The plane bit into the oak with a long, whispered hiss, curling away pale ribbons of wood that caught the light like spun honey. Tom Briar worked the blade in steady strokes, his shoulders shifting beneath a flannel shirt gone soft from many washings, the muscles in his forearms cording with each pass. Afternoon sun slanted through the open door of his workshop and laid warm stripes across the sawdust-furred floor. Beyond the door, the village of Briar Hollow stretched in patchwork greens and weathered stone, and somewhere among the hedgerows a thrush rehearsed the same three notes over and over, patient as prayer.
Wren Calloway paused at the workshop threshold, a basket hooked over one elbow. Inside the basket lay a jar of her latest tincture, feverfew steeped in grain alcohol, its glass clouded pale green. She had tied a sprig of dried rosemary to the handle as a small kindness. The gesture felt foolish now, standing in the doorway of a man who had kept her grandmother's cottage hearth burning through two bitter winters without being asked.
She knocked the doorframe with her knuckles.
Tom glanced up, and the plane stilled. A shaving curled free and drifted to the floor between them. He set the tool aside and brushed his hands down the front of his trousers, leaving twin streaks of dust across the worn fabric.
"Wren." His voice carried the rough warmth of West Country vowels, consonants softened by years of wood smoke and beeswax. "Come in, come in. Don't stand on ceremony. I've just put the kettle on the hob."
"I brought you something." She lifted the basket and stepped inside, her boots leaving prints in the fine sawdust. "For your hands. The tincture, and the rosemary's just for smelling."
He reached for the jar, turned it in the light, and nodded slowly. "Your grandmother would've known what was in this by the colour alone." A low chuckle rolled through his chest. "She'd have given me a whole lecture about the proper hour to pick feverfew. Moon position, dew weight, all of it. I used to sit at her kitchen table and feel like I was failing some test I didn't know I was taking."
Wren settled onto the wooden stool near his workbench. The seat was worn smooth from years of use, and she could feel the shape of whoever had sat there before pressing into the backs of her thighs. "I miss her lectures," she said. The words came out quieter than she had intended, frayed at the edges. "Most days I feel like I'm translating her recipes from a language I only half-learned."
Tom set the jar down with care and leaned against the workbench, folding his arms across his broad chest. He regarded her the way he regarded a length of timber that needed coaxing: patient, considering where the grain ran true.
"You'll learn it," he said. "You already know more than you think."
"How can you tell?"
"Because you came to a carpenter with a tincture for his hands and rosemary for the soul of it." He gestured toward the basket. "That's not a girl who's guessing. That's a girl who's listening to her own instincts and just doesn't trust them yet."
The thrush outside changed its tune. Wren tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and changed the subject before the kindness could settle too deep. "I actually came because I wanted to ask you something. About the village."
Tom tilted his head. The dust in his eyebrows caught the light and made him look older than his years, crusted with the evidence of his work. "Ask, then."
"The Hearthfire Festival." She pronounced the name carefully, as though handling something breakable. "I've seen preparations starting. Margaret at the post office had holly and ivy piled by her door yesterday, and old Mr. Ellis was sweeping his chimney like his life depended on it. But no one has explained to me what it actually is. Or what I'm supposed to do."
For a long moment, Tom said nothing. He turned toward the small iron stove in the corner, where the kettle had begun its slow complaint. He crossed the workshop in three easy strides, pulled two tin mugs from a shelf above the stove, and poured the water over a handful of dried chamomile he measured by instinct into each one.
"Two weeks," he said, carrying the mugs back and pressing one into her hands. The warmth soaked through the tin and into her palms. "That's when it falls. Always the first new moon after the autumn equinox, if you want the old calendar of it. Most folks just count forward from harvest."
"And what happens?"
Tom lowered himself onto an overturned crate across from her, his knees almost brushing hers. He cupped his own mug but did not drink, holding it near his chin so the steam drifted across his weathered face.
"Wildflower wreaths," he said. "Every cottage in the village hangs one. On the door, or above the hearth, or both, depending on the house and the household. They stay up through the new year. Twelve months of blessing, if you believe in that sort of thing. And if you don't, well, you've still got something pretty to look at through the dark months."
"Who makes them?"
"Whoever lives in the cottage. That's the tradition. Each family gathers the flowers from their own land, weaves them with their own hands, hangs them with their own intention." He paused, and the gravel in his voice shifted to something softer, almost reverent. "My mother used to say the wreath wasn't really finished until the hearth had warmed it. You hang the flowers cold, and then you light your first fire of the season beneath them, and the smoke takes whatever blessing you've woven up into the thatch and the beams. By morning, the wreath's part of the house. By new year, it's part of you."
Wren turned the mug slowly in her hands. The chamomile smelled sweet and a little dusty, like something kept in a jar too long and brought out for a guest. "So I would need to make one. For grandmother's cottage."
"You would need to make one," Tom agreed. "Every hearth in the village gets blessed, or the tradition says the whole year tilts crooked. Bad luck for the house, bad luck for the village. Some folks laugh at it now, call it superstition. But you won't find a single person in Briar Hollow who'll risk the test. Not one."
"Even the newcomers?"
"Even the newcomers, once they've been here a season." His mouth twitched. "Once they've seen what a crooked year looks like. We had a winter, oh, twelve, fourteen years back, when the Pemberton family forgot to hang theirs. Or maybe didn't bother. Their chimneys cracked in the January frost, their cattle took sick, and the eldest boy broke his arm falling from a hay loft in a manner no one could explain. Mrs. Pemberton hung a wreath the next autumn and has never missed one since."
Wren's lips parted. "The Pembertons. As in Rowan Pemberton?"
Tom sipped his chamomile. His eyes, pale blue and creased at the corners, did not leave her face. "Same family. Different generation. Rowan inherited the land and the title and none of his grandmother's caution, if you ask me."
"You don't like him."
"I don't dislike him. I don't know him well enough." Tom set his mug down on the floor beside the crate. "I know he buys things. Property, mostly. Old houses, old cottages, land that's been in families for generations. He comes to Briar Hollow three or four times a year, shakes a few hands, and goes home again with another parcel folded into his pocket."
"And my grandmother's cottage?"
Tom held her gaze. The thrush outside had gone quiet, and in the silence the workshop seemed to lean in closer, its walls of planed oak and hanging tools listening.
"He asked about it," Tom said. "Just after the funeral. Came to my workshop with a bottle of something French and a lot of questions about who held the deeds, who had a right to inherit, whether anyone in the village might be interested in selling on her behalf if the granddaughter proved unsuitable."
The word landed in Wren's chest like a small, cold stone. Unsuitable.
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him the cottage belonged to the granddaughter, full stop, and that the granddaughter had a good head on her shoulders and a grandmother who taught her well." Tom picked up his mug again and drank, deliberately, as if closing the topic. "He smiled the way foxes smile, thanked me for my time, and left the bottle on the bench. It's still here, if you want it. I keep meaning to throw it out."
Wren exhaled slowly. The chamomile cooled in her hands, and she watched a curl of steam unravel into nothing. "I'm not selling."
"No," Tom agreed. "I didn't think you were."
The stove ticked softly behind them. Somewhere across the village, a dog barked twice and stopped. Tom rose, crossed to a low shelf lined with jars and bundles, and drew out a fat envelope stuffed with pressed flowers and loose seed heads.
"This belonged to my mother," he said, bringing it back to her. "She kept every wreath she'd ever made, flattened between sheets of waxed paper. There's notes in the margins. Which blooms to gather, which to avoid, what each one carries for a blessing." He set the envelope in her lap with the gravity of someone placing a crown on a head. "Borrow it. Make a copy if you like. Return it when the festival's done."
Wren's fingers closed around the envelope. The waxed paper inside crinkled like the wings of a sleeping moth. She could not speak for a long moment, afraid that if she opened her mouth the wrong feeling would come out.
"Thank you," she said finally, and the words were clumsy and sincere. "I'll take care of it."
"I know you will." Tom settled back onto his crate, and the creak of the wood sounded like an old friend sighing. "Now. Two weeks isn't long. You'll need to plan your gathering. The wreath tradition says the flowers should be cut in the morning, after the dew but before the bees get hungry. That way the petals hold their shape and the bees don't lose their temper."
"Bee temperament," Wren said, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "A serious consideration."
"The most serious. My mother lost a whole swarm to a woman who cut her lavender at noon in July." Tom's eyes crinkled. "They followed her to the village green and stayed there for three days. Refused to go home. Reverend had to come out with a bell and a prayer before they settled."
Wren laughed, and the sound surprised her. She had not laughed in the workshop before. She had not laughed in the village much at all.
Tom nodded, satisfied, and reached for his plane again. The blade caught the light as he tested its edge with his thumb.
"Two weeks," he said, almost to himself. "Time enough, if you start tomorrow."
Tom's plane found the wood again, and shavings curled away from the blade like pale ribbons. The rhythm of his work seemed to settle the conversation, giving it room to breathe. Outside the open door, bees drifted past in lazy loops, their hum rising and falling like distant singing.
"There is one more thing," Tom said, not looking up from his work. "Something my mother made sure I understood before she passed. The wreath is not decoration. The wreath is the blessing."
Wren tilted her head. "What do you mean?"
"I mean the flowers are not symbols. They are the working itself." Tom ran his thumb along the edge of the board, checking for splinters. "When the people of this valley gathered at the hearthfire in the old days, they did not pray over a wreath and hope the gods were listening. They walked into the fields and the hedgerows and the meadows, and they gathered what was growing. The blessing lived in the petals. In the stems. In whatever the land had put out that year."
He set the plane down and looked at her directly, his brown eyes steady.
"The magic is in the flower, Wren. Cut it right, carry it with reverence, and it carries the summer with it. The blessing for the year ahead is nothing more than the blessing the land already gave. We are only reminding ourselves to notice."
Something shifted in Wren's chest. She thought of her grandmother's cottage, of the wild borders that had run riot along the back wall when she first inherited the place. She had assumed the chaos was neglect. She was beginning to understand it might have been intention.
"So the wreath has to be made from flowers that are still full of whatever the land gave them," she said slowly, working it out as she spoke. "Not dried. Not pressed. Not preserved."
"Alive," Tom confirmed. "Or as alive as a cut flower can be. That is why the morning matters. That is why the bees matter. The flowers have to be open, receptive, still holding the morning's gift." He paused. "If you gathered them at dusk, or in the rain, or after they had begun to turn, the wreath would still be pretty. It just would not do anything."
Wren sat with that for a moment. The envelope in her lap seemed suddenly heavier.
"And the wildflowers specifically," she said. "Not cultivated ones."
"Wildflowers," Tom agreed. "The old ones. The ones that grew here before anyone thought to plough a field or build a fence. Yarrow and meadowsweet and foxglove and the bluebells that run along the stream in spring. Cornflowers when you can find them. St. John's wort if the season is right. Vervain." He ticked them off on his thick fingers as he named them, each one landing with the weight of something remembered. "My mother could name every one by smell, even in the dark."
Wren's mind went immediately to the garden behind her grandmother's cottage. The borders she had been struggling with since autumn. The wild patches she had let go, then tried to rescue, then watched decline as the months turned cold and wet and colder still.
"The wildflowers in my garden," she said, and her voice had lost some of its ease. "They have not been doing well."
Tom's hands stilled in his lap.
"Define not well."
"Patchy. Some of the beds came up thin in spring. The yarrow barely bloomed. The foxglove is spindly where it should be proud. The meadowsweet looked healthy until July and then it just stopped. The leaves curled." She swallowed. "I thought it was the weather. Or that I had pruned wrong. Or that the soil needed something I had not given it."
Tom's expression did not change in any obvious way, but something behind it shifted. The easy humor of a moment ago was gone. In its place was the careful stillness of a man who has heard something he suspected but had hoped not to hear.
"You came into the cottage in October," he said. "After your grandmother passed."
"Yes."
"The garden would have been coming down for winter. You would not have seen it at its best."
"No. I saw the borders and the cottage beds, mostly. The formal ones. I assumed the wild patches were as they had always been." Wren pressed her palms together. "But when spring came, they were thin. And then in summer they were worse."
Tom rose from his crate and crossed to the window. He stood looking out toward the lane, toward the path that led up the hill to Wren's cottage. His shoulders were tight beneath his checked shirt.
"Show me," he said.
"Now?"
"Now. Before the light changes." He turned back to her, and there was nothing gentle in his face now. Only urgency. "If the wildflowers are failing, we have two weeks to find out why. And two weeks may not be enough."
Wren stood. The envelope went into her satchel, tucked against the small notebook she kept for sketches of root systems and germination charts. Tom grabbed a wide-brimmed hat from a peg by the door and a pair of leather gloves he did not seem to need for warmth.
They walked in silence along the lane. The village unfolded around them in its quiet Sunday rhythm, a dog barking somewhere behind a stone wall, the smell of bread from the bakery on the corner. Wren's feet knew the way to her grandmother's cottage without her mind having to direct them. Her body had learned the path through repetition, through the daily walk to the workshop and back, through the slower wandering of the evenings when she did not have the heart to stay indoors.
But today the walk felt different. The hedgerows that usually soothed her seemed to lean inward, watching. The birdsong was ordinary but it carried a thinness she had not noticed before. Even the light, warm and slanting as it was, felt like something being held up for inspection.
Tom did not speak. He walked beside her with the long easy stride of a man accustomed to covering ground, his hands loose at his sides, his eyes scanning the verges as they passed. Twice he stopped without warning and crouched to look at a clump of wild thyme growing at the base of a wall. The first time he stood again with a small nod. The second time he stood again with a slow exhalation that carried no words but said plenty.
"What is it?" Wren asked.
"The thyme is thin. The stems should be thicker at this time of year. The flowers should be coming into their second flush." He brushed a fingertip across a pale cluster. "These are tired. The color is wrong."
They continued on. At the gate of Wren's cottage, Tom paused and removed his hat. He held it in both hands in front of him, the way a man might hold a hat in church. Then he looked at the cottage, and at the garden sprawling beyond it, and Wren saw him take it in all at once. The structure of the beds, the shape of the borders, the particular way the wild patches lay against the back wall.
"The cottage beds look fine," he said. "The roses are healthy. The lavender is coming along. Someone has been tending those well."
"My grandmother. And me, since I arrived."
"But the wild borders." Tom pointed with the brim of his hat toward the far side of the garden, where the cultivation ended and the rougher ground began. "Walk me there."
Wren led him around the side of the cottage, past the woodpile she had restocked in October and the rain barrel she had scrubbed clean when the first frost came. The path narrowed where her grandmother's careful geometry gave way to older intentions. Here the lawn had been allowed to grow long. Here the stone edging had crumbled and not been repaired. Here the soil had been left to do whatever it wanted, year after year, without interference.
Or it should have been. But when Wren looked now, really looked, with Tom's eyes on it beside her, she saw what she had been trying not to see for months.
The yarrow was sparse. Where there should have been broad flat plates of white and pink and deep rose, there were only scattered stems, each one thinner than the last. The foxglove stood at the back of the border in a ragged row, its spires short, its bells pale. The meadowsweet had gone entirely brown at the lower leaves, and only the topmost clusters still carried any green. A corner that should have run riot with cornflowers and St. John's wort was bare earth with a few struggling seedlings.
Tom crouched at the edge of the yarrow and pressed his fingers into the soil. He lifted a handful and crumbled it slowly, letting it fall back. He smelled it. He tasted a pinch of it, the way a vintner might taste a worrying vintage.
"The tilth is off," he said. "The structure has gone out of it. And there is something else." He looked up at her, and the worry was no longer something she had to read in the lines around his eyes. It was right there in the open. "Wren, this soil is tired. Not just neglected. Tired. The way a field gets tired when it has given everything it has and no one has put anything back."
Wren knelt beside him. She let her own hands push into the earth, feeling what he had felt. It was cool, and it crumbled too easily. It held no shape. It smelled faintly of nothing at all, when soil should smell of growth and decay and the small wild industry of everything living in it.
"Can it be brought back?" she asked.
Tom did not answer immediately. He looked out over the failing borders with the expression of a man calculating what he had and what he needed. Then he sat back on his heels and let out a long breath.
"Yes," he said. "With work. With the right things put back in. With time." He paused. "But two weeks is not much time."
"How much time would be enough?"
"A season. Maybe two." He rose and brushed the soil from his knees. "If we are lucky, and the land is willing, and we know what we are doing."
Wren looked at the borders. She looked at the cottage. She looked at Tom, standing in her grandmother's garden with his hat in his hands and his face full of the thing he had not yet said aloud.
She waited.
He said it.
"And we would need to know what was taken out before we could put anything back."
Wren did not move. The sentence hung between them like the smell of woodsmoke from a fire lit somewhere she could not see.
Taken out.
The words rearranged themselves in her mind, turning over and over until she could see their shape. Not exhausted. Not starved of rain. Taken. As if by hands. As if by intention.
She thought of her grandmother's workbench in the cottage, the rows of jars she had catalogued on her first night, the gaps she had noticed even then without understanding what they meant. The space where the dried yarrow should have been. The empty shelf beneath the row of tinctures. The leather-bound ledger with its neat pages and then, suddenly, its absence.
"What was taken?" she asked.
Tom replaced his hat. The gesture was slow, deliberate, a man buying himself a moment before he had to speak.
"I don't know what was taken," he said. "That is the problem. Your grandmother kept her own counsel about the garden and its workings. But I know the soil, Wren. I have worked it my whole life. And soil does not forget. When you rob it of one thing, you rob it of ten."
He gestured toward the nearest border, where a tangle of dead stems stood like old soldiers who had refused to lie down.
"Here," he said. "What do you see?"
Wren looked. "Dead nettles. Bindweed. Some kind of grass I cannot name."
Tom nodded slowly. "What do you not see?"
She looked again. Longer this time. The border should have been alive with something. She could feel the absence like a word on the tip of her tongue.
"Nettles," she said slowly. "I see dead nettles. But not enough. The whole border should be thick with them in summer. They love this soil, this damp. They should be shoulder high."
"They were," Tom said. "Every year. Your grandmother used to cut them by the basketful for the village. Poultices. Tisanes. Cordials. She sold them to Ash Fenworth for the inn and gave the rest away." He paused. "And then, two summers past, they thinned. Last summer they were barely there. This summer they are gone."
Wren's hands curled into the soil. She felt the small grit of it between her fingers, the cold that had no life in it.
"Did someone pull them?"
"Someone or something. I do not know which is worse."
A bee drifted between them, circling the dead border with the slow aimlessness of a creature that had lost its map. It lifted, hung in the air a moment as if listening, then turned and flew back toward Tom's hives near the far wall. Even the bees, it seemed, had given up on this ground.
"We will need to amend it," Tom said, his voice dropping into the practical cadence she knew well, the voice he used when the emotion had grown too large and needed to be set down. "Leaf mould from the common. Manure from the dairy at the bottom of the hill. Wood ash from my own hearth if I have to carry it by the bucket. And we will need the seeds. Which means we will need to find someone with a stock of them."
"Ash Fenworth?"
Tom's expression shifted. Something tightened around his mouth. "Perhaps. Ash keeps to himself about certain things. About your grandmother, especially. He was closer to her than most knew."
Wren stored that. She had been storing a great many things since her arrival, small observations that seemed to have no pattern yet and might, given time and patience, begin to arrange themselves into one.
"What about Marigold Thorne?" she asked. "She is the local herbalist, is she not? She might have seed."
Tom considered this. "Marigold might. Though Marigold does not give easily, either. You will have to earn it from her, and earning from Marigold is no small thing." He glanced toward the gate, where the lane curved out of sight toward the village green. "There is another possibility. There is a man in the village today who is mapping the festival route for the council. A Mr Pemberton. He came into the inn last night and asked after you."
Wren looked up sharply. "After me?"
"After the cottage. After your grandmother. After the garden." Tom's eyes were careful, watchful. "He has money and he has manners and he has questions. Be cautious with him, Wren. Not because I think him dangerous. I do not. But because I think him hungry, and a hungry man in a clean coat is harder to read than one in a dirty one."
The morning light had begun to thicken, the early gold gone to white, the shadows shortening. Somewhere beyond the hedge a car passed on the lane, then another. The village was waking into festival day, and the cottage, for all its quiet grief, sat at the very heart of it.
"I will go to him," Wren said. "He may have information about the route. About the land. About who comes and goes." She rose, brushing the soil from her skirt the way Tom had brushed it from his knees. "If he asks questions, I can ask some back."
Tom's gravelly chuckle surfaced, brief and warm. "That is the Calloway in you. Your grandmother could never resist a stranger with a good question. She said once that every new face was a seed pod waiting to be cracked open."
"Did she crack yours?"
"Eventually." He touched the brim of his hat. "I will be here when you return. I will begin on the borders."
Wren crossed the garden to the back door, stepping over the threshold into the dim kitchen where the dried herbs still hung in their bunches from the beams and the copper pots still held the smell of centuries. She washed her hands at the stone sink, watching the soil swirl away in the cold stream, and dried them on the linen cloth that hung beside the window. Then she took down the basket she had begun to fill the night before, the one with the few jars she had decided to bring to the festival, and she set off down the lane toward the village green.
The festival had already begun to gather itself. Bunting in faded red and cream had been strung between the chestnut trees, snapping softly in the breeze. Stalls were being erected along the wide grass, their canvas awnings the colour of butter. The smell of frying bread drifted from somewhere near the church, and beneath it the deeper, older smell of the bonfire that was being laid in the pit at the centre of the green, a layered perfume of pine resin and old hay. Children ran past her with painted faces, tigers and foxes and one small creature that might have been a bee. A man in shirtsleeves was hammering the final post of a maypole into place, his arms already reddened by the morning sun.
Wren found Rowan Pemberton at the far end of the green, near the stone cross that marked the old market square. He stood at a folding table that had been set up beneath a canvas shelter, and he was bent over a large sheet of paper spread flat beneath a pane of glass, weighing down the corners with smooth river stones. He wore a pale linen coat despite the working dust of the morning, and his dark hair was swept back from his forehead with the careful precision of a man who did not allow the day to disorder him. As she drew nearer, she saw that his hands, though clean, were not those of a clerk. There were calluses along the outer edges of the palms, and a faded scar across the knuckle of his left index finger.
He looked up before she reached him. His smile arrived a half second before the rest of his expression, as if it had been waiting in the wings.
"Miss Calloway," he said. His voice was cool and even, every consonant crisp. "I was hoping you would come. Tom Briar mentioned you had settled into your grandmother's cottage. Allow me to introduce myself. Rowan Pemberton. I have the honour of being the council's unofficial cartographer for the festival route this year."
Wren set her basket down on the edge of the table. "Unofficial?"
"Volunteer," he said, the smile adjusting itself by a fraction. "The council voted to formalise the position last spring but has yet to allocate funds. Until then, I serve at the pleasure of the fête committee, which is to say at the pleasure of Marigold Thorne, which is to say I do whatever she asks and hope she does not ask too much."
He gestured toward the map. It was a detailed thing, hand drawn in careful inks, the lanes and footpaths of the surrounding country rendered with a precision that bordered on devotion. Each road had its name written in a neat copperplate script. Each landmark, the standing stone, the ruined mill, the old well near the common, had been marked with a small symbol and a notation in the margin.
"I am told you knew these paths as a child," he said.
"I knew some of them."
"Then perhaps you can help me with a difficulty." He turned the page over with the careful motion of a man handling something precious, and beneath it revealed a second sheet, this one older, its edges softened with handling, its ink faded to the colour of weak tea. "This is a draft of the revised route. The council wishes to extend the festival perimeter this year to include the new orchards at the western edge of the village. But I have come across an obstruction."
He slid a smaller page from beneath the glass, a single leaf torn from what looked like a field notebook, and laid it before her. On it, pressed flat and preserved beneath a square of muslin, was a sprig of some herb she did not at first recognise. It was slender, with narrow leaves arranged in pairs along a reddish stem, and at its tip a tiny dried flower, the colour of old ivory.
"I found this pressed between two pages of an old gazetteer in the parish archives," Pemberton said. "It was tucked into the entry for this village. I assumed at first it was a bookworm's nest, but the staff at the archives tell me it has been there for at least forty years. Longer, perhaps."
Wren drew the page closer. The herb was unfamiliar to her, and yet not entirely unfamiliar. There was something in the shape of the leaves, in the way they curved slightly inward at the edges, that tugged at the back of her memory.
"May I?" she asked, reaching for the page.
Pemberton inclined his head. "By all means."
She lifted the muslin carefully and turned the sprig over in its cradle of paper. The leaves were brittle but intact. The tiny flower, when she tilted it toward the light, revealed a structure she had seen only in books, a five-petalled corolla with a star-shaped throat.
"Have you a name for it?" Pemberton asked. His voice was carefully neutral, but his eyes were not. They were watching her hands, her face, the smallest flicker of her expression.
"I am not certain," Wren said. "It could be one of several. The leaves suggest something in the borage family. But the flower is unusual."
"Could you take it with you? Consult your grandmother's records, perhaps? I would be grateful. The route cannot be finalised until I know whether this plant is significant to the village in some way I have not yet discovered."
He said it lightly, almost too lightly, as if the matter were of no more consequence than the placement of a stall on the green. But his fingers, she noticed, had moved to the edge of the page and were holding it there with a pressure just slightly greater than necessary.
"I can take it," Wren said. "For a day or two. I will let you know what I find."
Pemberton's smile widened by exactly the right amount. "You are very kind. If there is anything I can offer in return, any information about the route or the festival's history, please do not hesitate to ask. I have spent the better part of a year gathering such things."
Wren slipped the page into her basket, beneath the jars, and bid him good morning. As she turned away, she felt his gaze rest on her back a moment longer than courtesy required. When she glanced over her shoulder, he was already bent again over his map, his pencil moving in small, precise strokes, his expression once more composed into the perfect mask of a man with nothing at all to hide.
She walked back toward the lane, the pressed sprig beneath the jars in her basket, and felt the weight of it there like a question waiting to be asked.