Chapter 5 The Sundown Rite

She learned the Sundown Rite on her fifth evening, and she learned it the hard way, by almost breaking it before she understood what it was. The light had gone the color of weak tea and she was in the long hall with a book she was not reading, and the clock on the stair landing had not yet struck, and Mrs. Pye came through the hall at a fast walk with her head down and her hands full, and Romilly said, Good evening, and Mrs. Pye did not answer, and did not even slow, and something in the set of the housekeeper's shoulders sent a small cold finger down Romilly's spine. A moment later the bell in the chapel rang once. Then it rang again. It was a slow bell and a deep one and it did not sound like a summons; it sounded like a sigh given metal. The house changed. Doors closed along the length of the hall, one after another, in order, from the far end to the near, as if an unseen hand were walking toward her closing the world behind it. The housekeeper disappeared into the west wing. Crispin appeared at the foot of the stair and stood with his hands folded and his head bowed and did not look at her. Mrs. Pye's lamp went out. The fire in the great room, which she could see through the open doors, settled low and did not die. And the silence came down over Withergrave the way water comes down over a stone, without hurry and without any way back. Romilly stood alone in the middle of the long hall with the book in her hands and understood two things at once. The Sundown Rite was beginning. And she had no idea what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to be silent. That much she could guess. Let no door stand open, the rule had said, and now she understood why, because the doors were closing, all of them, and the one that mattered most was the door at the end of the upper corridor, the plain one with no lock, and she thought of it standing open in the dark of the second floor and felt her skin go tight. She closed her book and she went soft-footed up the stairs, because she had not been told not to, and because some part of her had decided, standing in that cold hall, that she would not spend a year in a house whose silence she did not understand. The upper corridor was black, and her eyes made shapes out of the dark, and she walked by memory toward the far end with one hand out to the wall. The door to the Room of Years was open. A thin line of candlelight lay across the floor at its foot. She should have turned back. Later she would tell herself she did not turn back because she was brave, and she would know it was a lie. She did not turn back because the light in that forbidden room, at that hour of the Sundown Rite, was the first thing in Withergrave that felt like a promise. She put her eye to the gap. A single candle stood on a table at the far side of the room, and in its light she saw shelves and shelves and shelves of books and ledgers and long rolls of cloth, and in the middle of the room, with his back to her, the Keeper of Withergrave stood before the table with his head bowed and his hands at his sides. He was not reading. He was not writing. He stood the way a man stands at a grave, and the candle did not move, and the room did not breathe, and Romilly watched him the way she had watched the lantern on the flats, with her heart working and no name for what she felt. Then he said, without turning, without raising his voice: That door is not open to you. She did not run. She did not know afterward why she did not run. She stood in the black corridor with her eye at the crack of light and she said, through the gap, quietly, so as not to break the quiet that ruled the house, You wrote me a tenth rule and then you crossed it out. He turned. The candle turned his shadow on the wall, large and dark and slow. Come in, he said. Or go to bed. But do not stand in the dark and watch me. It is the one thing in this house I will not have. She went in. The room was cold and smelled of wax and dust and salt, and on the table beside the candle there lay a long folded thing of pale cloth, embroidered edge to edge, so old the white had gone the color of bone. She did not know it, then, for the Name-Cloth. She only knew that the Keeper of Withergrave stood between her and it, and that he did not seem angry, which frightened her more than anger would have. You broke a rule, he said. I did not enter, she said. You asked me in. A muscle moved in his jaw, and for one moment she thought he might almost have laughed, and then the moment was gone and he said, That will not save you with her. Honoria counts a rule kept or a rule broken and nothing in between. You stood on the turn of the stair. You looked through a forbidden door. That is a breaking, and there is a cost, and you will pay it, and I will be the one to set the price. He said it evenly, as a fact, and she believed him. What is the cost, she said. The Sundown Rite, he said, is not a prayer and it is not a punishment. It is a door that this house closes every night, and the closing of that door does something, and the doing of it is not free, and I am the man who pays for it. Tonight you opened a door while I was paying. That does not matter to me. It matters to the house. He crossed to the window, where the last grey light was gone and the flats lay black under a thin sliver of moon. Tomorrow the payment will be larger because of you, and you will help me make it, and you will learn why none of us stands in the dark and watches. She looked at the cloth on the table, at its embroidered edge where the candlelight caught thread gone the color of dried roses. Then teach me, she said. She understood then, standing in the cold room with the candle between them, that the rules of Withergrave were not there to keep her in and were not there to keep the village out. They were there to keep something closed, and the something was not a room and was not a person, and the man in front of her had been standing between the house and that something for eleven years, and the house had never once told him what it was. She thought about the wall below them with its twenty-seven little doors, and about the tide that touched the stone twice a day, and about a family that had believed for three hundred years that the sea takes back what the land gives, and she decided, in the space of one held breath, that whatever the house believed, she was no longer going to believe it without asking. He was quiet for a while. When he spoke again his voice had lost its evenness, just a little, just at the edges. You do not know what you are offering, he said. And that, Miss Draycott, is the problem with this entire house. ---