The Sweetening

The Road Gives Out

The road gave out at the cattle grid, and after that there was only the moor and the sky and the small grey shape of the house, waiting in its hollow like something that had been holding its breath.

Mhairi felt the change come up through the floor of the car before she saw it — the smooth complaint of tyres on tarmac giving way to the iron rattle of the grid, then the long shudder of the track itself, stone and rut and the soft give of peat at the edges. Ross slowed without being told to. The hire van was somewhere behind them, lost in a fold of the land, and ahead the track went up and up between banks of heather not yet in flower, brown and grey and wind-bent, until it crested the rise and showed them the whole of it at once.

She had not been here in twenty-six years. She had been seven the last time, brought up the hill in the back of a different car, and she remembered nothing of the place but a smell — peat-smoke and sour milk and wet wool — and her mother's hands white on the wheel going down. Iseult had never brought her back. Iseult had never spoken of it at all, not when Mhairi asked, not when she was dying and Mhairi asked again. The Hollow was a word her mother would not say, the way some people will not say a dead man's name.

And now it was theirs.

"There it is," Ross said. He said it gently, the way he said most things to her now, as though she were a horse that might shy. "Fenn's Hollow."

She looked. The cottage sat low in its dell where the cultivated ground gave out and the open moor began, a long grey thing under a grey slate roof, its windows small and deep-set and dark. A stone byre stood off to one side with a rowan tree leaning over it, and beyond the last field the land lifted again and went on bare and brown to the white edge of the sky. There was no other house. There was no tree but the rowan and a wind-stunted hawthorn by the gate. There was the wind, which she could hear now even through the glass, a long steady note that did not rise or fall.

"It's so big," said Tom from the back, and he meant the sky, and the moor, and the nothing of it, and his voice was full of a wild and rising joy that closed her throat. "Mum. Mum, it's huge. Can I run? When we stop can I run?"

"You can run," she said.

"Can Pruntt run with me?"

"Prunt's not — there's no dog, love. The dog's just —" She stopped. The solicitor's letter had said one collie, ageing, currently kept by a neighbour, to remain with the property if you wish it. "We'll see about the dog."

In the mirror she could see the round back of his head, the cowlick that would not lie down, his nose an inch from the window and his breath fogging it in quick excited bursts that he kept wiping clear with his sleeve to see again. Six years old and he had spent the whole drive north narrating the cars and the cows and the names of the service stations, and not one word of it had asked her to be all right, and she loved him so much in that moment that it hurt like a stitch in her side.

Ross's hand found her knee and rested there. She let it. That was as far as either of them went now — the resting of a hand, the not pulling away. There was a third seat empty in the back beside Tom, which there had to be, you could not buy a car with an odd number of seats, and she did not look at it. She had got good, this last year, at not looking at empty places. She was getting better all the time.

The track ran them down at last into the dell, and the wind dropped the way it does in a hollow, all at once, so the silence came up loud. Ross killed the engine. For a moment none of them moved, and the only sound was the tick of the cooling metal and, very faint, from somewhere behind the byre, a dog beginning to bark.

---

The key was an iron one, long as her hand and heavy as a tool, black with age and cold even in the warm car where it had ridden in the cup of the door. It had come in an envelope with the solicitor's compliments. Eda Fenn, deceased. The estate of. It turned hard in the lock and then all at once, and the door swung in on the smell she remembered — peat-smoke and sour milk and wet wool, twenty-six years deep — and on a house that had not been told its keeper was dead.

There was a chair drawn up to the cold hearth with a shawl over its back. There was a kettle on the hob and two cups on the dresser, set out, waiting. There were boots by the door, a woman's boots, dried mud still on them in the shape of the last steps Eda Fenn had walked before she lay down and did not get up. There was a loaf gone to green stone under a cloth on the table and a knife beside it. There was a clock, stopped. The whole low room was dim and still and entirely furnished with another life, as though the old woman had only stepped out to the byre and would be back directly, stamping her boots, asking who they thought they were.

"God," said Ross, very quietly, behind her. "They said it was cleared."

"They said it was empty," Mhairi said. "That's not the same thing."

Tom went past them both at a run, the way he went at everything, into the dim and out of it, into the back rooms, calling out what he found — a bed! another bed! Mum there's a tiny room! — and his small loud life ran through the dead house and could not fill it. Mhairi stood on the worn flag of the threshold and could not make her feet go in. The dread of it was not large. It was small and exact, like the cold of the key. This was a house that was still being lived in by someone who was not there.

She made herself cross the sill.

Along the deep stone of every window-sill, she saw, lay a thin grey line. She thought it was dust until she touched it and brought her finger to her lip without thinking, a child's habit her mother had slapped out of her, and it was salt. Coarse grey salt, laid the length of every sill in the house, and at the doorstones too, she saw now, a line of it worn but not gone, swept back into place again and again by a hand that was now in the ground.

"Damp," Ross said, watching her. He had a way now of explaining things to her before she could explain them wrong. "For the damp, maybe. Old places."

"Maybe," she said.

She did not say: salt does nothing for damp. She did not say: I have seen this before. She had — somewhere under the twenty-six years, in the white-knuckled dark of her mother's silence, there was a grey line on a sill and her mother's voice saying leave it, Mhairi, leave it be. The memory surfaced and turned and went down again before she could hold it.

Outside, the dog had stopped barking. When Mhairi went to the back door to look, it was sitting in the yard, a black-and-white collie gone grey about the muzzle, old and stiff and watchful, and it was looking at the house the way you look at a thing you are deciding about. Ross came out past her with a box in his arms and the dog rose at once and backed off three steps, hackles up, and stood between him and the byre as if to bar it.

"Easy," Ross said. "Easy, fella." He set the box down and put his hand out, low and friendly, the way you should, and the dog would not come. It looked at his hand, and it looked at his face, and it turned its head away as if from something it could not stand to see.

Mhairi came down the step. She did not put her hand out. She crouched, her knees in the cold mud of the yard, and said nothing at all, and after a moment the collie came to her. It came low and certain and pushed its grey head hard into her chest and stood there shaking very slightly, leaning its whole old weight against her, and she put her arms round the dirty warmth of it and felt something in her own chest come unstuck that had been stuck for a year.

"Prunt," she said, though she did not know how she knew the name. "Pruntt. There. There now."

Over the byre door, where the rowan leaned, someone had nailed a branch of the tree across the lintel, and bound it there with red thread gone pink with weather. The berries on it were last year's, shrunk to black beads. She looked at it a long time, the rowan and the red thread over the dark mouth of the byre, and she did not know what it was for, and she knew that it was for something.

---

They worked until the light began to go. Ross and the man from the van carried in beds and boxes and the few things of their own that had seemed worth bringing three hundred miles to start again with; Mhairi found sheets in a press that smelled of lavender and another woman's care, and made up the beds, and did not let herself sit down on any of them. Tom ran himself ragged in the long field and came in mud to the knees and famished, and she gave him bread they had brought and not the green loaf, and watched him eat it with both hands.

It was Tom who found the saucer. He found everything; he was at the age for it. He came to her holding it carefully in two hands, a shallow white saucer, old, crazed with fine brown cracks, and on it nothing but a film of something dried to a yellow ring.

"Who's this for?" he said.

"What, love?"

"This little plate. It was on the windowsill outside, on the little ledge. It's a cat plate, isn't it. Did the old lady have a cat?" He looked up at her, and then past her, out the small window at the dimming yard, and some of the wildness had gone out of him and left him only small. "Is it for the cat that comes?"

The hair stood up on her arms. "There's no cat, Tom."

"Then who's it for?"

And she found she had no answer, only the half-memory turning over again far down — a white saucer, her grandmother's red hands setting it out, leave the sweet upon the stone, a tune more than words — and she took the saucer from him gently and set it on the dresser face-down where he could not ask about it again.

"Bed," she said. "Teeth. Go on."

When he was down at last, and Ross was sat in the dead woman's chair by the hearth they had finally got lit, staring into the new flames with the careful patient hope he wore like a coat these days, Mhairi took her own coat from the peg and said she wanted the air.

"It's near dark," Ross said. He did not say don't. He had learned not to say don't. "Want me to come?"

"I won't be long."

The dog came with her to the door and stopped at the threshold and would not cross out into the dusk. It stood with its paws at the very line of the doorstone, where the salt was, and watched her go up the yard and out the gate into the last field, and it did not bark and it did not whine. It only watched.

The field ran up to the open moor, and at the top of it, where the wall gave out and the heather began, a single grey stone stood leaning out of the ground. She had not seen it in the daylight, busy as the day had been; she saw it now because the last of the light caught its flat top and held there a moment, pale, while everything below it went to shadow. It was taller than a man, but bowed, leaning out toward the moor as if it had spent a thousand years listening to something on the far side. The Greymother. The name came up in her without her choosing it, the way the dog's name had, the way the salt had. Her grandmother's word in her grandmother's voice.

The wind found her again as she climbed clear of the dell, that one long unbroken note, and brought her the smell of the moor — peat and cold water and something sweetish under it, like crushed grass, like honey gone over. Behind her the lit window of the cottage was small and yellow and far. Ahead and on every side the moor went out grey and endless to a horizon she could no longer see, only feel, the way you feel the edge of a bed in the dark. There was no light anywhere on it. There was no road. There was nothing for a mile, for miles, but the heather and the wind and the leaning stone, and her, and her grief that she had carried up here thinking the bigness of the place might let her set it down.

She came up to the Greymother and put her hand on the cold of it and looked out at the moor going dark, and she thought: I could be all right here. She thought it the way you say a thing aloud to see if it will hold. I could put it down, here, where there's room. We could be all right.

Then she looked down at the flat top of the stone, worn smooth as a sill by long use, by hands, by years, and the thought went out of her like a blown candle.

She had set out nothing, and there was no one on the moor for a mile in any direction, and yet here it was on the flat of the stone — a saucer of milk and a crust of bread, already skinning over in the cold.

What the Stone Is Owed

In the morning the saucer was empty, licked clean to a shine, and Mhairi told herself it was the dog, the way you tell a child there is nothing under the bed.

She had carried it back across the wet grass before the sun was properly up, the chipped white saucer cold in her two hands, and there had been not a smear of milk left in it, not a crumb of the bread, only the faint print of the skin that had cooled on top in the night, dried now to a ring like a tide-mark. The crust was gone. She had looked for it under the stone and in the heather at the foot of the stone and found nothing, not so much as a softened scrap a beak might have left, and that was when she had said it aloud, to herself, in the empty field, in the wind: the dog.

Prunt was at the byre when she came down, lying long in the doorway under the nailed-up rowan with his grey muzzle on his paws, watching her the patient way the old collie watched everything, as if he had seen it all once before and was waiting only to see whether she would get it right this time. She crouched and showed him the saucer. He sniffed it without much interest and looked away up the field toward the moor, his ears going forward, and a low sound came out of him that was not quite a growl, more the memory of one, and then it stopped.

"It was you," she said to him. "Wasn't it. You great soft thing."

He thumped his tail once against the threshold stone and did not get up.

Ross was up by then, in the doorway in his socks with a mug in his hand, the steam going sideways off it in the door-draught, and he had slept — she could see he had slept, properly, the lines easier round his eyes than they had been in a year — and he said the milk had probably been the dog or a fox, and that she ought not to be out on the wet grass in her nightthings at this hour, and there was a kindness in it that she had not heard from him in a long while, the kindness of a man who has decided, against the evidence of years, to be hopeful. She let him put his arm round her in the doorway. It was a small thing. It warmed her by half a degree, no more, and she was grateful for it the way you are grateful for any warmth you have stopped expecting.

So she took the question down to Nethergale.

She told herself she was going for provisions — there was no bread in the house and the milk would not last the week — but the truth was she wanted to put the saucer in front of someone who had known her grandmother and watch their face. She walked it, the long way down the lane with Tom barrelling ahead of her, because the morning had come up fine and the drift had peeled back off the tops to leave the moor lying clean and brown and enormous under a high pale sky. Tom would not keep to the lane. He went up the banks and down them, he flushed a pipit and chased it shrieking with laughter, he came back with his knees green and his fists full of cotton-grass and the cold burn already going into his cheeks so that by the bottom of the hill he was brown as a nut and louder than the wind. Six years old and frightened of nothing in the daylight. He kept stopping to look back and up, over his shoulder, to the long green swell on the skyline a mile off above the Hollow — the one rounded hill, greener than the moor around it, that stood up smooth and bare against the sky with no rock on it and no sheep on it and no bird going over it that she had seen.

"What's that one, Mam," he said, the third time. "The green hill."

"I don't know its name," she said, which was true.

"I want to go up it."

"Not today."

"Tomorrow."

"We'll see," she said, and took his sticky hand, and felt how he pulled, all the time, very gently, the way a dog new on a lead pulls — not away from her, exactly. Toward the hill.

Nethergale was less a village than the wreck of one: a single rutted street where the lane widened, a doctor's surgery in a square stone house with a brass plate gone green, a row of low farm cottages with their backs hunched to the weather, and at the top of it the chapel, roofless on one side, the slates slid off into the nettles and a young rowan growing up through the vestry window where no one had thought to pull it. The graveyard wall ran along the street, and where it ran she slowed without knowing why, because the wall at its foot was set with small stones, a row of them, low and grey and unlettered, each no bigger than a loaf, planted upright in the turf like teeth. She counted four before Tom pulled her on. She did not know yet to be afraid of them. They looked old and sad and ordinary, the way everything in that place looked old and sad and ordinary, and she filed them away and forgot them, for a while.

At the first gate a man was standing as though he had been put there.

He was big and very still, past sixty, in a collarless shirt and a waistcoat shiny at the buttons, with a face like a cliff that the weather has worked at for a long time, and he watched them come the whole length of the street without moving, and only when they were level with him did he lift one hand off the top bar of the gate.

"You'll be the Fenn lass," he said. Not a question.

"Mhairi Tace," she said. "My grandmother was Eda Fenn."

"Aye," he said, as if she had confirmed something. "Cradoc Sill." He did not offer the hand he had lifted. He was not looking at her, she understood, after a moment. He was looking at Tom — down at Tom, at the brown loud child swinging on the gatepost beside her, with a long slow attention that had nothing unkind in it and yet sat wrong, the way a man might look at a beast at market, sizing the thing for what it was worth and would cost. "Boy," he said.

"Tom," said Tom, with no shyness at all.

"Tom," the old man repeated, and something moved in the cliff of his face that was almost a smile and was not one. "He's a strong one. Healthy."

"He is," she said, and drew the child a half-step in toward her skirt without deciding to.

"You're at the Hollow, then." Sill's eyes came up off the boy at last and went past her, up the lane, up to where the chimney of Fenn's Hollow would be if you could see it, and beyond it to the long green hill. "Eda's place. You keeping it on?"

"For the summer. We'll see how it suits."

"It'll suit," he said, "if you keep it as she kept it." And then, before she could ask him what he meant by that, he had touched two fingers to his brow and turned and gone up his own yard, big and slow and certain, and a younger man crossing the yard with a feed-sack on his shoulder stopped dead to watch the boy over the wall until Sill said something low and he went on.

The doctor found her at the shop, which was the front room of a cottage with a bell on a spring.

"You're Eda's granddaughter," the woman said, putting out a dry cool hand. "Mona Pell. I knew Eda — at the end, anyway. I'm so sorry; she was a fine old soul." She was neat and grey-suited and brisk, with reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a way of holding your eye a beat too long, the professional way, the way that takes inventory. "And this is the wee man." She went down on her heels to Tom's level the way doctors do. "What a colour on him. Sleeping well? Eating?"

"Like a horse," said Mhairi.

"Good. Good." Dr Pell looked at the boy's eyes and at his colour and at the set of his jaw, and Mhairi had the sudden hot certainty that she was being asked something underneath the questions, and could not for her life have said what. "And you," the doctor said, rising, the eyes coming to rest now on Mhairi's face with that same level inventory. "Settling? It's a lonely spot, the Hollow. After — well. After everything." She let that sit. "You'll come to me if you need anything at all. Anything. There's no shame in needing a hand to settle, this far up. The moor's hard on newcomers."

"I'm not exactly a newcomer," Mhairi said. "My mother was born here."

"Iseult," said the doctor, and the name dropped between them like a stone into a well, and for just a second the brisk grey face was something else, wary, careful, before it closed up smooth again. "Of course. Of course she was." She did not say anything more about Iseult. No one in that place, she would find, ever said anything more about Iseult.

It was the shop-woman, in the end, weighing out the flour, who gave Mhairi the thing she had come for, and gave it as though it were nothing.

"You'll be keeping the stone, then," the woman said, "now you're up there." She did not look up from the scale. "Eda always kept the stone. Faithful, she was, to the last, near enough. There's not many keep it proper any more." She tipped the flour into a bag and folded the top down twice. "Milk's the best, and a bit of bread, the first cut off a new loaf. Honey if you've it. There's some leaves a coin." She said it the way she might have said put the bins out Tuesday — a thing one did, here, that everyone did, that needed no more explaining than weather. "Your gran had a verse for it. Sang it at us when we were bairns to put the fear in us." And she straightened, and her old face went soft and far-off, and she sang it, low, half to herself, in a tune Mhairi knew — knew in the body before she knew it in the mind, knew it the way you know a smell from a house you have not stood in for thirty years.

Leave the sweet upon the stone, rowan red and salt and bone; keep the sill and keep the door —

The woman stopped. Frowned. "Och, I've lost the end of it." She shook her head and pushed the bag across the counter. "Or them below— no. It's gone. Eda'd have it. There's a second part and all, about the ones under the — but it's gone, hen, it's gone." She would not meet Mhairi's eye now. She had said more than she meant to, and she knew it, and she totted up the flour and the milk and the sugar with quick small movements and would say no more.

But it had come back to Mhairi, standing there with the warm bag of flour in her arms and her son swinging on the door with the bell going — come back not whole but in pieces, in her grandmother's cracked old singing voice across the years: keep the sill and keep the door, or them below shall come for more. And under it, fainter, a second verse, the one the woman could not reach: under hill the lent ones bide, honey-fed and hollow-eyed — and then the thread frayed and was gone, and she stood holding the end of it, cold under all the warmth of the day, while the bell rang and rang on its spring.

She bought the bread. She went up the lane with Tom heavy-legged and quiet at last on her hip, the sun going long and red behind the green hill so that the hill stood up black against it, and she told herself it was a children's rhyme, a thing to frighten bairns off the bog, that the milk was the dog, that the man at the gate was only an old farmer who liked children, that the village was kind in its hard cold way and meant nothing more by its watching than that strangers were rare. She had told Ross, that evening, walking up — he had come down to meet them, lighter than he had been in a year, already half in love with the place, with the quiet and the cottage and the way old Sill had nodded to him man to man over the wall — and she had let his ease ease her, and they had gone up together with the child between them and it had been, for an hour, very nearly a marriage again.

The gate of the Hollow stood open at the foot of the dell where she had left it. And in the gateway, where there had been no one, there was a woman.

She was very old, older than Sill, older than the chapel, in black with a man's coat over it, and she stood with one hand on the gate as though she had been holding it shut against them, and she did not move aside. Tom went quiet on Mhairi's hip. Even Ross slowed. The last of the red light was off the hill now and the dusk was coming up out of the dell the way it comes up out of low ground, blue and cold, from the feet first.

"You're hers," the old woman said. Her eyes were pale, near white, and fixed not on Mhairi but on the child against her shoulder, and on the child they stayed. "Eda's girl. With Eda's grandson." She said the word grandson slowly, tasting it, as if to be sure. Then she let go of the child with her eyes and took hold of Mhairi with them, and her grip on the gate did not loosen at all.

"Hesta Sworn," she said, before Mhairi could ask. "I knew your gran when we were both bonnier. I'll tell you what she'd tell you, for she's not here to do it, more's the wrong of it." She leaned in. She smelled of woodsmoke and something green and bruised. "There's three things. You hear me, now. Keep the rowan over the byre door and don't you let any man take it down. Keep the salt at the sill, all the sills, fresh, and mend it after rain. And feed the stone, the grey stone at the field's end, every night the light fails — milk and the sweet of the bread — for it's owed, and a thing that's owed gets paid one road or the other."

"Owed to what?" Mhairi said.

The old woman did not answer that. She looked at the boy again, asleep now, his thumb gone to his mouth, his face slack and warm and ordinary against his mother's neck, and something crossed her ruined face that might have been pity, and Mhairi would remember it later and not be able to bear it.

"Keep the rowan, and keep the salt, and feed the stone, Eda's girl," the old woman said, not letting go of the gate. "And never — never — let the boy past the Greymother once the light has gone."