Foxglove & Folly: Three Parcels no Postmark

Three brown paper parcels sat on the worn flagstones of Widow Harker's apothecary when she opened the front door that morning, each one bound with undyed twine and bearing not a single mark of origin. No postmark. No sender's name. Nothing but a crude ink scrawl across the front of each: her name, spelled in a hand she did not recognise.

She stood in the doorway for a long moment, her shawl pulled tight against the chill that crept up Mistlewood High Street from the river fog. Behind her, the apothecary breathed its familiar chorus of dried rosemary and tincture of valerian, of beeswax polish and the faint vinegar tang of preserved specimens. Her cat Quill sat on the counter between two rows of amber bottles, watching the door with the pale indifference of a creature who had decided long ago that nothing in this world could surprise him.

Widow Harker bent and gathered the parcels. They were heavier than they looked. The twine bit into her fingers as she carried them inside, and she set them on the counter with a care that surprised her.

"Who in their right mind," she murmured, "sends a woman three parcels and no explanation?"

Quill flicked the tip of his tail. He offered no opinion.

She untied the first parcel slowly, her fingers remembering the knots her late husband had used on parcels sent from the markets at Thornbury. These knots were different. Tighter. Practiced by someone who wrapped things often.

The brown paper fell away. Inside, cushioned in a wad of cotton wool, lay a small pouch of soft doeskin, drawstrings pulled tight. Widow Harker untied the drawstring and tipped the contents onto her palm.

Seeds. A dozen at least, each one the size of a lentil, each one sheathed in a thin skin of metallic silver that caught the lamplight and threw it back in tiny, shivering sparks. She rolled one between her thumb and forefinger. It was cool. Too cool for a seed that should have been sitting in a sack or a paper envelope. The silver skin did not flake or tarnish under her touch. It simply waited.

She set the seeds down on a square of clean linen and reached for the second parcel.

This one came undone more easily. The twine was knotted in a sailor's hitch, the kind used by men who worked ropes for a living. Inside, more cotton wool, and a small glassine envelope sealed with a drop of plain wax. Through the paper she could see the shape of dried petals, pressed flat, their colour somewhere between bone-white and the faint violet of dawn over Mistlewood Marsh.

Moonflower. She knew the plant by sight, if not by name until now. Thornbury market women had whispered of it in her girlhood, a climbing vine that bloomed only at night and only under certain moons, its flowers said to close at the first light and never open again. She had never seen one. She had certainly never held its dried remains in her hand.

The petals gave off no scent. That was the first strange thing. Dried herbs carried fragrance; even the most neutral of them, pressed and stored for years, gave up some ghost of their original perfume. These petals offered her nose only a faint coolness, as if she had pressed her face against a window in winter.

She folded the glassine envelope shut and reached for the third parcel.

It was the heaviest. The twine here was knotted three times, and the brown paper had been waxed at the seams, as if the sender feared whatever lay inside might leak or escape. Widow Harker broke the wax with her thumbnail, and the paper crackled open.

A small glass vial, no longer than her index finger, lay nested in a twist of straw. The cork had been driven deep and sealed with the same plain wax as the petals. Inside the vial, a liquid caught the lamp and held it. It was not quite clear. It was not quite coloured. It shifted between pale silver and the faintest suggestion of green-gold as she turned the vial in her fingers, and somewhere in its depths something glittered that did not behave like sediment and did not rise like an oil.

She set the vial down beside the seeds and the petals and stood for a moment with her hands flat on the counter, feeling the slow tick of the apothecary clock above the door.

Three parcels. No postmark. No sender. Three things that, between them, meant nothing and meant everything.

A key rattled in the back door.

"Miss Calloway," Quill observed from his perch, in the tone of a cat who had been expecting her.

Juniper Calloway came through the back passage in a hurry, her boots leaving damp prints on the flagstones, her leather satchel thumping against her hip. Her hair was tied up with a green ribbon that had come half undone, and there was a smudge of something dark across her cheekbone that she had not noticed.

"Good morning, Widow Harker. I hope you don't mind my coming through the yard, the front latch was sticking and I thought I'd save us all the trouble of a locksmith. I was up at Thornbury market before the first bell and I have got to tell you about the price of dried elfwort, it has gone through the roof, and before you say a word I also brought you a bit of news from old Tom at the post office because he told me something this morning and I have been mulling it over ever since and I thought you ought to hear it sooner rather than later."

She stopped. She looked at the counter. She looked at Widow Harker.

"Something has happened," she said.

"Something has arrived," Widow Harker corrected her.

Juniper stepped closer. Her gaze moved from the linen square and its silver-sheathed seeds, to the glassine envelope and its pressed moonflower, to the vial with its strange, shifting contents. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again.

"Right," she said, more quietly. "Yes. I see. Has anyone else seen these?"

"Not unless the postman counts. He shoved them through the letter slot before I had my boots on."

Juniper picked up one of the silver seeds between her thumb and forefinger and held it up to the lamp. The light broke against it in tiny filaments, white and cold.

"These are not garden seeds," she said. "I have grown a great many things in my time, and I have never seen a seed do that."

"No. Nor have I."

"And moonflower." Juniper set the seed down and turned to the petals. "Pressed moonflower, Widow Harker. Properly pressed, not crushed, with the cell walls still intact. Whoever packed that envelope knew what they were handling."

"I had come to a similar conclusion."

"And the vial." Juniper did not touch the vial. She stood over it, hands behind her back, and watched the shifting silver-green as if she expected it to speak. "I have no idea what that is. I can tell you what it is not. It is not oil. It is not water. It is not tincture. It is not mercury, although I grant you it has the look of it. Whatever it is, it is alive to the lamp."

"To the lamp," Widow Harker repeated. "An odd thing to say."

"I mean it moves when the light moves. Watch."

Juniper lifted the lamp from its bracket and brought it closer to the vial. Inside the glass, the silver-green substance curled and pooled, drew itself toward the brighter side of the vial, and settled there as if content. When Juniper tilted the lamp away, the substance followed, slow and patient, like a cat watching a moving hand.

Widow Harker and Juniper Calloway stood side by side in the lamplight and considered the vial.

"Three parcels," Juniper said at last. "No postmark. No sender's mark. No note."

"No note."

"Someone who knows what moonflower is. Someone who has access to seeds that grow silver skin. Someone who keeps a liquid that prefers the light."

"That is a short list," Widow Harker said.

"That is a very short list."

Outside, the river fog was thinning. Through the front windows of the apothecary, the cobbles of Mistlewood High Street were beginning to dry in patches, and the first of the morning's carts was rattling up toward the market square. A crow landed on the chemist's signpost opposite and considered the day with one black eye.

Quill dropped from the counter and padded across to sniff at the glassine envelope. His whiskers twitched. He turned up his nose and walked away.

"Even the cat is not interested," Juniper observed.

"The cat is interested," Widow Harker said. "He is pretending not to be, because the cat believes that showing interest is the first step toward being asked to do something."

Quill, halfway across the floor, flicked his tail once and pretended he had not heard.

Widow Harker reached for her ledger and her best pen, and set them beside the three offerings. She uncapped the ink and looked up.

"You said Tom at the post office had news."

Juniper blinked. "I did say that, yes."

iper pulled the second stool from under the counter and sat, slowly, as though the morning had grown heavier since she stood up. Quill immediately claimed her lap with the air of a tenant who had been waiting.

"Tom says a stranger came in Tuesday last," she began. "Not through the front. Through the back door, the one the carriers use. Tom heard the latch and went to look, and there was a man he didn't recognize. Tall. Pale. Wearing gloves, which Tom thought was odd for the season. He bought three pennyworth of plain string and a single sheet of brown paper. Paid in coppers, not notes. Did not give a name."

"Coppers," Widow Harker repeated.

"Coppers. Tom said he counted them twice because it struck him as the kind of thing a person does when they have counted them many times before."

Widow Harker made a small note in the margin of her ledger. The nib scratched softly. "Gloves. Brown paper. String. No name."

"And," Juniper added, "Tom said the man asked after the postbox times. Not the collection times, the emptying times. Tom told him the morning collection goes out at half past nine and the evening at quarter to six. The man thanked him and left the way he came."

"The emptying times," Widow Harker said.

"I asked Tom the same question twice. He was certain."

Widow Harker set her pen down. The vial of moonflower resin caught the lamp and held the light in a small bright bead, as though it had swallowed a drop of sun and was not intending to give it back.

"Why would a man ask the emptying times of the postbox," she said, "unless he intended to put something in before the box was emptied, and wished to be sure it would not be forwarded on?"

"That was what Tom thought," Juniper said. "Tom is not a man who leaps to conclusions, but he thought that."

"And the parcels have no postmark."

"None. Tom showed me the bin where the evening collection sits before the bag goes up. There is a smudge of something on the rim. Not ink. He said it smelled of green apples."

Widow Harker closed her eyes for a moment. Green apples. The same green-apple sharpness Juniper had noted in the envelope, the faintest scent at the back of the throat, almost sweet, almost chemical.

"Green apples," she said, "and silver skin, and a liquid that follows the light. Three offerings from a man with pale hands who knows the emptying times of the postbox."

"Yes."

"And Tom saw no face."

"Only that he was pale. Tom said the sort of pale that comes from being kept indoors. Like a plant grown in a cellar."

Widow Harker opened her eyes and looked at Juniper steadily across the counter.

"The Association," she said.

Juniper did not answer at once. Quill, on her lap, turned his head and regarded Widow Harker with the flat amber patience of a cat who has heard a door close and is waiting to see who comes through it next.

"I have been thinking that too," Juniper said at last. "And I do not like the thinking."

"The Association sends letters on Association paper, with the proper seal, signed in triplicate. They do not creep in by the back door of the post office with brown paper and coppers."

"No. They do not."

"Which is precisely why," Widow Harker said, "if the Association wished to send something that they did not wish to be known to have sent, they would not send it as the Association."

Juniper's mouth thinned. "That is the kind of thought that gives me a headache in a specific place, just behind the left ear."

"Behind mine also," Widow Harker said. "It is the place where one keeps the thoughts one does not wish to have, but which will not leave."

Outside, the morning was gathering itself. A boy with a handcart went past with a load of cabbages, calling out prices in a voice cracked by early rising. Somewhere up the street, a shutter banged in a way that meant Mrs. Peck was airing her parlour, which she did every morning at half past nine with a regularity that could have been used to set a parish clock.

Juniper reached across the counter and, with the careful reverence of a person handling a sleeping bird, lifted the glassine envelope. The seeds shifted inside with the dry soft sound of small stones poured from a child's hand.

"May I keep these?" she said.

Widow Harker watched her. "What do you intend?"

"To plant them. In a chipped teacup on my windowsill. To see what they do."

"And if they do something we do not like?"

"Then we shall learn what we do not like, which is itself a thing of value. My father used to say that the only true danger in an apothecary is the thing one has refused to look at, because it was inconvenient to look at."

"Your father," Widow Harker said, "said a great many wise things, and also some very foolish ones, and you will forgive me for saying so because I knew him longer than you did."

"I will forgive you because you are right," Juniper said, "and because he would have laughed."

She set the envelope into the pocket of her apron. The seeds made a small dry whisper against the cotton. She stood, and Quill dropped to the floor with the affronted dignity of a cat who has been deprived of a throne.

"I shall plant them at noon," she said. "When the light is good. I shall note the hour and I shall note the sky and I shall write it down in the book my father kept for the seeds that did unusual things. There are eleven pages of entries. Some of them I do not understand. Some of them I understand too well."

"Juniper," Widow Harker said.

Juniper stopped at the door.

"Do not plant them alone."

"I am not alone. I have Quill."

"The cat is a comfort, but the cat is not a witness."

Juniper smiled, briefly, in the way she smiled when something had touched her and she did not wish to show how much. "Then come to the apothecary at noon. Bring your ledger. Bring your best pen. We will observe a thing, and we will write it down, and whatever we write will be true, even if it is alarming."

"I will come at noon," Widow Harker said.

Juniper nodded, touched the counter twice with her fingertips in the way her father had, a habit she had never noticed she had inherited until it was too late to inherit it gracefully, and went out into the morning. The bell above the door gave its small cracked note. Quill sat in the patch of sun she had left behind and began to wash his shoulder.

Widow Harker was alone with the vial, the envelope's faint green-apple ghost, and the small dark cube in its twist of paper. She did not pick up the cube. She sat very still and listened to the morning, and the morning was full of the ordinary sounds of Mistlewood coming awake: hooves on cobble, a far-off dog, the lift and fall of voices in the square. None of it sounded different. None of it sounded wrong. And yet the room had a quality, as though the air were a glass of water with a single drop of ink in it, still untroubled, waiting to be breathed upon.

She uncapped her pen and wrote, in her careful clerk's hand:

Received by hand, no postmark, three items. Item the first, a vial of resinous substance, golden-brown in lamp, sweet and faintly chemical, which moves toward the light. Item the second, a glassine envelope containing seeds of an unknown plant, smelling faintly of green apples. Item the third, a small dark cube wrapped in brown paper, weight and appearance of compressed tea, marked with a single rune not in the common script. To be observed. To be approached with care.

She set the pen down and looked at what she had written. It looked like the beginning of a story she had not asked to be told, in a language she did not yet know, and the first word of it was a single drop of ink falling into still water.

She capped the ink, closed the ledger, and placed both beside the vial where the lamplight would keep the small bright bead in the resin alive until Juniper returned at noon with a chipped teacup and whatever hour her father would have chosen, if he had been here to choose it.

The morning went on. The crow on the chemist's signpost ruffled its feathers and flew off toward the river. Mrs. Peck's parlour shutter banged again. A bell rang somewhere down the street, twice, which meant the post office was open and the first collection had gone out into the world.

Widow Harker drew the curtain half an inch across the front window and waited for noon, and for Juniper, and for whatever the seeds intended to do in the light when they were given soil and a little water and the patient attention of a hedge-witch's daughter who had inherited her father's book and his habit of touching things twice before she trusted them.

The bell down the street rang a third time. Widow Harker counted the silence between the rings, an old habit from her years at the customs house when each chime meant a barge had cleared the lock, or hadn't, and the difference mattered to the men who brewed her tea.

Noon came the way noon came to Tumberley in the early weeks of spring: slowly, and then all at once. The light through the curtain had shifted from the thin pewter of morning to something fuller, almost buttery, and the small bead in the resin was bright as a captive star. She heard the apothecary's door across the lane creak on its hinges, and then Juniper's particular footstep, which she had learned to recognize across thirty feet of cobbles and four months of sleeping beneath the same roof, a tread that always hesitated at the threshold as if the girl were checking whether the shop still approved of her.

Widow Harker did not open the curtain further. She heard Juniper come up the lane, the small clink of the chipped teacup against its saucer, and then the rap of knuckles on her own door, two short, one long, the rhythm her father had used when he came home with new specimens and wished to be let in without ceremony.

"It's only me," Juniper called through the wood, though it was never anything but. "I've brought the strong one. Mrs. Ledger's got a new tin and I'll not have her thinking I'm short-changing the woman."

Widow Harker opened the door. Juniper stood on the step with the chipped teacup balanced in both hands and a smudge of something green on her thumb. Her hair, never quite tamed, had begun to escape its plait in the usual manner, and her face held the particular expression she wore when she had been thinking about something since dawn and had not yet decided whether to say it.

"Come in," said Widow Harker. "The resin's still speaking."

Juniper set the teacup down on the small table by the door, looked at the vial on its shelf, and then, with the slow deliberation of someone who had been taught to handle a great many small living things carefully, she sat down in the chair opposite the window and folded her hands in her lap.

"I've been thinking about those seeds," she said.

"So have I."

"I dreamed of them."

"I am not surprised."

Juniper looked up at her. "Mother Harker, I dreamed they were a row of little green soldiers, and each one had a name, and the name was the name of a person I have not yet met. Is that the sort of dream that means something, or is it the other sort?"

"It is the sort of dream we observe," said Widow Harker. "We do not yet know which sort it is."

The morning passed in the careful way mornings passed when one had decided to be careful. Juniper steeped tea for both of them, and they sat in the parlour with the curtain still drawn, listening to the small sounds of the village assembling itself about its business. Widow Harker told her, in the plainest words she could muster, what she had felt at the bench: that the resin had warmed, that it had seemed to incline toward the vial, that she had written down what she had seen of the small bright bead and would show her the ledger if she wished it.

Juniper wished it, and read the page twice, and said nothing at all, which was, in Widow Harker's experience, the girl thinking hardest.

By half past one the light had shifted again, and from down the lane there came the particular sound that, in Tumberley, presaged any civic event worth announcing: the slow, deliberate tap of Mayor Hawthorne's malacca cane against the flagstones, and beneath it the soft complaint of his boots, which were always slightly too new for the cobbles.

Juniper tilted her head. "The Mayor," she said, as if identifying a bird by its call.

"Yes."

"Are we going?"

Widow Harker had not yet decided. She rose, drew the curtain aside an inch further than was her custom, and looked down the lane toward the chemist's signpost, where, every Friday afternoon when the weather permitted, the Mayor affixed to the board whatever notices he wished the village to absorb. Today the board was bare. Today the Mayor had come at an unusual hour, and was even now unrolling a long strip of cream paper and smoothing it with both palms while Quill, the clerk, stood at his elbow holding a pot of paste and a brush that had seen better decades.

"What does it say?" Juniper asked, for she had pressed her face to the window beside her and was squinting down the lane.

"I cannot read it from here."

"Then I'll go and see."

"Wait," said Widow Harker. She did not say why, only that the word came out of her with the weight of an old habit from the customs house, where waiting was a kind of work.

They waited.

The Mayor, having smoothed his paper to his satisfaction, stepped back, clasped his hands behind his back, and regarded the notice with the air of a man who had written something he was not entirely sure of. Then he turned, caught Widow Harker's curtain moving in the window, and lifted his hat to her with the formal courtesy he reserved for widows and for women he wished to be seen respecting. She inclined her head. He smiled, which on his broad pink face looked like the sun coming out after a morning of useful cloud.

Then he came up the lane toward her door.

Juniper sat down again, suddenly. "He's coming here."

"I can see that."

"Mother Harker, should I put the kettle on?"

"I suspect the kettle will not save us."

The knock came. It was a generous knock, the knock of a man who wished it known he was not ashamed of knocking. Widow Harker opened the door.

Mayor Hawthorne stood on the step in his better coat, the one with the brass buttons and the faintly military cut, and his hat was in his hand, for he had learned, perhaps from his wife, perhaps from the years, that one did not keep one's hat on in a widow's house unless invited to do otherwise. Quill hovered behind him, looking mildly aggrieved, as if he had been promised an errand and was about to receive a longer one.

"Mrs. Harker," said the Mayor, and his voice was the warm, rounded voice he used for all public occasions but had, today, an undertone of something a degree less polished. "I have taken the liberty of walking up, though I ought first to have written, and I confess I have not written. I find I have come instead."

"That is usually how it goes," said Widow Harker. "Please step in, Mr. Mayor. We have tea, and my apprentice has brought a strong tin."

The Mayor stepped in. He did not quite fill the small parlour, but he gave the impression of having considered it. Quill remained on the threshold, uncertain.

"You too, Mr. Quill," said Juniper, with the cheerful authority she sometimes assumed toward officials. "There's enough in the pot for four cups if we don't all want seconds."

Quill came in as if his shoelaces had been untied.

They sat. The Mayor accepted his tea. He blew on it, which was his habit, and regarded the steam with an expression that suggested he was about to say something he had been rehearsing in his study and had not yet managed to make sound like his own.

"Mrs. Harker," he said at last, "I have this morning been visited by two of our more notable residents concerning certain unusual activities reported around the village. I do not wish to be alarmist. I never wish to be alarmist. But I have called a public meeting for tomorrow evening, at the reading room above the tavern, and I should be glad, in the meantime, if you would attend me, and your young apprentice here, and bring whatever observations you may have made."

"Observations," repeated Widow Harker.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Of what nature?"

The Mayor set his cup down. He glanced once at Juniper, and then, as if deciding that a hedge-witch's daughter in a smock with green on her thumb was as good an audience as any for the truth he had come to deliver, he folded his hands on his knee.

"Of parcels, ma'am," he said. "Parcels arriving of late, three in number, with no postmark and no sender's mark, addressed to folk in the village by name, and containing items that do not quite belong to any catalogue I have seen in forty years of reading catalogues. There was a parcel to Mrs. Peck, containing, as I am told, a button of bone that was warm to the touch. There was a parcel to old Mr. Eldwin at the farrier's, containing a horseshoe of black iron that did not ring when struck. And there was a parcel to a gentleman I shall not name who received a folded letter containing a single word in a script no one in the village could read."

Widow Harker let the silence fill itself. Beside her, Juniper had gone very still.

"And yours, ma'am," added the Mayor gently, "I have come to ask about yours. I have come to ask whether you have received such a parcel. And if you have, whether you will, before tomorrow evening, allow me to look at the list you have kept."

She regarded him over her teacup. He met her gaze with the particular steadiness of a man who had promised his wife he would be honest this time and meant, at least for the afternoon, to keep his word.

"I have kept a list," she said.

"Ah."

"And I will show it to you."

"That's most kind, ma'am."

"On one condition, Mr. Mayor."

He inclined his head. Quill took out a small leather notebook and a pencil, then, catching himself, put them away again.

"What is your condition, Mrs. Harker?"

"That when tomorrow's meeting is held, the people of this village are told the truth, and not the kind of truth that sits well with whoever is paying for the reading room's lamp oil."

The Mayor's face did something complicated. It began as a polite wince, passed through a flicker of something that might have been gratitude, and arrived at the careful neutrality of a man who had been told, by his own wife, exactly this and was now hearing it from someone who had not the excuse of being married to him.

"I will do what I can," he said, which was, she knew, the most he could honestly promise.

"Then I will fetch the ledger," she said, and rose, and did.

She returned, and she opened the ledger, and she read him what she had written. The Mayor listened with his cup arrested halfway to his mouth and his face gradually losing its public colour. Juniper watched him, and Quill watched the carpet, and the resin on its shelf caught the early afternoon light and threw a small bright bead against the ceiling, as if it were keeping count of what was being said.

When she had finished, the Mayor set down his cup with the care of a man who had remembered, all at once, that he had somewhere to be and no clear idea of how to get there.

"I will hold the meeting," he said. "I will tell them what I have seen and what you have told me. I will not pretend the parcels are ordinary."

"And Mr. Quill," said Widow Harker, "you will set down in your notebook, for the village record, the names of those who received the parcels, and the names of those who sent them, if any such names come to light."

Quill, who had not taken out his notebook again, took it out now, and wrote, with a small black pencil, the date and the words: Three parcels, no postmark, observed by Mrs. Harker, apothecary apprentice, and the Mayor.

"And the seeds?" Juniper asked, from her chair.

"The seeds, Miss Calloway, will be the first thing I mention."

He rose. He thanked her for the tea. He thanked her for the list. He thanked her, in a manner she suspected he had borrowed from his wife, for her candour, and he left the way he had come, with Quill at his heels and his malacca cane tapping a thoughtful rhythm against the cobbles.

Widow Harker closed the door behind them, returned to her chair, and sat.

Juniper did not speak for a long time. The light moved. The bell down the street rang twice for the second collection. At last the girl stirred, looked at the vial on its shelf, and said:

"Mother Harker. Tomorrow evening we will be telling a roomful of frightened people that the world they were given does not entirely fit the world they have been living in."

"Yes," said Widow Harker.

"And after that we will not be the same."

"No."

Juniper reached for the chipped teacup, poured herself what was left of the strong tin, and drank it down as if she were putting on a coat against the weather.

"Good," she said.

Widow Harker picked up her pen, opened the ledger to a fresh page, and at the top of it wrote the date and the single word: Tomorrow. She looked at the word for a moment, then set the pen down, and went to the window, and stood there, listening to the lane, and to the small bright bead still speaking in its resin, and to the quiet, unhurried sound of a village beginning, at last, to learn its own name.