She went out into the first clear evening of the month, and the gate at the bottom of the drive stood open, as it had stood all week, waiting to be needed.
Chapter 20: The Gate Opens
Spring came to Connecticut the way it comes to Maine, Hannah thought β all at once and then apologetically, retreating twice into grey before it committed itself. But by the middle of May it had committed: the Whitmore gardens stood in that first, improbable green, the drive was dappled, the river at the bottom of the lane ran high and bright, and the gatehouse of Whitmore House had been remade.
Peter's firm had done it properly, as he had promised β more than properly. The roof was new, dark slate over the old beams, which had been kept and oiled and left visible, because Peter had stood in the little room in November with his notebook and said, to everyone's surprise, that the room had carried the story and the beams should stay where people could see them. There were low shelves along two walls, built at a child's height and already bowing faintly under books β new books, smelling of ink, and old ones from the house's own nursery, carried down by Clara in banana boxes over a weekend, with her sleeves rolled up and her mother's supervision delivered from a camp chair. There was a rug the colour of deep water. There was a stove, and Silas's chair beside it, and above the chair, framed in plain oak, a photograph of a young man standing outside a gate at night in 1976, with the lit windows of a great house behind the bars β and beside the photograph, Samuel's carved wooden gull, which Hannah had brought down from Maine at Christmas, riding the air on its wire over the heads of whoever sat reading below.
They had set the opening for a Saturday, and the town had been told by the village school, the church noticeboard, and the mysterious telegraphy of small places, and by ten o'clock the lane held more bicycles than it had held in fifty years.
There was no ribbon. That had been Hannah's one condition, stated in October and repeated, with a schoolteacher's finality, in April: no ribbon, no scissors, no speeches from a step. "A door isn't opened with a ceremony," she said. "It's opened with a key. That's the whole of it. That's what the place is for."
She came down the drive a little before ten with Beatrice on her arm β Beatrice in a hat of uncompromising spring green, walking with a stick now and refusing, still, to let the gravel win β and Clara behind them carrying a tray of lemonade in a jug, and Peter, who had been at the gatehouse since seven with two of his men and a level he did not need, wiping his hands on a rag and trying not to look like a man at a wedding. Silas stood by the pedestrian gate in his good coat, and in the breast pocket of it, Hannah knew, were fifty years of his life; and on the other side of the bars the lane was full of children.
They were not quiet. They were not meant to be quiet. They pressed along the gate the way children press along any interesting fence, in coats too warm for the day, holding library cards they had been given at school and holding, in several cases, younger brothers. Behind them stood the parents, and the headmistress of the village school, and the vicar, and half the village shop; and further back, unnoticed and noticing everything, the woman from the Connecticut paper who had once written GOLDDIGGER AT THE GATE above a photograph of this very spot, and who had come, Hannah had been told by Clara, to write the second half of the story.
Hannah Hart took the brass key from her coat pocket.
It was not a grand key. It was a plain, heavy, workaday key, worn bright at the bow where a man's thumb had gone every morning for fifty years, and it had hung on a nail by a fisherman's door in Maine through two generations of weather. In that cottage, which cousins were gently emptying room by room, the nail stood bare now, and would stand bare ever after; Hannah had decided that too, the day she packed. Some things finish their work. Some things only change doors. She put it into the lock of the pedestrian gate of Whitmore House β the gate it had been cut for, in a century when the house was young β and the lock, which Silas had oiled at dawn and every dawn that week, for luck, turned under her hand as though it had only been waiting to be asked properly.
She pulled the gate wide, and held it.
The children came through laughing β not in a line, not in an order, but the way water comes through, all at once and everywhere, pounding up the gravel in their good shoes, past Beatrice, who raised her stick a fraction in salute and was saluted back by a boy of six with the gravity of a diplomat; past Peter, who stepped aside and then, after a moment, crouched down to be told, at length and at close range, about a bicycle; past Clara and the lemonade, and into the little room, where they fell on the shelves like scholars and pirates at once, and where Silas Crane, keeper of the gate and of its secrets, took his chair by the stove and began, in his slow gatekeeper's voice, to read aloud about a bear who had lost his hat.
Hannah stayed at the gate. One by one the parents followed their children in, touching the iron as they passed, some of them β the older ones β with a certain expression, as though a thing they had been told one way all their lives had just been quietly re-told the other way, and had turned out to be a better story. The headmistress shook Hannah's hand. The vicar shook Hannah's hand. The woman from the newspaper did not shake her hand, but stood a while in the lane looking at the open gate, and then took out her notebook, and Hannah, catching her eye across the iron, nodded to her, and after a second the woman nodded back, and wrote something down.
A boy of perhaps nine, too old to run and too young not to want to, hung back at the gate itself, turning his new library card over in his hands. "Is it true," he said to Hannah, "that a man went out of this gate a hundred years ago and never came back?"
"Fifty years," Hannah said. "And he did come back. He sent me."
The boy considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "With the key?"
"With the key." She nodded toward the brass shining in the lock. "It's his. It's on loan to the gate."
He went through then, at a walk that was plainly costing him something, and broke into a run the moment he was decently past her.
At noon the sun stood over the gardens and the lemonade was gone and the reading room was full to its new beams with the sound of children being read to and children pretending not to listen while listening with all their might. Beatrice sat in the sun in the camp chair with a rug over her knees, watching the door, at peace in a way Hannah had never seen her, as if some account she had kept open for fifty years had finally, audibly, been closed. When Clara offered to take her up to the house, she waved the girl off and pointed her stick at the reading-room door. "Leave me where I can see it," she said. "I have spent fifty years looking in the other direction." Peter came and stood beside Hannah at the gate, with sawdust still in his cuffs.
"You'll have to close it eventually," he said.
"I know," Hannah said. "That's the thing about a gate. It opens. It isn't a wall anymore. It doesn't have to stay open to have been opened β it just has to open every day." She smiled. "Silas opens at nine. There are already complaints the children want eight."
"From the children?"
"From Silas. On their behalf. He's very fierce about it."
They stood together in the spring light, the heir of the house and the granddaughter of the man who left it, watching the town's children read in Samuel Whitmore's gatehouse, and Hannah reached out, without looking, and left her grandfather's brass key in the lock of the open gate, where it caught the sun and shone β a small, plain, faithful thing, come home at last to the door it was made for, and holding it open.
The End