Driven by necessity, Lavender’s sewing skills had improved—the crafting of sachets—but she didn’t trust her agility or steadiness when it came to removing the stitches from her cheekbone. She had a little money left from selling the sachets, even after buying flour, molasses and the pencils; she’d give the rest to Dr. Minyard, for treating her face and taking out the stitches. It wouldn’t be the full amount owing, but would signal her honourable intentions. She knew he didn’t expect it, but she’d feel better compensating him; she had her pride.
Arlo Snook had left for the Stables. Still in her nightgown, a cup of chicory coffee in her hand, Lavender tiptoed over to the harp in the parlour. Would those strings ever sound forth music again? And of all the melodies in the world, “All Through the Night.” Her mother played it often. It had to signify something. Perhaps, through the harp, she tried to send Lavender a clue about the nest egg. At the very least, the song’s lullaby strains were surely intended to comfort and soothe. And mitigate Mrs. Rose’s austere rhetoric, for the spirit harpist must have hovered there, during the old tutor’s visit, unseen by Lavender and her guest. Keeping a vigil.
Whether the harp played again, Lavender felt, hung in the balance; she sensed a delicate tracery of air around it. A fragility that affirmed her decision to keep the mysterious music secret.
Soon, the demands of everyday life rose to the fore. Lavender needed to craft something to sell. Before that, dusting, scrubbing and laundry. Gone were the days of a hired housekeeper, in her father’s era. Lavender spent the morning on household chores. She tried again to scrub the bloodstains from the dress after finding advice in Godey’s Lady’s Book—wine vinegar, hartshorn spirits, turpentine. She let the garment soak in the mixture. She looked, too, for some craft ideas in those pages, autumnal wreaths trimmed with owls fashioned from pine cones. Clearly meant as a whimsical project, a hobby, for its lady readers. For Lavender, it meant income. Food on the table.
DR. MINYARD WAS pleased with her face’s progress. He removed the sutures with a skilled, delicate hand, and applied antiseptic.
“There should be very little scarring,” the kind medic said. “Nothing some lady’s powder can’t conceal.” He praised Lavender’s herbal therapies, which had no doubt sped healing. He was his usual loquacious self, one moment quipping about how Lavender’s father used to carp about his illegible formularies, their Latin scrawl, how they’d nanty-nark, doctor and apothecary; the next moment, what a humourless man the new apothecary continued to be, with that look, like he’d just swallowed castor oil; and then back to Lavender’s face, how it had healed “almost as if by magic.”
She rose to gather her shawl, her coin purse and the large basket she’d brought with her. After the doctor’s office, Lavender was going to collect branches in the woods, for wreaths, and pine cones she’d fashion into decorative owls. She glanced at the stag’s head on the wall; no magic for that poor beheaded beast. “On the topic of magic, Doctor, I suppose you’ve heard of the famous Spirit Medium who’s arrived here?”
“I’ve heard of little else,” Varn Minyard said, sterilizing his instruments. “It’s all my patients talk about—besides their aches and pains.”
Lavender smoothed her shawl around her shoulders. “As a man of science, do you believe in it, Doctor? That the personality endures after death, and might be communed with?”
He removed his monocle, all thoughtful. “I have witnessed some things that confounded me utterly. Cases that elude any scientific basis. There have been times, I confess, when the line between life and death seems very porous, so I don’t believe it’s impossible to cross it—and I am eager to witness what this Trout lady can do.”
They chatted a bit more. Then Lavender reached into her coin purse and drew out a sum. She offered it to the doctor. “This covers part of the cost of you sewing me back together. I hope to soon have the rest.”
He waved her away. “Keep it. I wouldn’t think of charging a fee to an old family friend—and mercifully, thank heaven you didn’t bring me a chicken.”
She laughed. “Oh, I can’t spare my hen, Sir.”
“Did you like the little bouquet?” Dr. Minyard asked.
So he’d been the floral benefactor. The first one, at least.
“Very much. It was lovely, rife with meaning—sincerity, hope, beauty.”
“I was on my way to a house call near Pinnacle Street. I thought, after your mishap, you could use some cheer. I hadn’t time for a visit, and, in any case, didn’t send a calling card ahead. I’d been neglectful in sociability this past year, so many influenza cases, burns. In fact, I haven’t been this overrun since the cholera scare. The flowers came from my own garden. I was short of time, as I’ve mentioned, so I simply left them on your front stoop.”
“How did you learn their meanings, Sir? For they seemed not random.”
He glanced at the clock above the skeleton. “From your mother. During my visits to your house, we sometimes conversed about more than germ theory and opiates.” A sardonic guffaw followed, another glimpse at the clock.
Lavender could tell that, sociable as Dr. Minyard was, he must press on. But she longed for one more bit of intelligence. “Sir, I will leave you now, but I must ask—did you perchance, even more recently, leave a fine stem of yarrow on my doorstep?”
The doctor sent her a quizzical smile. “Not guilty.” Then he advised Lavender to stay away from tree roots—he meant her tumble, she supposed—and gave her a quick, fatherly farewell embrace.
As she walked with her basket to the edge of the village, towards the woods, she noticed, for the first time, the trees beginning to wear their autumnal robes. Some leaves had even fallen. This must have started days earlier; usually she was more attuned. But time behaved curiously lately. Herky-jerky. Sewing her sachets, Lavender had consulted the mantel clock only to discover the hour for mid-morning tea remained remote. Domestic time was often like that, inert as the figures on Mr. Keats’s Grecian urn. And time had snailed during Mrs. Clement Rose’s recent visit. But outdoors, in the garden or woods, minutes clipped along like code’s metallic tweedles through a telegraph. Lavender felt that whoosh, that freeing rush, now, as she penetrated the woods and collected fallen branches—pliable, artfully gnarled ones about the length of her forearm—for her wreaths.
Mrs. Clement Rose used to warn against walking alone in the woods, but Lavender had no intention of giving up her rambles, the ritual of following her mother’s old path that traced the river’s banks.
She came upon a swell of fallen pine cones, and gathered them. Taking time to study several, she was fascinated by their intricacy; how pine cones were like so many little mothers, whose curved bracts cradled their tender seeds within.
Suddenly, a twig splintered. Lavender cast about, didn’t see a deer or other creature.
She saw a man. Not far away. He hadn’t seen her, she thought.
Robert Trout.
She turned, causing a rustle of leaves.
She’d alarmed him. It was obvious from his audible intake of breath. “Miss Fitch! I thought a ghost rummaged about out here among the trees. Thank heaven it’s only you.”
“It’s only me.”
They both laughed.
He took a couple of steps closer. “Your face looks much better.”
“Dr. Minyard is very adept with the sewing needle,” Lavender said. She noticed that Robert carried his book. Much better a book than a snare for rabbits.
“Do you often hike in the wilds, carrying sticks?” he asked.
“They’re for wreaths. And these pine cones in my basket will soon become owls to deck them. They aren’t my usual wares,” she added. “But my garden flowers are expended for the season, so I must improvise.” A pause, a plunge. “What, Sir, if I may ask, are you doing out here?”
“The woods offer a respite from people’s stares and questions—about my affliction, about Allegra’s work, about everything—and I like to find a conducive rock to settle upon, and read Mr. Whitman. I enjoy the peace.”
“You keep the book with you all the time?”
“I can’t get enough. I read it over and over and have, indeed, committed much of its poetry to memory.”
She plunged again. “Would you read—or recite some?”
His eyes reminded her of a musical score she’d seen, and could mostly decipher, from Godey’s Lady’s Book, something like “How Deep Your Radiant Eyes.” She couldn’t retrieve the exact title. After the recent marvel in her own parlour, she wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if harp song began to issue from Robert Trout’s eyes, so intense was his expression.
“Poetry right here in the woods, Miss Fitch?”
“I can’t think of a more ideal place to hear of leaves, grass and poesy,” Lavender said, laying her bundle of sticks on the ground.
“What poetry does a botanist such as yourself read?”
“Mr. Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’ Keats. And Coleridge. My father was an apothecary, and therefore interested in the effects of opium on artistic composition. He immersed in De Quincey for that reason, and I’ve dabbled in it. De Quincey, I mean, not opium.”
“You’ll find Whitman, one of my own countrymen, different than any of those,” Robert said. “Now I’m even more eager to hear your opinion of his verse.”
A finch or some other poetry-inclined bird chirruped nearby, as if endorsing this.
Robert Trout cleared his throat. “I’ll try to recite. I may stumble, or misplace the occasional word, but you’ll get the gist.” His dark lock fell across his forehead. He brushed it back, and began.
“This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.”
He paused—for dramatic effect, Lavender supposed.
“Engrossing,” she remarked. “It bears a deeply personal cast. Please recite more.”
Robert’s voice rose, rapturous:
“One hour to madness and joy!
O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)”
The initial lines heated Lavender’s cheeks. No doubt, she blushed because of the intimate tone, the sharing of a secret—but I will tell you—being the one singled out to hear.
“What do you think of it?” Robert asked.
“It surely is quite—different, Sir.” For though Lavender had earned a Mistress of Liberal Arts credential from the Ladies’ Academy, she couldn’t penetrate the American’s words. She sensed her response fell flat. She tried again. “The verse is very—free.”
“Very.” Robert Trout scaled new heights of enthusiasm. “You’re not alone in your opinion. Whitman’s verse confounds many poetry readers in my country by virtue of its novelty, its—sensuality, and radical lens on the world. Listen, now. These lines teach us more about life beyond this mortal coil than all the planchettes and ear trumpets and lantern slides and crystal gazing-globes on earth.” He recited again:
“What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
“They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if there ever was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
“All goes onward and outward . . . and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
He stopped. Brushed back his lock again, or was it a tear? His recital had been moving, poignant. He fixed her in his gaze, like that first day at the railway station. Awaited her reaction, no doubt.
“It’s quite—transcendent, Mr. Trout. And your delivery most eloquent.”
Robert thanked her. “Anything else?”
“Certain phrases are very profound—’there is really no death’ and ‘nothing collapses’—and are corroborated by a . . . supernatural event in my own parlour.”
Day’s light tilted bluer.
“I must hear more of this, Miss Fitch.”
Bluer light still.
Robert Trout took a watch on a chain from his pocket, and blinked, aghast. “Confound it, I must part ways with you. I’m already late.”
Time was performing that trick again, buckling in on itself like a circus acrobat. He walked back to the village with Lavender, carried her bundle of sticks. It felt oddly jarring to be among people again; the woods had afforded such privacy. Several men strolled near them, pointing at Robert. “Look at the freak,” Lavender heard them say, followed by callous huffs of mirth. She knew Robert heard it too. He didn’t flinch, but his face—both the marred and whole sides—took on a stolid flatness. She read this look; it told her he’d endured this cruelty before.
He was quiet, for a moment, while the men receded down the street, then he said, “Forgive me, I almost neglected to mention—Allegra thanks you for some headache cures you suggested. They worked. She’s improved, such a relief, for her mood is fierce when she’s indisposed. She’ll read your tea leaves at the train station market, she said, to show her gratitude—any day this week. Free of charge.”
“I’m grateful for that. How is her tooth?”
Robert shrugged. “She seems happy enough.”
They were bound in different directions. “This is where we part,” he said, passing the bundle of sticks back to Lavender. “It delighted me to share Mr. Whitman’s words. Your ready ears brought me light, Miss Fitch.”
Where had the day gone? Soon enough, the lamplighter would be out on the streets with his long pole and wick. But this was the season of shrinking light—day’s windows dimmed. Lavender wished she could channel the remaining beams to Robert Trout. Given the ordeals he must confront, living with his disfigurement, he deserved every last ray.
Unlocking the gate, she passed the Private Garden—Do Not Enter sign, then went into the potting shed to deposit the pine cones and twigs. She collected an egg from the hen. She’d fry it with some cabbage for supper. A little rabbit stew was left for Arlo Snook, preserved on a small block of ice the boy had splurged on with his stable earnings. He was welcome to the stew.
She brewed a large pot of tea for supper. There was so much of it. The prospect of Allegra Trout reading her leaves thrilled Lavender, the hope that some clue about her mother’s gift might emerge. If the Oracle’s powers were as considerable as everyone said, and as the Crier vaunted, the mystery of the cache might be cracked open, and the era of scrounging would be over.
As Lavender shredded cabbage, she thought how fuzzy her mind had become lately, how distracted she was, how scattered her brain, for she hadn’t thought to tote the packet of tea with her that day, in case Allegra Trout strolled the village’s core. Nor had Lavender taken the fine pencil she meant to give Robert. She’d been dreamy, off somewhere else; no wonder harp song reached her from some plane beyond this one. She grew misty as autumn air over a marsh, woolly as the socks in her wellington boots. And she hadn’t asked Robert if he’d laid a stem of yarrow on her doorstep; given local people’s ease with disclosures, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to find out where “the village flower girl” lived. Everyone, except newcomers, knew the address of the apothecary’s garden.
Despite Lavender’s mind sputtering like a lantern low on fuel, one thing remained stubbornly fixed, constant, indelible: the blood marks on her dress that still soaked in the mixture of wine vinegar, turpentine and hartshorn.