Grave Gardners
ONE
There is a particular sort of village in West Yorkshire that does not so much sit on the moor as cling to it, the way a sheep clings to a slope it has no real business being on. Mosshope was that sort of village. The houses were made of the same grey gritstone as the walls, and the walls were made of the same grey gritstone as the ground, so that on a wet day, and most days were wet, it could be hard to tell where the village stopped and the hill began. There were three hundred and fifty people in Mosshope and most of them had been there for several hundred years, give or take a few grandparents, and they noticed a new family the way a pond notices a dropped stone.
Luka’s family arrived in October, in a hired van, to make a fresh start.
Grown-ups say things like a fresh start when the old start has gone wrong in a way they would rather not put into words. What had gone wrong, in this case, was that Luka’s brother Jamie had died in the spring, and the old house had too many rooms in it where Jamie was not, and you cannot keep living in a house that is mostly made of where somebody isn’t. So they had packed it into the van and driven north until the roads got narrow and the sky got big, and they had unpacked it again in a cottage on the edge of Mosshope, and they had told themselves that here, where nothing reminded them of anything, it would be easier.
It is worth saying now, because the rest of this depends on it, that grief does not stay behind in the old house. Grief goes in the van. It rides quietly in the back, between the kettle and the bin bags of coats, and it gets out when you get out, and it walks into the new house ahead of you and chooses the best chair.
But here is the thing nobody had told Luka, and the thing this story is really about. Grief is not the dangerous part. Grief is only love, with nowhere left to go, and love is never the dangerous part. The dangerous part is what people do to get away from it.
§
Luka was twelve, and he was lean and wiry and all elbows, with long limbs he had not quite grown into and a great unruly mop of chestnut hair that fell in his eyes so that he was forever pushing it back with the heel of his hand. He had a gap between his two front teeth, and a way of noticing things, small things, the things other people walked straight past. He wore a red woollen beanie even when it was not really cold, and round his neck, on a thin silver chain, he wore a flat grey stone with a hole worn through the middle of it.
The stone had been Jamie’s. Jamie had found it on a beach when he was nine and Luka was six, and had told Luka, with tremendous authority, that a stone with a hole in it was a lucky stone, and that if you looked through the hole at exactly the right moment you could see the fairies, which Luka had believed completely, because Jamie was the sort of older brother you believed. Luka had taken to wearing it after the spring. Nobody had said anything about that. Nobody in the cottage said anything about anything, by then.
That was the trouble with the new house, and it had nothing to do with the house. It was that Jamie had become a word you were not allowed to say.
It had happened without anyone deciding it. Luka’s mum, who had once filled every room she was in, now moved through the cottage like weather that could not make up its mind, doing the cooking and the washing and the being-upright, all of it with a face like a window with the curtains drawn, and if Jamie’s name came anywhere near the air she would go very still and then find a reason to leave the room. Luka’s dad coped by Doing Things. He fixed the guttering and rewired the dodgy plug sockets and built shelves the cottage did not need, and he worked late, and he was kind in a brisk, glancing, sideways sort of way that never once stopped moving long enough to be caught. Between the two of them they had made a rule that no one had voted for, and the rule was: we do not mention him. As if mentioning him would be cruel. As if he might hear, and be upset to learn he had died.
And Luka, who would have done anything not to feel the thing that was waiting under his breastbone like a held breath, was on the side of the rule. He kept it the way you keep a fire going. Because the thing the rule existed to contain was a single afternoon in a hospital that he could not think about, would not think about, had built an entire silent house around not thinking about, and if the rule ever broke then the afternoon would come out, and Luka was certain that if the afternoon ever came out the whole world would come down on top of him.
So when his little sister broke the rule, which she did, constantly, because she was five and did not understand that there was one, Luka was the one who came down on her hardest.
§
Mia was five. She was small and round and soft, with chubby cheeks that went pink in the wind and huge honey-coloured eyes and a mass of dark curls that she filled with whatever the day provided, grass and leaves and once, memorably, a worm. She wore a bright yellow waterproof coat and red wellies, and she carried everywhere a small wooden rabbit that Jamie had carved for her when he was first ill and had a lot of time to sit still and learn how to do things like carve. The rabbit’s ears were slightly different lengths. Mia loved it more than anything in the world. She had just learned to write her letters, that autumn, and was tremendously proud of it, and would write you a label for anything that stood still long enough.
And Mia said Jamie’s name.
She said it all the time, brightly, the way you would say the name of anyone you loved who happened not to be in the room. Jamie liked this one. Jamie thinks you’re being silly, Mummy. When is Jamie’s birthday, is it soon. And every single time, the temperature of the cottage dropped, and her mum’s face did the drawn-curtain thing, and her dad found a thing that needed doing, and Luka, hating himself, hissed at her to stop it, Mia, just stop.
“Why?” she said to him once, on the stairs, with the terrible directness of the very young. “Why won’t anybody say Jamie’s name?”
“Because it makes Mum sad.”
“She’s sad anyway,” said Mia, which was unanswerable, and which Luka therefore did not answer. “Saying it isn’t what makes her sad. Not saying it is. You all want to pretend he wasn’t even real.” Her chin had gone wobbly and stubborn at once. “I won’t pretend. He was my brother and I’m allowed.”
“You’re a baby,” said Luka, “who doesn’t understand anything,” and he went up to his room and shut the door, and it was the meanest he had been to anyone since the spring, and the worst of it was that he had said it because she was right.
§
TWO
He had found the sign on the very first afternoon.
While his mum unpacked plates very slowly, picking each one up as though it might say something, and his dad worked out that none of the light switches did what their labels claimed, Luka had slipped out the back, because he wanted, just for half an hour, to be somewhere nobody needed him to be all right. A sheep track took him up to the edge of the woods, dark huddled woods of hawthorn and rowan and stunted oak, the sort that look as if they are leaning together to whisper about you. And there, nailed high on the thickest, oldest hawthorn of all, at exactly the height a child might reach if a child stood on tiptoe, was a board.
It was split oak, silvered with age, and somebody had painted on it, in big wobbling capitals that wandered uphill and then thought better of it and came down again:
GRAVE GARDNERS
Luka laughed. It was the first time he had laughed properly in months, and it surprised him so much he looked round to check nobody had seen. Grave? he thought. Somebody can’t spell. Meant to be Grove, surely. Grove Gardners, some posh name for a flowerbed nobody’s tended since the war. The second word he barely questioned at all; Gardners looked like an ordinary enough way to write it, the way some families spelled their name.
He went closer. The longer he looked the odder the sign got. The oak should have rotted to nothing in a hundred Pennine winters, but it was sound as a table. The black letters should have weathered away, but they were dark and clear, as if freshly done, even though the paint, when he peered, looked ancient, soot-black and gone to a low shine. And all around the two big words, crowded into every inch of the board, were marks. Most were shallow and recent, just scratched-in initials, dozens of them, the sort of thing you do with a stone in two seconds to prove you were there. But a few were different: deep, careful, old, cut with real patience, and beside each of those deep ones a small word had been carved, a name, he thought, though the oldest had nearly closed over. Down in the bottom corner, deepest and oldest of all, two letters and a date. *E.H. 1927.*
Without quite meaning to, Luka reached up and ran his fingers across the big letters of the name.
The wood was warm. Not sun-warm; there had been no sun. It was warm the way a hand is warm, and under his fingertips, very faintly, it seemed to thrum, like a wire with something running through it. He snatched his hand back. Then, because he was twelve and the warmth had been more interesting than frightening, he got out his phone and took a photograph, and then, on an impulse he could not have explained, he read the two words out loud to the empty wood, in the flat amused voice of a boy reading out a spelling mistake.
“Grave Gardners.”
Nothing happened that he could see. A leaf fell. Far off, no bird sang. He went home for tea.
He had no way of knowing that he had, in about ninety seconds, broken every single one of the rules, and that something at the dark heart of the wood had felt his fingers on its name, and learned his face, and would remember.
§
He saw the dare for himself a day or two later, from the lane.
A clutch of village children, none older than nine, were daring each other at the treeline, working themselves up in that shrieking way children do, and one by one they would tear up the path, slap the flat of a hand against the great hawthorn just below the sign, and tear back again white-faced and triumphant, as though they had robbed a bank. One boy, braver than the rest, stayed long enough to scratch his initials into the board with a flint before bolting. None of them, Luka noticed, went so much as a single step past the trunk. The shadow of the hawthorn lay across the path like a drawn line, and they treated it exactly as if it were one.
So that, he thought, was where the shallow scratches came from. The dare-children, leaving their initials to prove they had touched the tree and lived. He did not yet think about the other carvings, the deep old patient ones with the names beside them. He would.
§
THREE
Mosshope School had one class for each year and a smell of wet coats that no fresh start could fix. Luka was put at a table by the window, and the children were nice to him in the careful, wide-eyed way children are nice to someone when a teacher has Had A Word beforehand. You can always tell when grown-ups have Had A Word. The kindness has the shape of it. They asked which football team he supported and whether he had a phone, and they asked him nothing else at all, and the nothing else sat in the corner of the room like a piece of furniture everyone politely walked around.
Three of them took him on, more or less, which is what passes for friendship at that age.
The first was Tim, who was built like a small wardrobe, broad and stocky and a good deal heavier than Luka, with near-black hair that sprang up in spikes whatever he did to it, a baseball cap worn backwards, and a grin that took up most of his face. Tim talked the way a tap runs, constantly and with enthusiasm and not always usefully, and he laughed at his own jokes before he had finished them so that nobody else had to. Luka liked him at once, because Tim was the only person in Mosshope who treated him like an ordinary boy and not a cracked thing that might come apart in your hands.
The second was Chloe, who was eleven and so pale and thin and quiet she seemed half made of mist, with long silvery hair like flax and eyes the soft blue of harebells. She carried a sketchbook everywhere in a canvas bag, and her hands were always smudged grey with pencil, and she said almost nothing but watched everything, the way Luka did, only more so. You never knew what she had drawn until she chose to show you, which was not often.
The third was Freya, and Freya was the one who mattered. She was taller than Luka and sturdier, a farm girl, broad in the shoulder, with a fair plait pulled back tight and slate-grey eyes that looked at you dead on, a spray of freckles across her nose, and a thin white scar through her left eyebrow. Pinned to her coat she wore a small wooden brooch carved into the shape of a hawthorn tree. There was a stillness to Freya, an unbothered, faraway certainty, as if she were always half listening to something the rest of them could not hear, and had long ago stopped expecting anyone to believe her about it. She did not seem lonely in it. She seemed, if anything, comfortable, the way you are comfortable knowing a thing for sure.
It was Luka who got it all going, on his third day, because the spelling was a safe thing to talk about. He got his phone out at break and held it up.
“Found this up the woods. Whoever painted it wants their pencil case confiscated. Grave Gard...”
He never finished the word.
Tim’s hand came down over the phone so fast Luka nearly dropped it. “Don’t,” said Tim, and his round cheerful face had gone white in a way that was far more frightening than any amount of spookiness, “say it. Out loud. Are you mad?” He glanced over both shoulders. The whole playground had gone quiet, the silence spreading out from Luka’s phone like a stain spreading through cloth, until even the boys kicking a ball had stopped to look. A small girl of about six, over by the wall, had put both hands over her mouth and was staring at Luka with enormous eyes, and then, in the thin sing-song of the very young, she began to recite, and three or four of the littler ones joined her without seeming to decide to:
“Grave Gardners, dark and slow,
Watch the woods where no-one goes.
Leave a tear, or leave a sigh,
They will grow, and never die.
Speak the name and you shall see
They are coming, one, two, three.“
“You don’t say it,” Tim hissed, low and urgent, drawing Luka into a huddle. “Everyone knows. You say the whole name out loud and they hear you. They know who spoke it. They come looking. And you’ve gone and read it off a photo. And, hang on.” His eyes went to the screen. “Did you touch it? To take that you’d have been right up close. Did you touch the letters?”
“I, maybe, I ran my hand over it,” said Luka.
A horrified groan went round the huddle. Tim looked at him the way you look at someone who has told you they ate something off the floor of a bus. “You touched the writing. Oh, mate. You’ve left a piece of yourself on it now. They know your face. They know your name. You’re marked.” He said marked the way other people say terminally ill, and then, because Tim loved nothing in the whole world so much as explaining a thing, he took a deep breath and explained.
You never said the name aloud. You never touched the letters. You never went past the sign, not one step, because the trunk’s shadow was the real border, and once you crossed it you were in their rules, not yours, and the paths moved so you could never find the way out. You never went alone. You never went after tea-time, because the dark woke them up brave. You never, ever cried up there or even let yourself feel sad, because they loved sadness, they swarmed to it like bees and fed on it and grew it bigger and bigger until you drowned. You carried iron in your pocket and salt in your shoe, because they couldn’t abide either. They were grave-diggers, said Tim, great filthy fellers with spades who dug up the dead, or no, they were the lost children who had wandered in over the years and gone all bark and stone and wanted you to come and play and never let you leave, or they stole your memories, your voice, your shadow, and if you left something you loved there they gave it back wrong, cold, with the wrong eyes.
Through all of this Luka had been getting colder and colder, not because he believed in grave-diggers, but because one part of it had gone through him like a wire. They love sadness. Leave a tear or leave a sigh, they will grow and never die. He thought of the held breath under his ribs. He thought, before he could stop himself, of a place that could take it off him.
“Most of that’s rubbish,” said a voice, and the huddle went quiet, because it was Freya, who had not joined in, and who had a way of stopping people.
She was leaning on the wall with her arms folded and that faraway calm on her face. “There’s no grave-diggers. No body-snatchers. They don’t chase you, they don’t steal your shadow, and salt in your shoe does nothing but make your foot itch.” She let that land. “But it isn’t all rubbish. That’s the trouble with it. There’s one true thing in there, hidden in with all the daft stuff, and because it’s mixed in with the daft stuff, nobody can tell which bit to believe, so they believe the wrong bits and laugh off the right one.”
“Which one’s true?” said Luka.
Freya looked at him for a long moment, deciding something. “You never take your sadness up there,” she said quietly. “That’s the one. Whatever else you do. You can dare the tree, you can leave a stone, but you never carry your own sorrow past that sign and hand it over, no matter how much you want shot of it. That’s the only rule that’s real, and it’s the only one nobody keeps, because it’s the saddest one and it’s wrapped up in spades and ghosts so it sounds like a game.” She unfolded her arms. “That’s all I’m telling you.”
“But what are they, though? Really?”
“I know what they are,” said Freya, simply, and not unkindly, the way you might say you knew the time. “My nana taught me the real name and the real of it. But I’m not going to be the one that says it to you. Some things you’ve got no business hearing secondhand off a girl by the bins. You’ll be told properly, or you won’t be told, and either way it won’t be me.” And she looked at him with those level grey eyes, perfectly serene, perfectly certain, and changed the subject, and that was that.
It was, Luka would think later, the single most maddening thing anyone had ever said to him. She knew. She plainly, completely knew. And she would not say. And there is nothing on this earth that will send a boy who cannot leave a thing alone up a forbidden hill faster than somebody calmly refusing to tell him what is at the top of it.
The bell went. As the others scattered, Freya hung back, and she said the true thing she had clearly decided Luka was the sort of person you could say a true thing to, the one true thing she would hand over.
“They all want you to be okay, by the way. The whole class. It’s not them being unkind. If you’re okay then they can stop feeling funny about you. People want you to be over things so they can be.” A pause. “My dad died. Two years ago. Heart. He was just there and then he was just not. So I know about the warnings, the real ones.” She looked at him sideways. “It comes round, in case nobody’s told you. People think grief goes in a straight line, a bit less every day, and then one Tuesday for no reason it’s the spring again and you’re flat on the floor. It comes round. Has yours come round yet?”
“I’m fine,” said Luka.
“Right,” said Freya, in a voice that meant she had heard that one before, possibly out of her own mouth, and she let it go, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for him since the spring. Across the yard, Chloe had begun, very quietly, to draw. Luka did not learn until much later what she had drawn that morning. When he did, it turned out to be him.
§
The E.H. 1927 cut deep in the corner of the sign stuck in him the way things did, and that evening he tried looking it up, a hundred-year-old set of initials from a Pennine village, which got him precisely nowhere, so the next day he asked Freya who E.H. was, and Freya knew, because Freya’s nana knew everything.
“Emmeline Hirst,” she said, as though it were obvious. “Everyone’s nana knew her. Mine still talks about her like she’s popping round Tuesday.” And she told him.
Emmeline Hirst had been a girl at the farm, a hundred years ago nearly, ten years old, quiet, full of the old rhymes. She was the one who had made the sign: split a board off a fallen oak, whittled it smooth, mixed soot and linseed oil from her father’s workshop into black paint, and nailed it high on the great hawthorn with hand-forged nails, in 1927. She had heard the name from the old people and written it down the way she heard it, Grave Gardners, not knowing she had it wrong, or perhaps knowing better than any of them that it was right. The sign had stayed ever since. Children mended it when it faded and banged in fresh nails, and the hawthorn had grown round its edges and held it fast. More than once, over the years, a grown-up who could not abide the place had gone up with a claw hammer to have the thing down for good, and every time the sign was back on the hawthorn by morning, in the same spot, with the same wrong, warm, thrumming letters, exactly where a ten-year-old had hammered it in 1927, as though it had never been touched.
“Nana says you can’t take it down,” said Freya. “It won’t be taken down. The wood won’t let go of the children’s name, because the children’s one’s the true one. It’s got a hundred years of kids in it. That’s what makes it work.”
“And the carvings?” said Luka. “There’s all the scratchy initials, I worked out those are the dares. But there’s older ones. Deep ones. With words next to them.”
For the first time, Freya hesitated, and the faraway look came down over her like a blind. “Those aren’t from dares,” she said. And she did not say anything else about the deep ones at all, and Luka, who was learning the grammar of Freya’s silences, did not push, though he filed it away with everything else she would not say, and the pile of things Freya would not say was getting, he noticed, to be quite a tall one.
§
FOUR
Luka lasted four days.
Four days of Freya’s calm maddening certainty, of I know what they are and I’m not going to tell you, of the warm thrumming sign and the deep carved names nobody would explain, and underneath all of it, quietly, the part of him that had heard they will mind it for you and could not stop turning it over. So on the Saturday, when his mum was lying down and his dad had gone off to a builders’ merchant two valleys over to buy something nobody needed, Luka pulled on his boots and his red beanie and went up the lane and stood in front of the sign, in front of the warm letters and the E.H. 1927 and the hundred years of children.
He told himself he was only going to look. Then he stepped past the trunk, over the line of the hawthorn’s shadow, into Hollow Wood.
He was wrong about the only-going-to-look, but he could not have known it yet.
§
The wood let him in easily, which he would think about afterwards. The packhorse stones, green and slick, made a path that seemed always to be going his way. The trees got older as he went, their trunks twisting and in places fusing together, the canopy thickening overhead until the light came down green and gold and dim, like light through deep water, and the brambles drew back from the path as if it had been swept. The further he went the quieter it got, until he realised, with the small cold prickle of someone noticing a thing too late, that there were no birds. No birdsong anywhere. Just the creak of wood, the rustle of leaves with no wind to move them, and somewhere ahead the soft endless drip of water. He thought he had been walking ten minutes. He had been walking nearly an hour.
Then the path tipped down, and he came over the lip of a steep green bank, and below him lay the Hollow: a bowl in the land, sheltered on every side so no wind reached it, the floor of it sloping to a small dark pool fed by a spring that welled up clear and silent over stones. The earth was almost black, and even from the bank he could feel that it was warm, warm as a sleeping animal, in October, on a Pennine hillside, which was not possible and was nonetheless the case. Everything grew too much and out of its season: snowdrops and primroses out in autumn, alongside flowers he had no name for, blooms the colour of a bruise, of bone, of the blue you only see deep underwater. Moss lay over everything in plush carpets of emerald and gold and silver. And dotted all about the bowl stood weathered standing stones and low cairns and long grassed-over mounds, and tucked into hollows and laid on stones were things, a hundred years and more of small offerings gone soft and dark, ribbons and a rusted tin soldier and a faceless doll and a child’s shoe, left by the children and the grieving of Mosshope for longer than the church had stood.
The air was thick, thick as breathing wool, and it pressed gently on him from every side, and he had the unmistakable, skin-crawling, not-altogether-unpleasant sense of being watched, kindly and completely, by the whole bowl at once. He should have turned round. But Luka was twelve, and grieving, and a boy who could not leave a thing alone, and he went down into the Hollow.
§
He had got halfway to the pool when something came down a tree at him head first.
It was small and quick and no taller than Mia, built all of slim honey-coloured willow and birch twigs wrapped in fine bark, with a tall spiky crest of leaves that bobbed as it moved, long pointed ears that swivelled at every sound, and enormous dark eyes, blackberry-dark, brimming with mischief. Tiny bells of hollow seed pod were strung at its waist and tinkled as it landed in front of him, grinning a grin full of small soft leaf-shaped teeth.
“Visitor!” it cried, delighted. “A real one. One that comes all the way down, not like the dare-ones who slap the tree and run. We knew you’d come, an’ all. You put your hand right on the name, didn’t you. We felt it. That’s how we know your face.” It cocked its head. “I’m Twiggle. Path-finder. I know the ways, every path and hollow-way and secret cut for miles, in here and out there both. That’s my job. That’s why I’m built for running.” It waggled its long jointed legs proudly. “You found the Hollow quick because I let you. I find the path for the ones who need finding. And you,” it said, the bounce going out of it all at once, “need finding something rotten. You’ve got the look. The packed-down look. Carrying something too big and pretending it’s nothing.” The look went straight through the front of his hoodie. “Come on. Mind the mounds, walk where I walk. I’ll show you what we do.”
And because there is a kind of magic in being shown a thing by someone proud to show it, Luka followed.
§
Twiggle led him first to a great fern, and from behind it, very shyly, peeped something round, about four feet tall, that looked exactly as if someone had rolled the softest parts of the forest floor into a ball and given it a face: a plump body of velvety green moss and grey lichen, a tummy stuffed with dandelion clocks, short stumpy arms, and a round cherubic face with two amber eyes far too big for it, so that it wore a permanent look of sweet startlement. It was tending a patch of the tiniest growing things, and ducked behind the fern when it saw Luka, peeping out with its stumpy hands over its face.
“That’s Bodkin,” said Twiggle, fondly. “Don’t shout, he can’t be doing with shouting. Bodkin does the little things. The small soft stuff. A baby’s first laugh. A good afternoon you’d forgotten you had. The littlest, breakable bits of remembering. He’s soft all the way through because what he tends is soft. That’s how it goes with all of us. We’re made of the thing we mind, and we mind the thing we’re made of, and not one of us ever got a say in which. Bodkin didn’t pick the soft little memories any more than Cobble picked the heavy ones or I picked the running. We’re born to our bit of it and we can’t put it down and we can’t swap and we can’t ever be anything else. That’s not a sad thing, mind. It’s just the true thing. A thing doesn’t choose to be kind, it just is what it is, and ours happens to look like kindness from where you’re stood.”
“H-hello,” whispered Bodkin, in a voice like wind through grass. “Lovely day for growing.” He held up, very shyly and very proudly, a single seedling in a thimble of bark. “This one came up ever so well. Somebody left a happy thing here, long ago, and I’ve minded it. Look. It’s never wilted. Not in eighty years.”
And Luka looked, and the seedling was perfect, and green, and absolutely, eerily still, never wilting, never growing, exactly as it had come, kept forever, and a small terrible idea opened in the back of his mind that he did not look at directly, an idea about things that are gone, and whether something that could keep a thing perfect for eighty years might keep a thing, might hold a thing, might give a thing back.
§
Twiggle took him round the dark pool to where the biggest thing Luka had ever seen that was not a building stood half asleep in the gloom. It was the size of a doorway and broader, a great heavy shape like a smooth grey boulder that had got up one geological morning and grown limbs, except that it was furred all over in thick plush moss and heather, so that it looked less like stone and more like a small, kindly hill out for a stand. It had a wide noble face with a great slack happy mouth and deep amber eyes that glowed warm and milky, and round its neck hung a heavy rope of ivy strung with river pebbles and old clay beads and fossils.
“Cobble,” said Twiggle, with respect. “Mind your toes. Slowest of all of us and the strongest.”
It took Cobble the better part of a minute to notice them, and another to turn his head, and the smile that spread across his face when he saw Luka arrived about a second after his mouth made it. “Friend,” he rumbled, and Luka felt the word in his chest before he heard it in his ears. “Visitor. Good.”
“Cobble keeps the borders, and the big heavy safe things,” said Twiggle. “Home. Belonging. The bedrock memories that don’t move. He’s the wall round the Hollow. He gives the best hugs in the world but you’ve to book ahead, because by the time he’s got his arms round you it’s next Tuesday.” Twiggle cackled at his own joke, exactly the way Tim did, and Cobble’s deep slow rumble of a laugh started up a moment later and rolled on pleasantly long after the joke was over, like distant thunder that had not yet got the news.
There was a soft round woolly creature called Thrum-Wool, like a walking armchair of cream and grey fleece and cotton-grass, who tended the memories of being cared for, of safe beds and being tucked in, and pressed a cup of something hot and berry-smelling into Luka’s hands before he could refuse, telling him he looked half frozen, dearie, drink up. And down by the pool, drifting among the densest flowers, the strangest and most beautiful of them all: tall and slender and seemingly made of flowers, layers of fine petals and velvet leaves and supple stems, glowing very faintly, her colours shifting from cream to lavender to apple green like sunlight through a stained glass window, with a whole wild meadow for hair where sleepy bees still bumbled, and dewdrops falling wherever she moved, and a heart-shaped face of impossible gentleness with huge luminous lavender eyes.
“Puddle-Petal,” murmured Twiggle, and for once he was almost quiet. “Kindest of us, wisest of us, and the one you most want to be careful of, all three at once. She tends the gentle feelings. Healing. Comforting. She mends what can be mended.” A warning Luka was too dazzled to catch. “Be careful what you tell her. She listens with the whole of herself, and she’ll want to help, and helping is what she’s for, and that’s exactly why you’ve to be careful, because the rules here are bigger even than she is.”
Puddle-Petal turned, and looked at Luka with her enormous eyes, and he felt the way you feel when someone who loves you puts a hand on the back of your neck, and suddenly his own eyes were stinging and the held breath was pressing up hard, and he understood, dimly, that this was a place that pulled the lid off things. He was frightened. He stepped back.
And behind her, half seen at the edges of the bowl, he became aware of the others. The ones Twiggle did not introduce. Tall lean shapes all of root and knotted dark wood, with no faces, only deep hollow sockets glowing faint green, moving hardly at all, turning the black soil with their long branching fingers, working to a clock that belonged to mountains. And at the very rim, the standing stones he had taken for standing stones, except that one had, very slightly, since he came down, changed the angle of its head. And running through all of it, faint and silver in the gloom, a great net of thin dark veins, like roots, pulsing very slowly, the way a thing breathes in its sleep, which he understood without being told was how the whole Hollow felt him, all at once, kindly, completely. These did not speak. These had names, Twiggle told him after, but not names you said out loud the way you said Bodkin or Cobble, older names, the names of the things themselves, Slow Stone and Deep Mire and Grey Bark and Twisted Thorn and Still Shadow and Damp Clay, the grief that does not move and the grief you sink in and the grief that remembers every detail and the grief that is all sharp edges and the grief that hides and the grief that weeps and weeps. The friendly ones, the ones with faces and jokes and cups of berry tea, were only the near side of the Hollow, the part that had learned to sit with children. These older ones were what lay underneath, and they were not kind and they were not unkind, they simply were, the way frost is, the way winter is, the way the tide is, and they followed one law only, the same law the friendly faces served under all their warmth, the law in the rhyme the small girl had chanted and the warning Freya would not explain.
Leave a tear or leave a sigh. They will grow and never die.
§
He did not learn the danger that day. That is important. Twiggle showed him what the Gardners did, that they tended and kept and grew and minded the things people brought, and the way Twiggle told it, it sounded like the gentlest thing in the world, like a lost-property office run by something that loved you. Nobody told him the catch. He left at dusk, dazzled, with a cup of berry tea still warm in him and a terrible wonderful idea taking root that he would not look at directly: that there was a place, an hour up the hill, where things were kept perfect and given back, and that somewhere in that fact, if he was clever and brave enough, might be a way to put right the thing he had done in the spring.
He came home filthy and three hours late, and his father met him in the lane with a torch and a white face, and Luka said he had got lost, which was almost true, and went to bed, and lay awake holding Jamie’s stone, thinking about a seedling that had not wilted in eighty years.
§
FIVE
Mia had never been up the hill. That is the thing to understand about Mia. She never once went past the sign, never saw the Hollow, never set eyes on Bodkin or Cobble or Puddle-Petal or any of them. And she believed in them more completely than anyone in the whole of Mosshope.
Her faith came from Freya, though Freya never knew she had given it, and would have been horrified to learn it.
It had started with the box. In a village the size of Mosshope the bereaved children find each other without meaning to, the way iron filings find a magnet, and small Mia, who missed her brother and was not allowed to say so, had attached herself to the big calm girl who carried a dad-who-died about in a biscuit tin and was not frightened of anything. Mia loved the tin. She loved that there was a person kept safe inside it, and she would hang about Freya in the lane and at the school gate, angling to see it opened, and while she hung about she listened, the way small children listen, with the whole of herself and only half her understanding.
And what she heard was Freya talking about the Gardners. Not the way the other children did, in shrieks and dares, but the way Freya talked about everything, calm and certain and entirely unafraid, because Freya knew what they truly were and so had no need to be frightened of them. To Freya they were a solemn, serious, careful thing, to be respected and on no account troubled. But Mia was five, and she did not catch the respect or the warning, the on no account. She caught the calm. She caught that here, at last, was one person in the whole world who spoke of grief and of the Gardners without flinching, without going cold and silent, without telling her to stop. And out of that calm, and a few drifting fragments, and her own enormous five-year-old need, she built herself a picture, the way a child builds a picture, choosing only the pieces that would hold her up. The Gardners were kind. They lived in the wood and they minded sad feelings and kept them safe and warm, the way Freya kept her dad safe and warm in a tin, the way you might leave your worries with a friend who was very good at looking after things.
She drew them, over and over: tall and thin, with too many fingers that went down into the ground like roots, which Luka found unnerving, because it was almost exactly what they really looked like and she had never seen them. But in Mia’s drawings they were always smiling, always surrounded by flowers, always cradling little bundles in their long arms, the bundles being, she explained, the sads people give them, and they keep them ever so safe. She talked about them constantly, in the same bright voice she used for Jamie, and the cottage went cold and silent around that too, so that after a while she had two whole subjects she was not allowed to mention, her brother and her gardeners, which to Mia were beginning, quietly, to be the same subject. She had taken the one person who was not afraid, and the one warning that mattered, and kept the courage and lost the warning, which is the most dangerous thing a loving child can possibly do.
Luka tried to stop her. This is the part he could not forgive himself for, later, though it was not really his fault. He had seen them now. He knew they were real, and he knew, without quite knowing how he knew, that they were not the safe kind thing his sister thought. But he could not say I have been there, because then he would have to say why, and he could not say they are dangerous, because he did not understand the danger himself, only felt it. So he said the weak things, the only things he had. They’re not real, Mia. Stop going on about them. You’re not to talk about it. And every time he said stop, he was one more person in that house telling Mia that what she felt and what she believed was unwelcome, was wrong, was a thing to be shut away, and he did not see, because he was twelve and drowning, that this was exactly the lesson that was going to send her up the hill.
Because here is what Mia worked out, in the long logical way of small children. Everybody she loved was sad, and nobody was allowed to say so. Mummy was sad behind a door. Daddy was sad behind a drill. Luka was sad behind a slammed bedroom and a snapped stop it. And Mia herself was sad, achingly, hugely, five-years-old sad, and every time the sadness came out of her somebody told her to put it away. So the sadness must be a bad thing, a wrong thing, a thing that hurt the people she loved. And there was a place, everyone knew, a kind place up the wood, where something gentle would take your sadness and keep it safe so it stopped hurting anybody.
It was, when you looked at it through five-year-old eyes, the kindest idea in the world. She would give them her sadness. She would give them everybody’s. And then nobody she loved would have to be sad ever again.
She knew where the sign was; every child did. And where the dare-children’s nerve failed at the shadow line, Mia’s did not, because Mia was not afraid of the Gardners, you are never afraid of someone you are sure is kind, and faith, it turns out, will carry a small person past a place that fear stops a bigger one cold. She did not need to go down into the Hollow. She did not need to see them. The lore said you left things in the old hawthorn at the threshold and the Gardners would have them, and Mia believed the lore the way she believed in her own hands, so that is what she did. She went up alone, in her yellow coat, with her newly learned letters, and she posted her sadness into the tree, and came home lighter, and went again.
§
Luka, who noticed things, noticed.
He noticed Mia disappearing, twenty minutes here, half an hour there, always when their mum had gone upstairs to be sad behind a shut door. He noticed her stop arguing about Jamie’s name, which frightened him more than the arguing ever had, going quiet and calm and far away and talking about Jamie now, when she talked at all, in a flat soft hollow little voice that did not sound like Mia. I don’t have to miss him so much now, she told Luka, not looking up from a drawing of a smiling root-creature cradling a bundle. They’re minding it for me. Isn’t that kind. And the smile she gave did not seem to know it was a smile.
And he noticed the cold. Not the weather. The house. The corners held their shadows longer in the mornings; a chill came in under the doors that no jumper could shift; and worst of all, sadness in that cottage had begun to grow on you, an ordinary small sadness landing and rooting and doubling, so that his mum wept over the washing up and could not stop, and his dad’s busyness took on a frantic hunted edge, and the whole place felt the way the Hollow had felt, thick and watched and waiting, as if something up the hill had put down a long pale root, found the cottage, and begun, very gently, to pull.
He noticed Mia’s hands, when he took one to drag her in to tea, were cold, properly cold, cold as the Hollow soil was warm, with a roughness across the knuckles and a faint greenish bloom he told himself was felt-tip and knew was not. He noticed she had stopped wanting to eat, that she moved more slowly, that a stiffness was coming into her, a heaviness, that she was, by tiny degrees, going still.
He did not have the word for what was happening. But he had eyes, and he had been to the Hollow, and he knew, the way you know there is a wasp in the room before you have seen it, that his little sister was being taken from them by inches, and that it had something to do with the wood, and that every time he had told her to stop talking about it he had pushed her one inch further toward it.
And still he told no one. Who was there to tell? A mother behind a shut door, a father behind a drill, a village that would not walk that side of the lane. So he carried it, the new terror stacked on top of the old held breath, and he was twelve, and it was too much, and one wet Tuesday after school it came out of him sideways, the way too much always does, as fury, at the only person small enough to be safe to be furious at.
§
It started over nothing, the way the worst ones do. He came into his room and found Mia sitting on his bed with Jamie’s stone, holding it up to her eye and squinting through the hole at the window, the way Jamie had taught them both to look for fairies, and something in Luka simply broke.
“Give it back.” He snatched it; the chain bit her fingers. “That’s Jamie’s. You don’t touch it.”
“I was looking for the fairies,” said Mia, and her lip went. “Jamie said if you look through the hole...”
“Stop saying his name!”
It came out enormous, far too big for the small room, and it shocked them both. Mia’s face crumpled, and then, instead of crying, set, hard and white, into an expression far too old for five.
“No,” she said. “You stop. You’re a pretender, like Mummy and Daddy. Everybody pretends he wasn’t real, and I’m the only one left who says he was, and you all hate me for it.” She was shaking. “So I gave it away. The missing him. The sad. Because nobody here wants it. Nobody here will be sad with me, so I took it where somebody would. The Gardners want it. The Gardners aren’t ashamed of him.”
The cold went right through Luka. “Mia. What have you been giving them? What have you taken up there?”
But she had already pushed past him, off the bed, out the door, hot tears coming at last, and she flung over her shoulder the thing that would send him up the hill, the truest thing anyone had ever said to him: “You love him too and you won’t even say it! At least Mummy and Daddy are just sad. You’re a liar!” And she was gone, down the stairs and out into the wet, and by the time Luka reached the back door in his socks there was nothing in the lane but rain, and her wellies were not by the door.
He knew exactly where she had gone.
§
SIX
He went up the hill in the dark and the rain, in his trainers, with no torch. As he passed the sign he saw, in the last grey light, the rain running down off the warm black letters in long streaks, exactly like the lore said, if rain runs down the letters like tears, someone’s gone in and not come out, and his stomach turned over. And in the hollow of the great hawthorn, just below the sign, where the lore said you left things, he found the folded paper.
He pulled it all out and crouched in the lee of the trunk and read it in the wet, page after page, in his sister’s careful five-year-old hand, every letter formed with enormous effort, the words spelled the way a small proud child spells when she has only just learned how and is going by sound alone.
DER GRAVE GARDNRS. MUMMY IS SAD. PLES KEEP IT SO SHE STOPS. MIA
DER GARDNRS. THANK YOO. I DOT MIS HIM SO MUCH NOW. HIS NAME IS JAMIE HE IS MY BRUTHER. NOBDY AT HOME WIL SAY IT SO I SAY IT TO YOO. JAMIE JAMIE JAMIE. PLES MIND HIM.
DEER GARDNRZ. NObDY HERE IS SAD EXSEP ME. SO HERE IS MY SAD. TAK IT ALL. I DOT WONT IT. MIA X
DER GRAVE GARDNRS. I HAV MOR. THE BAD DREEM AND THE HOSPITL DAY. TAK IT. YOO CAN HAV ME TOO IF YOO LIK. THEN EVRYBDY STOPS BEEIN SAD. LUV MIA XXX
YOO CAN HAV ME TOO IF YOO LIK. The line stopped his heart in his chest. He stuffed the letters inside his coat, against him, and ran down into the Hollow, and they were all there waiting in the steaming dark, the warm black earth fuming in the cold, the flowers glowing open, Twiggle still as a held breath on a root, Bodkin with his hands over his face, Cobble’s amber eyes glowing low, Puddle-Petal drifting at the centre by the pool, and behind and around them the silent old ones, the root-walkers and the standing stones and the slow silver pulse of the veins in the ground, the real thing under the faces.
And there, by the pool, in the very middle of them, was a small smudge of bright yellow.
It was Mia. She had come in. After all the weeks of leaving her letters at the door and running home, this time she had not run home; this time she had come down past the sign and into the bowl and all the way to the heart of it, and she was sitting at the foot of one of the great mounds with her wooden rabbit loose in her lap, and she was so still, and so pale, that for a lurching moment Luka thought he was too late. Her honey eyes had gone dull and far away. Her hands were greenish and cold-looking, and the cold of them seemed to be spreading, a faint bloom of moss creeping up over her knuckles and along the cuffs of the bright yellow coat, and a thin pale rootlet had come up out of the warm black earth and curled, almost tenderly, around one red welly, and she did not seem to mind it, or to notice it, or to notice him.
“Mia!” Luka was across the bowl and on his knees in front of her before he knew he had moved. “Mia, it’s me, it’s Luka, look at me.” He took her face in his hands and it was cold as the moor in February. She looked at him from a very long way down.
“I gave them everything,” she said, in a small flat faraway voice that did not sound like Mia at all. “Now nobody has to be sad. I’m going to stay here in the garden where it doesn’t hurt. It’s nearly done.”
“Get her up,” Luka shouted at the Gardners, at all of them, at the flower and the moss and the great mossy hill and the faceless old things in the dark. “Help me, do something, get her out of here!”
“We cannot, little one.” Puddle-Petal’s voice was the murmur of the spring and the hum of bees, and the sorrow in it was the worst thing Luka had ever heard. “Believe me, of all the things we have ever been unable to do, this is the one we would undo first. But we cannot. We have been trying, in the only ways we have, since the moment she walked in tonight and would not walk out. Bodkin has shown her every soft small lovely thing he keeps. Cobble has held her. I have sat beside her since dusk. And she does not hear us, because she has given us so much of herself that there is hardly enough of her left to hear with. She came too far in, and gave too much, and we cannot reach her now. We are the wrong hands. We always were.”
§
“You have to understand what we are,” said Puddle-Petal, “because your sister never did, and the village has not for a very long time, and the not-understanding is what is killing her. They only ever hear our name from children, and children always hear it wrong, and write it wrong, and the wrong of it is closer to the truth than the right ever was. Grieve Gardners. Not graves. Grieve. It is the old word, the dialect, for grief, for sorrow, for the carrying of loss. And gardner is not gardener, it is gardian, the old way of saying guardian. We are the Guardians of Grief. We tend the sorrow that people cannot carry. That is what we are. That is the name your friend would not say to you, because it was not hers to give, and she was right, it was ours.”
The name went through Luka like cold water, and a hundred small things he had not understood clicked quietly into place.
“Do not mistake us, though,” Puddle-Petal went on, gently, because she would not let even this comfort him with a lie. “You have been treated kindly here, and you will think us kind, and in a way we are. But we are not good, little one, not the way you mean it, not the way a person chooses to be good. We are kind the way the spring is kind, which is to say we cannot help it and we cannot stop it and we did not decide it. We did not choose to be the Guardians of Grief any more than the rain chose to be wet. We cannot refuse a sorrow that is brought to us, however dark; we cannot take one away, however much you beg; we cannot soften a truth to spare you, and we cannot last a shorter time than forever, which is why we can seem so cold, holding what we hold on a hill while the whole of your short warm life goes by. We will tend whatever you give us with all the care in the world. But the care is our nature, not our mercy, and the rules are bigger than the care, and they are bigger than me. Remember that, because it is the thing your sister never understood, and it is about to matter very much.”
“And here is the part nobody ever believes, the one true thing buried in all the daft stuff,” said Puddle-Petal. “A grief is a living thing, and it is meant to be carried. Held in your own arms, against you, where you can feel its weight and see its face. Carried like that, by the one it belongs to, it changes. It grows by being held, and it grows lighter, very slowly, year on year, until one day it is small enough to keep in a pocket and take out when you want to remember and put away when you want to laugh. Carried, it flowers. It becomes the loveliest thing in the whole garden.” She turned one petal-soft hand toward the edge of the pool, where Luka saw now a low dark mass of growth, swollen and cold and reaching, nothing like the bright flowers around it, and saw too that the pale rootlets creeping over Mia came from it. “But your sister did not want to carry hers. No one would carry it with her, so she could not bear to carry it at all, and she gave it to us to keep, to be rid of. And a grief given to us to be rid of cannot flower, because flowering is what grief does in loving hands, and we are not hands. It cannot grow lighter, because we hold things perfectly still, exactly as they came, forever, that is the whole of what we do. So it does the only other thing a living grief can do. It swells. It cools. It roots. And finding it has been abandoned, it reaches back, for the one it belongs to, looking for the warmth it was promised.” Her eyes were terrible and kind. “That dark thing by the pool is your sister’s grief, all the weeks of it she posted through the door, grown monstrous in the dark. And tonight she came in and sat down beside it at last, the way she would never sit beside it at home, and it is taking her back into itself the only way it knows. Not your brother. Your brother is gone, and that is the whole and only sorrow, and nothing here can change it. What is rooting your sister to this hollow is your sister’s own sorrow, thrown away and grown wild and come looking for her.”
“But she’s going still,” said Luka, his hands still on his sister’s cold face, the moss creeping at the edge of his vision. “The green. The roots. What’s happening to her, what does it do?”
It was Twiggle who answered, very quietly, no mischief left in him at all. “She didn’t just give us the sad, though. Did you read the last one. She gave us her. She offered us herself, to be kept safe and still and never sad, and she meant it, and she’s a giver right down to the root, your little one. And when somebody gives and gives and never carries any of it back, there gets to be less and less of them to go home with. They go quiet. And cold. And slow. And bit by bit they root, and still, and the green comes, and in the end, if nobody stops it, they stop going home at all. They become part of the garden.” He looked up at Luka. “It’s rare. It’s slow. It’s only ever happened to the ones who gave away every last thing and carried nothing. But it’s real, and it’s the true seed under all the daft stories your Tim tells, the lost children that went bark and stone. There weren’t snatchings. There was just, every long once in a while, a child too sad and too kind who gave themselves away an inch at a time, the way yours is doing now. We can’t stop it. We never could. We can only tend what’s given, and she’s given nearly all of it.”
“Then give it back!” Luka was crying now without noticing. “Give her back. And, and Jamie.” It came out before he could stop it, the thing he had carried up the hill under everything else, the real reason, the seedling-that-never-wilted reason. “You keep things. You keep them perfect, forever, you said, eighty years and it never wilted. So keep him. Bring him back. Just for a minute. I don’t care how, I don’t care if it’s wrong, I just need a minute with him, I need to, there’s something I have to say to him and I never got to say it and if you can keep a flower for eighty years then you can...”
“We cannot raise the dead,” said Puddle-Petal, and the gentleness in it was the most unbearable thing Luka had ever heard. “Oh, little one. I am so sorry. That is the one thing in all the world we cannot do, and I will not pretend otherwise to be kind, because a kind lie is the cruellest thing there is and there is enough cruelty about. We keep grief. We keep memory. We keep the shoe and the ribbon and the happy afternoon. We cannot keep a person, because a person is not a thing that can be kept, a person is a thing that lives, and living is the one art we have never had. If you gave us your brother we could only give you back your missing of him, grown vast and cold, the same as your sister’s. We cannot give you him.” She drifted close, until her huge eyes were level with his. “What is it. The thing you never said. Say it to me. I cannot carry it for you, but I can sit with you while you take the lid off it, and that is not nothing. That is, in fact, very nearly everything.”
And Cobble lowered himself with much slow creaking until his great glowing amber face was near Luka’s, and laid one vast warm boulder of a hand against the middle of Luka’s chest, exactly where the held breath had been for six months, and rumbled, “Friend. Cold in here. Big old cold. Let it out. Sky won’t fall. Sky never falls.”
And Luka, who had been no trouble at all for six entire months, who had kept the rule and shushed his sister and worn his dead brother’s stone and never once let the afternoon out, looked into the slow kind ancient eyes of a creature made of a hill, and could not hold the lid on for one second more.
§
“The last day. At the hospital.” The words came out of him in pieces, the afternoon he had built the whole silent house around. “He’d been ill so long. Years. It was always Jamie, always the hospital, everyone tiptoeing, and that day we had a row, a stupid one, over my headphones, he’d taken them, and I shouted at him, I was so sick of all of it. And then I was just sitting there by the bed, after, not talking, and he was in so much pain, he’d been in so much pain for so long, and I looked at him and I thought...” His voice tore. “I thought, I wish you’d just die. And I meant it. That’s the thing, that’s the thing I can’t, I meant it, for one second I really meant it, not because I hated him, because I loved him, because I couldn’t stand watching him hurt any more and I just wanted it to stop, I wanted him to not be in pain, I wanted him to be, to be allowed to go, to rest. I wished my brother dead because I loved him. And then the machines started, and the nurses came running and pushed me out, and he, and that was it. He was gone. That same minute. I wished it and it happened.” He was sobbing so hard he could barely get it out. “I killed him. I wished him dead and he heard me and he died, and the last thing I ever gave my brother was wanting him gone, and I can never say sorry, I can never tell him I only meant it because, because I couldn’t bear it, and that’s why I can’t say his name, because if I say his name I have to know what I did, so I just don’t say anything, I don’t feel anything, I keep the lid on. That’s why I needed him back. Not for me. So I could say sorry. So he could, so he’d know.”
The Gardners did not try to stop him. That is the one thing Gardners are truly good at, letting a thing grow until it is done. Cobble gathered him up into the warmest, safest, slowest hug there has ever been, all moss and heather and stone heartbeat; Bodkin pressed close and patted his arm and whispered there now, there now, let it grow; Twiggle danced a slow strange circle round them with his bells so quiet it was almost a lullaby; and Puddle-Petal wrapped the whole shaking heap of them in cool sweet leaves and held him while it came, all of it, the whole six months of it, out into the steaming dark.
And when at last he was emptied, she spoke, very softly.
“You did not kill your brother. Hear me, because I have tended the grief of this valley for longer than your village has had a name, and I know the shape of this one, I have grown it in a thousand hearts. A thought is not a hand. A wish is not a deed. Your brother died because he was very ill, in his own time, in the same minute he would have died if you had been thinking of football, or of nothing at all. You did not make it happen. You could not have. The world is not run by the wishes of frightened boys at bedsides, and thank goodness, or it would be a far darker place than it is.” Her glow steadied, warm now. “And the wish itself. Oh, little one. Listen to what you actually wished. You wished an end to the pain of someone you could not bear to see suffer. Do you know what that is? That is not murder. That is the oldest love there is. It is the prayer of every soul who has ever sat beside someone they adore and watched them hurt and thought please, let it stop, let them rest, let them be free of this. It is the most generous, most agonising love a person can feel, the love that wants the beloved’s peace more than it wants its own comfort, more even than it wants them to stay. You did not wish your brother dead. You wished your brother out of pain. That those turned out to be the same thing that day was the cruelty of his illness, and not of you. If he heard anything at all in that room, and I cannot tell you that he did, but if he did, he heard a little brother who loved him so much he could not stand to watch him suffer. That is what he heard. That is the truth of it. The shouted thing about the headphones is not the verdict, and the wished thing is not the verdict. The verdict is the whole of it, every ordinary day of it, the lucky stone and the carved rabbit and the fairies through the hole, and the whole of it, all of it, says loved.”
Luka cried again, differently this time, and it did not hurt the same way. And then he remembered, with a fresh lurch of cold, where he was and why, and he turned to Mia, who had not moved, whom the moss had climbed to the elbow now.
“Then help me get her back,” he said. “Please. There must be a way. You said you can’t reach her, but there must be something, somebody.”
“There is one thing,” said Puddle-Petal, very quietly, “and it is not us. We are the wrong hands, we have always been the wrong hands, that is the whole of her danger and the whole of yours. We brought her in. We cannot take her out. Only the thing that took her can give her back, and the only thing that ever made the old ones loose their hold, in all the years I have stood here, is the one thing your sister came up this hill to be rid of and your family swore never to speak.” She drifted back, and the friendly faces drew back with her, Bodkin and Cobble and Twiggle all stepping away from the pool, leaving Luka and Mia in the middle of the bowl, and behind them the dark mass stirred, and one of the great faceless old ones, all root and knotted wood, the one Twiggle had named for him, Deep Mire, the grief you sink in, turned the slow green light of its hollow eyes upon the two children and began, without hurry, to lean in.
“Say his name, Luka,” said Twiggle, from the dark, no mischief left in him at all. “Out loud. To her. That’s the only thing that’s ever taken a grief back off the old ones, because the only thing that ever could is somebody willing to carry it themselves, in front of the one who threw it away, so she can see how it’s done. It’s the same trick down in the village and the same trick in your house and the same trick right here. They daren’t say our name in case it calls a monster. Your family daren’t say his. And it never called a monster once in the whole history of the world. Saying a name just says, you were real, and you mattered, and I will not pretend you weren’t. That’s all a name has ever been. Say it. Quick. She’s nearly gone.”
§
SEVEN
So he did the thing the village had never managed and the cottage had forbidden, the thing both fears most dreaded, kneeling in the warm black earth with the cold creeping over his sister and the slow green eyes of the old one leaning down over them both. He took Mia’s mossy cold hands in his and he said it, loud, into the steaming dark, his voice breaking on it.
“His name was Jamie.”
The leaning thing paused.
“His name was Jamie,” said Luka again, louder, “and he was my brother, and your brother, Mia, and he carved you that rabbit and he found me this stone and he taught us both to look for fairies through the hole, and he had a stupid high eyebrow and he never took his hoodie off, and he was here, he was real, and he died, and we are allowed to be sad about it, we are allowed to say his name. I should have said it with you weeks ago. I should have been sad with you instead of telling you to stop. You were right about everything and I’m sorry, Mia, I’m so sorry, come back, please come back.”
“You said his name,” whispered Mia, from a very long way down, but a little less far than before.
“Jamie,” said Luka into her cold curls, holding on. “Jamie, Jamie. I miss him so much I can’t breathe, and I’ve missed him every single day, I just wouldn’t say it. I’m saying it now. I don’t want to give it away. I want to keep it. I want to keep him, and I can’t do it on my own, so will you help me, will you carry him with me, will you come home and be sad with me instead of giving it all away up here?”
And Mia, very slowly, like someone surfacing from deep water, turned her honey eyes up to her brother’s face and saw him, properly saw him, for the first time in weeks. And she began, at last, to cry. Properly. Hot and loud and snotty and entirely, gloriously human, the way she had not cried since the spring.
And the grief moved.
Luka felt it go past him, through him, a great slow tide of cold drawn up out of his sister and back toward the dark swollen mass by the pool, and the old one, Deep Mire, straightened from its lean and took the whole of it into itself with neither malice nor mercy, the way the ground takes rain, because Mia was carrying her own again now, in her own arms, in front of the one who had thrown it away, and a grief that is being carried cannot be kept. The moss loosened from her knuckles. The pale rootlet uncurled from her welly and sank back into the earth. The warmth came back into her hands by degrees, sob by sob, and her small fingers found the wooden rabbit and tightened round it as if remembering it. The dark mass at the pool’s edge did not vanish, the old ones keep what they are given and they keep it forever, but it stopped swelling, and stopped reaching, and settled at last into stillness, just one more dark and rooted thing among the mounds, holding only what was truly its own and no longer hungry for the rest.
“Take her home,” said Puddle-Petal, very softly, drifting close again now that it was safe, the friendly faces gathering back round. “Quickly, while she is warm. And do the rest of it down there, in the light, with the others, because it is not finished, it is only begun. She let go of it here because you showed her how. Now you must all of you keep showing each other, every day, for a long time, or the silence will close back over and she will only find another hill. Go on. Twiggle will run you out.”
Luka gathered his sister up, yellow coat and rabbit and all, and she was heavy and real and shivering and alive in his arms, and he carried her up out of the bowl while Twiggle ran the path ahead of them, finding it, the hour folding back into minutes, out past the sign and its wet streaming letters and down the dark lane towards the few small lights of home.
§
He shouldered through the back door soaked and filthy with Mia in his arms, and the cottage met them with its cold, the corners black with shadow at seven in the evening, and in the front room his mother sat staring at nothing and his father stood at the window with his back to everyone, no shelf, no drill, no busyness left in him, just a man frozen at the glass who had not even noticed both his children had been gone for hours.
Luka set Mia down on her feet, and held her hand, and the two of them stood together in the doorway, and he said it again, here, where it mattered most and was hardest of all.
“His name was Jamie.”
Nobody moved.
“His name was Jamie,” said Luka again, louder, breaking on it, “and he was my brother, and Mia’s brother, and your son, and he was here, he was real, and he died, and we are not going to pretend any more that he wasn’t. We’re allowed to be sad. We’re allowed to say his name in this house. Mia knew it all along and we punished her for it, all of us, and she nearly, she nearly...” His voice gave out. “Please. I can’t keep the lid on it for everybody. I can’t be the one who’s all right any more. I don’t want to be.”
And Mia, warm now, her face wet and her chin wobbling and entirely herself again, looked up at her silent frozen parents and said, in her own small clear voice, the bravest thing anyone said in the whole of that long autumn:
“I miss Jamie. Will you be sad with me? I don’t want to do it on my own.”
There is no point pretending what happened next was tidy, because it was not. Their mother made a sound none of them had heard her make in half a year, and crossed the room, and went down on her knees on the cold stone floor and pulled both her living children into her, saying his name now, Jamie, Jamie, my Jamie, over and over into their hair, the curtains thrown wide at last. And their father turned from the window with his face come undone, and crossed the room, and folded down around the three of them, and wept like a much younger man, and said, in a cracked voice that had not said the word in half a year, “Jamie. Our Jamie.” Four people on the floor of a cold cottage at the edge of a moor, soaked and shaking and saying a dead boy’s name out loud to each other with the lights on. And Luka, in the middle of it, with his sister warm against him and his mother’s tears in his hair and his father’s arm around them all, understood with absolute certainty that this, exactly this, was the opposite of the house falling down.
This was the house, at long last, standing up.
§
The cold went out of the cottage that night the way frost goes, not all at once but deciding to, and by morning the corners had given back their shadows and Mia woke up Mia again, ordinary and five and asking for cereal and cross that Luka had used all the hot water.
They got better at it after that. Not better at missing him; you do not get better at that, and anyone who promises you that you will is selling you the same cruel thing the false stories sell. But better at carrying it, which is a different skill, and one you can actually learn. The rule was gone. They said his name now, all of them, easily and often and sometimes through tears, and the saying did not bring the house down; it turned out the house had only ever been in danger from the silence.
Freya taught them the box, properly, the whole family this time. Luka had known about the tin for weeks, of course; the whole trouble had started with Mia mooning over it. But he had never looked inside, and when he finally told Freya some of what had happened, not the Hollow, just the rest, she did not go pink or look at her shoes, she just nodded and brought it round and opened it on the kitchen table. It was an old biscuit tin. Inside was a folded race programme from a day at the speedway her dad had taken her to, a pair of his reading glasses, a cufflink whose pair was long lost, and a scrap of paper with three words in his handwriting that she did not show Luka and he did not ask to see. Her nana had started it for her, the week after the funeral, because her nana came from a time and a place that understood these things and had been quietly horrified that nobody else seemed to. You put the person in the tin, Freya explained, the bits of them you can keep, and then the missing has somewhere to live, a proper place, instead of being loose in the house and growing in the corners, and on his birthday, or some random Tuesday when it comes round, you get the tin down and go through it and have a good cry and a good laugh and put the lid back on, and it does not fix anything, because nothing fixes it, but it makes the grief a thing you can hold instead of a thing that holds you. And Luka thought, but did not say, that this was the very thing Mia had understood before any of them, that there should be somewhere safe to keep the people you lose; she had simply got the wrong somewhere, carried it up a hill to strangers instead of keeping it here in the warm, because nobody at home would help her hold it. So they made one. The hoodie went in, and the headphones, and a dozen of Mia’s drawings, and a list in Luka’s writing of things Jamie used to say. His dad cried on the birthday and did not apologise for it. His mum laughed, once, telling a story about Jamie aged four, a real laugh, and then cried, and then laughed again, and Luka understood that this was what Puddle-Petal had meant, that the same grief could hold both at once, and that this was it flowering.
Chloe showed him the drawing in the end, the one from his second morning. It was him at the table by the window, and she had caught the lid-on look, the packed-down thing, before he had known it was visible. “You looked like me,” she said, which was how Luka learned that Chloe had lost someone too, and why she watched so hard and said so little, and that the school, and the village, and very probably the whole world, was quietly full of people carrying boxes, if only you knew how to look.
Tim never found out the hill part, because Tim was Tim and you did not tell Tim a thing you wanted kept. But it was loud, oblivious Tim who turned out to be exactly what Luka needed three days out of five: someone who treated him like an ordinary boy, who wanted to talk about conkers and football and nothing heavier than a wet sock, who could make him laugh until his ribs ached over nothing at all. There is a place for the friend who helps you hold the box, Luka came to see, and a place for the friend who does not know there is a box, and he was lucky beyond measure to have one of each.
And Mia? Mia stopped going up the hill, because she did not need to any more; her sadness had somewhere to live now, in the warm, with people who would be sad alongside her. But she never stopped believing in the Gardners, not for a second, and never stopped drawing them, tall and rooty and smiling among their flowers. She had been right about them in the only way that mattered, and wrong in the only way that nearly cost everything, and she was five, and both those things can be true of a person at once. She held the wooden rabbit close the way she always had, and sometimes she borrowed Jamie’s stone off Luka and held it up to her eye, squinting through the hole at nothing, and once announced she had seen a fairy, and Luka, who had decided he would never again tell his sister a thing was not real just because he could not see it, said he did not doubt it for a second.
§
He went up to the Hollow on the anniversary, in the spring, when the missing came round again exactly the way Freya had promised it would.
They were all there in the daylight, and there was no need for anyone to introduce anyone, because he knew them now. Where the dark swollen growth had been by the pool there was nothing but bright flowers, all open. “It still hurts,” Luka told Puddle-Petal. He had brought a flower from the cottage garden, and Jamie’s stone was warm round his neck. “I thought I’d better say. In case you thought I’d cheated it. It hasn’t stopped. I don’t think it ever will.”
“No,” she agreed gently. “It will not. That was never what we offered, and you should be wary of anyone who tells you they can offer it. But look how you carry it now. Look how light it has grown, and you barely felt it growing lighter. That is the only mercy there is. Not that the weight goes. It does not go. That you grow strong enough for it, and people grow up around you to help you hold it, and one day you can take it out and look at his face and even smile, and put it away again, because it is yours, and you would not give it up now for all the world.”
“I wouldn’t,” Luka agreed. To be rid of the grief, he understood now, would be to be rid of Jamie, and he would carry it over the moor and back a thousand times before he did that.
On his way down he stopped at the sign. He looked at it properly: the silvered oak, the warm thrumming letters that would not fade and would not be taken down, the E.H. 1927 cut deep by a serious ten-year-old girl who had heard a name and written it the way her heart heard it. And he understood, at last, the deep old patient carvings, the ones Freya would not talk about, the ones that were not from any dare. They were names. Each one a person somebody had lost, and could not say at home, and had climbed up here to set down somewhere it would last, in the one place in the whole valley where the village allowed you to grieve, even if the village had long forgotten that was what it was doing. A hundred years of them. A hundred years of children who had needed, more than anything, to say a name out loud and have it stay said.
He took out his penknife, and under all the rest, deep and careful, the way the old ones were done, he carved a single letter and a small heart beside it.
J.
He pressed his thumb over the fresh cut. The oak was warm, and it thrummed, very faintly, the way it had the first time, except that now he knew what the thrumming was. It was a hundred years of people refusing to be silent about the ones they loved. He was one of them now.
§
He still has the photograph of the sign on his phone. He shows people sometimes, when he wants to make Mosshope sound less ordinary than it looks, and they laugh at the spelling the way he once laughed, and he lets them, because it is funny and there is no harm in it being funny.
But he knows now what the wandering letters were really doing up there, nailed to a hawthorn at exactly the height a child could reach. They were not a mistake. They were the truest thing in the whole village, written so often and so wrongly by such small hands that the wrong of it had worn, over a hundred years, into something almost like a key. The grown-ups said grave and meant solemn. The old folk said grieve and meant grief. The little ones said both, and knew, the way little ones do, that they were the same word.
Grieve Gardners. The Guardians of Grief.
You cannot give it to them to be rid of. Nobody can take it off your hands, because that is not what hands are for. What you plant up there will grow, and a grief planted to be forgotten grows monstrous, cold and endless and starved, and reaches back for you in the dark. But a grief carried home and tended in the warm, said out loud, shared among the people who loved them too, grows into something else entirely, something you can live alongside, something that flowers.
The children’s rhyme had it right all along, hidden in the middle of all the spooky nonsense where nobody would believe it. Leave a tear or leave a sigh, they will grow and never die. They will. They do. A sorrow handed over to be rid of never dies and never softens; it only grows. So do not leave it up there. That is the part the rhyme never reached, and the part the children could never spell, and the part the grown-ups had forgotten, and the part Luka would spend the rest of his life knowing.
Do not leave it at all. Pick it up. Carry it home. Say their name out loud, with the whole of your heart, because a name said like that has never once called a monster, only ever the truth. And tend it in the warm, with the people who love you.
Because grief is only love, of course, with nowhere left to go.
And love, if you only let it, and if you do not try to do it all on your own, will grow.
