The rain had stopped an hour before dawn, but water still traced silver lines down the glass panes of Halloway Maps, pooling along the warped sills where generations of neglect had let the wood swell. Wren Halloway stood at the workbench with a magnifying lens clamped to her eye, turning the recipe card from her uncle's effects so the thin morning light caught the dried sprig pressed into its center. The herb was foreign to her. It was not sage, not thyme, not any of the common kitchen varieties that grew in the boxes outside the kitchen windows of Clover Hollow. Its leaves were narrow, almost needle-fine, and they held a faint, dusty green even after months beneath the card stock, as though some stubborn life still lingered in the fibers.
She set the lens down and exhaled, the sound lost in the larger silence of the shop. The room smelled of beeswax and old paper, of the camphor she rubbed into the brass fittings of the drawer pulls, of dust disturbed by her own passing. From somewhere up the lane came the clatter of a milk cart, the first true sound of the village waking. Wren looked at the card again. The handwriting was not her uncle's careful copperplate. It belonged to someone else, someone who had folded this sprig here with a deliberateness that suggested importance, and she did not know who.
The greenhouse at the edge of town was a glass and timber affair that most villagers had given up thinking about years ago. It belonged to a woman who had inherited it from a man no one could quite remember, and it was said that she grew things there that could not be grown anywhere else in the valley. Wren had never had cause to go. The path to her uncle's map shop, and to most of his business, ran through the center of Clover Hollow, where the cobbles were kept clean by regular sweeping and the shopkeepers knew one another's names. The greenhouse lay beyond the last cottage, past the drystone wall that marked the boundary of the common grazing land, and its glass caught the late afternoon sun in a way that made it glow faintly orange against the grey of the moors.
She put the card into the inner pocket of her coat, buttoned it shut, and stepped out into the lane. The air smelled of wet stone and chimney smoke, and the cobbles underfoot glistened with a thin film of moisture that would not dry until the sun climbed higher. Wren walked quickly, her boots tapping out a steady rhythm that she timed to the beating of her own pulse. She was a woman who had learned, in the years since her uncle's death, that hesitation in Clover Hollow was read as weakness, and weakness was read as invitation.
By the time she reached the drystone wall, the sun had risen enough to strike the greenhouse full in the face, and the glass blazed. A wooden gate stood ajar in the wall, its hinges orange with rust, and beyond it a path of crushed white stone wound between rows of raised beds. Most of the beds were empty at this season, their soil dark and damp and waiting. A single cold frame stood against the south wall of the greenhouse, its lid propped open, and from somewhere inside came the sound of water running into a metal basin.
Wren pushed the gate open and stepped through. The path crunched under her boots, and the sound brought a figure to the greenhouse door. She was a tall woman, her hair the color of iron filings, pulled back into a knot so tight it seemed to pull the skin of her face smooth. She wore a canvas apron over a plain wool dress, and her hands, when she raised one to shade her eyes, were stained to the wrists with something dark and greenish.
"You're early," she said. Her voice was low and unhurried, the vowels rounded in a way Wren did not recognize from the village. "Most of the people who come out here come in the afternoon, when the light is better and they have less they cannot face."
"I'm not most people," Wren said. "I'm looking for information about a plant."
"Information," the woman repeated, as though tasting the word. "That is one of the things I have. Come in, then. Mind the threshold. It sticks."
Wren followed her through the low door into a space that struck her first with its heat, then with its smell. The air was thick, almost liquid, and it carried a dozen competing scents at once. Wax and loam, something peppery and bright, something darker that suggested roots and stone. The glass walls magnified the early light until it lay in broad, warm bars across the packed-earth floor, and in those bars the leaves of a hundred plants turned and glistened as though aware of being seen.
The woman crossed to a long bench that ran beneath the north wall and began to untie the strings of a canvas apron she had left there. Wren stood just inside the door, unwilling to step further without invitation, and studied the room. There were plants in glazed pots and in wooden tubs, in hanging baskets and in shallow trays of sand. Some she recognized: rosemary, feverfew, a straggling mint that had clearly escaped its pot and rooted in the crack of the bench. Most she did not. A climbing vine with leaves the color of old blood wound up a post near the far end of the room, and its flowers, when she tilted her head to see them, were a black so deep they seemed to drink the light.
"You keep unusual company," Wren said.
"I keep plants," the woman replied. "Plants are not company. They do not answer, and they do not lie. That is why I prefer them to most of the people in this village." She turned back, and her eyes, pale and grey-green, settled on Wren with a directness that felt like a hand laid flat against the chest. "You are the map woman. Halloway's niece. I heard the funeral bell. I do not attend funerals. They are for the living, and the living make a circus of grief."
Wren felt a hot flash rise in her throat, but she swallowed it down. "I came about a plant," she said again, and this time she took the recipe card from her pocket and held it out. "This was pressed into a card I found among my uncle's papers. I do not know what it is, and no one in the village I have asked recognizes it. I was told you might."
The woman did not step forward. She looked at the card, and her expression did not change, but something in the quality of her stillness did. It was a difference Wren, who had trained her eye to read the smallest marks on a page, could not quite have named. After a moment the woman crossed to her, took the card by its edges with a care that suggested she handled many such things, and carried it to the bench. There she set it down beneath a lamp whose chimney was spotted with the residue of old oil, and she bent and looked.
The silence stretched. Wren heard the water in the basin somewhere behind her, the creak of the greenhouse frame as the morning warmed it, the distant, muffled sound of a rooster from the village. The woman did not touch the sprig. She only looked, and the looking went on long enough that Wren felt compelled to speak.
"Do you know what it is?"
"I know what it is not," the woman said. "It is not any of the herbs that grow in the kitchen gardens of this valley. It is not any of the simples the village women keep in their cupboards for winter. It is not a thing I have in this house, and I have most things that will grow in this latitude." She straightened, and her gaze came up to meet Wren's. "Where did your uncle get this?"
"I don't know. That is what I am trying to find out. The card was folded into a letter from a woman I cannot identify, in a hand I do not recognize. The letter itself is a list of instructions. I was hoping the plant might tell me who wrote them, or why."
"Plants do not tell you who," the woman said. "They tell you where. They tell you what soil they were grown in, what water they drank, what light they were given. If you learn to read them, they tell you a great deal. But they do not give you names." She paused, and her hand hovered over the sprig without touching it. "This was dried in a press, and the press was heated. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. A novice would have crushed the leaves, or browned them, or left them too damp and watched them go mouldy. This was done well. That tells you something about the person, but it does not tell you who they are."
Wren stepped closer. The sprig lay flat against the card, its needle-leaves arranged in a careful fan, its stem bent in a gentle curve. "Can you tell me what it is?"
The woman drew a breath, and when she spoke again her voice had shifted, taking on a cadence that sounded like recitation, or like the speaking of words learned long ago and rarely used. "It is a thing that has many names, and most of them are wrong. The shepherds of the high moors call it the needle of the dead, because it grows on graves that have been left untended. The midwives of the western valleys call it the remembering herb, because a tea made from it, taken in the smallest dose, will bring back a memory that the mind has tried to set aside. The apothecaries of the towns call it by a Latin name, and that name is also wrong, because the plant they name is a different plant, and the mistake has been in the books for a hundred years."
Wren felt the small hairs at the back of her neck rise. "What do you call it?"
"I call it by the name my teacher gave me, and that name I will not speak aloud in this house, because the house listens." The woman turned away, and began to roll down her sleeves with a matter-of-factness that suggested the conversation was over. "What I will tell you is this. The plant is rare in these parts. It does not seed freely, and it does not transplant well. Where it grows, it grows because someone has tended it for a long time, and that someone has done so with care and with a specific intent. If your uncle had a sprig of it pressed into his papers, it was either given to him by the person who grew it, or it was taken by him from a place where it was not meant to be taken from."
"Which is more likely?"
"Given the man I knew of him, and the way he moved through the world, I would say the second is more likely, but that is only a guess." She turned back, and her eyes had softened, just slightly, around the edges. "You have come a long way this morning, and you have not been invited to sit down. Sit. I will make a tea, and we will see if the day warms enough to speak more plainly."
Wren sat on the low stool the woman indicated, and she watched as her host filled a kettle from a copper tank in the corner and set it on a small cast-iron stove. The flame caught with a soft whoosh, and the sound of water beginning to heat filled the greenhouse with a small, domestic noise that made the larger strangeness of the room easier to bear.
The kettle sang, and the woman poured. She did not ask how Wren took her tea, and so Wren did not tell her, and the two of them sat for a long moment in a silence that was not uncomfortable but was not quite companionable either. The tea tasted faintly of mint, and faintly of something else that Wren could not name, something green and resinous that sat on the back of the tongue.
"Your uncle," the woman said, after she had drunk half her cup, "was a careful man, but not a cautious one. I do not think he understood, when he began what he began, that he was putting his hand into a thing that could put its hand back."
Wren set her cup down on the little stool. "What thing?"
The woman looked at her for a long moment, and Wren had the distinct impression that she was being measured. "There is a name for it," she said, finally, "and the name is older than this village, and older than the road that runs through it, and older than the language that road was named in. I will not say the name, because you do not need to carry it yet, and because names, once spoken, do not go back into the mouth that spoke them."
Wren nodded, slowly, because she did not know what else to do.
"What I will tell you is this." The woman leaned forward, and the light caught her eyes in a way that made them look almost golden for a moment, before settling back to their ordinary grey-green. "The plant your uncle had pressed in his papers is not a plant that grows where it is not wanted. If it was in his workroom, it was because someone gave it to him, freely, or because he took it from a place where it had been tended by someone who knew what they were tending. Either way, he was not alone in his enterprise. There is someone else. There has always been someone else."
The tea cooled in Wren's cup. The light through the glass was beginning to shift, the sun moving past whatever stood to the east of the greenhouse, and the quality of it changed from pale gold to something more silver, more diffuse. In that light, the woman looked older than she had when Wren first came in, or perhaps she simply looked more like her age.
"I have said enough for one morning," the woman said, and she stood, and the movement had the quality of a closing, the way a book is closed when the chapter is done. "You will come back, I think, with more questions than you came with today. That is the nature of the thing your uncle stirred up. It grows in the asking."
Wren stood as well. "I don't even know your name."
The woman smiled, and it was the first true smile Wren had seen from her, and it made her look, for a moment, like a different woman entirely, someone younger, someone who had once been less careful. "My name is Sage," she said, and the word sat in the air for a moment as if it had been set down on a surface. "It is not the name I was born with, but it is the name I have carried for a long time now, and it is the name that will serve you well enough for the purposes of this conversation."
"Sage," Wren repeated, and the woman nodded, and gestured toward the door.
"Go and have your lunch," she said. "You have not eaten today, I can tell. The road back to the village is easier going than the road you came in on, and you will be back in your uncle's shop before the light changes much. Take care with the sprig. Do not put it in water. Do not put it in the sun. Keep it where it was, and do not speak of it to anyone until you have thought about who you might speak of it to."
Wren wanted to ask more, but the woman had already turned away, and was busying herself with something at the far bench, her back a clear dismissal, and so Wren let herself out, and the door clicked shut behind her with a sound like a small bone snapping.
The road back was, as the woman had said, easier going. Wren walked it with the sprig pressed flat against her palm under the cloth, and she did not speak to anyone she met, and no one spoke to her, and she was back at the map shop before the bell over the door had finished its small complaint at being disturbed.
She put the sprig back in the atlas, between the same two pages, and she closed the atlas, and she put the atlas back on its shelf, and she stood for a long moment in the middle of the shop with her hands at her sides and her mind very full.
Then the bell rang again, and Eli came in, his face alight with the particular excitement of a child who has been entrusted with a mission and has carried it out successfully.
"I found it," he said. "I found where it grows."
Wren turned to him. "Where?"
"The Cradlewell Garden," Eli said, and he was slightly out of breath, and his hair was standing up in a way that suggested he had been running. "Behind the wall, where nobody goes anymore. I asked Mr. Ainsley, because I thought he might know, and he got a face like this." Eli made a face that was, in fact, a very creditable imitation of Mr. Ainsley's particular expression of mild affront. "He said the garden had been locked since Aunt Iris's funeral, and that the key was in the vestry hall, and that nobody had asked for it in all the time since."
Wren sat down on the edge of the counter. "Iris Halloway," she said. "That was my uncle's sister. She kept the garden."
Eli nodded, very seriously. "Mr. Ainsley said she was the last one who ever went in, and that she had been the one to lock it after she came out, and that she had taken the key with her, and that when she died, the key went into the vestry hall's strongbox, and that it had been there ever since."
"How long ago did she die?"
Eli counted on his fingers, silently, his lips moving. "Seven years," he said, finally. "He said it was seven years this autumn."
Wren thought about the sprig pressed in the atlas. She thought about the woman in the greenhouse. She thought about the name that had not been spoken, and the thing that had a name older than the road.
"Eli," she said. "Has anyone ever asked for that key in the seven years since?"
Eli shook his head, very definitely. "Mr. Ainsley said no. He said people had forgotten about the garden, mostly, and the ones who hadn't forgotten had agreed, after Aunt Iris died, that it was better left alone. He said he didn't know why it was better left alone. He said he didn't think anyone knew, except Aunt Iris, and she had taken the knowing with her."
Wren stood up. She went to the shelf, and she took down the atlas, and she opened it to the place where the sprig lay pressed and drying, and she looked at it for a long moment.
"Eli," she said. "I need to get into that garden."
Eli's face, which had been alight with the success of his errand, went through several expressions in quick succession: surprise, then delight, then a certain seriousness that sat oddly on his young features.
"I can get the key," he said. "Mr. Ainsley trusts me. He lets me dust the strongbox when nobody's looking. I could take it, and have it back before he ever knew it was gone."
"No," Wren said, and then, "not that way. If there is a proper way to ask, we will ask properly. If there is a way to be given the key, we will be given it. I will not have a stolen key in my hand when I walk through that door."
Eli considered this, and then nodded. "I could ask him," he said. "I could say I was asking for Mrs. Tomlins, because Mrs. Tomlins is always losing things and asking after them, and he wouldn't think twice."
Wren shook her head. "Not even as a favour for Mrs. Tomlins," she said. "I need to know what I'm walking into before I walk into it. I need to know why it was locked. I need to know why nobody has asked for the key in seven years."
Eli looked at her, and his face was very solemn. "Wren," he said, and the way he said her name made her look at him more closely, "Mr. Ainsley wouldn't tell me why it was locked. He said he didn't know. But his face said he did. His face said he knew and he didn't want to say."
Wren sat down again, on the edge of the counter, and she looked at the boy, and the boy looked at her, and outside the shop the afternoon was beginning to slide toward evening, and the light through the windows was going the colour of weak tea.
"Then we go carefully," she said. "We ask, and we listen, and we do not take what is not offered. Tomorrow I will go to the vestry hall, and I will ask, in my own name, for the key, and I will tell them why I am asking. And if they say no, I will ask them again, and if they say no again, I will wait, and I will ask again."
Eli nodded. "Can I come?"
"Yes," Wren said, "you can come. You have earned that much today, at least."
Eli's face broke into a smile that was so open and so uncomplicated that Wren felt, for a moment, as if the day had not been as strange as it had been, as if she had simply walked into the village and asked a question and received an answer, and there was no woman in a greenhouse with eyes that went golden in a certain light, and no sprig pressed in an atlas that had not been put there by any living hand in a hundred and thirty years.
But the sprig was there, and the woman was there, and the key was in a strongbox in a vestry hall, and tomorrow she would ask for it, and the asking, she suspected, was only the beginning of something she had not yet begun to understand.
That night, after the boy had been sent home with a wrapped heel of bread and a copper coin for his trouble, Wren Halloway pulled the unfinished map from the drawer in the back room and carried it to the counter. The shop was closed. The shutters were latched. The lamp was turned low. Outside, Clover Hollow made the small sounds a village makes when it is settling into itself for the night: a dog barking three streets away, the creak of a sign for the draper's shop, the distant complaint of a cartwheel that needed greasing.
She spread the map flat and weighted the corners with inkwell, ruler, brass compass, and a small stone she had picked up off the lane that morning and slipped into her pocket without thinking why. The map was larger than it had any right to be, given that it purported to show only a few square miles of the valley and the lower slopes of the hill. The paper was heavy and slightly rough, the colour of clotted cream, and it had been drawn in a hand that was half surveyor and half naturalist. Coastlines, such as they were, were inked in deep blue. Contour lines were fine as spider silk. But over the surface, between the surveyor's marks, someone, presumably her uncle, had scattered a second set of notations in a smaller, more hurried hand.
These were the symbols Eli had noticed on the path.
Wren had seen them before, of course. She had spent the previous fortnight trying to make sense of them, with the limited success of a person fitting a key into a lock by feel. Some looked like botanical sketches rendered in shorthand: a stem with three leaves, a stem with five, a stem with a curl at the top that might have been a fiddlehead or a question mark. Some were musical: a single note on a staff, a pair of notes a third apart, a rest. Some were astronomical, or might have been: a small disc, a disc with a crescent beside it, a disc with a ring. And some were notations of time: a sun at the top of an arc, a sun halfway down, a sun below a horizon line.
She sat down on her stool and opened the atlas to the page with the pressed sprig. The sprig was still in its fold of tissue, and she did not take it out. She only looked at the small drawing her uncle had made beside it, the one that showed the leaf with its seven lobes and the stem with its kink at the second joint. She set the atlas open beside the map and looked from one to the other.
Then she took up a fresh sheet of paper, sharpened a pencil, and began.
She worked slowly. She copied the first symbol that appeared in the margin of the map, the one that looked like a stem with three leaves, and beneath it she wrote: possible match, lungwort, three-lobed basal leaves, early spring bloom, damp woodland. She turned to the atlas and cross-referenced. The pressed sprig had seven lobes, not three. She ruled the line out, wrote: no, wrong leaf count, and moved on.
The second symbol was a stem with five lobes, slightly more elongated, with a small mark at the base that might have indicated a bulb. Beneath it she wrote: wild hyacinth, five basal leaves, bulbous root, white flowers in April. She looked at the date her uncle had noted in the atlas beside the press of the same plant. 29 April, 1894. She looked at the calendar on the wall. It was the eleventh of May. The bloom would be over, if there had been any. She wrote: possibly correct species, wrong time of year to verify, and moved on.
The third symbol defeated her. It was the one Eli had noticed, a shape that might have been a leaf or a question mark or a small hand with the fingers curled. She copied it carefully and stared at it for a long time. She turned the page sideways, then upside down. She held it at arm's length. She held it close. She tried to draw it freehand and found that her hand kept making the same small curl at the top, the same suggestion of a thumb.
She gave up, for the moment, and turned to the musical notations.
These were easier, in a way, because she had played the pianoforte as a girl, badly, under the patient instruction of an aunt who had believed that all young women should have at least one unmarketable accomplishment. Wren could read music. She could not play it well. She could, however, recognize a key signature when she saw one. The first cluster of notes on the map was in the key of G major, which she associated, for no reason she could justify, with cheerfulness. The second was in D minor, which she associated with a particular kind of formal sadness. The third had no key signature at all, only a single high note repeated three times with a rest between each, and beside it, in her uncle's hand, a small note: at the threshold.
At the threshold. She underlined the words and drew a circle around them.
The astronomical notations came next. She had only a child's memory of the constellations, picked up from a tattered book of star lore that had belonged to her mother, but she recognized the disc with a ring around it as a conventional way of indicating Saturn, and the disc with a crescent beside it as a way of indicating the moon at a particular phase. The small disc by itself might have been the sun, or might have been Venus, or might have been a generic marker for a bright object. She wrote: Saturn, moon (phase unclear), bright object (unidentified), and left it at that.
Then she went back to the symbols of time.
These were the most straightforward, and the most disquieting, because when she lined them up in the order her uncle had placed them along the margins of the map, they corresponded to the hours of a single day. The sun at the top of the arc was, she thought, noon. The sun halfway down was dusk. The sun below the horizon line was midnight. And between these, at intervals that roughly corresponded to the canonical hours of prayer in the older village tradition, her uncle had placed small crosses, as if to mark a pause.
She sat back and looked at the whole.
What she saw, when she stepped back from it, was a kind of score. The musical notations gave the melody, or one of the melodies. The astronomical notations gave the key, or something that worked like a key. The botanical notations gave the words, or the physical objects that had to be present. And the times of day gave the structure, the way the bar lines of a piece of music gave a piece its measure.
Her uncle, she understood now, had not been making a treasure map. He had been making a set of instructions. And the instructions, so far as she could make them out, were something like: at this hour, on this day, in this season, under this sky, find this plant, and sing this song.
She felt, for a moment, the same slight vertigo she had felt in the greenhouse, when Marigold Thistle had turned and the light had shifted. The map was a piece of paper. The atlas was a piece of paper. The symbols were marks on paper. They were not, in themselves, any stranger than the symbols in a grimoire or a hymnbook. But the thing they described, the thing they were trying to point to, was not on any map she had ever consulted, and the song they were trying to preserve was not in any hymnal she had ever opened.
She thought of the woman in the greenhouse. Marigold Thistle. The way she had stood among her plants, and the way the plants had seemed to lean toward her. The way her eyes had gone gold, briefly, in a certain light. The way she had said, very precisely, that the atlas had been left for the right hands.
If the symbols on the map were instructions, then the atlas was the key, and the key was the sprig, and the sprig was the proof that the instructions could be carried out. Her uncle had spent twenty years assembling the proof. He had died, she thought now, not of disappointment, but of being interrupted. There was a difference.
Wren got up from the stool, crossed to the cabinet, and took down the second-best bottle of the sloe gin. She poured a small measure into a cup and drank it slowly, standing at the counter, looking at the map. The gin was sharp and sweet and left a trace of almond on her tongue. It was, she decided, exactly the right thing to be drinking at this hour, on this night, in this shop, with this particular set of problems laid out before her in ink and pencil.
She had work to do. She had questions to ask. She had a key to apply for in the morning, and a boy to take with her when she asked for it, and a woman in a greenhouse to revisit, and a vestry hall full of men who had known her uncle longer than they had known her and who might, if she asked in the right way, tell her what they knew.
She had, in other words, a beginning.
She folded the map carefully and put it away in its drawer, and she covered the atlas with a clean cloth, and she set the cup in the basin and poured water over it, and she made sure the lamp was out and the door was bolted and the shutters were sound. Then she climbed the narrow stairs to the room above the shop, which had been her uncle's and was now hers, and she lay down on the bed without undressing, and she slept, and she did not dream, or if she did, she did not remember.
In the morning, she would go to the vestry hall and ask for the key, and the asking would be the first step on a path whose end she could not see, and she would take it anyway, because that was the sort of person her uncle had been, and the sort of person she was learning, slowly, to be.