A Thousand Candles for the Old Oak

The Hall of Candles is at Confetti Court, Suite 1, and it is a very quiet place, because it is full of candles and candles do not talk. There are candles on every shelf, sorted by colour and by stripe. The person in charge of all of them is the Keeper of Candles, a tall woman called Keeper Wick, who has a long grey plait and a pencil she has been using for fifty years.

One Tuesday, a Candle Requisition arrived in the post. It was from a girl called Ruby, and it was for the old oak tree in her park. Underneath, Ruby had written: My grandad says it is about a thousand years old. Please send the right number of candles.

Keeper Wick read it twice and set down her teacup. “A thousand,” she said. The Department of Birthdays never argues with a birthday. But the rule, which is carved over the door of the Hall, is that every candle must be counted by the Keeper herself, one at a time, before it leaves the building.

So she began.

“One,” said Keeper Wick, placing a candle on the long table. “Two. Three.” She counted all morning. She had reached thirty-seven when the big clock in the hall struck twelve, and by the twelfth bong she could not tell whether she was on thirty-seven or forty-nine.

She started again. This time she reached two hundred and twelve before a moth landed on the end of her nose. She went cross-eyed looking at it, and by the time it flew away she had lost count completely. She started again. At five hundred and sixty-eight, she sneezed, and forty candles rolled off the end of the table.

That was when the smallest Wick-Trimmer spoke up. The Wick-Trimmers are the Keeper’s apprentices, who trim the wicks and polish the shelves. The smallest one was called Spark, and she was so small that she usually stood on a box to be seen. “Keeper,” said Spark, “what if we put them in tens?”

So they did. Spark tied ten candles together with a pink ribbon, and that was a bundle. Ten bundles went into a shoebox, and that was a hundred. Now the Keeper counted bundles instead of candles, and boxes instead of bundles, and nothing could make her lose count, not clocks or moths or even sneezes.

By teatime there were ten shoeboxes stacked in a tower on the table. “One thousand,” said Keeper Wick. “Every one counted.” She wrote it in the ledger and underlined it twice.

Then Spark said a very sensible thing. “Keeper, you can’t put a thousand candles on a tree.” And Keeper Wick, who had been so busy counting that she had not thought about it once, looked at the tower of shoeboxes and laughed until her plait came undone.

In the end, the Department sent just one candle to the park. It was tall and white, with a gold stripe, and it came with a small brown label written in the Keeper’s own hand: On behalf of nine hundred and ninety-nine others, all counted and present, who wish the oak a very happy birthday. On Saturday, Ruby and her grandad put it in a cupcake at the foot of the oak, and she blew it out, and the leaves above them rustled in a way that sounded very much like thank you.

Back at the Hall of Candles, the ten shoeboxes went up on the highest shelf, still tied with their pink ribbons. Keeper Wick wrote a label for the shelf in her fifty-year-old pencil: The Old Oak, One Thousandth Birthday, 999 candles, all present and correct.

Then she turned down the lamps one by one, until the only light was the moon through the round window, shining on nine hundred and ninety-nine counted candles. Spark had fallen asleep on her box. Keeper Wick tucked a shawl around her, sat down in her own chair, and began, very quietly, to count the stars. She had reached seven when she fell asleep too.