Chapter 20 The Key Left in the Door

The parcel came on a Saturday, three weeks after the bank box, and unlike the last parcel it came with a proper stamp and a proper return address and had not been posted in Thistlecote at all. Verity opened it on the counter with Netta watching and Rufus pretending not to watch, and inside the brown paper was a small flat box, and inside the box, wrapped in tissue, was the green ledger. Not a ledger. The ledger. Her father's. The one she had carried back from the bank and put on the shelf and gone to look at so often that Netta had started to tease her about it. She turned to the shelf behind her. The gap where the book had been was empty. "Then what's on the shelf—" Rufus began, and stopped. Verity had opened the returned ledger, and it was her father's book all right, every page of it, every door, every date, the whole careful life, and it was hers, and she did not understand how a thing could be on the shelf and in a parcel at the same time. Then she turned to the last page, the page after the last entry, which in her father's book was blank, and was no longer blank, because someone had written there, in the spaced careful printing of a person who had learned it from a mother who had learned it from nobody. *Miss Callender. I took nothing that was yours, in the end, except the time it took to read the book, and for that I borrowed a copy of a copy, and you are holding the copy, and the true one is on your shelf, and you may check every page and find that they match, because I copied it by hand, door by door, over one long winter, before I ever came to this town. I am telling you this so that you know I meant to keep my promise about the last key, and so that you know about the other page.* *My mother had a sister. Her name was Verity. When she left this town she left two lives behind, and I have found the first, and I am writing to you because the second one has just sent me a key, with no note and no name, and a tag in a hand I do not know, and on the tag there is a place I have never heard of.* *It is in the box, under the tissue. Open it, if you like. You are the only locksmith I trust.* Verity looked in the box. Under the tissue, in a fold of paper, was a small iron key, old, cold, worn on both sides, with a tag, and on the tag, in a hand she did not know, was a single line. *The Old Rectory, Fellcombe. Ask for the woman who keeps the bees.* Below it, in the same hand, small and steady, four more words. *Tell no one yet.* Verity sat down on the stool behind the counter, and put the key in front of her on the wood, and looked at it for a long time, and Tibbs got up off the counter and came and sat on the ledger, which is where a cat ought to be, on top of the thing you were worried about. The shop bell went and Rufus came in with two coffees and stopped in the doorway when he saw the two ledgers side by side on the counter, the real one and the copy, and the small iron key between them. "Right," he said, slowly. "One of those is the book that's been on the shelf all week and one of those came out of a parcel, and they look the same, and I'm not going to ask which is which because I know you're about to tell me and I'd rather sit down for it." Verity told him. She told him about the copy made by hand over a winter, page by page, door by door, by a woman who had never once let herself be seen in a town she was trying to belong to; and about the other page at the back, and the sister named Verity, and the iron key, and Fellcombe, and the bees. Rufus turned his coffee cup round on the counter and thought about it the way he thought about a lock, from the inside out. "So the woman in the green coat wasn't the only one," he said at last. "There's another one. Somewhere. Who's got a key to a place nobody's heard of, and who wrote to Netta in a hand nobody knows, and who's been waiting." "Or who's been hidden." "Same thing, isn't it." "Usually," Verity said. She opened the copy and turned to the mill pages, and then to the back, where the second hand had written the four words about the ledger and the town and the mill and the truth, and she read them again with the real ledger open beside it, and the two of them matched, every line, every margin, every careful letter her father had ever pressed into a page. A woman had sat somewhere, one long winter, and copied the whole of a locksmith's working life by hand, so that she could read it without being seen to read it, and had done it well enough that a locksmith could not tell the difference until she said so. "That's the most frightening thing I've ever seen in this shop," Verity said, "and I've seen a man try to open a door with a fish." "What'll you do about Fellcombe?" "I'll find out where it is, and I'll write to the woman who keeps the bees, and I'll wait to be told what she wants, because the last person who wrote to me in a careful hand turned out to be worth knowing, and because a locked door is only ever a door that hasn't been given a reason to open yet." She closed both books. "And in the meantime I've got Mrs. Tunnicliffe's back door sticking, and a shop to run, and a cat who has plans for the afternoon." "So," said Netta, quietly. "Fellcombe." "Fellcombe," Verity agreed. She did not know where Fellcombe was. She would look it up in the morning. But she knew one thing already, and it had been true since the first evening of all this, when she knelt on Enid Tunnicliffe's step with the last of the light going grey over the square: that a town is a set of promises, and that some of them are kept, and some are broken, and some are left, quietly, in the dark, for whoever comes along next with the patience to open them. She put the little iron key on the ring with all the others, and turned the sign to CLOSED, and went to make tea.