The Caretaker and the Cold
Not properly. Not by name.
Once, his face had been carved into the choir stall, and his title, like his fathers before him had echoed from bell tower to boathouse like a blessing. But the years had peeled back the voices and weathered the wood, and now the islanders said little of him at all.
He kept to the chapel, its crumbling nave open to the wind, its bell long silent. In the hush of early morning, he repaired the bell rope, he stitched it with linen thread and beeswax, his hands steady from years of unspoken work. No one had asked him to stay. He simply had. Something deep in the floor stones, something older than duty, kept him there.
The lake froze over that winter. The reeds hardened into ivory stalks. And still, he stayed. He knew beauty in the stillness, and he saw tear-dropped shaped moisture in his rising, frosted, breath.
The villagers, the few that remembered the isle, called him the caretaker. They said he was part of the old vow, one that was hastily made, though none could name what that vow had been. They left food at the water’s edge once a month and cast no questions over the mist.
She was walking across the lake.
Almost gliding, her boots leaving no break on the surface. She wore a grey cloak, hood half-lowered, hair loose falling like spilled ink. And behind her, a trail of black-and-white feathers followed, fluttering gently in the airless dawn.
The magpies circled above her head in a slow figure-eight.
From the chapel tower, the Duke pressed a palm to the frostbitten windowpane. His breath caught. He hadn’t seen another soul cross that ice in years. Not since the last naming. Not since…
Her eyes turned toward the chapel.
He stepped back from the glass, startled. Though he knew she couldn’t have seen him, not from that distance, not in the fog.
But still, he pulled the heavy curtain across the window and let the bell rope drop from his hand. It coiled at his feet and a silence settled, as deep as the crypts below.
That evening, he found the firepit that was situated on the edge of the island had been cleared. A small circle of stones, carefully ringed, with fresh kindling tucked beneath dry moss had been made ready for a flame.
But there were no footprints on the shore. Only feathers.
He did not light the fire.
But he watched the kindling every night for a week.
And on the seventh morning, he found something else.
Folded once, weighted beneath a pinecone, there was a piece of parchment resting on the chapel steps.
Inked in dark, spare strokes, the note read:
“To he who walks without sound,
I offer this:
The silence between heartbeats
is not emptiness.
It is promise."
The Duke read the note three times. Once aloud.
Then he carried it to the bell rope and tucked it inside the weave.
The magpies watched from the rafters.
He did not ask why they had returned.
He only resumed the mending.
flm 25/08/2025