What Is Told of Summer Frosts

They tell it still, in Brancombe.

It begins in threes, as these things do. Three men on the hill with torches. Three days of searching before that. Three weeks after, four strangers came down from London on the morning train – though no one in the village had sent for them, and no one quite knew who had.

They were not, whatever the village first supposed, four of a kind. One had seen near sixty summers. One had barely seen thirty. One had crossed half of Europe to reach that platform; one had scarcely left London long enough to miss it. What they shared, the village decided later, was only this: that they arrived already knowing one another, like old friends, or something near it.

An old priest was waiting for them at the station, though the tale that comes before this one remembers him young. There was a raven-haired one among them who could charm a room before his coat was off, who walked past the priest at the platform expecting some porter to carry his own bags. There was a tall, pale one from the northern countries, young and fair-haired, who took up the lady’s bags besides his own. There was a dark, bearded one, older than the rest, who watched the priest with a plain and open suspicion. And there was the fourth, who was not a man at all: a woman who carried a parasol she never opened, said less than the other three together, and missed nothing.

It was the priest himself who carried the raven-haired one’s bags, and said nothing of it. It was the pale northern one who knelt, that first evening, at the same altar as the priest – the little chapel the village proper does not attend. It was three days before the dark, bearded one set his suspicion down, and he never did set it down entirely.

They tell it still, in Brancombe: that the strangers were not put up with the priest, whose house had no room for guests, nor much of anything else – a poor household for a man of God, though a plain one, and an honest one. They were put up instead with the other reverend – the modern one, as Brancombe called him, which was not altogether meant as praise – who kept a fuller table and had no patience at all for what the parish whispered about the girl on the hill. His housekeeper had opinions enough for the both of them. That the dead girl and her intended had been devoted as any couple in living memory. That no one could account for why he’d gone to the May fair with another girl on his arm. That this not-knowing had never once left the dead girl’s mind – not until it couldn’t any longer.

Three things happened at the inn that evening, and they are still told in order.

The raven-haired one held court, and by the end of it the room held him back.

The dark, bearded one sat with the dead girl’s father, gently – as gently as a stranger can – and the father broke open like a dropped jug, and named the boy in the cell a murderer before the whole room, and wished him hanged.

And the boy’s own brothers came up from their table with their fists already made, and it took the pale one and the quiet one both to put the room back together before anyone bled for it.

Then – for it was still light, being June, and there is always more day left in June than a man expects – the four of them climbed the hill to the cave where the girl had been found. And here the telling turns, as it must.

The standing stone that had watched that hollow since before any grandfather’s grandfather was gone. Not toppled. Not broken. Simply gone, as though it had never stood there at all. In the grass nearby, a scorching that was not fire, but cold acting the part of it. And a silence that was not merely quiet.

The pale one drew a circle of salt. He cut his own hand, for these things are never given freely, and let the blood fall into the empty socket where the stone had stood.

And when he spoke, they say it was not with one voice but two.

I died, they said. I rose. I fell. I walk.

Then a howl the whole hillside seemed to draw breath before it came. Then the frost came over the grass like a hand closing. The dark, bearded one – outside the circle, as he had been told to stay – put his shoulder against whatever had drawn itself around his friends, and was thrown back for his trouble, and the cold came down again, worse than before.

They tell it still, in Brancombe, and they always stop it there – at the edge of that circle, on that hill, with the cold still spreading. Not because nothing more happened. Because the ones who could finish it were not yet home to tell it.