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“I’m not going into the herb garden at midnight if someone is creeping up on me—”
“Not to attack you. But to cheat you into thinking that you were destined to marry them.”
“I’m not going to marry anyone who creeps up on me,” Matthew protested. “Mother Alinor, this isn’t going to work! It can never have worked! People would always have had to marry madwomen!”
“You could try rosemary,” Alinor said, turning to Gabrielle. “You take a plate of flour and put it under a rosemary bush on Midsummer Eve. In the morning you will find your future husband’s initials written in the flour.”
“That’s a pretty one,” Hester said.
“Could we do that?” Mia asked, her eyes shining. “Just to see, of course. Not that I believe in it!”
“But I don’t want to marry a man who goes around at midnight writing his name in plates of flour,” Gabrielle objected.
“Besides, he’ll bump into Matthew’s mad wife, creeping up on him!” Mia laughed. “Is it all pretend?”
“It’s all about looking into your own heart, and then reading whatever you want in leaves and flour and dust,” Alinor ruled.
“Grandmother, have you ever told fortunes?” Hester asked her.
Alinor’s face was grave. “No sensible woman would ever do so. Even now, it’s not safe. When it’s wrong, you’re taken for a fool; and if it comes right, then you’re taken for a witch.” In the brightness of the sweet-smelling stillroom, with the untroubled young faces before her, she spoke without a quaver in her voice. “I was wrongly accused once.”
“What did they say?” Mia asked.
“That I had a purse of faerie gold.” Alinor smiled, refusing to remember the fear. “That I was a mermaid from the sea.”
“Was there a priest?” Gabrielle asked acutely.
Alinor gave her a little smile. “Once there was.”
“Was there a true love?”
“As true as it could be.”
“But have you ever known Midsummer Eve foretelling to come true?” Mia asked.
“Well, of course people make wishes come true. There’s no magic in that—just desire.”
“These young ladies are too young for wishes,” Matthew said firmly, and Alinor shot a smile at him.
“Just so.”
Alinor guessed that curiosity would get the better of the girls, and she watched from her bedroom window as they let themselves out of the garden door and crept into the herb garden with a basket of goods. She picked up her cape, drew it around her shoulders, and put up the hood. The garden was light with the eerie luminous gleam of midsummer night, a pale sun almost white, hidden by the flat silver sea, the moon high and golden, rising over the trees of Sealsea Forest.
Alinor went down the stairs, holding to the bannister, picked up her cane by the front door, opened the door without a sound, and felt the warm air on her cheek. A barn owl called plaintively from somewhere in the garden, and an answering cry came from the wood. Alinor smiled, imagining the girls clutching each other in fright.
The drive of white shingle gleamed in the half-light, and Alinor walked away from the house, past the tall gateposts, and took the path to church. She paused at the lich-gate, remembering the time she had waited in the churchyard on Midsummer Eve. It was so long ago that it seemed as if another woman had walked in the moonlight and waited on the porch to see a handsome young man coming towards her. Alinor put her hand to her heart, remembering how it hadspeeded the moment she had seen him, all those years ago, and then she stepped out of the shadow of the lich-gate into the eerie dusk of the silent graveyard.
She was alone; the upright headstones were solitary, casting dark shadows on the bleached grass, the carved crosses hid no one. The only large memorial was dedicated to the Peachey family, at the far end of the graveyard in solitary grandeur, and there was no one standing in its shadow.
Alinor’s feet made no sound as she walked to the church porch. In the distance she could hear the softest whisper from the harbor as the tide crept in, silvery under the light sky, and the babble of a few sleepless birds. She seated herself on the bench of the porch, where she had waited nearly forty years ago, and looked out through the archway down the path, towards the sea, for the ghosts of those she loved, that would come to say farewell as they would die this year.
From the bell tower in the graveyard she heard the slow clank of the mechanism winding up to ring the bell. Twelve times the hammer hit the bell, the sound ringing out into the gray night as if it were calling someone from far away. Alinor rose to her feet, like a girl will stand to see her lover, until at last he came, walking between the graves, his feet on the ground making no mark, and there was no sound when he reached the stone step of the porch.
All her heart was in her smile. “James,” she said. “I am so glad you are come to me, at last.”
He was a young man, as handsome as the priest from the charcoal burner’s story with long, dark hair tied back at the nape of his neck and dark eyes set in a pale face, and when she put her hand out to him she saw the scratched hand of the fisherman’s wife that she had been forty years ago. “I knew we would meet again,” she said simply.
He nodded. “I knew it too.”
