Chapter 1 The Road to Brannel

The road to Brannel climbed through three valleys and ended in a place the map had drawn as a grey smudge between two contour lines. Dr. Rhea Alder drove it in a borrowed car with a leaking exhaust and a radio that picked up nothing but static from the last town onward. The windscreen wipers worked on one speed — slow, reluctant, and insufficient — and the rain came at the glass in sheets that turned the world beyond the bonnet into a watercolour bleeding off its edges. She had taken the post because nobody else would. The listing on the regional health board had been pinned to a corkboard for six weeks, the paper curling at its corners while the other positions were claimed and crossed off in red marker. General practitioner, village of Brannel, population approximately two hundred. The clinic was provided with the cottage. No on-call surgeon within forty minutes. The description had used the word "quiet" three times, which Rhea had learned to read as a form of warning. The tarmac gave way to gravel, then to packed mud, then to a track that followed the curve of a peat-stained stream up the mountainside. The stream ran the colour of weak tea, stained by the bogs that capped the ridges on either side. She had read about those bogs in the regional almanac during her first week of preparation. Peat cutting was still practiced in Brannel, though the almanac had noted this with a faintly puzzled tone, as though it were a habit preserved more by stubbornness than by necessity. The village appeared between two bends as though it had been placed there by careful hands and then left to weather. Stone cottages with slate roofs, walls darkened by decades of rain to the colour of wet charcoal. A church with a square tower and no spire, its belfry a dark rectangle open to the sky. Smoke rose from several chimneys, though Rhea could see no one in the streets. The smoke went straight up in the windless air, each column a separate column of grey against the grey sky, and the effect was of a village holding its breath. She parked beside what the letter had described as the medical cottage — a narrow building at the end of the single paved street, its door painted a green so faded it was nearly the colour of the moss that crept up the stonework on either side. The door was unlocked. Inside, the air was warm and smelled of peat smoke and something herbal she could not identify — not lavender, not thyme, but something in that family, a scent that seemed to belong to the walls themselves. The cottage had a consultation room at the front, a small dispensary behind it, and living quarters upstairs. The examination table was solid oak, scarred and darkened with age, and the scales on the sideboard were the old kind with brass weights. Someone had been thorough in cleaning the place before her arrival, but the thoroughness had only made the age of everything more visible. The stone floor had been scrubbed until it gleamed. The shelves held jars that had been emptied and washed and replaced in a neat row. The whole cottage had the quality of a held breath. She was still standing in the consultation room, running her hand along the back of a chair, when the knock came. Three raps, evenly spaced, precise. Mrs. Kroll stood on the threshold with a basket. She was perhaps seventy, perhaps eighty, her face mapped with the deep lines of a life lived outdoors and indoors in roughly equal measure. Her hair was white, pulled back and pinned with a tortoiseshell clip. She wore a shawl of undyed wool over a dark dress, and the shawl was wet from the rain though she did not appear to have noticed. "You're the new doctor," she said. It was not a question. "Rhea Alder." "Mrs. Kroll. I keep the books for the parish council, such as it is. I brought you bread and a jar of the preserve from the autumn plums. You'll want to eat. The shop in the village keeps odd hours." Rhea took the basket. The bread was warm. "The previous doctor," Rhea said, and then stopped, because Mrs. Kroll's expression did not change but something in the quality of her attention shifted, a subtle hardening, like the moment when a door you thought was ajar turns out to be locked. "Dr. Fenn left in the spring," Mrs. Kroll said. "He was called away to family matters." "His notes said he'd been here eleven years." "People do stay in Brannel, Dr. Alder. They stay because it suits them to." She paused. "I'll show you the shutter latches. They're on every window. You'll need to learn to use them before dark." "The shutters?" "Every window in the village has iron shutters on the inside. You'll see the latches when you look. They're old, but they work." Mrs. Kroll's gaze moved past Rhea to the window behind her, where the grey light fell across the examination table. "In autumn, you keep them closed from sundown. Every house does. It's how it's done." "Is there a reason?" "There are many reasons for things in Brannel, Dr. Alder. Most of them are good enough reasons, and the rest are old enough that they amount to the same thing." She adjusted her shawl, drawing it tighter at her throat. "The consultation hours are posted on the door. The villagers will come to you. Don't walk the hills after dark in October or November. The peat burn is not lit in autumn — don't ask why, just don't light it. And if you see the moths, close the shutters and leave them closed until morning." "The moths?" "The autumn moths. You'll know them when you see them. They're not like the summer ones. Don't leave a light burning for them. I know it's a doctor's instinct to leave every window lit — light means safety, clean rooms, sterile work. Here, in autumn, light is the wrong thing." She said it the way one might say that the bridge is out or the river freezes early — as information, not superstition, a fact of the landscape that could kill you if you ignored it. Then she descended the two stone steps to the street and walked away along the wet road, her shawl the only point of colour in a world made entirely of grey and green and black. Rhea closed the door. The bread in the basket was still warm. She went to the window and looked out at the village, at the columns of smoke, at the church with its open belfry, at the iron latches on every visible window, screwed into the stone with heavy bolts that had been there so long the metal had gone the same colour as the walls. She counted the houses she could see from the consultation room. Every single one had them. She lit a lamp and set it on the table and opened the basket and ate the bread, which was dense and dark and tasted of peat smoke and grain. The plum preserve was very sweet and slightly bitter at the end. The rain continued against the windows, and the wipers of her car sat motionless in the driveway, and somewhere in the village a bell rang once — not the church bell, a smaller sound, a hand bell or a cattle bell — and then stopped, and the silence that followed was so complete it seemed to have texture, as though it were made of something solid and wet and old. Rhea Alder sat in the consultation room of the medical cottage in Brannel and felt, for the first time since leaving the city, that she had arrived somewhere that would not give up its truths easily. ---