The church bells of Lower Piddlington rang seven times across the village green, their bronze voices swallowed by the gathering dusk. Smoke curled from the chimney of The Whistling Marmot, and through its frosted windows, the warm glow of oil lamps spilled onto the cobblestones like melted butter across a hot pan.
Iris Thistleberry pushed through the tavern door and let the noise wash over her: the clatter of tankards, the hum of conversation, the sharp bark of laughter from a corner table where old Tam Hackett was holding court with another of his interminable tales about the war. The Whistling Marmot smelled of woodsmoke and spilt ale and something savory bubbling in the kitchen, roast pheasant, perhaps, or Mrs. Whitcombe's eternal stew.
She spotted her quarry immediately.
The villagers had clustered near the great stone hearth, nursing pints of bitter and glasses of elderflower wine, and their heads turned toward her as she made her way through the press of bodies. News traveled fast in Lower Piddlington, and by now, half the village knew that Cosgrove had been found dead in his bakery that morning, his aprons flour-dusted and his ovens cold.
Fern Briarby materialized at her elbow with a glass of something amber and a look of quiet concern. She wore her habitual expression of gentle watchfulness, her brown eyes soft as the earth she coaxed into bloom each spring, her dark hair pinned back beneath a knitted cap the color of dried heather.
"You look done in," Fern said, her northern vowels rounding the words into something almost musical. "Sit. I've ordered you the pheasant pie, if that suits. The cook remembered you once said you favored it."
"I haven't eaten since dawn."
"Then sit. Eat. Talk after."
Iris allowed herself to be guided toward a small table near the window, where the green stretched out below them, the pond gleaming in the last of the light. Fern arranged herself across from her with the practiced grace of a woman accustomed to kneeling in gardens and rising without complaint, and for a moment, neither of them spoke.
The silence between them had the texture of old cloth, worn soft and familiar. Fern had known Iris since they were both girls, had supplied the Emporium with crystallized violets and rose petals and lavender sugar for nearly a decade, and had never once asked for more than her modest wholesale price and the occasional evening of Iris's company on the porch of the shop.
"You spoke with the constable," Fern said at last.
"Came to fetch me at the Emporium just past five." Iris wrapped her hands around the glass Fern had pressed into them, welcoming the bite of the pewter against her cold skin. "Poor Hollis was beside himself. He thought he'd have to identify the body, but Cosgrove's sister came down from Market Harborough before the constable could send for her."
Fern's expression did not change, but her hands, folded neatly on the table, tightened almost imperceptibly. "And what did the constable say? About the manner of it?"
"Heart failure, he thinks, brought on by shock or exertion. But he'll have the doctor look properly in the morning, and the apothecary, if he deems it necessary."
"Shock," Fern repeated. The single word carried a weight that Iris could not quite parse. "Or exertion."
"You have something to tell me."
It was not a question. Fern was not a woman given to airy speculation; if she had a thought, she polished it like a river stone until she was certain of its shape. Iris waited, watching her friend's face in the lamplight, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the silver threading through the brown at her temples.
"When did you last speak with Cosgrove?"
"Last Tuesday. He came to the Emporium for his weekly order. Three dozen egg yolks, two pounds of caster sugar, the usual." Iris paused, remembering the visit with the peculiar clarity that attends small interactions now become significant. "He seemed... distracted. He kept glancing at the door as though he expected someone. I asked if all was well, and he laughed, but it was a thin sound, the sort you make when you don't wish to discuss a thing."
Fern nodded slowly, her gaze drifting toward the window. Below them, the green was emptying as the villagers drifted homeward, but here in the Marmot, the evening crowd was thickening, the farmers and the tradespeople, the young mothers with babes in arms, the old men in their cloth caps who had nothing better to do than drink and argue.
"What I have to tell you," Fern said, "I would rather not have to tell you in a public house."
"Then tell me where it will not be overheard, and I shall go there."
"After you've eaten. You've had a long day."
"Fern."
"The pie, Iris. Then we talk."
The pie arrived, golden-crusted and fragrant, and Iris forced herself to eat it, knowing Fern would not speak otherwise. The crust shattered under her fork, releasing steam scented with thyme and black pepper, and the meat beneath was tender enough to fall apart at a glance. She ate slowly, tasting nothing, her mind circling the questions she wished to ask and the questions she feared to answer.
When the plate was cleared, Fern rose and led her out through the back door of the tavern, into a small courtyard where the kitchen slops were kept and the cook took her smoke. A single lantern hung above the door, casting a pale pool of light onto the worn flagstones, and beyond the low wall, the dark mass of the churchyard rose against the sky.
Fern produced a folded paper from her apron pocket and handed it to her without ceremony. Iris took it, unfolded it, read.
The paper was a copy of a letter, written in a clerk's careful script, bearing the date of the previous Thursday. It was addressed to one Mr. Cornelius Cosgrove, baker, of the village of Lower Piddlington, and it informed him, in the chilliest possible civil language, that his application for the prime stall position at the upcoming Autumn Festival had been reviewed and provisionally approved, pending confirmation of his continued good standing with the Village Trades Council.
"He was going to have the best spot," Iris said slowly.
"He was. The corner near the bandstand. The very one Mother Dewdrop used to set up her quilt display, back when her hands were steadier." Fern's voice was carefully neutral, the vowels flattening themselves against the consonants in the manner of a woman trying to keep her composure. "He was going to have it, and he was going to keep anyone else from having it."
"Anyone else?"
"He wrote to the Trades Council in February, asking for clarification of the rotation policy. He received an answer in March, informing him that the prime position was awarded by seniority, and that he, Cornelius Cosgrove, held the longest standing tenancy in the village, and could therefore expect to occupy the prime spot for the foreseeable future."
Fern paused, letting the implication settle.
"I spoke with Marigold this afternoon," she continued. "At the Records Office, where she was helping her mother sort through the autumn licensing forms. She mentioned, in passing, that there had been some correspondence. I asked her what manner of correspondence. She showed me the file."
"She should not have shown you the file."
"She should not. And she would not have, ordinarily. But she has been frightened since yesterday, when she heard the news about Cosgrove, and frightened people say things they ought to keep to themselves."
Iris stared at the letter, reading the words again. They did not become less ominous upon repetition.
"Who else applied for the stall?"
"According to Marigold, three other bakers submitted requests. One was from a woman in the next village over, name of Plumbtree, who makes a very decent fruit loaf but has no particular claim to a prime spot. The second was from a young man, Caspian Vanille, who has lately set up shop on the High Street and has been making rather a lot of noise about his patisserie being the future of the village." A pause. "And the third was from your family."
The words landed like a physical blow. Iris felt the breath leave her body, felt the cold of the flagstones through the thin soles of her boots.
"From Hollis," she said, though she knew it could not be anyone else.
"From Hollis. Dated the fourteenth of February. The same week Cosgrove submitted his own request for clarification. Hollis asked for the prime spot, citing the Emporium's founding charter, which apparently grants the Thistleberrys certain ancestral rights to the festival grounds."
"And Cosgrove wrote to the Council as well."
"Yes. Asking whether the Thistleberry charter still held legal force, given that the Emporium had not occupied a festival stall in living memory."
The silence stretched between them, filled by the distant sound of the tavern, the wind stirring in the churchyard elms, the soft footfall of some creature in the undergrowth beyond the wall.
"Hollis did not tell me he had applied," Iris said.
"No."
"He did not tell me he had asked about the charter."
"No."
"Did he tell you? When did you learn of this?"
"Marigold told me this afternoon. Before that, I knew nothing." Fern's voice softened further, taking on the particular gentleness she reserved for plants in distress and friends in crisis. "Iris. I am not suggesting anything. I am only telling you what is in the file. You asked me what I had to tell you, and I am telling you."
"I know. I know you are."
She folded the letter carefully along its original creases and returned it to Fern, who tucked it back into her apron with the deft economy of a woman accustomed to pocketing seeds and small tools. The lantern above them swayed in the draft from the open door, and the shadows jumped and resettled.
"Why would Hollis not tell me he had applied?" Iris asked, though she knew the answer, or some part of it. The Emporium had been struggling. The festival takings, traditionally a third of their annual revenue, had dwindled to almost nothing over the past decade as the village fair had become less of a destination and more of a way station. Hollis had been putting on a brave face for months, reassuring her that the books balanced, that the creditors could wait, that the autumn would bring a bounty of custom.
He had been lying. He had been lying as long as she had known him.
"He did not want to worry you," Fern said.
"He did not want me to stop him."
"Yes. That, too, I think."
They stood together in the small courtyard, two women with the weight of an unkind inheritance pressing down upon their shoulders, and the church bells began to toll the quarter hour, their voices thin and distant in the cold air.
The name Dewdrop had made Iris picture a stout woman in her middle years, the sort who kept cats and served tea in cups with saucers. What she found in the corner booth of the bakery on Briar Lane was something else entirely: a girl, surely no older than nineteen, with hair the particular reddish-brown of wet brick and hands that would not stop moving beneath the table. Marigold Dewdrop sat across from Iris with a cup of cocoa gone cold and a plate of almond biscuits she had not touched, and her eyes kept darting to the window, to the door, to the window again, as though she expected someone to walk in and stop her from speaking.
"Good morning, Miss Dewdrop," Iris said. She kept her voice low, gentle as she could make it, the voice she used for nervous customers who came in complaining about the price of vanilla pods. "Thank you for agreeing to meet me."
"I have to be back by quarter past," Marigold said. Her words came quick and tumbling, each one tripping over the next. "Because of the files, you see, the civic archive has its own internal clockwork and I am the one who winds it, so to speak, metaphorically speaking, though of course we do not actually wind anything, that would be absurd, we use a spring mechanism that Mr. Quill designed in the spring of eighteen ninety-three and it has not failed once, which is more than you can say for most things in this village."
Iris blinked. "The spring of eighteen ninety-three."
"The filing mechanism. Not the season. Although it was also the season, if you take my meaning, which I am not sure I do, so never mind."
Iris signaled to the server for a fresh pot of tea and a scone she had no intention of to eat. The Dewdrop girl was young, and frightened, and Iris had the sudden uncomfortable suspicion that whatever she had to say was going to cost her something. People did not usually volunteer to meet with the family of the deceased unless they had been given something in return, and the something usually came in the shape of a burden.
"Miss Dewdrop," Iris said, when the tea had been poured and the scone placed between them like a small white flag, "I am not here as the Thistleberry heiress. I am here because Hollis was my brother, and I want to know what happened to him. If you have information, I would be grateful for it, and it will be held in confidence. You have my word."
"Your word." Marigold repeated the phrase as though testing it for structural flaws. "Words are funny things, are they not, Miss Thistleberry. They can mean anything. They can mean their opposite. My mother always said that words were the most dangerous commodity in any shop, more dangerous than yeast, because yeast only rises but words, words can fall."
Iris waited.
Marigold's hands, beneath the table, made a small rustling sound against her skirt. Her shoulders had crept toward her ears.
"I used to bake," she said. "Before I took the position at the Records Office. I was an apprentice to Mrs. Pimblett, the woman with the shop on Elderberry Row. You may know her."
"I know of her."
"She is a terrible woman. I do not say that lightly. She made me scrub her floors on my knees from six in the morning until the bells rang for six at night, and she did not pay me a single halfpenny for my first three years. But she taught me the business. She taught me the real business, the way the custards behaved, the way the custards resisted, the way a custard knows when the cook has lost faith in it. You cannot teach that. You either have the feeling for it or you do not."
"I have the feeling," Iris said, and the words came out more fiercely than she intended.
Marigold looked at her then, properly, for the first time since she had sat down. Her gaze was the particular hazel of unripe hazelnuts, and there was a steadiness in it that Iris had not expected from someone so visibly unsettled.
"I believe you do," Marigold said. "Which is why I agreed to meet you."
The teapot steamed between them. Outside the window, a woman with a basket of laundry passed, humming something tuneless.
"I came to you," Marigold said, "because three days before Mr. Thistleberry died, he came to me."
The words landed in Iris's chest like a stone dropped into still water. She set her teacup down carefully, so that it would not rattle against the saucer, so that her hands would not betray her.
"He came to the Records Office," Marigold continued. "He said he needed to see the trade ledgers from nineteen thirty-one. I told him that was nearly a hundred years ago and that those particular ledgers were kept in the basement vault, which is damp, and that no one ever went down there unless they had to. He said he had to. He was very polite. He had a kind face, I thought. He looked tired."
Marigold reached into her handbag, a sensible brown leather thing with a tarnished clasp, and drew out a folded paper, which she smoothed flat on the table with both hands as though she were ironing it. Iris leaned forward.
It was a copy of a bill of sale, dated the fourteenth of April, nineteen thirty-one. It recorded the transfer of a recipe titled "Method for the Production of a Yellow Custard of the First Quality, Suitable for Tarts and Timbales" from one Hamish Quill, gentleman, to the Thistleberry family, for the consideration of twelve pounds, six shillings, and eightpence. The handwriting was old and brown, and the ink had feathered in places, but the signature at the bottom, in a copperplate that Iris would have recognized anywhere, belonged to her great-great-grandfather.
"I copied this myself," Marigold said. "I am allowed to make copies. It is in my job description. I am very thorough about my job description."
"Miss Dewdrop."
"Marigold. Please. Miss Dewdrop makes me feel like I should be wearing a hat."
"Marigold. Why did my brother want to see this particular document?"
Marigold's hands, which had briefly stilled during the recitation of her professional responsibilities, resumed their restless motion beneath the table.
"Because he had been receiving letters," she said. "Anonymous letters. They came to the Emporium, addressed to him personally, and they accused him of something I do not fully understand, something about a recipe he had been selling to undercut the local bakers. He said the letters were wrong. He said he had never sold any recipe to anyone. He said that he had inherited a family recipe and that he had guarded it the way his father had guarded it, and his father's father before him."
"Someone had been claiming he sold a recipe," Iris said slowly. "Someone had been writing to accuse him of selling his own inheritance out from under the village."
"Yes."
"And he came to you to check the original transaction. To make sure the recipe had not been sold, in nineteen thirty-one, to anyone but the Thistleberrys."
"Yes. He wanted to know if there had been any other transfers. Any sales, any transfers, any bequests, any changes of ownership recorded in the village. He said he had been thinking about it for months, ever since the first letter, and he had finally decided that the only way to know for certain was to consult the original records."
Iris looked down at the bill of sale. Twelve pounds, six shillings, and eightpence. The price of a small house, in those days. The price of a life.
"And was there?" she asked. "Any other transfer?"
Marigold's voice dropped so low that Iris had to lean across the table to hear her.
"There was another document," Marigold said. "In the same vault. In the same hand. Dated nineteen thirty-two, the year after the first. It recorded a transfer of an identical recipe, identically titled, identically worded, from one P. Vanille, provisioner, to a Mr. Cosgrove of Cosgrove and Sons, Provisioners, for the consideration of nine pounds, four shillings."
Iris did not move.
"The recipes," Marigold said, "are the same. Word for word. I checked. I am very thorough. But the sellers are different. The Thistleberrys sold theirs in thirty-one, and a P. Vanille sold theirs in thirty-two. And Mr. Thistleberry, when he saw the two documents side by side, went very quiet. He asked me to make him a copy of the second one as well, and he paid me sixpence for my trouble, and he left, and he said, very politely, that he would be in touch if he needed any further assistance."
She folded her hands in her lap, finally, as though she had come to the end of a script she had rehearsed.
"And that was the last time I saw him alive," she said.
The bakery was quiet around them, the morning trade not yet begun, the air heavy with the yeasty warmth of rising dough. Iris felt the paper beneath her fingers, the old brown ink, the creak of her great-great-grandfather's signature, and she thought of Hollis standing in a damp basement with a girl half his age, looking at a piece of paper that should not have existed.
"P. Vanille," she said. "Do you know who that was?"
"No," Marigold said. "There is no P. Vanille in the village records. There never has been. I checked. I am very thorough."
"What about Cosgrove? The Cosgrove and Sons?"
"Oh, them. Everyone knows the Cosgroves. They had a shop on the High Street, the big one with the green awning, until about fifteen years ago when it closed. They sold provisions, baked goods, that sort of thing. They were rivals of your family for decades. I think they blamed the Thistleberrys for their closure, although I am not sure of the details. The records on that particular period are, I am afraid, incomplete. There is a gap in the archive between nineteen seventy-eight and nineteen eighty-nine that I have been trying to address with the parish council, but they do not listen to me, no one ever listens to me, I am just the girl who winds the clockwork."
Iris reached across the table and laid her hand, very lightly, on Marigold's wrist. The girl flinched, then stilled.
"Marigold," Iris said. "You have done a great service. A greater service than you know. I will not forget it."
Marigold's eyes filled, suddenly and without ceremony, and she blinked rapidly and looked away.
"I did not know him," she said. "Mr. Thistleberry. I only spoke to him the once. But he was kind to me. He asked if the vault was cold, and he offered me his scarf. I told him I was fine, but he left it on the desk when he went. I still have it. I have been meaning to return it."
Iris withdrew her hand. The brown paper lay between them, its old ink patient, its secret out.
"Keep it for now," she said. "I may need to speak with you again."
"I have to be back by quarter past," Marigold said. "The clockwork."
"Yes," Iris said. "The clockwork."
She folded the copy of the bill of sale and tucked it into her own pocket, where it lay against the weight of the letter she had already received from Fern. Two documents, two weights, the growing gravity of a thing she could not yet see the shape of.
She paid for the tea and the untouched biscuits and stood to go, and at the door she turned back. The girl sat alone in the corner booth with her cold cocoa and her untasted biscuits, and her hands had resumed their motion beneath the table, and she looked, for all the world, like someone winding a clock that no one else could hear.
"Marigold," Iris said from the door. "One more thing."
"Yes, Miss Thistleberry."
"Have you heard the name Caspian Vanille?"
Marigold's hands went still.
Marigold's hands went still. The clockwork under the table stopped its whisper, and for a long breath the only sound in the corner of the tea room was the hiss of the radiator and the distant clatter of the street.
"No," Marigold said. The word came out too quickly. "No, I have not heard that name."
Iris did not move from the door. She let the silence do its work, let it settle between them like dust in a beam of winter light. Marigold's fingers, hidden beneath the tablecloth, resumed their tiny circling motion, and her eyes found the woodgrain of the tabletop and followed it as though she were reading a map.
"Are you certain," Iris said. It was not a question.
"He might have written in the ledger," Marigold said, and her voice had gone bright and clerkish, the cadence of a girl reciting a file. "The ledger does hold many names. I could check. I will check when I return. I have a very good memory for ledger entries, Miss Thistleberry. I catalogued them last spring, all seven hundred and forty-two of them, in order, with cross-references."
"You do not need to check," Iris said. "I asked if you had heard the name. Heard it spoken. Somewhere other than a ledger."
Marigold's blush, which had retreated, came back in a slow tide.
"I cannot say that I have," she said. "I am very careful about names. Names are important. Names go in the file."
Iris watched her. The girl was a poor liar, which was, in Iris's experience, the very best kind, because a poor liar spent so much energy on the lie that she had none left to guard what mattered.
"Then I will not keep you," Iris said. "Your clockwork."
"Quarter past," Marigold said. "Yes."
But she did not move. Her hands, beneath the table, had found each other and were gripping, knuckle white against knuckle white.
"Miss Thistleberry," she said. "I do not like to be late. But I do not like to be wrong, either."
"Then do not be either," Iris said.
She turned and went out into the cold.
The village had changed its mind about the weather. The sleet had stopped, and the clouds had thinned to a brittle grey that let through a watery light, and the cobbles steamed where the salt had been laid down. Iris walked the length of the high street with her hands deep in her pockets and her head bent against a wind that came in off the moor smelling of wet bracken and cold iron.
She did not go to the Emporium. She did not go to Hollis. She went to the post office, where she stood in the queue behind a woman with a parcelled terrier and a man who wanted to know why his pension had not arrived, and she bought a stamp and posted the letter she had been carrying since breakfast. It was addressed to a firm of solicitors in Dorchester, and it contained a single line, in her own careful hand.
Please reopen the file on Cosgrove Properties Ltd.
She walked back out into the cold, and the wind took the envelope from the slot and bore it away into the sorting room with a sound like a long breath.
It was half past eleven when she reached the lane that ran behind the row of shops, and the lane was quiet, and the back doors were shut, and the bins were out for the morning collection. She let herself into the Emporium through the yard gate and crossed the courtyard with its stacked crates and its smell of vanilla pods, and she let herself in through the trade door, and the warmth of the kitchen folded around her like a hand.
She did not put on an apron. She did not go to the copper. She went to the office, and she sat at the desk, and she laid out the two documents side by side.
The letter from Fern, with its pressed petals and its careful sketch of the roots.
The copy of the bill of sale, with its 1924 date and its price of two hundred and fifty pounds.
Two documents. Two weights.
She read them again. She read them a third time. She took a pencil from the pot and made a note in the margin of the bill of sale, in her own hand, small and neat.
Cosgrove, 1924. CV present as witness. Price below market. Vanilla trade implied.
She set the pencil down and looked at what she had written, and she did not like it.
She thought of the letter she had posted to Dorchester. She thought of the letter still pinned to the board in the back room, the one that had come addressed to her father. She thought of Marigold Dewdrop, in her corner booth, winding a clock that no one else could hear.
The shop bell rang.
She heard the door open and the cold come in, and she heard the footfall in the front of house, and she stayed where she was, because she knew the step. She had known it since she was a girl. There was no one alive who could walk into her shop without her knowing who it was.
"Iris," Hollis said from the doorway.
She did not look up.
"Close the door," she said. "You are letting the cold in."
Hollis came in and closed the door, and he stood there with his hat in his hands and his breath still clouding the air.
"Well," he said. "Are you going to tell me?"
She looked up at him then. He was thinner than he had been a month ago, and greyer, and the lines around his mouth had deepened, and she saw in his face the thing she had been trying not to see all morning: that he was afraid.
"Sit down," she said. "I will make you a custard."
"Iris."
"Sit down."
He sat. She went to the kitchen and came back with two bowls and two spoons, and she set one before him and kept one for herself, and the custard was still warm, and it smelled of vanilla and of the bitter back-note she had been chasing for months.
He did not pick up the spoon.
"Fern's letter came this morning," she said.
"I know."
"Then you know what is in it."
"I know what she saw."
"She saw roots," Iris said. "Roots that go under the shop. Roots that have been cut. Roots that are growing back."
Hollis looked at the bowl.
"She is a careful woman," he said.
"She is," Iris said. "And she would not write to me if she were not certain."
He was quiet. The shop ticked around them, the pipes, the cooling copper, the tick of the clock on the wall that her father had wound every Sunday.
"And then," Iris said, "I went to see a young woman at the records office. And the young woman showed me a bill of sale dated 1924. And the bill of sale records the transfer of this property from a Cosgrove to a Cosgrove. And the price recorded is two hundred and fifty pounds. And one of the witnesses is named Caspian Vanille."
Hollis's hand, resting on the desk, made a small sound. Not a tap. A flinch.
"Hollis," Iris said. "Did you know?"
He did not answer.
"Did our father know?"
He picked up the spoon. He looked at the custard. He set the spoon down again.
"Yes," he said.
The word fell into the room and lay there.
"Yes," he said again. "He knew. He knew, and he did not tell you, because he thought he could manage it. Because he thought it was manageable. Because that is what he always thought."
Iris set her own spoon down. Her hand was very steady.
"Then tell me," she said.
Hollis looked at her. The clock ticked. The copper ticked. Somewhere in the shop a tray slid half an inch on its rack, and the sound was enormous.
"Our father," Hollis said, "was a partner in a venture he should never have joined."
"Venture," Iris said.
"A business," Hollis said. "An arrangement. A trade in something that was not, at the time, thought to be wrong. It was thought to be difficult. And profitable. And he was young, Iris. He was younger than you are now."
"What kind of trade?"
Hollis put his hat on his knee. He smoothed the brim with his thumb. He was buying himself time.
"Vanilla," he said. "Not the pods. Not the extract. The source. The living plant. There was a man in those days who had access to cuttings in a part of the world where the plant grew wild, and cuttings could be brought out in small lots, and a cutting could be sold for a great deal of money to the right buyer, and the man who brought them out had a partner in this country who arranged the buyers and laundered the money through a property company."
"Cosgrove," Iris said.
"Yes."
"And the partner."
Hollis was quiet.
"Hollis."
"The partner," Hollis said, "was our father."
Iris did not move. The clock ticked. The copper ticked. The tray slid another half inch on its rack.
"And Caspian Vanille," she said.
"Is the man who brought the cuttings out. And is now, by all accounts, returned to this country. And is now, by all accounts, aware that our father has died."
Iris looked at the bowl of custard between them. The surface had begun to dim, and the bitter back-note was rising as it cooled, and she understood at last what she had been tasting. She understood why every batch for months had carried that note, and why no amount of pod or extract had been able to cover it, and why the note was strongest in the cellars.
The note was the plant. The plant was underground. The plant was growing back.
"How much did he bring in," Iris said.
"Enough to buy this shop three times over," Hollis said.
"And the two hundred and fifty pounds."
"Was the price of a small lot of cuttings," Hollis said, "on a day in 1924 when the market was soft."
"And the witnesses."
"Were men who knew what they were signing, and did not ask, and were paid not to."
"And Cosgrove."
"Was a name our father borrowed from a man in the village who had the same name and no idea his name was being used, and who has been dead these fifty years."
"And the cellars."
"Were dug then," Hollis said. "And lined. And fitted with the heat the cuttings needed. And bricked over after. And sealed. And forgotten. Until the ferns began to grow through the floor."
Iris looked at him for a long time. He did not look away.
"Why did he not tell me," she said.
"Because," Hollis said, "he loved you. And he was ashamed. And he thought if he held it long enough, it would stop being true. And he was wrong."
She picked up her spoon. She tasted the custard. The note was there, faint and bitter and unmistakable.
"We are going to the cellars," she said. "Now. Today. Before he comes."
"Iris."
"We are going to look at what is growing under our floor. And we are going to decide what to do about it. And we are not going to decide alone."
She stood up.
"I am going to send for Marigold," she said. "And for Fern. And we are going to open the trap, and we are going to see."
"And if what is growing is what we fear," Hollis said.
"Then we will know what we are dealing with," Iris said. "And we will not have known it alone."
She went to the back room and took the letter from the board, and she read it once more, and she folded it, and she put it in her pocket with the bill of sale and the note about the roots. Three documents. Three weights.
She came back through to the kitchen.
"Fern will come," she said. "She is already coming. She said she would bring the roots."
"And the girl," Hollis said.
"The girl," Iris said, "is the only honest clerk in the village. And she is afraid of the wrong thing. And we owe it to her to set her right."
She untied her apron. She took down her coat. She looked at the clock.
"Half past eleven," she said. "We have the morning."
She opened the door into the shop, and the cold came in, and the smell of vanilla came with it, and underneath it, faintly, unmistakably, the bitter note of something growing where it should not be.
She went out to meet it.