a glasshouse in her first year of study.
“Ismay never told you, then,” Maren said.
“Told me what?”
And Maren smiled at her — kind, and three hundred years old, and not kind at all.
“Whose hands do you think you have, little gardener?”
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