Chapter 1: The Kettle That Wouldn't Hush
The kettle in the Grubb kitchen had been singing since Tuesday, and by Saturday morning Aunt Mildred had had quite enough of it.
"Wren Tanner," she said, in the voice she used for spiders in the bath and unexpected bills, "make that thing stop."
Wren was standing at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, elbow-deep in porridge pots, and she had not touched the kettle at all. It sat on the stove minding its own business, or trying to, except that every few minutes it let out a low, wavering note that was not quite a whistle and not quite a hum and not quite anything a kettle ought to do. It sounded, if Wren was honest, a little bit like it was trying to sing along with something only it could hear.
"I'm not doing anything to it," Wren said, which was true, and which had never once helped.
"Well, somebody is," said Aunt Mildred, folding her arms so that her elbows made two sharp points, like a bird deciding whether to peck. "That kettle whistled a tune all last week and it has never done such a thing in eleven years of living in this house, and you have been in this house for eleven years, and I don't think that is what anybody would call a coincidence."
Wren did not think it was a coincidence either, though not for any reason she could have explained to her aunt without being sent to bed without supper. Odd things happened around Wren. They always had. Doorknobs buzzed faintly when she touched them at the end of a long day. Once, in the school library, every pencil in the tin on Mrs. Aldous's desk had begun to hum the same low note at exactly the moment Wren walked past, and she had been made to stand in the corridor for an hour while the librarian decided whether pencils could be possessed. They could not, it turned out, but Wren had stood in the corridor anyway, because someone had to be blamed and it was never going to be the pencils.
She turned the tap off and dried her hands on her apron, which was really Aunt Mildred's old apron, cut down and re-hemmed, with a faded rose on the pocket that had mostly worn away into a pink smudge.
"I'll take it off the heat," she said.
"You'll do more than that," said Aunt Mildred. "You'll take it out to the shed until it learns to behave itself, and you'll use the little pan for tea until it does."
This seemed to Wren like exactly the sort of solution a grown-up would come up with - punish the kettle, inconvenience everybody, solve nothing - but she had learned a long time ago that arguing with Aunt Mildred was like arguing with a locked door. So she wrapped the kettle in a tea towel, the way you might wrap something that was hurt, and carried it out across the yard to the coal shed, and the whole way it hummed softly against her arms, almost comfortingly, like a cat that has decided you are its person whether you asked to be or not.
"Sorry," Wren told it, setting it down on the shelf between a rusted paint tin and a bag of old clothes-pegs. "It's not your fault. It's never anybody's fault, as far as I can tell. Things just happen around me."
The kettle hummed once, low and sweet, as if it agreed, and then went quiet.
Wren lived in the smallest room in the house, tucked up under the sloping roof at the top of the stairs, just above the coal shed itself, which meant that on cold nights she could hear the coal settling and shifting below her floor like something breathing. It was not a large room. It held a narrow bed, a chest of drawers with one door that stuck, and a single window that looked out over the back garden, the shed, and, past the hedge, the grey rooftops of the rest of Puddleton stretching away toward a sky that seemed to specialize in the color of old dishwater.
She had lived in that room for as long as she could remember, which was not very long, because Wren did not remember much before she was three. She knew the facts the way you know facts about a country you've never visited: her parents, Tom and Linnet Tanner, had mended fishing boats down on the coast, and one autumn there had been a storm, a very bad one, and afterward there had been no more Tom and Linnet Tanner, and Wren had come to live with her mother's sister in Puddleton, a hundred miles from the sea, in a house that smelled of boiled cabbage and furniture polish and never, not once, of salt water.
She had one thing that had been her mother's. It was a small bell, no bigger than a thimble, tarnished a soft brownish color, hung on a bit of plain leather cord. Aunt Mildred had given it to her on her seventh birthday, taking it out of a drawer as if it were something she'd rather not be holding, and said, "Your mother had this at a fair, I believe. Silly little thing. She liked silly little things." Wren wore it under her collar, where it couldn't be seen and couldn't be taken away, and on nights when the house felt very large and very quiet and very much not her own, she held it in her fist until she fell asleep.
It never made a sound. Not once, in four years of wearing it, had it so much as tinked. This was, Wren sometimes thought, rather funny, seeing as how everything else around her seemed to want to hum and buzz and whistle the moment her back was turned.
That evening, after the dishes and the sweeping and the ironing of Uncle Selwyn's shirts (seven of them, though he only had need of five, on account of a strange and specific vanity about spare collars), Wren's cousin Percival came thundering up the stairs two at a time, which he was not allowed to do, and did anyway, because Percival Grubb at twelve years old had never yet encountered a rule he felt personally applied to him.
"Mum says you put a curse on the kettle," he announced, leaning in her doorway with the particular smugness of someone delivering bad news they've enjoyed carrying.
"I didn't put a curse on anything."
"That's what a curse-putter would say."
"That's what anybody would say, Percy, because it's true."
Percy considered this, the way he considered most things - briefly, and only in service of proving himself right regardless of the answer. "Well, something's wrong with you," he said, with the easy confidence of someone who had never once had to wonder if something was wrong with himself. "Ordinary people don't make kettles sing."
"Maybe the kettle just likes singing."
"Kettles don't like things. They're kettles."
"Then maybe it's not the kettle's fault and it's not my fault either, and everyone should stop blaming somebody for something nobody understands," Wren said, more sharply than she meant to, and was rewarded with the deep satisfaction of watching Percy's face do the thing it did when he couldn't think of a comeback fast enough - a kind of blinking, gaping pause, like a fish surprised by a window.
"I'm telling Mum you were rude," he said, which was what he always said when he'd lost an argument, and thundered back down the stairs to do exactly that.
Wren shut her door - it didn't have a lock, but it had a habit of sticking in its frame if you pulled it just right, which was nearly as good - and sat on the edge of her bed with her mother's bell in her hand.
Outside, the evening was doing the thing early autumn evenings did in Puddleton, turning the color of a bruise, purple-grey and tender-looking, with the streetlamps flickering on one by one down the lane. Wren pressed her forehead to the cool glass of her window and looked out at the coal shed, where the kettle sat in the dark being punished for nothing, and felt the particular, familiar ache of being the only strange thing in a very plain place.
"I don't want to be strange," she told the glass, which did not answer, being glass. "I just want to know why."
She did not expect an answer. She had asked the same question, in different words, more nights than she could count, and the world had never once bothered to reply.
But that night, for the first time in eleven years, something did.
It was very small and very soft - not a sound so much as the memory of one, a note so faint it might have been the house settling, except that Wren had lived in this house long enough to know exactly how it settled, and this was not that. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere: from the floorboards, from the window glass, from the old iron bedstead, from her own chest, humming up through her ribs like a second, quieter heartbeat.
She sat very still, holding her breath, waiting for it to happen again.
It did. A low, warm note, and then another just above it, and then - impossibly, because a sound cannot have a color, and yet this one did, gold at the edges like late afternoon sun through leaves - a third note that seemed to come from very far away and also from right beside her ear.
Wren looked down at the bell in her palm.
It had not moved. It was not glowing, not shaking, not doing any of the things a bell in a story might do. It sat in her hand exactly as tarnished and exactly as silent as it had every day for four years.
And yet she was certain - as certain as she had ever been of anything - that the sound she'd just heard had come from somewhere close to it. Not from the bell itself, precisely. More like the bell had opened a window, just a crack, onto a room full of singing she'd never known was there.
She sat with it a long time, turning the little bell over and over between her fingers, and when at last she lay down to sleep, she left her window unlatched - not on purpose, or not only on purpose, but because some small, unschooled part of her hoped that whatever had just found its way in might want to visit again.
Downstairs, unnoticed, unremarked upon, and entirely unpunished, the kettle in the coal shed began, very softly, to hum.
