Mailing 1. Kindling Term, week 1.
These are the two letters in the first envelope, word for word. They take about ten minutes to read, so make yourself a cup of something warm. First the school's Keeper's Office writes to you. Then she does. Skip straight to her letter.
THE KEEPER'S OFFICE
RUSSETMOOR
To the Keeper,
You have been chosen.
A first-year student of Russetmoor has been placed in your keeping for the year now beginning. You did not ask for this, and you may reasonably wonder what it requires. It requires very little. It requires everything you have in the way of attention.
Twice in every month the mail coach leaves the valley through the Narrows, and it will carry a letter to you from your student. The letter may be long or short, cheerful or otherwise. It will be honest, we hope. It will be read by no one at Russetmoor before it reaches you. That is our promise to the student, and now it is yours as well.
The rules of keeping are three.
First, read. Every word.
Second, keep. Students may enclose small things with their letters: papers, cards, the odd leaf. These are sent to you for safekeeping. Please do not discard them, and please do not discard the letters. The Office encloses an Almanac slip with every coach. Keep those too.
Third, do not reply. We know this is the hard one. The valley does not accept post from Keepers to first-years, and letters so sent will not arrive. Your student knows this. She does not know your name and she never will. Your silence is not unkind. In our long experience, a person will tell the truth to someone who cannot answer, when she will tell it to no one else.
Russetmoor keeps autumn. We ask you to keep the rest.
With the thanks of the Office,
Ruth Pell
Registrar
Folded inside, on two half sheets, in her handwriting:
Russetmoor. Kindling Term, week 1.
Dear Keeper,
I have started this letter four times. The first began "To whom it may concern," which made me sound like I was applying for a position at a bank. The second began "Dear Sir or Madam," and then I thought, what if you're a very old dog someone taught to read, and I laughed so loudly the girl in the next bed threw a slipper at me. The third I spilled ink on. So here is the fourth, and you'll have to take me as I come.
They tell us you're a stranger. They tell us you can't write back. They tell us you'll read everything. I don't know which of those is strangest. I don't know you at all, and by the end of this you'll know me, which hardly seems a fair trade.
Still, there is something comforting about telling a person who can't look disappointed halfway through. So I'm going to tell you properly.
My name is Eliza. I'm nineteen. I come from Wexcombe, which you won't have heard of, because nobody has. It is a mill town, and it is gray, and it smells of wet wool and coal smoke. My mother and my little brother Toby live on Tallow Street, above the shop where my mother takes in sewing. The letter came addressed to me in violet ink, Miss E. Darrow, and I read it standing in the hall with my boots still wet. I don't think I breathed until the end of the second page. My cousin Edith was away when it came. She'll have heard by now.
I kept thinking someone would send the girl from the mill town home again, very kindly. I'd rather they said it unkindly. I know what to do with that.
The mail coach carried eight of us from the last town on the ordinary road. For three hours it was hills and sheep and a drizzle that got into your collar. A small freckled boy called Davy Reed, who is eighteen and looks twelve, asked the driver forty questions before the first hill, and I counted, because there was nothing else to do. Then the road ran into a crack in a cliff, so tight the wheels whined against the rock. They call it the Narrows. It went dark, and cold, and the girl beside me grabbed my arm. And then we came out the other side and it was autumn.
I don't mean it looked like autumn. I mean the air changed in one breath. It smelled of woodsmoke and apples and something like pennies. Every tree in the valley was red or gold or a brown so deep it was nearly purple, and the leaves were coming down, all of them, slowly, the way snow does when there's no wind. The girl said "oh" in a small voice, and so did I, and then we were both embarrassed.
It's always autumn here, Keeper. No spring. No summer. Nobody waiting for winter. They say it as if they're telling you where to put your boots. Even the name is autumn. Russet is what my mother calls the red-brown a leaf goes just before it falls.
The girl who grabbed my arm is called Penny. Penelope Ashby on her admittance card, and Penny to everyone living. She's from a farm with eleven people on it. She cried for the whole first hour of the coach, and then she stopped, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and gave me half a ginger cake. I've decided we're friends. She hasn't been told yet but I think she knows.
The main building is called the Hall. Nobody calls it anything else. It is enormous and gray and swallowed in ivy, and the ivy is red, like the inside of a pomegranate. There were a dozen coaches in the yard, and at supper there were four hundred of us in one room. On the front steps a tall girl with a straight back was explaining to a porter that one says "fewer bags," not "less bags." She was right, which made it worse. Her name is Clara Vell. Her mother came here, and her grandmother. I've decided to hate dislike her. She hasn't been told that either.
We're first-years, the new ones, and we wear nothing on our collars yet. The older students wear small gold pins: a leaf once you've finished your first year, a branch by your fourth. The masters wear a pin shaped like a tree root. You earn them. At supper we were shown what for.
The Warden is a very tall, very old woman in a black shawl that sits on her shoulders like a folded pair of wings. She stood up and said, "Russetmoor keeps autumn," as if that explained anything, and then she said, "Masters." A bearded man with a fingertip missing didn't even rise. He looked at the long windows, and every lantern on the avenue down to the lake lit itself, one after another, like someone running a thumb down a row of keys. A broad floury woman set a pear seed on the high table and laid her hand over it, and it came up through her fingers. A tree, Keeper, as tall as she was, in blossom and then in fruit, in the time it takes to say grace. She passed the pears down. I ate one. It was warm. Then a kitchen boy dropped a glass, and the Warden looked at it, and it stopped. It hung a foot above the flagstones with the cider half out of it, like a tongue. She left it there all through supper.
Last was a thin man with ink on his cuffs. Master Fenn. He didn't do anything I could see. Every flame in the room went out at once, every candle, the fire, and the sound went with them. Four hundred people and I couldn't hear my own breath. It lasted one heartbeat. I've never been so frightened of nothing.
And in that one heartbeat, with every ordinary sound gone, I heard something far off to the north. A note. One note, held far too long, the way a fiddler holds the last of a tune when he's forgotten how to stop.
Then the candles were back and everyone was laughing and clapping. I had turned my head toward the north wall. I looked round to see who else had. Nobody. Only Master Fenn, at the high table, was not looking at the room.
He was looking straight at me.
I don't know what it was. I asked Penny if she'd heard anything and she said, "Heard what? It went quiet. That was the trick." I asked the boy Davy, who'd asked the forty questions, and he took out a notebook and wrote it down, which was not the comfort I was after.
I couldn't sleep. Our dormitory is tucked right up under the roof, and my bed is by a window, and at some black hour I looked out. There was a boy on the lawn with a rake, a lantern hung on a post beside him, pulling the leaves into a long neat row in the dark. Behind him, as fast as he raked, they were falling again. He must have known. He kept raking anyway. It's the first thing I've seen here that looked like home. My mother would have liked him.
Penny has just rolled over and said "turnips" quite clearly in her sleep. I'm going on.
I've put a pencil arrow on the map. That's where I'm writing to you, under the roof, trying not to wake Penny.
The map in your first envelope, 11 by 17 inches. Tap to see it full size.
I've decided you're kind, because it's easier to write to someone kind. If you're not, please don't tell me. You can't anyway. That's the rule.
Toby wants to know if there are dragons. I'll find out. Have you got a Toby, Keeper? Someone who asks the one question you can't answer?
Before the next coach, I'll have had my first lessons. I'll have to stand in front of Master Fenn and find out whether I can do anything worth teaching.
That was what I was frightened of on the road. That I couldn't.
Now I keep thinking of the way he looked at me when I heard that note.
Keep this one, will you? If I sound very brave in the next, you'll know what I was like before I had anything to boast about.
Yours, I suppose. That's the rule too.
E.
P.S. At breakfast I asked a second-year what's past the north wall. "The orchard." Why is it closed? "It wasn't, last year." Then her eyes went to the high table, quick, the way you'd check a sleeping dog is still asleep. Master Fenn was there. She took her toast to another table.
Also in the envelope: a folded map of the valley with her pencil arrow on it, the first Almanac slip, and her leaf seal sticker on a card in her handwriting: "They gave us each one of these at supper. I'm sending you mine so you know I'm real. E."
Letter 2 is already written.
It begins like this:
"We have lessons now, which means I have something to tell you besides leaves. Although it is mostly leaves. You'll see."
By the end of it, she will have done something a first-year should not be able to do.
Keep reading
If you want the next one, she'll keep writing to you. The first envelopes leave the valley on Monday, November 2, and every Keeper begins with this letter on real paper, with her map, the first Almanac slip and her leaf seal. Letter 2 follows about two weeks later, and then two letters every month.
Monthly is $15 a month. The Full Year is $156, paid once. Postage inside the US is included. You pay when you join, and if she isn't for you after two letters, tell us within 30 days of the second one being mailed and we'll refund you in full.