little child. 'I'll put her to bed,' I told John.
Ghost-white, he nodded. 'Yes,' he said, in a voice thick with dust. He could hardly bear to look at her. He made a slow gesture toward the destroyed ceiling. It was the slow motion of a drowning man dragged under by the current. 'And I'll sort this out.'
But an hour later, when the Missus was clean, and in a fresh nightdress, tucked up in bed and asleep, he was still there. Exactly as I had left him. Staring at the spot where she had been.
The next morning, when the Missus did not appear in the kitchen, it was I who went to wake her. She could not be woken. Her soul had departed through the hole in the roof, and she was gone.
'We've lost her,' I told John in the kitchen. 'She's dead.'
His face didn't change. He continued to stare across the kitchen table as though he hadn't heard me. 'Yes,' he said eventually, in a voice that did not expect to be heard. 'Yes.'
It felt as if everything had come to an end. I had only one wish: to sit like John, immobile, staring into space and doing nothing. Yet time did not stop. I could still feel my heartbeat measuring out the seconds. I could feel hunger growing in my stomach and thirst in my throat. I was so sad I thought I would die, yet instead I was scandalously and absurdly alive-so alive I swear I could feel my hair and my fingernails growing.
For all the unbearable weight on my heart I could not, like John, give myself up to the misery. Hester was gone; Charlie was gone; the Missus was gone; John, in his own way, was gone, though I hoped he would find his way back. In the meantime the girl in the mist was going to have to come out of the shadows. It was time to stop playing and grow up.
'I'll put the kettle on, then,' I said. 'Make a cup of tea.'
My voice was not my own. Some other girl, some sensible, capable, ordinary girl had found her way into my skin and taken me over. She seemed to know just what to do. I was only partly surprised. Hadn't I spent half my life watching people live their lives? Watching Hester, watching the Missus, watching the villagers?
I settled quietly inside myself while the capable girl boiled the kettle, measured out the tea leaves, stirred and poured. She put two sugars in John's tea, three in mine. When it was made, I drank it, and as the hot, sweet tea reached my stomach, at last I stopped trembling.
THE SILVER GARDEN
Before I was quite awake I had the sense that something was different. And a moment later, before I even opened my eyes, I knew what it was. There was
Gone were the shadows that had lurked in my room since the beginning of the month; gone, too, the gloomy corners and the air of mournfulness. The window was a pale rectangle, and from it there entered a shimmering paleness that illuminated every aspect of my room. It was so long since I had seen it that I felt a surge of joy, as though it weren't just a night that had ended but winter. It was as if spring had come.
The cat was on the window ledge, gazing intently into the garden. Hearing me stir, he immediately jumped down and pawed at the door to go out. I pulled my clothes and coat on, and we crept downstairs together, to the kitchen and the garden.
I realized my mistake the moment I stepped outdoors. It was not day. It was not the sun, but moonlight that shimmered in the garden, edging the leaves with silver and touching the outlines of the statuary figures. I stopped still and stared at the moon. It was a perfect circle, hanging palely in a clear sky. Mesmerized, I could have stood there till daybreak, but the cat, impatient, pressed my ankles for attention, and I bent to stroke him. No sooner had I touched him than he moved away, only to pause a few yards off and look over his shoulder. I turned up the collar of my coat, shoved my cold hands in my pockets and followed.
He led me first down the grassy path between the long borders. On our left the yew hedge gleamed brightly; on the right the hedge was dark in the moon shadow. We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have lingered-a single ivy leaf turned at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky-but I could not stop. All the time, the cat stalked on ahead of me with a purposeful, even step, tail raised like a tour guide's umbrella signaling
Under the arch he paused. He looked left and right, intent. Saw something. And slunk off, out of sight, toward it.
Curious, I tiptoed forward to stand where he had, and look around.
A winter garden is colorful when you see it at the right time of day, at the right time of year. Largely it depends on daylight to bring it to life. The midnight visitor has to look harder to see its attractions. It was too dark to see the low, wide spread of hellebore leaves against the dark soil; too early in the season for the brightness of snowdrops; too cold for the daphne to release its fragrance. There was witch hazel, though; soon its branches would be decorated with trembling yellow and orange tassels, but for now it was the branches themselves that were the main attraction. Fine and leafless, they were delicately knotted, twisting randomly and with elegant restraint.
At its foot, hunched over the ground, was the rounded silhouette of a human figure.
I froze.
The figure heaved and shifted laboriously, releasing gasping puffs of breath and effortful grunts.
In a long, slow second my mind raced to explain the presence of another human being in Miss Winter's garden at night. Some things I knew instantly without needing even to think about them. For a start, it was not Maurice kneeling on the ground there. Though he was the least unlikely person to find in the garden, it never occurred to me to wonder whether it might be him. This was not his wiry frame, these not his measured movements. Equally it was not Judith. Neat, calm, Judith with her clean nails, perfect hair and polished shoes scrabbling about in the garden in the middle of the night? Impossible. I did not need to consider these two, and so I didn't.
Instead, in that second, my mind reeled to and fro a hundred times between two thoughts.
It was Miss Winter.
It couldn't be Miss Winter.
It was Miss Winter because… because it was. I could tell. I could sense it. It was her and I knew it.
It couldn't be her. Miss Winter was frail and ill. Miss Winter was always in her wheelchair. Miss Winter was too unwell to bend to pluck out a weed, let alone crouch on the cold ground disturbing the soil in this frantic fashion.
It wasn't Miss Winter.
But somehow, impossibly, despite everything, it was.
That first second was long and confusing. The second, when it finally came, was sudden. The figure froze… swiveled… rose… and I knew. Miss Winter's eyes. Brilliant, supernatural green. But not Miss Winter's face. A patchwork of scarred and mottled flesh, crisscrossed by crevices deeper than age could make. Two uneven dumplings of cheeks. Lopsided lips, one half a perfect bow that told of former beauty, the other a twisted graft of white flesh.
My mind was in turmoil; blood was pounding in my ears; shock paralyzed me. She stared at me unblinking, and I realized she was less startled than I was. But still, she seemed to be under the same spell as me. We were both cast into immobility.
She was the first to recover. In an urgent gesture she raised a dark, soil-covered hand toward me and, in a hoarse voice, rasped a string of senseless sounds.
Bewilderment slowed my responses; I could not even stammer her name before she turned and hurried away, leaning forward, shoulders hunched. From out of the shadows emerged the cat. He stretched calmly and, ignoring me, took himself off after her. They disappeared under the arch and I was alone. Me and a patch of churned-up
