The Kissing Bough

The Longest Night

The greenhouse light was still burning when Dilys came in from the snow, but for the first time in four winters she had not left it on for a ghost — she had left it on because Ambrose Cardew was out there arguing with the geraniums, and that, she thought, was the difference between a light kept for the dead and a light kept for the living.

She stood a moment in the scullery doorway and watched him through the glass. He had a seed catalogue open on the potting bench, folded back to a page he plainly disapproved of, and he was addressing the overwintering pelargoniums as though they were a coroner's jury who had returned a verdict he meant to overturn. She could not hear the words through two panes and a fall of snow, but she knew the cadence of them. Ambrose in full flow was a thing of dry and terrible precision. The geraniums, wisely, said nothing.

Welly said a great deal. The lurcher heaved himself up from the warm flags by the range, groaned like a man of ninety rising from a deep chair, and came to press his grey muzzle into her cold hand by way of accusation. He was thirteen now, and grizzled about the jaw, and had taken to sleeping in the exact centre of any doorway a person might reasonably wish to use; but his nose had not aged a day, and he had already found, and eaten, one of the mince pies Dilys had cooling on the dresser, and left the crimped edge of it on the floor as a signed confession.

"You are a disgrace," she told him, with love. He wagged, unrepentant, and leaned his whole considerable weight against her shins in the way that had been his father-in-heart's before him — Hugh had taught him that, or Hugh had simply been leaned upon in the same fashion, and the dog had inherited the habit along with the man's old tartan blanket and his place at the empty half of the bed.

The empty half. She caught the thought as it rose and set it gently down again, the way you set down a cup you have decided not to break. Four winters. And here she was warm and dry with snow on her shoulders and a pathologist arguing with her houseplants, and she was — she made herself use the word, silently, the way one presses a bruise to see whether it still hurts — happy. Tentatively, guiltily, with a flicker of the old superstition that the moment she admitted it aloud some tidy cosmic bookkeeper would come and take it away. Grief had rules, she had always felt, and one of them was surely that you did not get to be this pleased about a seed catalogue and a man's cross voice through glass. Somewhere, some part of her that had loved Hugh Ashcroft for thirty-one years was braced for the bill.

She rapped the scullery window. Ambrose looked up, saw her, and mouthed something that was almost certainly these people are lunatics, and stabbed the catalogue with one long finger.

She went out to him. The greenhouse held its own small climate, damp and green and mild, and it smelled of leaf-mould and paraffin and the particular sweetness of geraniums kept just this side of dormancy. Outside the glass the snow came down without any hurry at all, which was the frightening kind; the hurried kind blew itself out, but snow that fell like this, straight and steady and patient, meant business with the whole valley.

"They are offering," said Ambrose, without preamble, "a variety of Lathyrus odoratus called, and I quote, 'Cuddles.'"

"I know the one. Deep rose. Very good scent."

"They have named a sweet pea 'Cuddles,' Dilys, and they expect me to plant it and then presumably to say the word out loud, in my own garden, to another adult."

"You could grow it and never speak of it."

"That is worse. That is a secret. I have kept enough of other people's." He shut the catalogue. His hands, she noticed — she noticed his hands rather more than she used to — were long and dry and steady, the hands of a man who had spent forty years taking apart the dead to find out what the living had done to them, and who now used them chiefly to argue and to pass her the good scissors and, lately, to hold her elbow on the icy stretch by the church. "You've been to the allotments in this."

"I've been to Miriam's. We were dividing the last of the snowdrops in the green, if you must know, and gossiping, which is the true purpose of a plantswoman in January." She began to unwind her scarf. "The bones," she said, and the word changed the temperature of the greenhouse by a degree or two, as it had changed the temperature of the whole village since midsummer. "Word's come from Kingsbourne. They're — provisional, Clemency says, they'll say nothing certain till the tests come back — but provisional."

Ambrose was very still, in the way he went still over a body. "A name."

"A name they aren't saying, officially. And a name everyone in the Green Man has been saying since about four o'clock." She looked at him. "Micky Endicott."

He turned the word over. He had come to Little Hemlock only three years since, and the village's dead of forty years ago were not his dead; but he had read the file Owen had let him read, on the summer's remains that the water-meadow had given up when the river ran low at Maidenwell Corner, and he knew what a young man's bones looked like when the ground had held them a long time and not gently. "The estate boy. The one who went to Canada."

"The one who was said to have gone to Canada." Dilys hung her scarf on the nail by the door. "Which is a different thing, and I don't think, until this summer, that above three people in this village had ever noticed it was a different thing." She heard the sourness in her own voice and did not much like it. "Come in and be fed. The snow's coming down the valley, and I want to walk to Sadie's before it makes up its mind, and you are not letting me go alone in this, whatever your opinion of a man escorting a woman anywhere."

"My opinion," said Ambrose, following her in, stooping under the lintel, "is that you have the road-sense of a pheasant. Which snowdrops did you take from Miriam?"

She told him. It carried them all the way indoors, and neither of them said the name again, but it walked in with them all the same and sat down by the fire, the way the dead do.

—

The village, when they went down into it at dusk, was doing what English villages do in the teeth of a hard winter, which is to prepare with immense seriousness for a party.

Twelfth Night was the day after tomorrow, the fifth, and Little Hemlock kept its wassail the way other places kept Christmas — as the true centre of the season, the last night the green boughs were allowed to stay up, the night the sleeping orchard on the manor slope was sung to and toasted and frightened awake for another year's fruit. The lane down from Foxglove Cottage had a lantern in every third window already. Somebody's children had made an indifferent snowman on the green and given it a carrot for a nose and a broken clay pipe for dignity. Marion Kettleby went by with a covered basket and a face of grim purpose, on WI business that would not be denied by mere weather, and called out that the hall committee had four dozen Twelfth-cakes to see to and no help worth the name, in a tone that meant she was enjoying herself enormously.

But under the lantern-light and the woodsmoke there was the other thing, the thing that had been in the village since summer and had got worse with the frost, and its name was Thornfield Homes.

You could read it on the noticeboard by the lychgate, where the parish council's beige little notices about grit-bins were half-covered by a great hand-painted banner, HANDS OFF THE GLEBE FIELD, gone soft and blistered with damp. You could read it in the number of cars that had been up and down the Kingsbourne road all autumn that nobody in Little Hemlock owned. Thornfield wanted the Glebe Field, and beyond the Glebe Field it wanted the water-meadow, and had wanted it with a patient, well-lawyered hunger for longer than seemed reasonable for so unremarkable a stretch of wet grass and old apple trees; and the man it sent to want it on its behalf was one Damian Prosser, who wore town shoes to a country and smiled at everybody and had been seen, this very week, stuck and swearing at the Kingsbourne end of the road because the snow had beaten him to it.

The resistance had its headquarters, as all the best resistances do, in the pub.

The Green Man stood at the foot of the green with its lamps lit and its windows gold, and over its door — Dilys saw it as they came down the last of the slope, and thought nothing whatever of it, which was the point — hung this year's kissing bough. Sadie Bunce made a good one. It was the old kind, a double hoop of withy bound with holly and ivy and rosemary and trailing red ribbon, with a fat sprig of mistletoe swinging in the heart of it, the berries on it white and waxen and translucent in the lamplight, catching the glow like little glass beads a child might want to string. It turned very slowly in the warmth that leaked out under the door. It was pretty. It was Christmas. It meant nothing at all, and half the village would kiss under it before the week was out.

Inside, the fug hit them like a soft wall: woodsmoke, wet wool, spilt beer, and the particular sweet-and-bitter reek of the wassail cider that Sadie had a cauldron of on the range at the back, spiced and steaming, being got ready two days early because a thing worth doing was worth doing well. The snug was full. The campaign had a trestle table under the window heaped with maps and folders and a laptop nobody could get a signal for, and around it the usual and the unusual: Sadie herself behind the bar with her sleeves shoved up; Clive Sowerby scowling into a pint as though it had said something about his leeks; the Reverend Clemency Odell in a fisherman's jumper looking, Dilys thought, tired to the bone under her good cheer, holding a flock together in a season that kept handing it fresh things to be frightened of.

And, holding court whether the court wished it or not, the outsider.

Dilys had met Rosamund Sharrow twice and had not, either time, warmed to her, and had come away both times respecting her more than she liked. She was fifty-eight or so, square and short and dressed for a building site, with cropped iron hair and a pair of half-glasses she wore pushed up into it, and reading spectacles besides that she wielded like a pointer, and a voice that carried into every corner of the snug and did not care that it did. She was a heritage-and-land consultant — the campaign had scraped together the money to hire her from goodness knew where — and her whole trade was in being right where other people had been comfortably, expensively wrong, and she plainly loved it.

"—because it isn't a feeling," she was saying, to poor Freddie Quennell, who had wandered in out of the cold looking for allies and found a lecture, "it's a record. You don't stop a development by loving a field, Mr. Quennell, you stop it by proving it's older and stranger and more important than the man with the money says it is, and you do that in the deeds." She tapped the table. "And I've been in the deeds. Old estate conveyances are the most wonderful liars, do you know that? Everybody signs them and nobody reads them. I have read them." She let that sit, pleased with it, and reached for her glass. "There's something in the deeds of this village that'll win us the Glebe Field and then some. Then some, I said. I'll want another day with the planning file before I say more, and I'll want it before this snow buries me alive, so nobody's to interrupt me tomorrow."

"Something," said Freddie Quennell faintly, in a way Dilys would remember later. "What sort of something."

"The sort you don't discuss in a pub," said Rosamund, with enormous satisfaction, and drank.

At the trestle behind her, unregarded, sat the oldest man in Little Hemlock. Amos Kestle was eighty-four and had worked the manor land for the Quennells when Freddie was in short trousers, and he sat where he always sat, by the fire, with his half-pint of mild that he made last the whole evening, and he was talking, as he mostly talked now, more to the fire than to anyone in it.

"—Canada," he was saying, to nobody. "Went to Canada, they said. Young Micky." He turned his half-pint slowly on the table without drinking it. "Never did send that postcard, though. Said he would. Said he'd send our Nesta a card off the boat and one from the other end, and there come the one, off Liverpool, and then—" His hand made a small flat motion, wiping the air clean. "Nothing. Funny, that winter. All that business up the meadow. All them men and their motors, and old Sir Edmund poorly, and then young Micky just — gone." He looked up, mild and vague, and found nobody listening, and did not seem to mind. "Never did send that postcard from Canada," he told the fire again, comfortably, as if it were a thing he had settled long ago and only liked to visit.

Dilys, threading her way to the bar with Ambrose behind her, heard it and felt the small cold finger of it touch the back of her neck, and told herself it was the draught from the door.

—

And here, she was to think afterwards, was where the whole of it was laid out in front of her, on the fourth of January, in lamplight, plain as a hand of cards face-up on green baize — and she read none of it, because there was nothing yet to read it against.

She saw Godfrey Loveridge come in.

He came in the way he came into everything, which was as though the room had been a little cold and dim before him and was warmer for his arriving. Seventy-four, upright, silver-headed, in a good tweed coat with snow on the shoulders, he stamped his boots in the doorway and beamed round the snug, and the snug beamed back, because you could not help it; there was not a soul in Little Hemlock who did not owe Godfrey Loveridge some kindness. The cricket pavilion was his. Half the church roof was his. He had chaired the parish council since before Dilys was widowed, and he had been the Wassail King — the man who led the rite out among the frozen trees and blessed the orchard and handed the honoured guest the King's own cup — for forty winters, by universal and delighted consent, because nobody did it half so well.

"Sadie!" he called, unwinding his scarf. "How's the cider coming? A King can't bless a thin brew." And, catching sight of Rosamund and her maps, he crossed to her with his hand out and his whole face open. "And here's our champion. Miss Sharrow. We're depending on you, you know — the whole village. Whatever you've found in those dusty old papers, I hope it's a cannon we can fire." He said it warmly, admiringly, the grand old man welcoming the clever outsider, and Rosamund, who did not warm to many, warmed a degree to that.

"A land-agent yourself once, weren't you, Mr. Loveridge," she said, half a challenge. "Before all this good works."

"A land-agent once," he agreed, easily, spreading his fine old hands, "long ago, before I gave myself to the village and it forgave me for it. Which is why, dear lady, I know exactly how much a good set of deeds can frighten the right people." He laughed, and the snug laughed with him, and Sadie put a steaming cup of the wassail cider into his hand, and he raised it to Rosamund Sharrow in salute; and it was all so warm and so kind that Dilys, watching, felt only the ordinary pleasure of watching kindness, and thought what a lucky village it was in its old men.

She bought her half of stout and Ambrose's whisky, and she was turning from the bar with them when the smallness of it happened, the thing at the door.

A child — one of the Sowerby grandchildren, three and imperious — had got itself up onto the settle by the entrance and reached, with the ruthless single-mindedness of the very young, for the prettiest thing in reach: the low-swinging heart of the kissing bough, and the little white glass beads that hung in it, that plainly wanted eating.

The grandmother had the wrist in an instant.

"Don't you touch those white ones," the old woman told the reaching child, under the kissing bough at the Green Man, "they're poison, those are" — and Dilys, buttoning her coat against the deepening snow, thought only that grandmothers were so often, and so unknowingly, exactly right, and went out into the last quiet evening Little Hemlock would have for a long time.

The Wassail King

There is no institution so heartsick with tradition as an English village at Twelfth Night, and Little Hemlock kept its wassail the way it kept its secrets — thoroughly, warmly, and with absolutely no idea what it was doing.

By the evening of the fifth the snow had stopped pretending to be weather and become geography. It had come down the valley for two days and a night, straight and patient, the frightening kind, and it had filled the hollows and rounded the walls and turned the ten miles of lane to Kingsbourne into a rumour; and Little Hemlock, sealed up in it like a fly in white amber, did the only sensible thing, which was to put on its good coat and go to a party. Hemlock Manor stood at the top of the village with every window gold, and the hall of it — the great cold stone hall the Quennells could no longer afford to heat and heated anyway, once a year, for this — was warm for the first time since Michaelmas, warm with bodies and candles and a fire you could have roasted a Quennell in, and it smelled of woodsmoke and hot cider and the sharp sweet catch of crab-apples charring on a shovel by the hearth.

Dilys came in on Ambrose's arm, which was a thing she still did with a small private astonishment, stamped the snow from her boots, and stood a moment to let the warmth take her.

"They will all," said Ambrose, low, surveying the hall over the top of his scarf as one might survey a mortuary drawer one is not sure one wishes to open, "expect me to sing."

"They will not. You have a face that discourages singing."

"I have a face," he agreed, "that has discouraged a great many things," and let a beaming Sadie Bunce relieve him of his coat.

The whole village was there, or the whole of it that could reach the top of the hill without dying, which in a snow like that was a badge of some distinction. Marion Kettleby stood guard over the Twelfth-cakes as though the Women's Institute had been entrusted with the crown jewels and half expected them to be pinched; there were four dozen, and she had counted them, and would count them again. Clive Sowerby had got into a good black jacket that made him look like a bull attending a funeral, and was standing very near the fire drinking with the deep suspicion of a man who did not trust anybody who put spice in a drink that was perfectly good without it. Miriam Pardoe found Dilys within a minute and pressed a cup on her and began at once, in a whisper, on the outrage of somebody's hellebores. The Reverend Clemency Odell moved among the frightened and the snowbound with the steady, tired warmth of a woman keeping a small boat's worth of souls afloat by main goodwill. And by the tall windows, apart, radiant in a manner that had nothing to do with the fire, stood Enid Purslowe — widowed these three years of the most disagreeable man the village had ever produced, and grown, since, into something loose-limbed and laughing that Dilys could not look at without a private, complicated gladness, as at a plant one had thought killed by frost putting up green.

And over the double doors, turning very slowly in the warmth, hung the great kissing bough.

It was Godfrey Loveridge's own, as it was every year — he grew the mistletoe on the old apple-standards behind the manor and cut the greenery himself and bound the bough with his own hands, holly and ivy and bay and rosemary and the fat pale sprig at the heart of it, and there was not a doorway of any consequence in Little Hemlock at Christmas that did not owe its green to him. Dilys, waiting for her cider, looked up at it the way a plantswoman cannot help looking, and catalogued it without meaning to: the berries white and waxen and half-translucent, each one, she knew, holding its single flat seed in a smear of that sticky green-glass viscin, Viscum album, the loveliest parasite in England, rooted in the living wood of the tree it fed on and would, given years enough, quietly kill. Pretty as glass beads. A child two feet off was being hoisted to see it, and reaching.

"Not the white ones, my duck," its mother said, hooking the small hand down. "Those are only for kissing, not for eating. Those'd make you poorly."

"They would indeed," said Dilys, to nobody, and took her cup.

—

The bowl was the heart of it, and the bowl was safe, and that — she would come to understand, but slowly, and too late for Rosamund Sharrow — was the whole of the trick.

It sat on the long table at the top of the hall, the great old wassail bowl, big as a christening font and near as old, and Sadie had two days' spiced cider steaming in it, and all night the village dipped from it and drank. That was the point of it. That was the meaning of the thing, older than anyone could say: one bowl, and everyone's lips to it, so that the drink you took was the drink your neighbour took, and no man could be poisoned at the wassail because no man drank alone. They passed it and dipped it and toasted in it, Clive and Clemency and Marion and the Quennells and the snowbound strangers all from the one steaming source, and it made them, for the length of the evening, a single warm animal against the cold.

"To the orchard," they said, dipping, "and next year's fruit," and drank, and Dilys drank with them, and it was good — apple and clove and a rasp of ginger and the roasted crab-apples bobbing in it going soft and gold.

There was the cake, too, and the bean in it. Marion cut it with the ceremony of a surgeon, and it was young Owen Fettiplace — off-duty and snowed in and looking, out of uniform, about nineteen — who bit down on the dried bean and was crowned, to a great roar, Lord of Misrule for the night, and made to wear a paper crown and command one absurdity of the company, which he did, scarlet to the ears, ordering Clive Sowerby to dance; and Clive, astonishingly, after a pause of real menace, did. The world turned upside down for an hour, the way it was meant to at Twelfth Night — the constable made king of fools, the fool made to caper — and everybody laughed until they wept, and nobody thought a thing of it, that the true King of the night had not yet shown his hand.

Threaded all through it, under the laughing, was the war.

You could not keep it out. Rosamund Sharrow would not have let you if you had tried. She had set up by the fire with a glass and an audience she had half-collected and half-cornered, and she was doing what she did, which was to be cleverer than the room and to make quite sure the room knew it.

"—because you people keep talking about stopping Thornfield," she was saying, "and you can't stop Thornfield. Thornfield's a shell inside a shell inside a brass plate in an office in Kingsbourne with that oiled little man Prosser out front of it, and it will still be there when we're all dead. What you can do—" she tapped the side of her nose, maddening, delighted with herself "—is prove the ground under it is worth more asleep than built on. And I have been in the deeds. And I will tell you, when I've had my one more day with the old planning files and not a minute before, that what I've turned up doesn't just save your field. It goes off like a mine under a good deal more than your field. Somebody in this county has been telling the same lie for forty years." She drank. "I do so love a liar who keeps his story straight. It means he had something worth lying about."

"Prosser's snowed out in Kingsbourne, I heard," someone offered.

"Prosser," said Rosamund, with contempt, "is a glove. I'm not interested in the glove."

Freddie Quennell, hovering at the edge of this with a squire's helpless courtesy and a face the colour of tallow, made a small sound. His wife did not. Cressida Quennell stood a little back from the firelight, straight and dark and expensive in a way the manor could not really justify, and she watched Rosamund Sharrow across the warm room with an attention Dilys did not like at all — the flat, waiting attention of a woman doing sums.

—

The trouble came out of the corner where the drink had gone, as trouble mostly does.

Dilys never learned exactly how Julian Crake had come to be snowbound in Little Hemlock for Twelfth Night, only that he had — a soft, ruined, once-handsome man of fifty-odd who had been, before Rosamund Sharrow was through with him, a consultant of some standing, and who had spent the intervening years and a good deal of tonight's cider becoming a grievance with legs. He crossed the hall to her at the fire with the terrible deliberateness of the very drunk, and the room felt it come, the way a barometer feels weather.

"There she is," he said, too loud. "The great Rosamund. Tell them, why don't you. Tell them how you get to be right." His voice cracked up out of him. "You stood up in front of the whole Institute and you called me careless and you called me worse and you took my name apart in front of every soul who might ever have hired me again, and you were wrong, and you never once—"

"I was not wrong, Julian." Rosamund did not even turn her head far. "You were sloppy, and you were sloppy in print, and I said so. If you'd rather I'd let it stand—"

"You ruined me." The words fell into a hall gone suddenly, awfully quiet. "You'll get yours, Rosamund. You hear me? A woman like you — you'll get yours, and there won't be a soul in the world sorry."

It was Loveridge who ended it, of course. He had come in unseen at the height of it, silver-headed, unhurried, and he simply put a hand on Julian Crake's shoulder — not hard, an old man's hand — and said something low and kind that nobody caught, and steered him, still shaking, out of the firelight and toward the cold quiet of the passage and a chair, the way a shepherd folds a distressed ewe; and the hall let its breath go and reached, gratefully, for the bowl.

"Charming," murmured Ambrose, at Dilys's ear. "Does one gather the deceased has been busy?"

"She isn't deceased, Ambrose."

"No," he agreed. "Merely much disliked. It is not always a great distance."

Dilys was going to answer that, and did not, because as she turned she saw the other thing — the small, quiet, vicious thing that made no scene at all. Rosamund Sharrow and Cressida Quennell, near the drawn curtain of the great window, standing very close and speaking very low, and neither of them smiling.

"—into papers that are none of your business," Cressida was saying, so quietly that only the shape of it carried. "My family's papers. Prying into what isn't yours—"

"Then your family," said Rosamund, pleasantly, "should have burnt them forty years ago, shouldn't they. Careless of them not to."

Cressida Quennell went white about the mouth, and turned, and walked away; and Dilys, some quarter of an hour later, chancing to want the cloakroom and taking the wrong door in a house she did not know, saw her again — alone in the little estate office off the passage, with a drawer open and a bundle of old buff folders in her arms, pressing them flat to her chest and looking at the door with the particular stillness of the caught, before Dilys murmured an apology and withdrew, and thought no more of it than that everyone had their reasons, that night, to wish the prying woman at the fire a long way off.

—

At eleven they went out to wake the trees.

They bundled into coats and scarves and went out through the great doors under the slow-turning bough and up the white slope of the orchard, forty souls with lanterns and a fiddle and every pot and pan and tea-tray the manor kitchen could muster, into a cold so pure it stopped the breath. The snow had eased to a fine drift of single flakes, and the orchard climbed the hill in black-and-white rows, the old cider trees crook-backed under their loads, and at the top of it — where the ground broke and fell away to the flat white nothing that was the water-meadow under snow — stood the oldest of them all.

The Apple Tree Man. The one they wassailed first and last. Its great low limbs had been propped on posts these forty years; its bark was green-black and furred, and it leaned out over the slope as if listening to the ground, and the ground below it, Dilys knew and did not let herself dwell on, was Maidenwell Corner — where the river had run low at midsummer and given back the bones of a boy the whole village had spent forty years believing had gone to Canada. There was orange tape down there under the snow. Nobody looked at it. Everybody knew where it was.

And there, at the foot of the oldest tree, Godfrey Loveridge became the King.

He did it beautifully. He had done it for forty winters and he did it as though it were the first and holiest time — took the toast that Sadie soaked in the wassail cider and set it up into the crook of the branches for the robins that were the tree's good spirits; poured the libation of hot cider over the black roots so it steamed and stank sweetly in the cold; lifted his fine old voice, cracked but true, into the old song, old apple tree, we wassail thee, and hoping thou wilt bear, and forty voices came in ragged behind him, and then, at the turn of it, they beat the pots — every tray and pan and lid, a great glad clangour flung up into the frozen dark to frighten off whatever it was that stole a good year's fruit, so that the whole white hillside rang and the snow slid from a bough and Wellington, three fields off in Foxglove Cottage, no doubt woke and was outraged.

Then they trooped back down, faces streaming, laughing, half-frozen and wholly happy, into the blessed heat of the hall; and the King came to the last and best of it, which was the honouring.

For the bowl was for everyone, but the King's cup was for one.

It was the old pewter cup, kept for this, and by right immemorial the Wassail King filled it himself, and blessed it himself, and into it — not into the common bowl, but into this one cup alone — he spooned with his own hand the ceremonial float, the dark spiced roasted-apple that he brought each year from his own stillroom, his own cordials and preserves being famous the length of the parish; and then he chose, before them all, the one guest he would honour with it. Old men had wept to be given the King's cup. It was the highest small thing Little Hemlock had to give.

Dilys, warm and tired and pleasantly cider-slow, watched him lift it and thought only how well he did these things, and how much poorer they would all be when he was gone.

He drank Rosamund's health with it and pressed it on her.

She took it, gruff and — Dilys saw, surprised — moved, the abrasive outsider caught off her guard by an old man's grace, and she drank it down, and the hall clapped her, and for a while it warmed even Rosamund Sharrow.

And then, over the next hour, the wassail turned.

She grew loud first. Louder than the drink alone should have made her, holding the fire again, laughing too hard, her colour high — flushed dark, not the fire's flush but a deep uneven burn up her throat and into her face — and then, past midnight, not loud at all. Dilys, at the far end of the hall, watched her put a hand flat to her breastbone as if something there had gripped her, and press the back of her wrist hard to her mouth, and go a bad colour under the redness. Somebody laughed and said the consultant couldn't hold her cider. Rosamund said something short and thick that nobody quite heard, and got herself up unsteadily, one hand out for the table that was not where she thought it was, and muttered about air, about the cold, about — Dilys caught only the fragment, and it lodged — the dig, want to see the dig, the ground at Maidenwell that had obsessed her since she came; and she went out through the great doors under the white berries into the dark, and the snow, which had held its breath through the wassailing, came down again in earnest, thick and straight and final, like a door swinging quietly shut.

"Too much cider on an empty stomach," said Marion Kettleby, comfortably, and refilled her cup from the safe and common bowl. "She'll walk it off. They always do." And nobody, Dilys least of all, went after her; because it was warm inside and cold out, and because a grown woman may take the air; and because there is no one on earth so easy to let walk out into the snow as a woman nobody much likes.

The party broke up not long after. When they came to go, the news went round quiet as the snow itself — the lane to Kingsbourne was gone, filled level bank to bank, and the Green Man's telephone, that one thin thread to the world, had crackled down to nothing an hour since. Little Hemlock was shut. Sealed in white, alone with itself and everyone in it, for as long as the weather chose.

Ambrose walked her home through it, close, his hand at her elbow on the treacherous stretch by the church as it always was now, the snow squeaking under their boots and settling on their shoulders and the village dark and buried and dreadfully beautiful all around them, and she was, she knew, happy, guiltily and wholly happy, and could not think why a small cold unease should be walking home a pace behind her the whole way, plucking at her sleeve like a thing she had forgotten to do.

At her own white gate she stopped, and let Ambrose go on to his, and stood a moment in the falling snow with the flakes stinging her upturned face; and the picture came to her that she would carry out of that night and into all the nights that followed, and could not, then, read at all.

"To the honoured guest," said Godfrey Loveridge, King of the wassail for forty winters, and he filled the King's cup with his own hand and spooned in the spiced apple and set it before Rosamund Sharrow with a bow so courtly and so kind that the whole hall applauded — and Dilys, applauding too, thought what a fortunate village it was to have one man in it who had given it, freely and for nothing, the whole of his long and generous life.