Maren's boot struck the flint road and a spatter of dust rose around her ankle, fine as flour, pale as old bone. The coach door swung shut behind her with a groan of iron hinges, and then the driver whistled to his team and the whole conveyance lurched forward, leaving her alone at the crossroads of Briarfen with her suitcase bumping once against her hip.
She did not move for a moment.
The mist lay low across the hedgerows, threading through the cottage chimneys across the valley, soft as unspun wool. Somewhere a rooster called, hoarse and belated, and a dog answered from behind a garden wall. Closer, climbing the south slope of the hill, came the smell of wild lavender, sweet and faintly astringent, curling around her like a hand she could not see.
Briarfen.
Three years since she had breathed that particular air. Three years since the funeral that was not a funeral, since the front parlour of Halloway Cottage had been sealed with a length of ribbon and a solicitor's letter, since her mother's name had become a thing no one in her hearing wished to speak aloud. Three years, and here she was again, twenty-two years old and heavier in the chest than the suitcase in her hand.
Maren shifted her grip on the leather handle. The case bore the marks of the journey: a scuff across one corner where it had slid from the coach rack, a smear of road mud on the underside that she had not yet had the chance to wipe away. Inside, packed in careful folds, lay her mother's green ledger, the bundle of letters she had not been allowed to read, and the small brass key that had arrived in the solicitor's envelope with no note attached.
She looked up and down the crossroads.
To her left, the old coaching inn, The Hartshorn, sat shuttered but not dark; smoke threaded from the kitchen chimney in a slow, deliberate ribbon. To her right, the lane climbed toward the common and the standing stones she had once been forbidden to approach. Ahead, the village proper opened like a fan: the forge first, then the smithy, then the row of weavers' cottages with their painted doors, and at the heart of it all, the stone cross of the old market square.
And somewhere beyond the square, past the schoolhouse and the duck pond and the lych gate of St. Edmund's, the cottage on the edge of the village that bore her mother's name.
The mist shifted. A figure emerged from the doorway of Tilly Brackenford's bakery, three doors from the square, wiping her hands on a cloth that had seen better decades.
"Maren Halloway," said Tilly Brackenford, not a question, not quite a greeting, her West Country rasp carrying across the cobbles. "My stars, child. They said you'd come, but I told the Mayor, I said, that girl's got more sense."
Maren allowed herself a small, tired smile. "Hello, Tilly."
Tilly Brackenford was a small woman built close to the ground, all brisk efficiency and bright, sharp eyes that missed very little that happened in Briarfen and even less that happened in her own oven. Her hair was pinned up in the same style she had worn since Maren was small, white now where it had once been the colour of bracken, and her apron bore the dusting of a morning's work: flour, cinnamon, the faint ghost of clove.
"Don't you 'Hello, Tilly' me." Tilly crossed the road in three purposeful strides, the cloth now tucked into her belt. "I've had that spare room aired since Wednesday. Bedsheet smells of lavender too, you'll like that. Sit yourself down inside, I've got a pasty on the stone and a pot of something that'll put the road dust out of your bones."
"I don't want to put you out."
"You won't put me out. You'll do as you're told for once in your life and eat something hot." Tilly's hand closed, gently but with the immovable authority of long acquaintance, around Maren's elbow. "The coach from Exeter, was it? You look done in."
"From Exeter, via Honiton. There was a broken axle at the Half Moon and we waited an hour."
"Walter Harker's axle," Tilly said grimly, as though she had expected this. "I told him about that pinion last Michaelmas. Now then. In you go."
The interior of Tilly Brackenford's bakery had changed very little in three years. The same oak counter, scarred with the marks of a thousand scored loaves. The same brass lamp hanging from a hook by the door, unlit in daylight. The same dresser against the far wall, its shelves lined with stoneware jars of dried herbs and spices that Tilly had been collecting, Maren suspected, since before Maren was born. The smell that met her at the threshold was a warm, complicated thing: yeast and woodsmoke, caraway seed and butter, and beneath it, almost buried, the clean thread of rosemary.
Maren set her suitcase down beside the door and let herself be guided to the stool at the end of the counter.
"Sit," said Tilly. "Eat."
A pasty appeared before her, golden-crusted and steaming, the crimped edge a perfect row of small finger-pressed scallops. Maren broke it open and the filling released a curl of steam: skirt of beef, swede, a nub of potato, a wisp of thyme. The first bite was so warm it almost hurt.
"Now then," said Tilly, leaning her elbows on the counter opposite, her chin in her hands. "Tell me what brings you home, Maren Halloway. And don't tell me it's the cottage, because the cottage can wait another month, and so can the solicitors, and so can whatever's in that letter you got."
Maren looked up from the pasty. "How did you know about the letter?"
"Because I know Solicitor Grimm, and Solicitor Grimm cannot keep a piece of paper in his desk for more than a day without mentioning it to three people, and three people in Briarfen means the whole village before supper." Tilly's eyes narrowed, not unkindly. "Also your Aunt Esme wrote to me the week before last and said you'd had word from Grimm's office and that you hadn't told her what was in it."
Maren set down the pasty.
"She wrote to you?"
"She always writes to me. We've been corresponding since your mother and I were girls in the schoolroom together. She sends me her preserves, I send her my shortbread. She worries, Maren, the way she always has, only more so since your mother..." Tilly paused, chose her words. "Since your mother went away."
The word hung in the warm air of the bakery. Went away. As if Elspeth Halloway had simply stepped out one morning for a walk along the lane and had not yet found her way back.
"Tell me what's in the letter, child," said Tilly softly. "You'll feel better for it, and if it's bad news, better I hear it first than half the parish."
Maren hesitated. Her thumb traced the rim of the plate, around and around, the way it always did when she was weighing what to say.
"It's the cottage," she said at last. "The keys. The solicitors say I have to go in. They say there's something my mother left for me in the apothecary room, something they couldn't send through the post."
Tilly's hands stilled on the counter.
"The apothecary room," she repeated. "The little back room off the kitchen with the green door."
"Yes."
"And the key in the envelope?"
"The brass one. It fits, I expect. They didn't say what it opened, only that I was to use it on the door of the apothecary room and nowhere else."
Tilly was silent for a long moment. The clock on the wall behind her ticked steadily, a small wooden sound, and a bee bumped against the kitchen window in slow, persistent circles.
"Your mother," said Tilly, "spent the last summer before she disappeared in that room. Locked in from morning to night. The smell came out under the door, Maren. People talked. I told them to mind their own business, but people talked. Lavender, and something else I couldn't put a name to. Something a bit greener."
"I remember the smell," Maren said quietly.
"I know you do. You were eight years old and you used to sit on the kitchen floor outside that door and read your book and not say a word to anyone. Your father said you were the quietest child he had ever met." Tilly's voice caught, just at the edge. "You don't have to go in today, child. There's tomorrow. And the day after. The cottage has stood empty this long, it'll stand another week."
"I'll go today," Maren said, and was surprised to find she meant it. "But I'll eat the pasty first, if that's all right."
"That's more than all right." Tilly pushed the plate towards her again. "Eat. I'll cut you a slice of the seed cake for the road, and a small loaf wrapped in cloth for your supper, and you are not to argue with me on this."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
"You'd dream of it. You'd just lose." Tilly turned away toward the kitchen, then paused at the doorway. "One more thing, Maren. While you were gone, the Mayor's niece came round to the cottage twice. Both times she said she was checking the place was secure, but I saw her coming down the path and her hands were empty and her shoes were clean. The second time she had a basket, but the basket was lighter when she came out than when she went in."
"Lenna Veil?"
"The same. The Veils have had an eye on that cottage for thirty years, Maren. Don't you forget it. Don't you forget it for one single minute."
Tilly disappeared into the kitchen, and the sound of a knife against a board followed her, brisk and businesslike, the steady rhythm of a woman who had decided, without ever saying so, exactly how the morning was to be conducted.
Maren sat alone in the bakery and finished the pasty and tried to quiet the small, cold thing that had begun to move in the centre of her ribs the moment the brass key had fallen out of the solicitor's envelope three weeks ago in Exeter.
She knew, with the certainty of a child who had grown up in a house full of quiet warnings, that the door of the apothecary room was not the only thing the key would open.
Maren folded the seed cake and the small loaf into the cloth Tilly had pressed upon her, tied the corners in a clumsy knot she did not bother to redo, and stepped out into the lane. The morning had warmed enough to lift the smell of the river, and somewhere behind the church a dog was barking in the slow, considered way of dogs that meant the postman, not a fox.
She turned east.
The lane climbed past the green where the maypole stood stripped of its ribbons, past the stone cross with its moss-eaten saint, and then began to thin. Cottages gave way to hedgerow, hedgerow to the first of the forest's long shadows, and the cobbles underfoot softened to packed earth and then to a path her boots knew better than her mind. She had not walked it in seven years. She had counted the weeks once, in Exeter, in a small room above a chandler's shop, and then she had stopped counting, because the number had grown so large it had begun to feel like a piece of furniture she could not move.
Then the path curved, and there it was.
The Weathered Root Apothecary squatted at the edge of the trees like a hen deciding whether to cross a road. Its sign still hung from the iron arm above the door, the painted root so faded by weather that it looked less like a root than a question someone had asked the wood and the wood had declined to answer. The windows were shuttered. The shutters were not latched. That, she decided, was the second bad sign of the morning, after Lenna Veil's name.
The door was ajar.
Inside, the shop was exactly as she remembered and entirely different. The smell met her first: dried rosemary, dried lavender, dust, and beneath them something older, something that lived in the wood of the counter and the glass of the jars and could not be aired out no matter how long the windows stood open. She had known that smell as a girl. She had thought it was the smell of medicine. She understood now, standing on the threshold with her hand still on the iron latch, that it was the smell of her grandmother's hands.
Jars lined the walls from floor to ceiling, each one labelled in her grandmother's small, slanted hand. Valerian. Feverfew. Yarrow. Tormentil. Comfrey. Maren read the names without moving her lips and felt, for a moment, as though she were reading the labels on the inside of her own ribs. Bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling beams, tied with red thread that her grandmother had always said was for luck and Maren had always suspected was for the birds, to keep them from stealing the seed. Beneath the counter, the drawers of the great chest stood in their rows, each with its brass pull shaped like a different root, and each with its own particular creak when it was opened, so that her grandmother, Maren had once told her, could tell from the kitchen which drawer she had drawn on without ever coming into the room.
Tilly was waiting by the counter. She had come through the back door, through the drying yard and the cold frames where Elspeth had once grown her own valerian and her own feverfew, in defiance of every gardening book in the West Country. Tilly had a key of her own, on a length of green ribbon. She had been coming here, Maren realised, for three weeks, to air the shop, to sweep the floor, to keep the dust from settling so deep it became a kind of burial.
"Sit down, my girl." Tilly's voice was not the brisk voice of the bakery. It was a voice with the rasp turned up and the briskness turned down, and something else laid over it that Maren could not at first place. Then she could. It was the voice women used when a child had fallen from a height, and they had not yet looked to see how far.
"I'm all right, Tilly."
"I know you are. Sit down anyway."
Maren sat.
The stool behind the counter was the same stool her grandmother had let her stand on, when she was four, to reach the lower shelves. It was lower than she remembered. Or she was taller. Or grief, which she had not yet begun to feel, was already bending her down toward it.
Tilly set two things on the counter between them. The first was a key. Not the brass solicitor's key that had arrived three weeks ago in Exeter in a long envelope smelling of other people's papers and other people's troubles.
The first was a key. Not the brass solicitor's key that had arrived three weeks ago in Exeter in a long envelope smelling of other people's papers and other people's troubles. This key was older. It was iron, blackened at the teeth, and hung from a twist of faded red ribbon. Tilly set it down beside the second thing, and Maren saw what the second thing was, and for a moment the shop was very quiet.
The second thing was a jar. Not a jar from the shop's shelves, not the labelled rows of tinctures and dried simples that Elspeth had kept in such meticulous order. This was a small glass jar with a cork stopper, and inside it, pressed flat against the glass as though it had been waiting there for years, was a sprig of something dried. Maren did not at first recognize it. The colour had gone out of it. It was the brown of old paper, the brown of tea left to stand. But the shape of it, the way the little bells hung in a row along the stem, she knew that shape.
"Briar bell," she said.
Tilly nodded.
"Your grandmother grew it," she said. "In the far garden. You won't have seen it. It only flowers in the last week of August, and only in a year when the weather has been particular."
Maren looked at the jar. The little bells were no larger than her smallest fingernail. Each one was dried to the colour of weak tea, but at the base of each bell there was the ghost of a stain, a faint violet, the violet of a bruise that has nearly healed.
"She pressed it herself," Tilly said. "The week before she went."
Maren did not ask before she went where. She had asked the question a hundred times in the last three weeks, of the solicitor in Exeter, of the constable who had walked the riverbank twice, of her own reflection in the dark window of the shop when the lanterns were out and she could not sleep. She had asked the river. She had asked the lane. She had asked the brambles at the bottom of the garden, the ones that had grown up over the gate in the years her mother had been gone, the ones that flowered in August with that pale, bruising violet. The brambles had not answered. The river had not answered. Only Tilly answered, and what Tilly answered was not the question Maren had asked.
"She left this for you," Tilly said. "In my keeping. She made me swear on the bread and the salt."
Maren looked at the key. She looked at the jar.
"Both of them?" she said.
"Both of them."
"And you kept them for thirty years?"
"Thirty-one," Tilly said. "And I would have kept them thirty-one more, if you had not come home."
Home. The word sat between them on the counter, beside the key and the jar. Maren had not thought of Briarfen as home in a long time. She had been in Plymouth, in a little rented room above a chandler's shop, learning the trade from a man whose hands smelled of turpentine and whose voice she could barely understand. She had been doing well. She had been forgetting, by degrees, the smell of the drying yard and the sound of the lane after rain. She had been forgetting her mother's laugh. Then the letter had come, and the key, and the train to Exeter, and the slow cart ride over the moors with a driver who did not speak, and now she was here, in the shop, with Tilly and the key and the jar and the word home, and the forgetting was over.
"I didn't know she had grown briar bell," Maren said.
"She didn't tell anyone," Tilly said. "Not even me. I only knew because I came in one morning and she was standing in the far garden with her sleeves rolled up, and she had that look on her face she had when she was being wicked."
"Wicked?"
"Elspeth Halloway was a good woman," Tilly said, "but she was a wicked gardener. She never grew a thing the books told her to grow. She grew valerian in the shade and feverfew in the sun and she let the comfrey run wherever it wanted, and she never told a soul what she was doing in the far garden because the far garden was hers."
Tilly reached across the counter and took Maren's hand. Her fingers were flour-dusted, even now, even at the end of a long day, as though the flour of the bakery had worked its way into the whorls of her skin and made a home there.
"You go through the cottage tonight," Tilly said. "You catalogue what you can. You don't have to be quick about it. The shop isn't going anywhere."
"I don't know where to start," Maren said.
"Start with the jars," Tilly said. "Your mother labelled everything in that house except the things she meant to keep secret. Start with the jars, and when you come to something you can't read, you set it aside and you ask me. I'll be down at the bakery. I'll be down at the bakery for the next thirty years, if that's what it takes."
She picked up her shawl from the back of the stool and wound it around her shoulders, and she went out through the back door, through the drying yard, through the cold frames where the valerian had run to seed and the feverfew had gone leggy and wild. Maren heard the back gate creak, and then the lane gate, and then Tilly's footsteps on the lane, fading, fading, gone.
The shop was quiet.
Maren stood behind the counter for a long time. The key and the jar sat where Tilly had set them down. The evening was coming in through the front windows, and the light in the shop was the colour of weak tea, the colour of the briar bells in the jar. She could hear the clock in the parlour ticking. She could hear a dog barking somewhere down the lane. She could hear, very faintly, the sound of the river, which was not so much a sound as a feeling in the floorboards, a low tremor that ran through the whole cottage and that she had not noticed until she stopped noticing everything else.
She took the key and the jar and carried them into the back room. She set them on the shelf above the workbench, beside the scales and the pestle and the little tin of beeswax that her mother had used to seal the tops of the tincture jars. Then she lit a second lamp, and she went back to the front of the shop, and she began.
The jars were on the shelves to her left, floor to ceiling, in rows that her mother had labelled in a hand that grew shakier as the years went on. The earliest labels, from when Elspeth was a young woman, were round and firm and almost printed in their precision. The later ones, from the last summer, from the last autumn, from the winter before Maren was born, were thin and wavering, the letters drawn out as though each one cost her something. Maren read them as she went. Yarrow. Mugwort. Vervain. Ladies mantle. She wrote each name in her own notebook, in her own hand, and she noted the colour of the dried herb, the smell of it when she cracked the lid, the weight of the jar in her palm.
Some of the jars she could not read. The ink had faded, or the label had been soaked through at some point and the words had bled into the brown of the paper until they were only
the shape of something she almost knew. She set those aside in a separate basket, to ask Tilly about later, or to puzzle over by lamplight when the shop was closed and the rain had stopped its tapping on the window glass.
The work went on. Maren's hand grew cramped around the pen, and she flexed it now and again, spreading the fingers wide and then curling them back into a fist. The lamp threw her shadow long and wavering against the far wall, and somewhere outside a cart rattled past on the lane, the driver whistling a tune that trailed away into the dark. She smelled the herbs as she went, each one a small shock of recognition or strangeness. Rosemary. Thyme. Sage. The sharp green sting of crushed feverfew. The dusty sweetness of dried chamomile that had sat too long in its jar.
There was a row of jars on the bottom shelf that she had not touched yet, pushed far back against the wall as though her mother had wanted them out of sight. Maren crouched and pulled the first one forward. The label was clear enough, written in that later wavering hand. Hemlock. The word sat on the paper like a small dark thing, precise and deliberate. She turned the jar in her hands. The herb inside was a pale, dry green, finely cut, and when she cracked the lid the smell that rose was acrid and unpleasant, like parsnip tops left too long in a forgotten corner of a garden. She knew hemlock from her training. Every apprentice knew hemlock. The very name was a lesson, the way certain words in certain trades were lessons, spoken low and often.
She set the jar on the counter and looked at the one beside it. Hemlock, second cutting. And the next. Hemlock, root, washed and dried. And the next. Hemlock, tincture, completed November. Five jars. Six. Seven. Eight jars of hemlock, each one labelled, each one catalogued with a care that went beyond the ordinary habit of an apothecary keeping her stores in order. An ordinary apothecary might keep one jar of hemlock, for the few rare conditions that called for it, prepared with extreme caution, stored apart, used sparingly. Her mother had kept eight.
Maren sat back on her heels. The lamplight caught the glass and threw a small bright coin of reflection onto the ceiling. She thought of her mother's hands, how steady they had been on the outside, how something in them had trembled for years before she disappeared. She thought of the key on the shelf above the workbench, and the jar that had been beneath the floorboard, and the way the cottage had felt when she first stepped into it, as though it had been waiting.
She took up her notebook and wrote, in letters as even as she could make them: Hemlock. Eight jars. Excessive quantity. Investigate further. She underlined the last two words. Then she crossed them out, because underlining and circling were habits she had picked up from her mother, and she did not want to think about that just now.
A knock came at the shop door. Three raps, then two, then one. Tilly's knock. Maren rose and brushed the dust from her knees and went to unbolt the door. The night came in, cool and damp, smelling of wet earth and woodsmoke from the chimneys of the nearer houses. Tilly stood on the step in a shawl the colour of dried heather, a basket on her arm, her face creased into something that was not quite a smile.
"You've lit the lamps," Tilly said, looking past Maren into the shop. "Good. That's good."
"I started the inventory."
"Any of it make sense?"
"Some of it." Maren hesitated. "Tilly, why would she keep eight jars of hemlock?"
Tilly's expression shifted. The not-quite-smile thinned, and the lines around her mouth deepened. She set the basket down on the step and did not step inside, not yet, as though the threshold were a kind of agreement she was not ready to make.
"She didn't," Tilly said. "Keep eight jars, I mean. That was the strangeness. Elspeth was careful. Careful as anything I ever saw. She'd have known better than to stock that much of anything so dangerous."
"Then where did it come from?"
"That's the question." Tilly drew her shawl tighter. "That's the question I've been sitting on for three years, Maren, and I don't have an answer yet. But I brought you something." She lifted the basket. "Bread, and a bit of cheese, and a jar of last year's blackberry. And this." From beneath the cloth she drew a small leather notebook, no bigger than Maren's palm, its cover darkened with age and use. "I found it in the back of the shop safe last week. I'd forgotten I'd put it there. She gave it to me the summer before you were born, told me to keep it safe, told me to give it to you when you came home."
Maren took it. The leather was soft under her thumb, and there was a stain on the front, round and dark, that she did not look at too closely. She opened the cover. The first page was in her mother's hand, smaller and more careful than the labels on the jars.
For Maren, when she is ready. Not before.
She closed the notebook. The lamp inside the shop guttered once and steadied. Tilly was watching her with the expression she had worn the day Elspeth had not come home, the expression that had not left her face in three years of waiting.
"Come in," Maren said. "Please. Sit down. I'll make tea."
She stepped back into the warmth of the shop, and Tilly followed, and the door closed behind them, and the rain began again, soft and steady, on the roof of the cottage that had been her mother's and was now, in all the ways that mattered, hers.