Letters from Hollowmere

Letter 6 — The First Snow The first deep snow comes to Hollowmere in the night — and the village does the gentlest, strangest thing: it lets it stay. No one clears the paths; the snow lies deep and, Edwin slowly realizes, simply refuses to melt, holding through the winter sun the way everything does in a place that keeps its own time. Snowed in by a fire that never goes out, he carries warm bread...

Letter 5 — The Long Way Margaret writes back warmer than ever — and does the one thing Edwin asked of her, she dates her letter — but the date she sets down is three weeks ahead of the day he reads it, as if her time and his have quietly come apart. Stranger still, she thanks him, lovingly, for the cutting that has taken root by her wall — the same cutting still sitting undelivered on his own desk...

Letter 4 — The Far Garden Margaret writes back, warm as ever — but something in her letter sits a half-inch out of place: a tall pale plant she cannot name has come up beside the angelica, and she admits she has begun to lose her careful count of the days. The very same two things have been happening to Edwin. Then the fog breaks to a hard frost, and a smell of impossible summer leads him over a f...

Letter 3 — The Bakehouse The reply Edwin has been waiting for arrives from his sister Margaret — and comes, he's almost certain, sooner than the long slow road should allow. Then the fog settles deep in the valley, and on one white morning the smell of new bread draws him through it to a place he had never seen: a low, golden bakehouse kept by Mr. Oates, whose oven has never once been let go c...

Letter 2 — The Green Door A week on in Hollowmere, Edwin finally lifts the latch of the little green-doored shop on the square and steps inside. He meets its keeper, Mrs. Sorrel, among the hanging herbs and the jars of coloured water — and on a shelf at the back he finds the angelica from his sister Margaret's garden, and is, for a moment, home. He walks down to the river and stands a long whi...

Letter 1 — The Hare and Lantern Edwin has arrived in Hollowmere. He writes home from a small inn called The Hare and Lantern, describing the village square, the landlady Mrs. Pell, his first meal in the public room, and a walk to the post office through the dusk. He drifts into a memory of his sister Margaret's garden, planted with cornflowers and angelica. He hears a fiddle somewhere far in t...