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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Town Under the Lid
Once, the valley town of Whistleby had the best weather in the county, and what was better still, it kept it in jars.
That was how things had always been done. If a Tuesday in June turned out especially fine — the sort of warm, buttery afternoon that made dogs sigh and old men take their hats off — somebody would climb Whistleby Hill with a glass jar, hold it open to the breeze, whisper the catching words, and screw the lid down tight. Inside, the jar would glow faintly gold, like weak tea held up to a lamp.
The jars went into cellars and cupboards and under beds. A hard frost was saved for skating. A brisk wind was saved for drying sheets. And every autumn, the whole town brought their best jars to the square for the Turning Fair, and opened one great bright day together, and danced under borrowed sunshine while the leaves came down.
That was before Hector Snell.
Mr. Snell was an enormous man with a damp forehead and a horror of being even slightly cold. He arrived eleven years ago in a motorcar with a heater in it, bought the catching rights from the council for a sum nobody was allowed to know, and pushed through a piece of paper called the Weather Act. After that, every cloud, breeze, sunbeam, and snowflake over the valley belonged to him, personally and legally.
He built the bottleworks on the hill. It had four chimneys, a hundred windows, and a great copper funnel on the roof that hoovered up anything nice that tried to happen. The good weather was bottled, crated, and sent off in lorries to rich cities that wanted a fine Saturday for a garden party.
Whistleby kept the seconds. Drizzle. Fog. A low grey ceiling that never lifted, day after day, like a lid on a pot.
Washing did not dry. Apples did not sweeten. Everybody spoke quietly, because it is difficult to be loud under a lid.
Hazel Thistle, who was ten, was not a quiet person.
"Observe," she said, standing on a kitchen chair with a cushion stuffed up her jumper and a saucepan lid held like a medal. She let her chin sink into her neck and made her voice wobble and boom. "Citizens of Whistleby. I am extremely important. I have never seen my own feet. Kindly hand over the sky."
Her grandmother Josie laughed until she coughed. She sat where she always sat, in the chair by the cold stove, wrapped in three cardigans, her knuckles swollen and stiff as knots in rope.
"You'll get us arrested," said Dot Thistle, but she was smiling into the washing-up, and her shoulders were shaking.
Hazel bowed. "And now, a currant bun, stolen from the works canteen at great personal risk." She produced it from her pocket, slightly squashed, and broke it into three.
And because she was pleased with herself, and because her mother was laughing for the first time all week, something warm rolled through the kitchen. The curtains lifted off the sill and hung there a moment, like a girl's skirt in a summer field. A smell of cut grass drifted through the room. The damp patch on the ceiling steamed gently.
All three Thistles went very still.
Dot dropped her cloth and shut the window. Josie leaned forward and gripped Hazel's wrist with her stiff old hand.
"Small," she said. "Keep it small."
Because that was the Thistle family's other secret, the big one, the one that mattered more than a stolen bun.
Weather leaked out of Hazel.
It had always done it. When she laughed, warm air rolled out of her. When she sulked, the kitchen misted over until you couldn't see the dresser. When she was frightened, the room went cold enough to see your breath. When she sneezed — and she sneezed a great deal, since the cottage was damp — exactly three snowflakes came out and drifted down onto the tablecloth, each one different, each one perfect.
Under the Weather Act, all weather in the valley belonged to Hector Snell. Nobody had ever asked what that meant for a girl who made her own.
Hazel had a fair idea, though, and so did her mother, and that is why the Thistle windows stayed shut, and why Hazel had learned to swallow her laughs like hiccups, and why she was, at ten years old, extremely tired of being careful.
