The town did not look like the photograph in my head. Roads I had memorised as a child seemed narrower, hedges thicker, the maples that once kept me shaded now reaching higher than the rooftops. Northwick smelled of wet earth and damp wool; a faint tang of coal hung around the chimneys as if the place wore a slow, private winter year-round. I drove slower than necessary, as if reducing speed might slow the way the town's outlines rearranged themselves into a landscape where I had once been grown and now felt oddly foreign.
Aunt Lisbeth's cottage sat on a small rise behind the church, its paint gone to tobacco and bone where the sun had taken hold in bands. I parked under a tree that dripped with leftover rain and carried the small bag I had brought for a short stay. Inside, the house smelled of lemon oil and old paper, of tea left to cool and of mothballs that never entirely retired. Her photographs lined the mantel: a younger Lisbeth with wind-tousled hair, an image of the tower in winter when the bells wore icicles like teeth, a dozen garden pictures cropped to show nothing but plants and hands. When I closed the door behind me, the quiet felt less like the absence of sound and more like a held breath.
The funeral had been small. Mourners clustered by the grave with the practical, hushed attentions of people who have long since learned how to be present in a town where everyone remembers everyone else. The minister offered a plain sermon about duty and steadiness. A bouquet of white florals lay by the headstone—chosen by someone who knew Lisbeth liked plain things. People came with their condolences and their small, townwise observations about Lisbeth's habits: how she polished the brass of the belfry ladder every spring, how she refused to let the historical society catalogue certain parish records, how she once left a loaf at the vicarage door during a particularly harsh storm. None of their recollections surprised me; they deepened the loneliness.
After the burial, the vicar found me by the church steps. He wore a face the town trusted and a coat with the faded shoulder patch of a governor's emblem that had long since lost its meaning. His hands were careful as he reached into his coat and produced a small iron key wrapped in coarse paper. It was the sort of key that looked as if it had survived attempts at being useful for generations.
"She asked me to give this to you," he said in a voice like lint. "Said you were best with things that have names and histories."
I took the key, feeling ridiculous for the warmth of surprise that pooled in my chest. I had left home to conserve what others had long thrown away, to repair things people considered past their usefulness. That this tiny, nondescript object felt like a tether made me feel both gratified and exposed. Within the paper with the key was a folded slip of card, its edges softened by handling. Scratched across it in my aunt's cramped hand were a few letters and a string of marks that could have been music—dots, lines, and numbers, arranged in a way that read less like a note and more like a map for sound.
Outside, the church tower rose as it had when I was small, stooped and patient. I stood a long time on the steps with the key in my palm, the folds of the slip creased between thumb and forefinger until the folded card bore the arc of my aunt's routine care. The bell above us did not ring then; it hung, mute and waiting, like an unspoken thing that would be addressed later. I told myself, half a joke, that if any oddness lived here it would be in brass and stone, not in the careful handwriting of a woman who kept her life to the scales of order and habit.