The morning room at Ashworth Hall faced east, and on clear days the light arrived the way guests were meant to arrive at dinner: without apology, in a flood. On this particular Thursday, the light cut across the floorboards in long pale ribbons, illuminating a scatter of dried petals, a marble paperweight, and the dust that gathered in the seams of the window seat. Somewhere beyond the wainscoting, a clock ticked with the patience of something that had long since given up expecting attention.
Charlotte Winslow set the wooden case upon the table and released the brass clasps with a soft double click. Inside, nested in baize, lay her botanical specimens: seventeen pressed flowers gathered over six patient months from hedgerows, meadows, and one illicit excursion into the estate's walled garden. The lavender stems had gone grey at the edges. The cornflower had lost its blue to the brown of time. The bird's-foot trefoil, three tiny petals splayed like a claw, remained stubbornly vivid, as though it had not yet received the news of its own death.
Eleanor Ashworth sat in the window seat with her ankles crossed and her gaze directed toward some middle distance that had nothing to do with the room's contents. Her posture was an achievement in itself: spine straight, shoulders drawn back, hands folded in her lap as though she were posing for a miniature. She wore a morning dress of sprigged muslin, and her dark hair had been arranged by her maid into ringlets that caught the light and refused to release it. She was fifteen. She looked, in that moment, considerably older.
Charlotte drew a breath, then a second, and arranged her face into what she hoped was encouraging rather than desperate.
"I thought we might begin with something simple," she said, lifting the bird's-foot trefoil from its bed of cotton wool. "This is a common little plant. You have probably walked past it a hundred times without noticing. The country people call it 'eggs and bacon,' on account of the colour."
Eleanor did not look.
"The Linnaean system classifies it as Lotus corniculatus. Linnaeus was a Swede who grew tired of every botanist in Europe calling the same flower by seventeen different names, so he devised a method by which each plant receives two: one for its genus, one for its species. Rather like Christian names and family names, only the order is reversed."
Silence. The clock ticked. A log shifted in the grate, releasing a small sigh of heat.
"I have brought some paper and pencils, if you would like to try drawing one. You need not be clever about it. The point is only to look."
Eleanor's gaze remained fixed upon whatever occupied the middle distance. Her lips, which were full and quite well-shaped, held a small, precise compression that Charlotte was learning to interpret as refusal.
Very well.
Charlotte set the trefoil down and selected the lavender instead. She placed it in the centre of the table, where the light could not avoid it.
"This was gathered from the kitchen garden," she said, keeping her voice light. "The cook cuts it for the linen cupboards. Mrs. Pembury says her mother used to lay it between the sheets of the dowager's cradle, though whether that was to sweeten the dreams or to keep out the moths, I could not say."
No response. Eleanor's right index finger tapped once against her left thumb, a movement so slight it might have been involuntary.
"I have a primer," Charlotte continued, undismayed, or at least performing undismay with reasonable conviction. "It is in English, and it has pictures. We could read a chapter together, or we could work through the plates, or we could simply sit and observe and see which direction the morning takes us. The choice, I should tell you, is entirely yours."
At this, something shifted. Eleanor's head turned, slowly, the way certain statuary turned in Gothic folktales, and her eyes settled upon Charlotte with an expression that was not quite a sneer and not quite a challenge. It was the look of a person deciding whether to be bothered.
"I am to call you Miss Winslow," Eleanor said. Her voice was clear and cool, the vowels rounded in that particular way the London masters cultivated in their pupils. "And you are to teach me botany. Is that the arrangement?"
"Among other things. Reading, writing, arithmetic, French, a little Italian if we have the courage of our ambitions, geography, history, drawing, music if you can bear it, and the various accomplishments expected of a young lady of your situation."
"My situation," Eleanor repeated, as though tasting the phrase for poison.
"Your situation as a young lady of consequence with a future to prepare for," Charlotte said smoothly. "Which is, I am told, what every governess in every great house in England is employed to do. We prepare the future."
Eleanor's gaze dropped to the lavender.
"I am to be presented at court in two years," she said. "My sister-in-law has already written to Madame Celeste in Bond Street for my gown. I am to have three feathers in my hair, and the smallest one tipped with a ruby that once belonged to the old Duchess of Devonshire. I do not think Linnaeus will help me with any of that."
"I should not be so sure. Madame Celeste herself keeps a cabinet of dried blooms, I am told, and uses them to select her palettes. A girl who can speak knowingly about a peony has the advantage over one who cannot."
This was invention. Charlotte had no idea whether Madame Celeste kept so much as a geranium. But Eleanor's mouth softened, a fraction, a degree, and the small compression of her lips loosened.
"Peonies are vulgar," Eleanor said.
"Some are. Some are not. The Paeonia officinalis has been grown in monastery gardens for a thousand years, and the monks valued it for the heart, not the palette. But we can come back to peonies another day. Today, if you are willing, I thought we might begin with something that asks very little of us."
Charlotte reached again for the lavender, and Eleanor watched her fingers.
"Why do you press them?" she asked. "If you wished to keep flowers, you could put them in water."
"Because pressed, they last longer. A cut bloom has a week, perhaps two, before it surrenders. A pressed specimen, properly dried, will keep for years. Decades, sometimes, if one is careful with the paper."
"Years," Eleanor said, in a tone that suggested she found the idea faintly ridiculous.
"Years," Charlotte confirmed. "I have a rose in my case that my mother pressed the year I was born. It is the colour of weak tea now, but it is still a rose."
Eleanor considered this. Outside, a rook called from the elm, and another answered, and the conversation between them had the quality of a disagreement that had been going on for some time.
"You are not what I expected," Eleanor said at last.
Charlotte was not entirely sure what to do with this, so she laughed, briefly, and said, "I beg your pardon?"
"I expected someone older. And more," Eleanor searched for the word, "tired. Mrs. Pembury said you were young, but I thought she meant young the way Cook is young. Not young the way I am young."
"I am twenty-three," Charlotte said. "Old enough to be embarrassed about it, young enough to be embarrassed by it. A little of both, I find, suits me."
"Mrs. Pembury also said you were quick."
"Quick at what, I wonder."
"Quick at noticing things. She said that to be careful around you. Or perhaps she said to be kind to you. I cannot quite remember. She said both, I think, which is rather the same thing in her mouth."
The clock took this observation into its keeping and gave nothing back.
Charlotte lifted the lavender by its stem and held it in the light. The little purple buds, long past their season, were the colour of a bruise that has begun to heal. "Would you like to hold it?" she asked. "It does not bite."
Eleanor's hand uncurled from her lap. It was a pretty hand, though the nails had been bitten down to the quick and then grown out again, a record of small private battles. She took the stem between her thumb and forefinger, held it at arm's length, and regarded it as a bank clerk might regard a suspicious banknote.
"It smells of nothing," she said.
"On the contrary. It smells of quite a lot, but quietly. You must put it closer."
Eleanor brought it nearer, the motion reluctant, as though she feared being thought enthusiastic. Her nostrils flared, once.
"Lavender," she said. "The same as in the linens."
"The very same. The cook cuts it when it is in flower and hangs it in the kitchen to dry. I asked her for a few sprigs, and she said yes, which surprised me, because I had not been here long enough, I thought, to ask favours of the cook. But she said yes, and gave me twice what I had asked for, and told me to come back in July for the roses if I was of a mind."
"The cook," Eleanor said, with the faint emphasis of a person not used to cooks having opinions about her presence, "is French."
"She is from Alsace, which is sometimes French and sometimes not, depending on the century. Her name is Mme Dupont. She has been here longer than I have been alive, and I suspect she will be here longer than I will be anything. She is, in any case, a great one for the lavender, and she gave me these, and here we are."
Eleanor turned the sprig in her fingers, the buds loosening a little. A fragment fell to the floorboards and lay there, very small and very purple, on the pale wood.
"Does it have a use," Eleanor asked, "beyond smelling of sheets?"
"Several. The Romans used it in their baths, which is where the name comes from: lavare, to wash. The ladies of the previous century infused it in vinegar and dabbed it on their temples when the day had been too much. Bees love it. The bee-keepers at the home farm bring their hives up to the lavender field in midsummer, and the honey they make is the colour of sunlight through a church window."
Eleanor's expression did not change, but the tap of her finger had ceased, and she had not yet asked to be excused from the room, both of which Charlotte took as omens of a kind.
"You talk a great deal," Eleanor observed.
"I do," Charlotte agreed. "It is a flaw I have been working on for some years without conspicuous success. If you would prefer, I can be silent. I have been told it suits me better, though I do not always believe it."
Eleanor placed the lavender back on the table. She did not place it where Charlotte had indicated. She placed it at the edge, as though granting it a provisional lodging.
"The bee-keepers," she said, "do they sell the honey in London?"
"Some of it, I am told. The rest goes to the village, and the dowager has a pot of it on her breakfast tray every morning, which is how I know about the colour."
"I have not seen the dowager at breakfast."
"You would not. She takes hers in her room, and at an hour when most of the house is still asleep. She is a person of deliberate habits."
Eleanor considered this, and whatever she found in the consideration produced a small nod, almost imperceptible, more a settling of the chin than an affirmation.
"Tell me another plant," she said.
Charlotte, who had been bracing herself for dismissal, felt the small interior shift of a person who has just been thrown a line. She kept her face composed. "Another plant?"
"From the case. Tell me one. Any one."
Charlotte drew out the cornflower. Its blue had gone the colour of weak coffee, but the shape remained, the ragged crown of the corolla, the long slender stem.
"Centaurea cyanus," she said. "The cornflower. It grew, once, in every wheat field in England. The reapers called it 'hurtsickle,' because its tough little stem could turn the edge of a scythe. The dye from its petals was used to colour the ribbons of the Order of the Garter, which is a kind of knighthood, and the highest honour the King can bestow."
Eleanor reached for it.
The morning, which had begun with the patient hostility of a fortified town, eased, by a hair's breadth, into something that could almost be called civil. Charlotte told her of the trefoil and the dandelion, the latter with some liberties regarding its Latin name, which she had misremembered and would not admit. Eleanor listened without speaking, and at one point, when Charlotte paused to take a breath, she said, without looking up, "You may go on."
Outside, the rooks continued their argument. The clock continued its patient arithmetic. Mrs. Pembury, who had been listening from the corridor with the practised stillness of a woman who had raised two children of her own and buried one of them, drew back from the door without a sound and went to inform the house that the governess had not, as of yet, been thrown from the window.
The clock on the mantel marked the half hour with a single, brass-throated chime, and Eleanor's mouth, which had been half-open to ask something about the dandelion's medicinal properties, snapped shut.
"Miss Ashworth."
Mrs. Pembury stood in the doorway. She had not knocked. In Mrs. Pembury's experience, knocking on doors of one's own household was a vanity, and vanity was the one indulgence she permitted herself to abhor on principle. Her hands were clasped at her waist, a posture so habitual that the bones of her wrists had long since worn grooves to accommodate it. The morning light from the corridor behind her turned the edges of her cap to a faint silver, but her face remained in shadow, and her eyes, when they found Charlotte, were unreadable.
"Miss Winslow." The name came a fraction of a beat later, as if the housekeeper had only just remembered the courtesy. "You will be wanted in the stillroom. The dowager keeps to her own room today, and there are linens to air, and the lavender from the south border wants tying. You may resume the lesson after nuncheon, if there is a lesson to resume."
Eleanor's gaze moved from the housekeeper to Charlotte and back, the way a spectator at a card table watches the dealing.
"The stillroom," Eleanor repeated, in a tone of polite, incredulous wonder. "Is that where the tea is made?"
"It is where a great deal of useful work is done, Miss Ashworth, by hands that are not otherwise occupied." Mrs. Pembury's gaze did not flicker. "Miss Winslow. The dowager likes her lavender tied before the dew is off it, and the dew is, I am sorry to report, not waiting."
Charlotte had already begun to gather her satchel. Her hands were steady. There was, in fact, a small, private mercy in the interruption: it gave her a reason to leave that she had not been obliged to invent, and she had learned, in her twenty-three years of being the daughter of a man whose fortunes had risen and fallen like the mercury in a country barometer, that the best exits were the ones one did not have to claim.
"Of course, Mrs. Pembury. I was just telling Miss Ashworth of the uses of the dandelion."
"I have no doubt." The housekeeper's mouth did not move, but something in the region of her eyes suggested that she had, in fact, no doubt at all, and that the doubt she lacked was not of the charitable variety. "The dandelion will keep."
She stood aside in the doorway, which was as much invitation as Mrs. Pembury ever extended. Charlotte passed her with a nod that was, in its economy, almost a salute. The scent of beeswax and something sharper, perhaps carbolic, followed the housekeeper like a wake.
Eleanor did not rise. She remained at the desk, the pressed cornflower between her fingers, and watched the empty doorway with an expression that, on a less carefully composed face, might have been called thoughtful.
"I had not realised," she said, to no one, "that governesses were not permitted to take tea with the family."
The words fell into the room like a stone into a well. The clock, which had resumed its counting, ticked on. The rooks outside had moved to a different, more fractious debate. Somewhere in the lower regions of the house, a door closed with the soft, final sound of a decision having been reached.
Mrs. Pembury, who had not actually left, but who had paused at the threshold in the manner of a woman who knew exactly which floorboards creaked and which did not, turned her head a quarter of an inch.
"Miss Winslow is not a governess, Miss Ashworth. She is the companion to the dowager countess. There is a difference, though I will not bore you with it at present. The dowager takes her meals in her own rooms, and Miss Winslow attends her. The family dining room is for the family."
"Of course." Eleanor's voice was silk over steel. "I had only meant, Mrs. Pembury, that it was kind of Charlotte to give up her morning to my education. I had not thought, until you mentioned it, that she might have been somewhere she ought not to have been."
"She was somewhere she was invited to be." The housekeeper's tone did not change. "By the dowager. Who, as it happens, is also family, though not, I grant you, the sort of family that is currently of interest to the young ladies of the house."
The observation landed. It landed, moreover, with the unerring accuracy of a woman who had been calculating trajectories across carpeted hallways for the better part of forty years. Eleanor's chin lifted a fraction, the way a horse lifts its head at the prick of a spur, and her fingers tightened, just perceptibly, around the stem of the cornflower.
Mrs. Pembury allowed the silence to do its work. She had raised her sister's two children, both of whom had grown into reasonable, if not remarkable, adults, and she had learned that the young required, above all else, the opportunity to discover, without assistance, the precise dimensions of the hole they had just dug for themselves.
"I will have a tray sent up," the housekeeper said at last, in a voice that suggested the offer was not optional and the recipient had no say in the matter. "And I will inform the dowager that Miss Winslow's lesson will resume at three, if Miss Ashworth has not by then discovered some more pressing engagement."
She withdrew. The door, which had never been fully open, closed with the soft, self-satisfied click of a woman who had said exactly as much as she intended and not a syllable more.
Eleanor sat very still.
The room, in the absence of Charlotte's quiet, instructive voice, felt larger than it had a moment before. The plants in their glass case watched her with the blind, patient curiosity of things that had outlived their usefulness and been preserved regardless. The light through the mullioned windows had shifted, the way light does when a cloud passes over the face of a sun that was never entirely sure of its welcome in the first place. She looked down at the cornflower. Its bruised petals had left a faint, grey-blue crescent on the ball of her thumb, the kind of mark that would last until the next handwashing and perhaps beyond, if she was not careful.
She thought of the stillroom. She had not been in the stillroom since she was a small child, trailing after Cook in search of biscuits, and the image of Charlotte Winslow tying lavender in the long, cool, herb-scented quiet of it rose in her mind with a clarity that was, she told herself, merely aesthetic. The girl had a certain competence. That was all. A certain competence, and a way of holding a magnifying glass that suggested she had been doing it for some time, and a way of speaking about dandelions that suggested she found them, against all reasonable expectation, interesting.
Eleanor set the cornflower down on the desk, carefully, the way one sets down a card that one is not yet ready to play.
She thought of what her sister-in-law, Lady Caroline, would say, if she could see Eleanor now, sitting alone in the schoolroom with a pressed weed and the lingering, improbable scent of a morning that had, for a few minutes, not been entirely unbearable. Lady Caroline would say something about usefulness. Lady Caroline said something about usefulness at least twice a day, usually while rearranging flowers that had not required rearrangement, and usually in a tone that suggested the word itself was a kind of indictment.
Eleanor smoothed the skirt of her dress. She had chosen, this morning, a pale morning dress of jaconet muslin, sprigged with a small, repeated pattern of cornflowers. She had chosen it before she had known that the lesson would involve the actual plant, and she had not, she told herself, chosen it because of the lesson. The coincidence was the kind of thing one noticed only if one was looking for coincidences, and she was not, as a rule, in the habit of looking for them.
The clock struck the hour. The rooks had reached a temporary ceasefire. The house settled around her with the long, listening exhale of a place that had seen worse mornings and expected, with the grim confidence of old stone, to see them again.
At three, she told herself, she would go down to the schoolroom. She would bring the cornflower. She would ask, in a voice of suitable detachment, whether Miss Winslow had been obliged to eat her nuncheon in the stillroom, and whether the lavender had been satisfactorily tied, and whether the dowager had, in the course of the morning, expressed any opinion about the educational merits of dandelions.
She would ask these things, and she would listen to the answers, and she would not, under any circumstances, allow her face to betray the fact that she was asking them at all.
She sat for a long moment longer, in the quiet, in the light, in the particular, suspended hush of a house that had not yet decided what to make of her.
Then she rose, and crossed to the window, and looked out, with great attention, at nothing in particular.
The afternoon rain arrived with the particular reluctance of weather that had been threatening all morning and had at last lost patience with its own postponement. It came not in sheets but in a fine, determined mist that turned the gravel walks to pewter and settled on the greenhouse glass in beads too small to fall.
Eleanor found Charlotte in the greenhouse by accident, or what she told herself was accident. She had been walking, with the particular aimlessness of a person who did not wish to be found walking toward any particular destination, and the path that curved behind the kitchen garden had, without any conscious consultation with her feet, deposited her at the greenhouse door.
She stood for a moment with her hand on the handle. Through the glass she could see Charlotte Winslow, half-bent over the potting bench, and the sight was so domestic, so entirely without pretension, that Eleanor felt the familiar twist of something she refused to examine. Jealousy, perhaps. Or the particular discomfort of witnessing in another person a quality one has been taught to consider insignificant.
She pushed the door open. The air that met her was warm and thick and startlingly alive, a thing with weight and intention after the cold mist of the garden. Earth, she thought first. Then rose. Then something sharper, resinous, that she could not name.
Charlotte turned. She held a cutting in one hand and a small pair of garden shears in the other, and there was soil on her fingers and a streak of it, quite unconsciously, across the cuff of her sleeve. Her hair had come loose at the temples in the manner it always did when she had been working, and she looked, Eleanor thought, like a figure from one of those pastoral engravings Margaret had once shown her, the ones where shepherdesses were depicted with improbable cleanliness and improbable complexions.
Eleanor herself had never in her life looked like a shepherdess. She suspected she never would.
"I did not know you were here," she said. The words came out cooler than she had intended, stripped of the warmth she had meant to convey. She was not, she told herself, in the habit of lying about her intentions. She had simply not yet decided what her intentions were.
Charlotte set the shears down with the care of a person setting down a sleeping child. "I beg your pardon, Miss Ashworth. I did not mean to be absent from the schoolroom at this hour."
"You are not absent. You are here." Eleanor let the door close behind her. The mist had dampened the shoulders of her pelisse, and she could feel the chill of it now against the warmth of the greenhouse, a thin blade of cold drawn down her arms. "I am the one who is interrupting."
"It is not an interruption." Charlotte's voice was measured, careful, the voice of a person who had learned to make every sentence a small fortress. "Only a change of venue."
Eleanor did not smile. She wanted to, which was perhaps why she did not.
She moved deeper into the greenhouse, past the rows of potted geraniums whose leaves were already showing the first mottling of autumn, past the trays of seedlings that Margaret had been nursing since spring, past the tub of bay that had been pruned, she noticed, into a shape that was almost, but not quite, spherical. Charlotte's work, she supposed. Charlotte's hand visible in the architecture of the thing.
At the far bench, in a clay pot of unusual size, stood the rosebush.
Eleanor stopped. The rain tapped at the glass above her, a soft, irregular percussion that filled the silence without breaking it. The rosebush was not in flower. It would not flower again, she understood, until the spring, if then. But it was alive. The stems were woody and dark, the leaves a deep, glossy green that had not yet begun to yellow, and at the very top, where the light came in strongest, a single new shoot had pushed out, pale and tentative, the color of a green that had never been asked to do anything except grow.
"That," Eleanor said. She did not point. "That is my mother's."
"Yes."
Charlotte had not moved from the potting bench. She stood with her hands loosely at her sides, the soil still visible on her fingers, and she looked at Eleanor with an expression that Eleanor could not, for the moment, decode. Not pity. Not triumph. Something more attentive than either.
"I did not know it was still here." Eleanor's voice was very quiet. She had not meant it to be quiet. She had meant it to be ordinary, conversational, the kind of voice one used to remark upon the weather or the state of the gravel. "I thought, when we left, when everything was packed, I thought it had been given away. Or thrown out."
"It was given to the greenhouse." Charlotte paused. "By Lady Caroline. With instructions that it was not to be pruned, and not to be moved, and that if anyone asked after it, they were to be told it had died in the move."
Eleanor did not know what to say. She had a great many things she could have said, and not one of them seemed adequate, and so she said nothing at all, which was, she realized as she stood in the warm, rose-scented air, a thing she had not learned to do in a very long time.
She moved closer to the pot. The clay was old, and cracked in two places, and had been mended with what looked like copper wire. She recognized it. Her mother had kept her best secateurs in a pot like that, in the toolshed at the dower house, and Eleanor had once, at the age of seven, hidden a stolen biscuit in the same pot and been discovered by the gardener, who had been very kind about it and had not, she was fairly certain, told her mother.
The memory was so sharp, and so entirely unexpected, that it took her breath.
"She used to talk to it," Eleanor said. She had not known she was going to say it. The words simply came, from some part of her that had not yet learned to be cautious. "Every morning. She would go out before breakfast, even in the rain, and she would say things to it that she would not have said to anyone else. I used to listen from the schoolroom window. I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen."
She stopped. The rain was louder now against the glass, or perhaps the greenhouse was quieter, or perhaps she was simply more aware of it.
"I would give a great deal," she said, and her voice was not steady, and she was not, at that moment, entirely in command of it, "to have heard what she said."
Charlotte did not speak. She had moved, without sound, to the bench where the cutting lay, and she picked it up again, and Eleanor understood, with a small, sharp clarity, what she was looking at. The cutting. The tender, careful way Charlotte held it. The way she had been positioned, when Eleanor came in, half-bent over it as though she had been in the middle of a conversation.
"She has not flowered for two years," Charlotte said. "Not since the move. Lady Caroline thought, and Mrs. Pembury agreed, that it might be kinder to take a cutting while there was still strength in the wood, and to start again, rather than wait for the original to decline."
Eleanor looked at the cutting in Charlotte's hand. A small thing. A piece of stem, no longer than her finger, with two leaves and the faintest thickening at the base where roots, given patience, might eventually form.
"You are trying to bring it back," Eleanor said.
"I am trying to give it a chance," Charlotte said. "Whether it comes back is not, in the end, up to me."
Eleanor stood for a long time in the greenhouse, in the warm, complicated air, while the rain fell on the glass and the rosebush held its single pale shoot up to the light. She thought about her mother. She thought about the way her mother had held her, once, when she was very small, and had said, into her hair, a thing Eleanor had not understood at the time and had, in the years since, almost managed to forget. She thought about the way her mother had died, which had been sudden and which had not, in the conventional sense, been fair, and about the way her mother's friends had behaved afterward, some with excessive kindness and some with excessive caution and some, like Lady Caroline, with the particular excessive patience of a person who had decided that the kindest thing they could do was to preserve the small, living things.
She thought about Margaret, who had been kind to her that morning in a way that had not, she now understood, been accidental.
She thought about the fact that she had spent the entire morning composing a question about lavender.
"Mama," she said.
The word came out before she could stop it, and it was not, as she had expected, addressed to Charlotte. It was not, as she had feared, a piece of calculated theater. It was simply a word, the only word, the word that had been sitting in her throat since the morning and had at last, in the warmth and the rose-scent and the company of a person who was not, in the end, her enemy, found its way out.
She did not wait to see what Charlotte made of it. She turned, and she walked, very quickly, past the geraniums and the bay and the trays of seedlings, and she pushed the door open, and she went out into the rain.
The mist struck her face. It struck the shoulders of her pelisse, and the crown of her bonnet, and the hands she had not thought to raise, and it was, she discovered, exactly the right temperature, and exactly the right pressure, and it did not, she was grateful to note, require her to say anything at all.
She stood for a moment in the wet gravel, with the greenhouse door still swinging behind her on its hinges, and she breathed.
Then she walked, not toward the house, but along the path that curved behind the kitchen garden, where the lavender grew in its long, patient rows, and where the rain was already beginning to settle on the grey-green leaves in beads that looked, in the uncertain light, almost like small, persistent flowers.