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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Seventh Autumn
Every seventh autumn, the lake on the mountain breathed fog down over the town of Sparrowgate, and the lamps had to be lit at noon.
Tamsin Gullick woke on the first morning of it and knew before she opened her eyes. The window was grey as a plate. The rooftops across the lane had gone, the church had gone, the mill chimney had gone. Only the sound of the town was left: the clank of a bucket, a door, somebody's boots.
Tamsin was eleven, and she was the best worrier in Sparrowgate. Everybody said so, though they did not always say it kindly. Behind her back, and sometimes in front of it, the boys at school called her Tamsin Frets.
She did not mind very much. Worrying was a job, and she was good at it, and since her father died in the quarry two winters ago it was the only useful job she could think of to do.
So she did it properly. Before breakfast she counted the coal in the scuttle — eleven lumps, and four days until the coalman came, which was not enough but nearly. She listened at the door of the little room where her brother slept and counted his breaths. Rufus was six, and when he breathed you could hear the air whistling in him, like a kettle deciding whether to boil.
Downstairs, her mother Josie was pinning up her hair with three pins in her mouth.
"Fog's in," said Tamsin.
"Mm," said Josie, around the pins.
"The seventh-autumn one. Mrs. Padgett says it lasts a fortnight."
"Mrs. Padgett says a lot of things." Josie took the pins out and smiled, and Tamsin saw how grey her mother's face was, grey as the window. Josie worked at the woolen mill, and lately she had been working doubles, which meant she left in the dark and came home in the dark and slept the way people sleep when they have run out of everything.
"You're doing another double," said Tamsin.
"I am."
"That's six this week."
"Tamsin." Her mother put a hand on her cheek. Her palm was rough from the looms. "Let me do the fretting. That's mine."
"You're too tired to do it," said Tamsin, which was true, and which was the wrong thing to say, and her mother went out into the fog without saying goodbye properly.
Tamsin took Rufus to school the long way, past the mill dam, because she always did. The dam held back the stream that came down from the mountain lake, and the sluice gate let the water through in a neat white rush. She checked it the way she checked everything: gate down, water going where water should go. Then she felt better for about eleven seconds.
Biscuit came with them. Biscuit was Rufus's dog, brown and scruffy and short one back leg, which he did not seem to have noticed. That morning he stopped in the middle of the lane, lifted his nose, and whined at nothing at all.
"He doesn't like the fog," said Rufus.
"Nobody likes the fog," said Tamsin.
But Biscuit wasn't looking at the fog. He was smelling it, deep and doubtful, the way you smell milk that has been out too long.
