The perfume was heaviest there, and for a moment Bod wondered if snow might have fallen, for there were white clusters on the greenery. Bod examined a cluster more closely. It was made of small five-petaled flowers, and he had just put his head in to sniff the perfume when he heard footsteps coming up the path.
Bod Faded into the ivy, and watched. Three men and a woman, all alive, came up the path and into the Egyptian Walk. The woman had an ornate chain around her neck.
“Is this it?” she asked.
“Yes, Mrs. Caraway,” said one of the men—chubby and white-haired and short of breath. Like each of the men, he carried a large, empty wicker basket.
She seemed both vague and puzzled. “Well, if you say so,” she said. “But I cannot say that I understand it.” She looked up at the flowers. “What do I do now?”
The smallest of the men reached into his wicker basket and brought out a tarnished pair of silver scissors. “The scissors, Lady Mayoress, “he said.
She took the scissors from him and began to cut the clumps of blossom, and she and the three men started to fill the baskets with the flowers.
“This is,” said Mrs. Caraway, the Lady Mayoress, after a little while, “perfectly ridiculous.”
“It is,” said the fat man, “a tradition.”
“Perfectly ridiculous,” said Mrs. Caraway, but she continued to cut the white blossoms and drop them into the wicker baskets. When they had filled the first basket, she asked, “Isn’t that enough?”
“We need to fill all four baskets,” said the smaller man, “and then distribute a flower to everyone in the Old Town.”
“And what kind of tradition is that?” said Mrs. Caraway. “I asked the Lord Mayor before me, and he said he’d never heard of it.” Then she said, “Do you get a feeling someone’s watching us?”
“What?” said the third man, who had not spoken until now. He had a beard and a turban and two wicker baskets. “Ghosts, you mean? I do not believe in ghosts.”
“Not ghosts,” said Mrs. Caraway. “Just a feeling like someone’s looking.”
Bod fought the urge to push further back into the ivy.
“It’s not surprising that the previous Lord Mayor did not know about this tradition,” said the chubby man, whose basket was almost full. “It’s the first time the winter blossoms have bloomed in eighty years.”
The man with the beard and the turban, who did not believe in ghosts, was looking around him nervously.
“Everyone in the Old Town gets a flower,” said the small man. “Man, woman, and child.” Then he said, slowly, as if he were trying to remember something he had learned a very long time ago, “One to leave and one to stay and all to dance the Macabray.”
Mrs. Caraway sniffed. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said, and kept on snipping the blossoms.
Dusk fell early in the afternoon, and it was night by half past four. Bod wandered the paths of the graveyard, looking for someone to talk to, but there was no one about. He walked down to the Potter’s Field to see if Liza Hempstock was about, but found no one there. He went back to the Owenses’ tomb, but found it also deserted: neither his father nor Mistress Owens was anywhere to be seen.
Panic started then, a low-level panic. It was the first time in his ten years that Bod could remember feeling abandoned in the place he had always thought of as his home: he ran down the hill to the old chapel, where he waited for Silas.
Silas did not come.
“Perhaps I missed him,” thought Bod, but he did not believe this. He walked up the hill to the very top, and looked out. The stars hung in the chilly sky, while the patterned lights of the city spread below him, streetlights and car headlights and things in motion. He walked slowly down from the hill until he reached the graveyard’s main gates, and he stopped there.
He could hear music.
Bod had listened to all kinds of music: the sweet chimes of the ice-cream van, the songs that played on workmen’s radios, the tunes that Claretty Jake played the dead on his dusty fiddle, but he had never heard anything like this before: a series of deep swells, like the music at the beginning of something, a prelude perhaps, or an overture.
He slipped through the locked gates, walked down the hill, and into the Old Town.
He passed the Lady Mayoress, standing on a corner, and as he watched, she reached out and pinned a little white flower to the lapel of a passing businessman.
“I don’t make personal charitable donations,” said the man. “I leave that to the office.”
“It’s not for charity,” said Mrs. Caraway. “It’s a local tradition.”
“Ah,” he said, and he pushed his chest out, displaying the little white flower to the world, and walked off, proud as Punch.
A young woman pushing a baby buggy was the next to go past.
“Wossit for?” she asked suspiciously, as the Mayoress approached.
“One for you, one for the little one,” said the Mayoress.
She pinned the flower to the young woman’s winter coat. She stuck the flower for the baby to its coat with tape.
“But wossit for?” asked the young woman.