by Susan Cooper
“Oh, Will,” she said. “Not everywhere. Put it all along the mantelpiece or somewhere, so it’s controllable. I mean, otherwise we shall have holly berries underfoot every time anyone draws the curtains.”
A typical female attitude, Will thought in disgust; but he was not inclined to draw attention to his holly by making any great protest. In any case, he reflected as he tried to arrange the holly artistically over the mantel, up here it would be a protection against the only entry into the house that he had forgotten about. Having left his Father Christmas days behind, he had not thought about the chimney.
The house was glowing now with light and colour and excitement. Christmas Eve was almost accomplished. But last of all there came the carol-singing.
After tea that day, when the Christmas lights had been turned on, and when the last rustling scuttlings of present-wrappings were ending, Mr Stanton stretched back in his battered leather armchair, took out his pipe, and beamed pontifically at them all.
“Well,” he said, “who’s going on the trek this year?”
“Me,” said James.
“Me,” said Will.
“Barbara and I,” said Mary.
“Paul, of course,” said Will. His brother’s flute-case was all ready on the kitchen table.
“I don’t know whether I shall,” Robin said.
“Yes, you will,” said Paul. “No good without a baritone.”
“Oh, all right,” said his twin begrudgingly. This brief exchange had been repeated annually now for three years. Being large, mechanically-minded and an excellent footballer, Robin felt it was not quite proper for him to show eagerness for any activity as ladylike as carol-singing. In fact he was genuinely devoted to music, like the rest of them, and had a pleasant dark-brown voice.
“Too busy,” Gwen said. “Sorry.”
“What she means is,” said Mary from a safe distance, “that she has to wash her hair in case Johnnie Penn might come round.”
“What do you mean, might?” said Max from the armchair next to his father’s.
Gwen made a terrible face at him. “Well,” she demanded, “and what about you going carolling?”
“Even busier than you,” Max said lazily. “Sorry.”
“And what he means is,” said Mary, now hovering beside the door, “that he has to sit up in his room and write another enormous long letter to his blonde bird in Southampton.”
Max pulled off one of his slippers to hurl, but she was gone.
“Bird?” said his father. “Whatever will the word be next?”
“Good grief, Dad!” James looked at him in horror. “You really do live in the Stone Age. Girls have been birds since the year one. Just about as much brains as birds too, if you ask me.”
“Some real birds have quite a lot of brains,” Will said reflectively. “Don’t you think?” But the episode of the rooks had been so effectively removed from James’s mind that he took no notice; the words bounced off.
“Off you all go,” said Mrs Stanton. “Boots, thick coats, and back by eight-thirty.”
“Eight-thirty?” Robin said. “If we give Miss Bell three carols, and Miss Greythorne asks us all in for punch?”
“Well, nine-thirty at the very outside,” she said.
* * *
It was very dark by the time they left; the sky had not cleared, and no moon nor even a single star glimmered through the black night. The lantern that Robin carried on a pole cast a glittering circle of light on the snow, but each of them had a candle in one coat pocket just the same. When they reached the Manor, old Miss Greythorne would insist on their coming in and standing in her great stone-floored entrance hall with all the lights turned out, each holding up a lighted candle while they sang.
The air was freezing, and their breath clouded out thick and white. Now and then a stray snowflake drifted down from the sky, and Will thought of the fat lady in the bus and her predictions. Barbara and Mary were chattering away as cosily as if they were sitting at home, but behind the chatter the footsteps of all the group rang out cold and hard on the snow-caked road. Will was happy, snug in the thought of Christmas and the pleasure of carol-singing; he walked along in a contented dreamy state, clutching the big collecting-box they carried in aid of Huntercombe’s small, ancient, famous and rapidly crumbling Saxon church. Then, there ahead of them was Dawsons’ Farm with a large bunch of the many-berried holly nailed above the back door, and the carol-singing had begun.
On through the village they sang: “Nowell” for the rector; “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” for jolly Mr Hutton, the enormous businessman in the new mock-Tudor house at the end of the village, who always looked as though he were resting very merry indeed; “Once in Royal David’s City” for Mrs Pettigrew, the widowed postmistress, who dyed her hair with tea-leaves and kept a small limp dog which looked like a skein of grey wool. They sang “Adeste Fideles” in Latin and “Les Anges dans nos Campagnes” in French for tiny Miss Bell, the retired village schoolmistress, who had taught every one of them how to read and write, add and subtract, talk and think, before they went on to other schools elsewhere. And little Miss Bell said huskily, “Beautiful, beautiful,” put some coins that they knew she could not afford into the collecting box, gave each of them a hug, and — “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” — they were off to the next house on the list.
There were four or five more, one of them the home of lugubrious Mrs Horniman, who “did” for their mother once a week and had been born and bred in the East End of London until a bomb had blown her house to bits thirty years before. She had always given them a silver sixpence each, and so she still did, coolly disregarding changes in the currency. “Wouldn’t be Christmas without sixpences,” Mrs Horniman said. “I laid a good stock in before we got landed with all them decimals, so I did. So I can go on every Christmas just the way I used to, me ducks, and I reckon my stock’ll see me out, until I’m deep in me grave and you’re singing to someone else at this here door. Merry Christmas!”
And then it was the Manor, the last stop before home.
Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green,
Here we come a-wandering, so fair to be seen. . . .
They always began with the old Wassail Song for Miss Greythorne, and this year the bit about the green leaves, Will reflected, was even more inappropriate than usual. The carol bounded its way along, and for the last verse Will and James soared up into the high pealing descant that they did not always use for an ending because it took so much breath.
Good master and good mistress while you’re sitting by the fire,
Pray think of us poor children who are wandering in the mire. . . .
Robin tugged the big metal bell-pull, whose deep clanging always filled Will with an obscure alarm, and as they spiralled up in the last verse the great door opened, and there stood Miss Greythorne’s butler, in the tail-coat he wore always on Christmas Eve night. He was not a very grand butler; his name was Bates, a tall, lean, morose man who could often be seen helping the one aged gardener in the vegetable garden near the Manor’s back gate, or discussing his arthritis with Mrs Pettigrew at the Post Office.
Love and joy come to you
And to you your wassail too . . .
The butler smiled and nodded politely at them and held the door wide, and Will all but swallowed his last high note, for it was not Bates; it was Merriman.
The carol ended, and they all relaxed, shuffling in the snow. “Enchanting,” Merriman said gravely, surveying them impersonally, and Miss Greythorne’s high imperious tones came ringing past him. “Bring them in! Bring them in! Don’t keep them waiting on the doorstep!”
She sat there in the long entry hall, in the same high-backed chair that they saw every Christmas Eve. She had not been able to walk for years after an accident when she was a young woman — her horse had fallen and rolled on her, the village said — but she flatly refused ever to be seen in a wheelchair. Thin-faced and bright-eyed, her grey hair always swept up on
top of her head in a kind of knot, she was a figure of total mystery in Huntercombe.
“How’s y’mother?” Miss Greythorne demanded of Paul. “And y’ father?”
“Very well, thank you, Miss Greythorne.”
“Havin’ a good Christmas?”
“Splendid, thanks. I hope you are.” Paul, who was sorry for Miss Greythorne, always went to some trouble to be warmly polite; he made sure now that his eyes did not flicker round the high-roofed hall as he spoke. For although the cook-housekeeper and the maid were standing beaming at the back of the hall, and though of course there was the butler who had opened the front door, otherwise in all this great house there was no trace of any visitor, tree, decoration, or any other sign of Christmas festivity, save for one gigantic branch of many-berried holly hanging over the mantel.
“An odd season, this,” Miss Greythorne said, looking at Paul pensively. “So full of a number of things, as that odious little girl in the poem said.” She turned suddenly to Will. “And are you having a busy time this year, eh, young man?”
“I certainly am,” said Will frankly, caught off balance.
“A light for your candles,” said Merriman in low respectful tones, coming forward with a box of enormous matches. Hastily they all tugged the candles from their pockets, and he struck a match and moved carefully among them, the light turning his eyebrows into fantastic bristling hedges and the lines from nose to mouth into deep-shadowed ravines. Will looked thoughtfully at his tail-coat, which was cut away at the waist, and which he wore with a kind of jabot at the neck instead of a white tie. He was having some difficulty in thinking of Merriman as a butler.
Someone at the back of the hall turned out the lights, leaving the long room lit only by the group of flickering flames in their hands. There was the soft tap of a foot; then they began with the sweet, soft lullaby carol, “Lullay lullay, thou little tiny child . . .” ending it with a last wordless verse played only by Paul. The clear, husky sound of the flute fell through the air like bars of light and filled Will with a strange aching longing, a sense of something waiting far off, that he could not understand. Then for contrast they sang “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen;” then “The Holly and the Ivy.” And then they were back at “Good King Wenceslas,” always a grand finale for Miss Greythorne, and always making Will sorry for Paul, who had once observed that this carol was so totally unsuited to his kind of music that it must have been written by someone who despised the flute.
But it was fun being the page, trying to make his voice so exactly match James’s that the two of them together sounded like one boy.
Sire, he lives a good league hence . . .
. . . and Will thought: we’re really doing well this time, I’d swear James wasn’t singing at all if . . .
Underneath the mountain . . .
. . . if it weren’t for the fact that his mouth’s moving . . .
Right against the forest fence. . .
. . . and he glanced through the gloom as he sang, and saw, with a shock as brutal as if someone had thumped him in the stomach, that in fact James’s mouth was not moving, nor was any other part of James, nor of Robin or Mary or any of the Stantons. They stood there immobile, all of them, caught out of Time, as the Walker had stood in Oldway Lane when the girl of the Dark enchanted him. And the flames of their candles flickered no longer, but each burned with the same strange, unconsuming pillar of white luminous air that had risen from Will’s burning branch that other day. Paul’s fingers no longer moved on his flute; he too stood motionless, holding it to his mouth. Yet the music, very much like but even sweeter than the music of a flute, went on, and so did Will, singing in spite of himself, finishing the verse . . .
By Saint Agnes’ fou . . . oun . . . tain. . . .
. . . And just as he began to wonder, through the strange sweet accompanying music that seemed to come out of the air, quite how the next verse could be done, unless a boy soprano were expected to sound like good King Wenceslas as well as his page, a great beautiful deep voice rolled out through the room with the familiar words, a great deep voice that Will had never heard employed in song before and yet at once recognised.
. . . Bring me flesh and bring me wine
Bring me pine-logs hither;
Thou and I will see him dine
When we bear them thither. . . .
Will’s head swam a little, the room seemed to grow and then shrink again; but the music went on, and the pillars of light stood still above the candle-flames, and as the next verse began Merriman reached casually out and took his hand, and they walked forward, singing together:
Page and monarch forth they went,
Forth they went together,
Through the rude wind’s wild lament
And the bitter weather.
They walked down the long entrance hall, away from the motionless Stantons, past Miss Greythorne in her chair, and the cook-housekeeper, and the maid, all unmoving, alive and yet suspended out of life. Will felt as though he were walking in the air, not touching the ground at all, down the dark hall; no light ahead of them now, but only a glow from behind. Into the dark . . .
Sire, the night is darker now,
And the wind blows stronger;
Fails my heart I know not how,
I can go no longer. . . .
Will heard his voice shake, for the words were the right words for what was in his mind.
Mark my footsteps, good my page;
Tread thou in them boldly . . .
Merriman sang; and suddenly more was ahead of Will than the dark.
There before him rose the great doors, the great carved doors that he had first seen on a snow-mounded Chiltern hillside, and Merriman raised his left arm and pointed at them with his five fingers spread wide and straight. Slowly the doors opened, and the elusive silvery music of the Old Ones came swelling up briefly to join the accompaniment of the carol, and then was lost again. And he walked forward with Merriman into the light, into a different time and a different Christmas, singing as if he could pour all the music in the world into these present notes — and singing so confidently that the school choirmaster, who was very strict about raised heads and well-moving jaws, would have fallen mute in astonished pride.
• The Book of Gramarye • They were in a bright room again, a room unlike anything Will had ever seen. The ceilings were high, painted with pictures of trees and woods and mountains; the walls were panelled in shiny gold wood, lit here and there by strange glowing white globes. And the room was full of music, their own carol taken up by many voices, in a gathering of people dressed like a brilliant scene from a history book. The women, bare-shouldered, wore long full dresses with elaborately looped and ruffled skirts; the men wore suits not unlike Merriman’s, with squared-off tailcoats, long straight trousers, white ruffles or black silk cravats at the neck. Indeed now that Will came to look again at Merriman, he realised that the clothes he wore had never really been those of a butler at all, but belonged totally to this other century, whichever it might be.
A lady in a white dress was sweeping forward to meet them, people round her moving respectfully back to make way, and as the carol ended she cried: “Beautiful! Beautiful! Come in, come in!” The voice was exactly the voice of Miss Greythorne greeting them at the Manor door a little while earlier, and when Will looked up at the face he saw that in a sense this was Miss Greythorne too. There were the same eyes and rather bony face, the same friendly but imperious manner — only this Miss Greythorne was much younger and prettier, like a flower that has unfolded from the bud but not yet been battered by the sun and wind and days.
“Come, Will,” she said, and took his hand, smiling down at him, and he went easily to her; it was so clear that she knew him and that those around her, men and women, young and old, all smiling and gay, knew him too. Most of the bright crowd was leaving the room now, couples and chattering groups, in the direction of a delicious cooking smell that clearly signalled supper somewhere else in the house. But
a group of a score or so remained.
“We were waiting for you,” said Miss Greythorne, and drew him towards the back of the room where a fire blazed warm and friendly in an ornate fireplace. She was looking at Merriman too, including him in the words. “We are all ready, there are no — hindrances.”
“You are sure?” Merriman’s voice came quick and deep like a hammer-stroke, and Will glanced up curiously. But the hawk-nosed face was as secret as ever.
“Quite sure,” said the lady. Suddenly she knelt down beside Will, her skirt billowing round her like a great white rose; she was at his eye-level now, and she held both his hands, gazing at him, and spoke softly and urgently. “It is the third Sign, Will. The Sign of Wood. We call it sometimes the Sign of Learning. This is the time for remaking the Sign. In every century since the beginning, Will, every hundred years, the Sign of Wood must be renewed, for it is the only one of the six that cannot keep its nature unchanged. Every hundred years we have remade it, in the way that we were first taught. And now this will be the last time, because when your own century comes you will take it out for all time, for the joining, and there need be no more renewing then.”
She stood up, and said clearly, “We are glad to see you, Will Stanton, Sign-Seeker. Very, very glad.” And there was a general rumble of voices, low and high, soft and deep, all approving and agreeing; it was like a wall, Will thought, you could lean against it and feel support. Very strongly he could feel the strength of friendship that came out of this small group of unfamiliar, handsomely-dressed people; he wondered whether all of them were Old Ones. Looking up at Merriman beside him, he grinned in delight, and Merriman smiled down at him with a look of more open relaxed pleasure than Will had yet seen on the stern, rather grim face.
