The baby seemed asleep with its head on her shoulder, but even the baby was swaying its hands gently in time to the music.
And then the music stopped and there was silence in the square, a muffled silence, like the silence of falling snow, all noise swallowed by the night and the bodies in the square, no one stamping or shuffling, scarcely even breathing.
A clock began to strike somewhere close at hand: the chimes of midnight, and they came.
They walked down the hill in a slow procession, all stepping gravely, all in time, filling the road, five abreast. Bod knew them or knew most of them. In the first row, he recognized Mother Slaughter and Josiah Worthington, and the old earl who had been wounded in the Crusades and came home to die, and Doctor Trefusis, all of them looking solemn and important.
There were gasps from the people in the square. Someone began to cry, saying, “Lord have mercy, it’s a judgment on us, that’s what it is!” Most of the people simply stared, as unsurprised as they would have been if this had happened in a dream.
The dead walked on, row on row, until they reached the square.
Josiah Worthington walked up the steps until he reached Mrs. Caraway, the Lady Mayoress. He extended his arm and said, loud enough that the whole square could hear him, “Gracious lady, this I pray: Join me in the Macabray.”
Mrs. Caraway hesitated. She glanced up at the man beside her for guidance: he wore a robe and pajamas and slippers, and he had a white flower pinned to the lapel of his robe. He smiled and nodded to Mrs. Caraway. “Of course,” Mr. Caraway said.
She reached out a hand. As her fingers touched Josiah Worthington’s, the music began once more. If the music Bod had heard until then was a prelude, it was a prelude no longer. This was the music they had all come to hear, a melody that plucked at their feet and fingers.
They took hands, the living with the dead, and they began to dance. Bod saw Mother Slaughter dancing with the man in the turban, while the businessman was dancing with Louisa Bartleby. Mistress Owens smiled at Bod as she took the hand of the old newspaper seller, and Mr. Owens reached out and took the hand of a small girl, without condescension, and she took his hand as if she had been waiting to dance with him her whole life. Then Bod stopped looking because someone’s hand closed around his, and the dance began.
Liza Hempstock grinned at him. “This is fine,” she said, as they began to tread the steps of the dance together.
Then she sang, to the tune of the dance,
“Step and turn, and walk and stay,
Now we dance the Macabray.”
The music filled Bod’s head and chest with a fierce joy, and his feet moved as if they knew the steps already, had known them forever.
He danced with Liza Hempstock, and then, when that measure ended, he found his hand taken by Fortinbras Bartleby, and he danced with Fortinbras, stepping past lines of dancers, lines that parted as they came through.
Bod saw Abanazer Bolger dancing with Miss Borrows, his old former teacher. He saw the living dancing with the dead. And the one-on-one dances became long lines of people stepping together in unison, walking and kicking (La-la-la-oomp! La-la-la-oomp!) a line dance that had been ancient a thousand years before.
Now he was in the line beside Liza Hempstock. He said, “Where does the music come from?”
She shrugged.
“Who’s making all this happen?”
“It always happens,” she told him. “The living may not remember, but we always do…” And she broke off, excited. “Look!”
Bod had never seen a real horse before, only in the pages of picture books, but the white horse that clopped down the street towards them was nothing like the horses he had imagined. It was bigger, by far, with a long, serious face. There was a woman riding on the horse’s bare back, wearing a long grey dress that hung and gleamed beneath the December moon like cobwebs in the dew.
She reached the square, and the horse stopped, and the woman in grey slipped off it easily and stood on the earth, facing them all, the living and the dead of them.
She curtseyed.
And, as one, they bowed or curtseyed in return, and the dance began anew.
“Now the Lady on the Grey
Leads us in the Macabray,”
sang Liza Hempstock, before the whirl of the dance took her off and away from Bod. They stomped to the music, and stepped and spun and kicked, and the lady danced with them, stepping and spinning and kicking with enthusiasm. Even the white horse swayed its head and stepped and shifted to the music.
The dance sped up, and the dancers with it. Bod was breathless, but he could not imagine the dance ever stopping: the Macabray, the dance of the living and the dead, the dance with Death. Bod was smiling, and everyone was smiling.
He caught sight of the lady in the grey dress from time to time, as he spun and stomped his way across the municipal gardens.
Everyone, thought Bod, everyone is dancing! He thought it, and as soon as he thought it he realized that he was mistaken. In the shadows by the Old Town Hall, a man was standing, dressed all in black. He was not dancing. He was watching them.
Bod wondered if it was longing that he saw on Silas’s face, or sorrow, or something else, but his guardian’s face was unreadable.
He called out, “Silas!” hoping to make his guardian come to them, to join the dance, to have the fun they were having, but when he heard his name, Silas stepped back into the shadows and was lost to sight.
“Last dance!” someone called, and the music skirled up into something stately and slow and final.
Each of the dancers took a partner, the living with the dead, each to each. Bod reached out his hand and found himself touching fingers with, and gazing into the grey eyes of, the lady in the cobweb dress.
She smiled at him.
“Hello, Bod,” she said.
“Hello,” he said, as he danced with her. “I don’t know your name.”
“Names aren’t really important,” she said.
“I love your horse. He’s so big! I never knew horses could be that big.”
“He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well.”
“Can I ride him?” asked Bod.
“One day,” she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. “One day. Everybody does.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
And with that, the dance was done. Bod bowed low to his dancing partner, and then, and only then, did he feel exhausted, feel as if he had been dancing for hour after hour. He could feel all his muscles aching and protesting. He was out of breath.
A clock somewhere began to strike the hour, and Bod counted along with it. Twelve chimes. He wondered if they had been dancing for twelve hours or twenty-four or for no time at all.
He straightened up, and looked around him. The dead had gone, and the Lady on the Grey. Only the living remained, and they were beginning to make their way home—leaving the town square sleepily, stiffly, like people who had awakened from a deep sleep, walking without truly waking.
The town square was covered with tiny white flowers. It looked as if there had been a wedding.
Bod woke the next afternoon in the Owenses’ tomb feeling like he knew a huge secret, that he had done something important, and was burning to talk about it.
When Mistress Owens got up, Bod said, “That was amazing last night!”
Mistress Owens said, “Oh yes?”
“We danced,” said Bod. “All of us. Down in the Old Town.”
“Did we indeed?” said Mistress Owens, with a snort. “Dancing is it? And you know you aren’t allowed down into the town.”
Bod knew better than even to try to talk to his mother when she was in this kind of mood. He slipped out of the tomb into the gathering dusk.
He walked up the hill, to the black obelisk, and Josiah Worthington’s stone, where there was a natural amphitheater, and he could look out at the Old Town and at the lights of the city around it.
Josiah Worthington was standing beside him.
Bod said, “You began the dance. With the Mayor. You danced with her.”
Josiah Worthington looked at him and said nothing.
“You did,” said Bod.
Josiah Worthington said, “The dead and the living do not mingle, boy. We are no longer part of their world; they are no part of ours. If it happened that we danced the danse macabre with them, the dance of death, then we would not speak of it, and we certainly would not to speak of it to the living.”
“But I’m one of you.”
“Not yet, boy. Not for a lifetime.”
And Bod realized why he had danced as one of the living, and not as one of the crew that had walked down the hill, and he said only, “I see…I think.”
He went down the hill at a run, a ten-year-old boy in a hurry, going so fast he almost tripped over Digby Poole (1785–1860, As I Am So Shall You Be), righting himself by effort of will, and charged down to the old chapel, scared he would miss Silas, that his guardian would already be gone by the time Bod got there.
Bod sat down on the bench.
There was a movement beside him, although he heard nothing move, and his guardian said, “Good evening, Bod.”
“You were there last night,” said Bod. “Don’t try and say you weren’t there or something because I know you were.”
“Yes,” said Silas.
“I danced with her. With the lady on the white horse.”
“Did you?”
“You saw it! You watched us! The living and the dead! We were dancing. Why won’t anyone talk about it?”
“Because there are mysteries. Because there are things that people are forbidden to speak about. Because there are things they do not remember.”
“But you’re speaking about it right now. We’re talking about the Macabray.”
“I have not danced it,” said Silas.
“You saw it, though.”
Silas said only, “I don’t know what I saw.”
“I danced with the lady, Silas!” exclaimed Bod. His guardian looked almost heartbroken then, and Bod found himself scared, like a child who has woken a sleeping panther.
But all Silas said was, “This conversation is at an end.”
Bod might have said something—there were a hundred things he wanted to say, unwise though it might have been to say them—when something distracted his attention: a rustling noise, soft and gentle, and a cold feather-touch as something brushed his face.
All thoughts of dancing were forgotten then, and his fear was replaced with delight and with awe.
It was the third time in his life that he had seen it.
“Look, Silas, it’s snowing!” he said, joy filling his chest and his head, leaving no room for anything else. “It’s really snow!”
INTERLUDE
The Convocation
A SMALL SIGN IN THE hotel lobby announced that the Washington Room was taken that night by a private function, although there was no information as to what kind of function this might be. Truthfully, if you were to look at the inhabitants of the Washington Room that night, you would have no clearer idea of what was happening, although a rapid glance would tell you that there were no women in there. They were all men, that much was clear, and they sat at round dinner tables, and they were finishing their dessert.