Elspeth stood in the workroom doorway with the wet ink shining on the paper, and she understood, all at once, that she had a choice to make, and that she had already made it.
She could leave. The carrier's cart came on Thursdays. It was Tuesday. She could pack her shears and her thimble and her black dress, and she could wait two days, and she could go back to Edinburgh, to the workroom above the Grassmarket, to the bad light and the worse pay, and she could forget Dunmire House entirely, the way you forget a dream that frightened you.
Or she could stay, and find out what was in the jar.
She stayed. She did not decide it, exactly. She simply did not leave. In the morning she went down to breakfast, and ate what was put in front of her, and went to the workroom, and finished the blue dress, and when Miss Verity came to try it on, Elspeth fitted it with steady hands, and Miss Verity turned this way and that, and said it was the finest dress she had owned in twenty years, and Elspeth thanked her, and said nothing about the letter, or the diary, or the pen writing in the night.
But that afternoon, when the house was quiet, she did the thing she had been meaning to do since the first night. She took the storm jar down from the shelf, and she carried it to the window, and she looked at it properly, in the daylight.
The jar was glass, stoppered tight, the label tied around its neck in faded ink: *The great storm. The night the master died. 7 October 1911.*
And inside it, at the very bottom, where the light could barely reach, was a small dark shape, curled tight, like a thing asleep. Elspeth turned the jar, slowly, and the shape moved — not much, only a little, the way a sleeping thing moves when it dreams — and she saw, then, what it was.
It was a bird. A small bird, no bigger than her thumb, with its wings folded and its beak tucked into its breast, as though it had flown into the jar to shelter from the storm and had never flown out again.
Elspeth put the jar down on the worktable. She sat down. She put her head in her hands, and she thought about what Miss Verity had said — that the mistress kept the weather as a diary, that the weather was the only honest record of a life — and she thought about what Mrs. Bain had said, that the jar was not empty and none of them knew what was in it, and she thought about the letter, and the diary, and the pen writing in the night, and she understood, at last, what none of them had understood.
The mistress had not put the storm in the jar. The storm had put itself there. Or rather — the bird had. The bird had flown in out of the great storm, on the night the master died, and the mistress, in her grief, had stoppered the jar without looking inside, and the bird had lived there ever since, on air and darkness, because that was what the house did to living things. It shut them up, and it kept them, and it did not let them go.
Elspeth did not know if that was true. She did not know if any of it was true. But she knew one thing, and she knew it with the same certainty with which she knew how to cut a sleeve: the bird was alive, and it had been alive for a year, in a jar, in the dark, and if she did not open the jar, it would die there, and the house would keep one more small dead thing on its shelves, and call it weather.
She was reaching for the stopper when the workroom door opened, and Mrs. Dunmire stood there.
Elspeth had never seen the mistress leave the drawing room. She had never seen her standing, or walking, or anywhere but sitting by the fire, looking into it. Now she stood in the doorway, in her black dress, with her hands folded in front of her, and she looked at Elspeth, and at the jar on the worktable, and her face, which had been tired for so long that tiredness had become its shape, changed.
"Put it down," Mrs. Dunmire said. Her voice was not soft now, and it was not slow. It was the voice of a woman who had given an order and expected it to be obeyed.
Elspeth put the jar down. She did not let go of it. Her hands stayed where they were, on either side of the glass.
"Mrs. Dunmire," she said. "There is a bird in this jar. It is alive."
"I know," Mrs. Dunmire said. "I have always known."
"Then why —"
"Because I put it there," Mrs. Dunmire said. "Not the storm. Me. On the night my husband died, I found the bird on the step, half dead from the storm, and I put it in the jar to keep it safe, and I stoppered the jar, and I have kept it ever since. Do you know why, Miss Drummond? Because it is the only living thing in this house that has never left me. My husband left. My son left. My sister-in-law talks of leaving every day. But the bird has stayed. It has stayed for a year, in the dark, and it has never once asked to be let out."
Elspeth looked at the jar. The bird was still now, curled tight, its beak tucked into its breast.
"That is not staying," Elspeth said, quietly. "That is being kept."
Mrs. Dunmire's hands, folded in front of her, tightened until the knuckles showed white. "You do not understand this house," she said. "You have been here three days. You do not understand what it is to lose everything and to keep the one small thing that is left."
"I understand more than you think," Elspeth said. "My mother died two years ago. My father went to Canada and has not written since. I came here because there was nothing left in Edinburgh for me. I know what it is to keep a small thing. But a small thing kept in the dark is not kept, ma'am. It is only hidden."
They stood there, the mistress and the dressmaker, with the jar between them on the worktable, and the house was quiet around them, and the rain had begun again on the window, and Elspeth thought of the letters, and the mirrors, and the diary, and the pen writing in the night, and she asked the question she had been carrying since the first morning.
"Who writes the letters, ma'am? The ones that arrive by post, in my handwriting, with words from my diary. Who writes them?"
Mrs. Dunmire looked at the jar. She did not answer at once. When she did, her voice was so low that Elspeth had to lean forward to hear it.
"I do," she said. "I write them. I have written them for thirty years. I write the letters that arrive in this house, and I write the letters that leave it, and I write them in the hands of the people they are meant for, because that is the only way I know to make the house speak. Mrs. Bain opens the letters because she thinks she is protecting me. She is not. She is protecting herself from knowing that I have already read them, because I wrote them."
Elspeth stared at her. "You wrote the letter that said you were expecting me? Before I arrived?"
"Yes," Mrs. Dunmire said. "I write to everyone who comes here, before they come. I write to them in their own hand, because I have read their letters of application, and I know their hand. I write to them so that they will know, when they arrive, that they were expected. That they were wanted. That this house, which has taken so much from me, has not taken my ability to expect someone."
"And my diary?" Elspeth said. "How did you know what I wrote in my diary?"
"I did not read your diary," Mrs. Dunmire said. "I read your face. You are afraid of the jars, Miss Drummond. It is written on your face every time you look at them. I wrote what I thought you would write, and I was right, because fear writes the same words in everyone."
Elspeth looked at the jar. She looked at Mrs. Dunmire. She thought about the bird, and the storm, and the three years of black dresses, and the hundred jars of weather on the shelves, and she understood, at last, what the house was.
It was not haunted. It was not cursed. It was only a house where a woman had lost her husband, and had spent three years writing letters to people who were not there, and keeping weather in jars, and covering mirrors, because the world outside had become too bright and too loud, and the only way she knew to bear it was to make the house smaller, and quieter, and darker, until it was small enough to hold.
"Open the jar," Elspeth said.
Mrs. Dunmire shook her head. "If I open it, the bird will fly away. And then there will be nothing left."
"If you open it," Elspeth said, "the bird will fly away, and you will have given it back its life. And you will still have the jars, and the letters, and the house. And you will have me. I am not leaving, ma'am. I am staying. I will sew your mourning dresses, and I will sew Miss Verity's blue dresses, and I will stay until you tell me to go. But I will not stay in a house where a living thing is kept in a jar."
Mrs. Dunmire stood in the doorway for a long time. Then, slowly, she came forward, and she put her hands on the jar, next to Elspeth's hands, and together, the mistress and the dressmaker, they pulled the stopper out.
For a moment, nothing happened. The jar stood open on the worktable. The bird lay still at the bottom. And then, very slowly, it unfolded its wings — wings so small and so thin that Elspeth could see the light through them — and it rose, up out of the jar, up into the air of the workroom, and it flew, once, around the room, past the shelves of weather, past the bolts of cloth, past the dressmaker's dummy in its black bombazine, and out through the open window, into the rain, into the gray sky over the moor, where it vanished, like a word spoken and carried away by the wind.
Mrs. Dunmire stood at the window, watching it go, and Elspeth stood beside her, and neither of them spoke, and the rain came down, and the house was quiet, and for the first time since she had arrived, Elspeth thought the quiet sounded less like silence and more like peace.
That night, there was a letter on Elspeth's breakfast tray. It had not been opened. The seal was whole. It was addressed to her, in the neat hand, and inside was a single sheet of paper, with four words written on it, in a hand she did not know.
*Thank you for staying.*
Elspeth put the letter in her pocket. She went down to the workroom. She took up her shears. And as she worked, she heard, from the drawing room below, a sound she had not heard since she arrived — the sound of a mirror being uncovered, very slowly, and set back on the wall where it belonged.
And then, from the hall below, she heard the front door open, though everyone in the house was already inside, and a voice — a man's voice, low and kind, and not unkind at all — called her name from the foot of the stair.
"Elspeth."
She put down her shears. She went to the door. And she went down to see who it was.
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