Violet’s hands went still over the linen. “Sarah.”
“Yes.”
The kerchief went into Violet’s pocket.
Margaret’s province was Catherine’s turned inside out: trunks containing various items more thrown in than packed, linens loosely squared, papers not labelled.
Violet asked herself where a person kept the thing she could neither throw away nor leave out and took up the most-read book in the trunk—Thomson’sSeasons, its spine gone soft. A small, folded paper slid from inside the back cover into her palm.
They read it together, heads close, his shoulder warm against hers and neither of them moving away. The hand was small and quick and clean.
Ten drops in warm milk at bedtime when the wakefulness is on you, and no more, and nothing of it to Dr Maddox, who scorns the old receipts. Burn this when you have it by heart.
No signature. No date.
“I wonder,” Violet said softly, “if at the end she had begun to wonder, and kept receipts on purpose, and told no one.”
Henry had not spoken. She looked up and found him grey to the lips and his eyes fixed on the paper.
“I have seen this hand before,” he said, the words coming from somewhere behind his teeth. He touched the edge of the paper once. “I cannot recall who."
They put the provinces back as they had found them, sheet by sheet, and at the door Violet looked back once. Three beautiful faces watched them out, and she thought, before she could stop the thought:every one of you was chosen.
She closed the door on it, and on them, and said something sensible about the light going, and they set off down the long gallery toward his mother’s rooms with the afternoon falling in the high windows and four hundred years of painted Iredells watching them walk.
She was aware of him looking at her. She kept her face in good order and her eyes on the dead dukes and expected the silence to continue.
“How did you come to this work?” he asked instead. “The plants. The healing.”
“My mother,” she said. “She can name every green thing in a hedgerow at a walking pace, in Latin and English and the old country words besides. When I was small that bench of hers was the only place in England where everything made sense. Five daughters and no money, her stillroom kept us alive, andlearning it was…” she looked for the honest answer, “it was how I loved her. Other girls did their sampler at their mother’s knee. I did foxglove, and was taught to be afraid of it properly.”
They walked. And because he had asked her a true question, she found the courage to ask him one.
“Did you love them? All of them.”
He did not break stride, and he did not answer quickly.
“Elizabeth, yes,” he said at last. “In the way one loves at three and twenty, when love has cost nothing.” A few more paces. “Catherine and Margaret, I was beginning to. There is a moment when warmth turns and becomes something more. I had reached it with both of them. And both times, within the season, they were taken.” His voice stayed level, but she heard the weight beneath. “For twelve years I believed the beginning was the blade, Violet. That I had only to start loving a woman and I had as good as buried her. You cannot know what it is to be told the knife was never in your hand.”
She could not speak. She looked straight ahead. He looked at her, and she felt the full weight of his attention coming to rest on her face.
“They are my past,” Henry said quietly. “I will not pretend the past away, but…” They stopped walking. Henry turned toward her. “You are my present, Violet. And the whole of my future.”
She looked at him for a moment in the dying light and found she had no words. She began walking again.
“Here,” he said when they arrived at an ornate door. She was relieved for the distraction, for having something to do. He held the door open, and they went into his mother’s rooms together.
They searched the room but found no hidden compartments, no missed nooks.
“Perhaps I have missed something in the stillroom,” she said to Henry after they had given up looking. “When I first entered it, there was dust.” She closed her eyes and envisioned the moment she entered the room for the first time. “But there were specimens that were not as dry as they should have been. I credited the quality of the jar, even the specimen, but now I wonder,” she opened her eyes and looked at him. “Perhaps they were not as old as a decade.”
Henry nodded. “There is only one thing left to do.”
He led the way and Violet followed.
But at the foot of the east stairs the smell of supper met them, and the clatter of the kitchen and somewhere below a girl laughing. They stopped without needing to confer.
“She is back before dinner,” Violet said. “And that room has a dozen reasons to be seen.”
