Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

Most agreed that the youngest girl had been discovered wandering in the snow by a policeman on the beat. She had subjected him to a dazzling deluge of tall tales, the tallest being that she was the missing Penelope Crescent. Fortunately the constable had been patient enough to check this story, which had turned out to be true.

The rescue of the older girl was a far more sensational matter. Those who gathered to witness the Capping Ceremony to mark the completion of the new railway station were forced to wait as the proceedings stalled for inadequately explained reasons. It was later revealed that Piers Crescent, the civil engineer who had designed it, had suddenly demanded that everything halt, since the snow would make the placing of the apex too dangerous.

While the crowd became restless, and the organizers tried to convince the increasingly irate civil engineer that his fears were groundless, a solitary figure had been noticed at the very top of the pyramid, weakly waving its hand. Hundreds watched as several men, including Piers Crescent, clambered up the scaffolding and came down again carrying a frail-looking young girl. Those who saw her recognized her from her photograph as the missing Theresa.

In spite of all this evidence, however, there were still some newspapers that insisted that Theresa had actually been rescued the night before, when she was discovered dripping and dishevelled on a dockland jetty.

There was just as much confusion about the identity of the girls’ kidnappers. All the papers that evening had carried stories on the arrest of Violet Parish, with lurid details of her rumoured criminal contacts. Having painted her scarlet as blood, the same papers’ accounts of her next day were short and rather furtive. The Crescent girls and their family were apparently adamant that Violet was blameless, and that she had in fact been injured in her attempts to protect the children.

Indeed, it seemed the one person who had pointed the finger at Violet Parish was a tailor named Grace, and he was no longer to be found. As the days stretched with no further word, the papers alternated between describing the kidnappers as ‘mysterious’ and hinting heavily that the missing tailor might have been one of them.

It was a week of wild stories, however. Everything, including the seasons, seemed to have gone mad for a time. Crazy reports of children seen on roofs, mysterious wild-fowl behaviour, ghost barges and missing dressmakers seemed not out of keeping with the freak miniature winter that had descended on Ellchester within hours, and which yielded to an Indian summer within days. After a while, ‘Wild White Week’, as it became locally known, was dismissed as a time that didn’t count, a period when the usual rules had temporarily stopped working.

The Crescents certainly had nothing to tell the newspapers. The reporters tried for a while to trace Violet Parish, but Piers had paid for her to be moved from the city hospital to a private clinic outside town, and no details of her location were forthcoming. The Crescents, after all, could afford a high quality of discretion.

The clinic nestled in the lap of three hills, and had a peaceful, coddled feel. Its lawns were neat, but not severely so, and there were crazy-paving paths through its little orchard. The apple trees had suffered during the freak blizzard, however, the weight of the snow ripping away many boughs. The grass was lush and green, but still had a saturated, sodden look. Like the patients within, the grey-stone clinic was suffering its own share of recovery pangs as workmen struggled to mend a damaged roof, and pipes that had burst during the freeze.

To anybody who knew her, it was clear that Violet was suffering from impatience and boredom more than from the splint on her leg. The orderlies had quickly learned that her repeated demands for news on ‘when it would be fixed’ were questions about her motorcycle, not her leg. Violet had been lucky, suffering only sprains and bruises rather than any fractures.

‘I bounce,’ she explained to anybody who asked, with a savage grin.

She refused to believe there was any good reason for the splint (‘They’re just afraid I’ll chase the male orderlies’) or for her to be denied cigarettes (‘I’m choking without them’). The staff tolerated her jibes, but refused to yield to any of them. Violet was at least allowed visitors. She seemed happiest in the company of another patient, a young girl who had been admitted at the same time with the conveniently vague complaint of ‘nerves’.

On the first morning in September, that same young girl could be found in Violet’s private room, leaning out of the window to hear the church bells chime.

Trista never tired of hearing them. Clocks fascinated her now, the way they ticked and told the hours without her dying. Suns that set and rose again, without a countdown. Mornings without the whispers and snickers of mortality.

The last soft chime throbbed into silence, and Trista stepped back into the room with a slightly rueful smile.

‘Are you going to do that every hour for the rest of your life?’ asked Violet. She was dishevelled and shiny-faced without her make-up. The books and magazines which people had given her to relieve the tedium had avalanched on to the floor and been left to sprawl there.

‘It still isn’t boring,’ Trista answered, slightly embarrassed. ‘I’m enjoying meals as well, now I can just eat a normal amount.’ Then, a little more boldly: ‘Are you going to keep moving around, now that it’s not chasing you?’

Violet puffed her cheeks thoughtfully, and wiggled the toes of her imprisoned leg.

‘Probably,’ she said at last. ‘Habits die hard. I love the fact that I can stay still if I want, and sleep a full eight hours in the same bed without causing Ragnarök. But… it turns out I love speed, motion and change too, and without them I go stir crazy. At some point, that became part of me. However, now I’m the one who chooses. I can move towards something, instead of just running from a past I can never escape.’

Violet peered at Trista through narrowed eyes.

‘I… saw him that night,’ she said carefully. ‘The night of the snows.’

Trista did not ask who ‘he’ was, nor did she exclaim or prompt. She came over and sat by Violet’s bed, giving her friend a silence to fill.

‘It was bitterly cold in the hospital, and the sisters had run out of blankets to pile on us. And then the windows all burst open, and the rooms filled with the blizzard. Not just gusts of flakes, but a real snowstorm so thick it was as if we were all outside. I felt as if the world had melted away, and all that was left was Winter, with me and my bed in the middle of it.

‘Then I saw a figure walking towards me, through the snow. And it was…’ Violet trailed off, and laughed under her breath.

There was a long pause, and Trista realized that no more tale would be told. There was only a snow-blank page for her to fill in herself.

‘And… he seemed… happy?’ was all she could think of to ask.

Violet gave the slightest nod, and a very small smile that made her look younger and slightly shy.

‘He says he likes my hair short,’ she said, under her breath.

‘I’ve been thinking about the watch.’ Trista bit her lip, then made herself unbite it. The mannerism gave her a funny feeling now that she had seen Triss do the same thing. ‘It was mainly linked to… to him through his hair. But it was linked to you because it was yours , and because he wanted you to have it. That means it still is linked. I’ve stopped time running out for me, but it’s possible I did the same for you. I… don’t know what that means.’

Violet pondered this, brow creased, hands behind her head, then finally gave a shrug.