The last light of the day bled from the sky in thin copper ribbons as the stagecoach crested the rise above Brackenhollow. Mortimer Underbough pressed his nose to the smudged glass of the window, his breath making a small ghost against the pane. Below, the village nestled in the crease of a shallow valley, its rooftops the colour of old slate, its chimneys trailing threads of wood smoke into the cooling air. A bell tolled somewhere, low and unhurried, marking the hour in a fashion he had not heard since childhood visits to his grandfather's country house. The sound settled into his chest, and he sat very still.
He had not wanted to come. The letter from the solicitor had arrived three weeks ago, written in a clerk's careful copperplate, informing him that his Great-Aunt Edna, whom he had met perhaps four times in his life, had departed this world at the considerable age of ninety-one, and that, to his lasting bewilderment, she had left him everything. Not his mother, who had kept up a brisk correspondence with her aunt for decades. Not his Uncle Theophilus, who had once described the woman as "a rum sort, dear, but harmless." Him. Mortimer. The boy who kept the tea rota at the Bureau and flinched at unexpected knocks.
He climbed down from the coach on legs that had gone stiff from four hours of travelling, his small leather valise clutched against his chest like a shield. The driver tipped his hat and drove off without ceremony, leaving Mortimer standing in a drift of wood shavings and the faint, lingering sweetness of someone's baking. A sign above the tavern door read The Sighing Trout, and beneath it a smaller board advertised fresh meat pies, done at half past four.
"Mortimer Underbough, as I live and breathe."
The voice arrived before its owner did, sharp and warm as a kitchen knife. A woman bustled around the side of the inn, wiping her flour-dusted hands on a cloth that appeared to have once been a Sunday table napkin. She was small, round, and moving with the determined velocity of a person who had somewhere more important to be at any given moment. Her bonnet was perched at a slight angle, and her eyes, set in a face like a comfortable armchair, missed nothing.
"Mrs. Crumbly," Mortimer managed, and then, because it seemed the polite thing to do, "how lovely."
"Fiddle," said Mrs. Crumbly, and took him firmly by the arm. "Lovely, he says. Look at the state of you. When did you last eat a proper meal? Don't answer, I can tell by the colour of your face. Come inside, come inside, I have pies going cold and no use for them."
"I have a key," Mortimer said, producing from his waistcoat pocket the small iron key that had come with the solicitor's letter. "The house, my aunt's house, it is my purpose here to take possession of..."
"Later," said Mrs. Crumbly, steering him towards the inn door with the gentle ruthlessness of a tugboat. "First, you sit. First, you eat. A body cannot think about keys on an empty stomach. You are far too thin. Your mother would have my head."
He allowed himself to be guided inside. The taproom of the Sighing Trout was small, low-ceilinged, and scented with wood smoke, candle wax, and the yeasty warmth of baking pastry. A fire crackled in the grate, and a tabby cat of considerable girth regarded him from the hearthstone with an expression of supreme indifference. Two elderly gentlemen were playing dominoes in the corner, and they raised their hats to him as he passed, murmuring something that might have been "evening" or might have been "welcome."
"Sit," said Mrs. Crumbly, depositing him on a bench near the fire. "Do not move. Do not argue. I have been baking since four this morning and I will not have my work go to the wall."
She vanished through a low doorway that led, Mortimer presumed, to the kitchens. He heard her voice, then, brisk and distant, instructing someone to "warm a plate, quick as you can, and none of that sulky business, I've no time for it." The domino players continued their game in companionable hush. The cat blinked once, slowly, and resumed its washing.
Mortimer sat very still, his valise on his knees, and tried to compose his thoughts. He had prepared a small speech, on the journey, concerning the proper procedure for entering an inherited property. He had memorised the relevant clauses from his own copy of the Transfer of Estates Act, and he had a list, written in his neatest hand, of all the things he intended to inspect before nightfall. The roof. The cellar. The chimney pots. The damp course, if any. The neighbours, with documentation of their names and occupations. The list, folded into four, was currently being slowly crushed under his right thigh.
"Now then," said Mrs. Crumbly, reappearing with a plate piled high with three pies, each the size of a child's fist, golden and glistening. "Eat. They are mutton. Do not ask if there is anything else, there is not, mutton is what I have and mutton is what you'll have."
"Three," Mortimer observed, with the faint despair of a man confronting arithmetic.
"You'll eat three," said Mrs. Crumbly, seating herself opposite him with a cup of tea that had not required any preparation, "and you'll be glad of it, come midnight, when the wind gets up and the house does its sighing, as it does."
"The house sighs?"
"All houses sigh, dear. Brace yourself."
He picked up the first pie. It was hot enough to scald his thumb through the cloth napkin, and when he bit into it the pastry shattered into a thousand warm flakes and the meat inside was peppered and tender and entirely too delicious for the mood he had been hoping to maintain. Mrs. Crumbly watched him eat with the satisfied air of a woman whose calculations had been vindicated.
"I knew your great-aunt," she said, after a suitable interval in which he had disposed of half the first pie. "Forty years I've known the Underboughs. Your grandfather, rest him, used to come down for the grouse shooting and leave his cartridge case behind every single year. Your great-aunt Edna, she was a rum one. Sharp as a tack and twice as pointed. She knew what she was about, that woman."
"I only met her four times," Mortimer admitted, between careful bites.
"And yet she left you the house."
"I am, as far as I can determine, her only surviving relative with no profession requiring frequent travel. My mother is in Bath. My Uncle Theophilus is in the Orkneys, studying puffins, or so he informs us by post. I am... static, in an administrative sense."
"Static," repeated Mrs. Crumbly, in a tone that suggested she was filing the word away for future use. "Is that what we are calling it."
The fire popped. A log settled in the grate, sending a small shower of sparks up the chimney. The cat stretched, stood, and made its slow, dignified way across the room to a spot directly beneath Mortimer's bench, where it settled like a rumpled cushion.
"She expected you," said Mrs. Crumbly, after a pause that had a different quality to it. "I will say that much. Not last week, mind, nor last month. Years ago. Decades. She used to talk about it down at the post office, when she could be bothered to walk that far. 'He'll come,' she'd say. 'When the time is right, he'll come. He won't want to, but he will.' And I'd say, 'Edna, love, you're talking through your bonnet, that boy's buried in some ledger somewhere in the city and won't thank you for dragging him out.' But she was certain of it, your aunt. Certain as I've ever seen her of anything."
Mortimer's hand, halfway to the second pie, paused in mid-air. The pie, glistening and faintly steaming, seemed to him suddenly a much more serious object than it had a moment ago.
"She knew I would come."
"She knew."
"Without writing to me. Without summoning me. Without, in any ordinary sense, telling me of her intention."
"Ordinary," said Mrs. Crumbly, and gave a small, dry laugh that carried no humour. "Now there's a word."
He ate the second pie in a thoughtful silence, aware that his list of proper procedures was becoming rapidly less relevant. The cat purred against his ankle, a low, rhythmic sound that he found strangely steadying. The domino players had finished their game, or paused it, and were now watching him with the frank curiosity of men who had all day to indulge it. Outside, the light had gone from copper to ash, and the windows of the taproom had turned to squares of deep, ink-blue glass.
"You are wondering," said Mrs. Crumbly, who had been watching him with the same frank curiosity, "whether to ask me what she meant."
"I am wondering," Mortimer said, "whether you would tell me if I did."
"I might," said Mrs. Crumbly. "I might not. I've known that family forty years, and I've learned that the Underboughs, for all their peculiarities, do not suffer from a surfeit of information. They parcel it out, the way some folk parcel out sherry at Christmas. A sip here, a sip there, and never the whole bottle." She lifted her teacup, examined it for a moment as if it contained the answer to a question she had not yet asked, and set it down again. "Your great-aunt was a private woman, Mortimer. A very private woman. But a just one. And if she left you the house, she left it for a reason, and the reason will become clear in its own good time, or it will not, and you will have to make do without it."
"That," said Mortimer, "is not a reassuring thing to say to a man who is about to spend his first night alone in a house he has not entered in twenty-three years."
"Then it's fortunate," said Mrs. Crumbly, "that you will not be spending it alone."
She rose, briskly, and took from the hook beside the fireplace a lantern already lit, its small flame dancing behind glass. The light it cast was warm and yellow, and it made the shadows in the corners of the room shift and resettle.
"Juniper Thistle," she said, "lives in the cottage at the end of the lane that leads up to your aunt's gate. She has the run of the place, has had for years, tending the garden and the chickens and the bits of the house your aunt couldn't manage on her own. She will see you in, and she will show you what needs showing, and she will not show you what does not. That is her way. You will get on with her, or you will not. Either way, you will be glad of her company tonight."
"Juniper Thistle," Mortimer repeated, testing the name. It had the feel of something found at the bottom of a drawer, faintly scented with lavender. "She knew my aunt."
"She knew your aunt in the way that anyone who lived within a mile of her for forty years knew her, which is to say not at all and entirely, depending on the day of the week." Mrs. Crumbly smiled, then, a small, private smile. "She is waiting for you at the gate. She has been waiting since Wednesday. She says she likes to be early, but I suspect she has her own reasons."
Mortimer looked down at his valise, at the key in his waistcoat pocket, at the list crushed under his thigh. The third pie sat on the plate, still warm, and he realised with a small shock that he was actually hungry, that he had been hungry since the moment he stepped off the coach, that perhaps he had been hungry for longer than that.
"Eat that last one for the road," said Mrs. Crumbly, as if reading his thoughts. "You will want it where you're going. And Mortimer."
"Yes?"
"Welcome to Brackenhollow."
The third pie was apple and blackberry, and Mortimer ate it in three bites standing at Mrs. Crumbly's parlour window, watching the last copper light bleed from the rooftops. He brushed the crumbs from his lapels, accepted the brown paper parcel of his wrapped coat, and stepped out into an evening that smelled of wet slate and woodsmoke.
The lane to Brackenhollow began behind the churchyard and climbed. Gravel gave way to packed earth, then to flagstones set so unevenly that Mortimer had to watch his feet as well as the way. On either side, the hedgerows rose taller than his head, ancient and thorned and patient, and somewhere beyond them a dog was barking in long, thoughtful intervals, as if the dog too was considering the situation.
The key in his pocket had grown warm against his hip. He pressed his thumb against it through the cloth and felt the shape of it, the particular notch in the ward that marked it as old and particular and his.
The gate stood at the top of the lane where the hedgerow ended and the world opened out into a small, steep meadow. It was wrought iron, black with age, and it stood ajar in a way that felt intentional. Beyond it, the path curved between two sentinel beeches whose leaves had not yet begun to fall but were beginning to consider it. The cottage, he knew, was somewhere beyond the rise. He could not yet see it. He could see, instead, the figure leaning against the left-hand gatepost with the boneless ease of someone who had been leaning there since some time before his arrival and intended to remain until some time after.
She was younger than he had expected. That was his first coherent thought, followed immediately by the second, which was that she was holding a trowel and a half-eaten roll and she did not appear to be in a hurry about either.
"Mr. Underbough," she said, not moving from the post. Her voice had the soft West Country burr Mrs. Crumbly had warned him about, vowels rounded and unhurried, consonants left to arrive when they would. "I'm Juniper. I've the soil under my nails and a bit of cheese in my pocket, so you'll forgive me if I don't shake hands just yet."
"Mortimer," he said. "Please. I'm very pleased to meet you, and I am, I confess, rather at sixes and sevens about the, the whole affair, so if I seem a little, that is to say, I have not quite, my aunt, you see, the key, and the letter, and now this cottage, and I find I do not quite know what to say next, and so I am saying it badly, which is a habit of mine when I am, well, when I am."
He stopped. He took a breath. He had not, he realised, taken a breath in some time.
Juniper pushed herself off the gatepost with the slow deliberation of a cat. She was taller than he had first taken her for, and her hair was the particular shade of dark that looks almost green in certain lights, though whether that was the evening or the hair itself he could not decide. Her dress was a deep moss-coloured wool, and there were leaves in her pockets, and a small, ink-stained notebook was tucked into her belt alongside a pair of secateurs.
"Come up to the cottage," she said. "I'll make tea. You can set down that valise. It looks as if it's been arguing with you since Reading."
"I beg your pardon?"
"It is listing to starboard, Mr. Underbough. You've been carrying it crooked for the better part of a mile. Your left shoulder will ache tomorrow."
He glanced down. The valise was, he saw, listing. He adjusted it, feeling the weight resettle into a more honest position across his shoulder, and felt the small corresponding release in his neck.
"Thank you," he said.
She turned and set off up the path without waiting for him, but at a pace so measured that he could fall in beside her without hurry, which he did, and they climbed in a silence that was not quite silence, since there were birds settling in the beeches, and the sound of his own breathing, and the small cheerful crunch of her boots on the path.
The cottage came into view as they crested the rise, and Mortimer stopped walking for the second time that evening, which was, he reflected, twice more than was his custom. It sat low and square at the end of a longer garden than he had expected, the kind of garden that suggested the cottage had grown out of the soil rather than been set upon it. Smoke rose from a chimney at the far end, but it rose in a way that did not quite seem to be coming from a fire, more a thin, fragrant breath that carried something herbal and faintly resinous across the evening air. Lights burned in two of the downstairs windows, and the windows themselves were not quite flat, they bowed very slightly inward, as if the glass had been persuaded into its frame rather than fitted.
"The plants," Juniper said, without turning. "You're looking at the plants."
He was. The garden was, he could see now, not so much a garden as an enthusiastic negotiation between order and wilderness, with order currently losing. Rosemary grew in a hedge along the path. A fig tree leaned against the eastern wall. There were terracotta pots in regimented rows beside the door, each one labelled in a careful, upright hand he did not yet recognise, and beyond them, climbing a trellis with the cheerful aggression of a thing that knows it has been invited in, was a wisteria that should not, by any rule of horticulture he had ever been taught, have been flowering twice in one year.
"The wisteria," he said.
"Don't," said Juniper. "She gets ideas."
He looked at her. She looked back at him with an expression he could not quite read, which was, he suspected, her customary expression.
"Edna, your aunt, she asked me, when I first took on the watering, to keep a list of what bloomed when and for how long. She said it was for the Bureau's records. She was a paperwork woman, your aunt, even when the paperwork was about roses. I have seventeen years of notebooks in a drawer in the kitchen. They are in order. They are not, I should warn you, what most people would call tidy. My idea of order and the Bureau's idea of order are not, historically, on speaking terms."
"I see," said Mortimer, who did not yet see but felt he ought to begin the practice.
"Good," she said. "Come inside. The kettle will be singing by now, and if we stand out here any longer the rosemary will start making suggestions."
The door was not locked. It swung inward at her touch, and the warmth that came out to meet them was not, Mortimer realised, entirely the warmth of a fire. There was a hearth, certainly, low and deep, with a small, well-behaved blaze that looked as if it had been laid by someone who understood that fires were tools rather than company. But the warmth behind it came from somewhere else, from the walls themselves, from the beams, from the flagged floor that gave slightly under his boots in a way he found oddly reassuring.
The kitchen was the sort of room that made a person lower his voice without knowing why. It was long and low, with a deal table scrubbed to the colour of honey, and a dresser whose shelves held an order of jars and tins that was not the order he would have chosen and was, he suspected, the only order that made sense. Bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling in tied sheaves, labelled in the same careful hand he had seen on the pots outside, and there was a clock on the wall that was not, he noticed after a moment, ticking, but that he felt was nonetheless keeping time.
"Sit," said Juniper, indicating a chair by the hearth with a tilt of her head. "Put the valise down. It has apologised enough."
He sat. He set the valise down. The relief was greater than he cared to admit.
She moved through the kitchen with the unselfconscious ease of someone who has done so for decades, though she was not, he thought, yet thirty. The kettle was already hot. She set it on a hook above the fire, measured tea into a brown pot from a tin on the dresser, and set out two cups. The cups were not a pair. One was plain white with a chipped rim. The other had a pattern of small blue birds around its foot, and was, he thought, very old.
"The kettle was singing when I came up," he said, more to fill the silence than anything else.
"It does that," she said. "Edna said it was the wind in the flue. The wind has not changed since she passed, and it still does it. Make of that what you will."
"I will make very little of it, I am afraid. I am not in the habit of making things of small domestic phenomena."
"No," she said, and glanced at him over her shoulder with an expression that was almost, but not quite, amusement. "I don't expect you are."
She brought the tea. She set his cup before him. She sat down across the table with her own, and folded her hands around it the way one folds them around a small, warm animal.
"Right," she said. "Cards on the table, Mr. Underbough. I have been watering your aunt's garden for seventeen years. I did not apply for the position. I did not, to be honest, know there was a position to apply for. She asked me one afternoon, and I said yes, and that was that, and it has been that for every afternoon since, give or take a thunderstorm and the year I had the measles."
Mortimer took a breath. "I had no idea she had arranged," he began.
"She arranged very little that she did not need to arrange, and she arranged a great deal that she did need to arrange, and the difference between the two was not always obvious to anyone but her. She told me, when she first asked me, that the garden would need someone after her. I told her that was morbid. She told me it was practical. We had, as I say, been at this for seventeen years. She was right. I was wrong. I am, on this point, content to have been wrong."
She sipped her tea. He sipped his. The fire shifted in the grate, and a log settled with a small, considering sound.
"The cottage is yours now," Juniper continued. "The garden is yours. The lists are yours. The key is yours. I am not yours, and I would like to establish that early, as a matter of professional courtesy between one who keeps accounts and one who keeps bees."
"I would not presume," Mortimer said, a little stiffly.
"Good. Then we understand each other. What I will do, since you have come all this way and the evening is not getting any younger, is take you through the cottage this evening, and through the garden tomorrow in daylight. What I will not do is explain your aunt to you. That is not my job. That is not anyone's job but hers, and she is not here to do it, and I am frankly annoyed that she is not, because she promised me she would be, and your aunt was not a woman who broke promises, which is the part of this I am finding hardest to forgive."
There was a silence. Mortimer looked at his tea. He looked at the dresser. He looked at the bundles hanging from the ceiling, and at the clock that was not ticking, and at the small brown dog that had, he noticed, come in without his noticing, and was now sitting at Juniper's feet looking at him with an expression of patient appraisal.
"I am sorry," he said, at length.
"So am I," she said. "She was a difficult woman and a good one and she left more questions than answers, and I have spent three days wondering who would turn up, and now you have turned up, and you have a key, and you have the will, and you look as if you have not slept since Tuesday, and I will tell you what I told your Mrs. Crumbly when she telephoned this morning to say you were on the afternoon coach. I will tell you what is here and I will show you what needs showing and I will not show you what does not. That is her way. I learned it from her. I am not in the habit of unlearning things I have learned from people I respected, even when they have gone and left me with a garden and seventeen notebooks and no instructions."
She set her cup down with a small, deliberate click against the saucer.
"Have you eaten, Mr. Underbough?"
"I, yes, Mrs. Crumbly insisted on a pie, three, in fact, the last was apple and blackberry, and I confess I ate it rather more quickly than was perhaps dignified."
"Good. Then I will not offer you supper. I will, however, offer you another cup of tea, and then I will show you the cottage, and then I will leave you to settle in, and then tomorrow, if you are awake before I am, which you will not be, help yourself to breakfast. If you are awake after I am, which you will be, knock on my door, which is the blue one at the bottom of the lane, and I will come up and we will walk the garden."
"I would not wish to put you to that trouble."
"It is not trouble. It is what Edna asked me to do. It is what I have been doing. It is, if I am honest with myself, which I am trying to be, what I would have done even if she had not asked me, because the garden is the garden and the garden does not stop needing attention because the woman who planted it has gone to plant something else."
The small brown dog, who had been listening to all of this with an air of grave consideration, stood up, stretched, and walked across to Mortimer's chair. It sniffed at his shoe. It looked up at him. It placed one paw, with great deliberation, on the toe of his boot, and left it there.
"Bramble likes you," said Juniper. "Bramble likes very few people. Do not let it go to your head."
Mortimer looked down at the paw on his boot. He felt, suddenly and without warning, the prickle of something at the back of his eyes that he was not going to indulge, not here, not now, not in front of a woman he had met ten minutes ago and a dog who had placed its paw upon him in a manner he could only describe as ceremonial.
"I am very glad to be here," he said, and his voice was steady, and his hands were steady, and only the dog, perhaps, noticed that the hand he set down to scratch behind its ear was not quite as steady as it might have been.
"Right," said Juniper, rising. "Another cup, then, and then the tour. And Mr. Underbough."
"Yes?"
"You will want the blue room. Edna would have wanted you in the blue room. It is at the front of the house and it looks out over the garden, and the bed was made up on Tuesday, which is when I knew, though I did not like to say so. The linen is aired. There is a jug of water on the landing. The window sticks a little on the left, but a firm hand will manage it."
She paused at the door to the scullery, and looked back at him.
"Welcome to Brackenhollow," she said, and though she was not Mrs. Crumbly, and would not, he suspected, have thanked him for the comparison, the words were the same ones, and they landed in the same place, somewhere behind his ribs, where the key had warmed against his hip.
Juniper washed the cups in a stone sink that smelled of lavender and something older, something green and rain-soaked, and set them to drain on a shelf above the range. Bramble, having transferred its allegiance from Mortimer's boot to the mat before the hearth, arranged itself into a crescent of biscuit-coloured fur and slept, or pretended to sleep, with one amber eye half-lidded and watchful.
"Right, then," said Juniper, drying her hands on a cloth that had seen better days. "The tour. I will show you the downstairs first, and then the garden, and then Edna's room, if you feel ready for Edna's room. There is no hurry about Edna's room."
Mortimer nodded. His throat felt full.
The sitting room he had already seen. Juniper took him through it again, slower this time, pointing out the things he had missed: the row of inkwells on the windowsill, their glass stained in three colours, green and black and a particular rusty red he could not have named; the framed sampler above the mantel, worked in cross-stitch by someone whose stitches were uneven but whose letters were surprisingly crisp, reading WORK WHILE YOU HAVE LIGHT; the small painting in a tarnished frame, no bigger than a book, of a woman in a garden with a pair of shears in her hand, and behind her, a cottage that might have been this cottage, or might have been any cottage, or might have been a cottage that no longer existed.
"She did that one herself," said Juniper, tapping the frame with one blunt fingernail. "Badly, if you ask me. But she was proud of it."
From the sitting room, a low door into a parlour he had not been in. Smaller than the sitting room, papered in a pattern of pale blue cabbage roses that had faded to the colour of skimmed milk. A desk here, taller than the one in the other room, with a hinged lid and brass handles shaped like acorns. The lid was closed. On the desk stood a single photograph in a silver frame, a portrait of a woman Mortimer did not recognize, not at first, because the woman in the frame was not Great-Aunt Edna as he remembered her from the single occasion they had met, when he was seven and she was ancient and neither of them had known what to say.
The woman in the photograph was younger. Not young, not young the way Juniper was young, but younger, perhaps in her forties, with her dark hair pinned up in a style that belonged to a different decade, and a mouth that looked as though it was accustomed to speaking its mind. She wore a high-collared blouse and a brooch at her throat, and she was not smiling, but her eyes, even in the black and white of the photograph, had a quality of attention, as though the photographer had said something mildly absurd and she was on the point of replying.
"Edna," said Juniper, unnecessarily.
Mortimer looked at the photograph for a long time.
"I did not know her," he said, at last, and the words felt inadequate in a way he could not have explained.
"No," said Juniper. "I do not think many people did. She was better at being known by dogs than by people."
They stood for a moment in the pale blue parlour, and the only sound was the tick of a clock on the wall that Mortimer had not noticed until then, a small clock with a painted face and brass hands, going quietly about its business.
"May I open it?" said Mortimer, indicating the desk.
"That," said Juniper, "is yours to open when you are ready. I think she would have liked you to open it when you were ready, and not before. There is no lock. The key is in the top left drawer, but the drawer does not need a key. She never could abide locks. Said they invited the wrong sort of person to think."
Mortimer touched the brass handle, shaped like an acorn, and left his hand there for a moment, and then took it away.
The kitchen he had seen. Juniper showed him the larder, which was cool and smelled of dried herbs and stone, and the cold shelf beneath the scullery window where a dish of milk stood covered with a saucer, for Bramble, who did not, it transpired, eat from bowls. The range was lit, and would need lighting again in the morning, and the kindling was in the basket to the left of it, and the matches were in the tin on the mantel, and the tin had a picture of a heron on it, and Juniper told him all of this as though she were handing over a relay baton in a race she had been running for some time and was now, with visible relief, handing off.
"The privy," she said, leading him out through the back door into a small flagged yard, "is round the corner. The pump is the green one. The other one has a cracked handle and will take your hand off if you are not careful. I speak from experience."
The yard opened onto a path, and the path opened onto the garden, and the garden opened onto something Mortimer had not been prepared for, though he could not later have said what he had been prepared for, and so the unpreparedness itself was a surprise.
The garden was not large. It was not small. It was the size of a garden that had been made over many years by a person who had not consulted anyone about it, and it was not, in any conventional sense, tidy. It was overgrown in places, and undergrown in others, and there were corners where things grew together in a way that suggested they had been introduced to each other once and had taken to each other, and corners where things grew alone in a way that suggested they had been introduced to no one and were none the worse for it. There were roses, and there were cabbages, and there was a bed of nettles that Juniper steered him firmly past, and a wigwam of hazel poles with something climbing up them that had not yet made up its mind what it was.
"That," said Juniper, indicating the hazel wigwam, "is the inheritance. She made me promise to show it to you. It is beans, mostly, but there is a marrow in there that has designs on the world, and I would keep an eye on it if I were you."
They walked the path together, Juniper pointing out this and that, a bush that flowered in February and smelled of honey, a stone trough that filled with rain and was visited by newts, a gate in the far wall that opened onto nothing in particular and was for leaning on while one considered the view, which was of a meadow and a line of trees and a sky that was doing its best to look like an illustration of itself.
"Here," said Juniper, stopping at a patch of ground near the house, "is where she sat. Most days, when the weather permitted. That bench. That cup of tea. That book, or no book, depending. I used to find her here when I came up the path, and she would say, Juniper, you are early, or Juniper, you are late, and either way I knew she was glad to see me, though she would not have said so, because saying so was not the kind of thing she did."
The bench was wooden, weathered to a silver that was almost white, and there was a mark on the arm where a cup had been set down many times in the same place. Mortimer sat on it. The wood was cold through his trousers. He looked at the view, which was the view Juniper had described, meadow and trees and a sky that was, indeed, behaving as though it had been put there for the purpose of being looked at.
"I am glad you are here," said Juniper, and then, "I should not have said that. It is not my place to say that. But I am."
Mortimer nodded. He could not have spoken.
They went back into the house. Juniper showed him the stairs, which were narrow and steep and had a rope handrail that had been there since before either of them was born, and the landing, where the promised jug of water stood on a small table next to a spotted bowl of potpourri that smelled of rose and something sharper, cloves perhaps, or time. She opened a door on the left of the landing.
"The blue room," she said.
It was blue. Not the blue of a sky, or the blue of a forget-me-not, but the blue of a particular kind of light at a particular time of evening, a blue that was also, if you looked at it long enough, a kind of grey, and a kind of green. The bed was high and white and made up with a counterpane that had been darned in several places with such patience that the darns had become part of the pattern. There was a jug of water on the washstand, and a basin, and a cake of soap that smelled of nothing in particular, and a towel folded into a shape that suggested someone who believed that towels should look as though they were trying. There was a view of the garden from the window, and the sky beyond it was doing its evening work, turning from blue to that particular shade that has no name but means the day is nearly done.
Mortimer set his case on the floor by the bed. He looked at the room. The room looked back.
"I will leave you to settle in," said Juniper, from the doorway. "Supper is at seven. There is shepherd's pie, because that is what she liked on the days she knew someone was coming, and today she would have known."
After she had gone, Mortimer sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. The counterpane smelled of lavender and something else, something he could not name, but which he recognized, as one recognizes a face seen once in childhood and then not again for thirty years. He took the key from his pocket and held it in his hand, and then he put it back, because there would be time for the key tomorrow, and the day after, and all the days that were now, without his quite having agreed to it, his.
He unpacked slowly. Two shirts. Three changes of underclothes. A spare pair of trousers. The cardigan Mrs. Crumbly had pressed upon him, saying, Mortimer, you will catch your death, and the phrase had been so absurd, so perfectly Mrs. Crumbly, that he had taken it and not argued. A book he had been meaning to read and had not, a biography of a man whose name he could not now remember. A toothbrush. A tin of his own particular brand of toothpowder, which Mrs. Crumbly had once described as the toothpowder of a man who was not afraid of his own opinions. A small leather folder containing his papers: the will, the letter from the solicitor, the inventory, and now, folded in among them, the letter from Great-Aunt Edna, which smelled faintly of rose, and of a hand that had held it before him.
He placed the letter on the bedside table, next to the spotted bowl of potpourri. He stood at the window. The garden was settling into the shapes it would keep for the night, and the bench where Great-Aunt Edna had sat was a pale smudge against the darkening green. Somewhere a bird was singing the particular song that birds sing when they have decided that the day is over but are not yet ready to stop talking about it.
At seven, he went downstairs. Juniper had laid the table in the kitchen with a checked cloth and two places, and the shepherd's pie was in a blue dish on the range, and there were broad beans, and a glass jug of something that was not water and was not quite wine. Bramble had taken up a position under the table and was breathing on Mortimer's ankle in a manner he found increasingly difficult to object to.
They ate. The shepherd's pie was excellent, the crust browned in a pattern that suggested the fork had been wielded with purpose. Juniper talked a little, and he listened, and the silence between her sentences was not the silence of a pause but the silence of a place where someone might speak if they chose, and it was all right not to choose.
After supper, Juniper washed up. Mortimer dried. Bramble supervised. The kitchen was warm, and the range ticked, and the clock on the wall went about its business with the quiet competence of a thing that has been doing the same job for a long time and sees no reason to alter its methods.