The seventeenth day of September

Apple-scented air. Pearmain, Costard, Pomewater, Codlin, Jennetting, Catshead, Nonpareil. Fruits best gathered when the moon is full and the weather is fine, as it is now, on Saint Lambert’s Day. Who gave our Lambert his name, I wonder? As he can neither write nor speak, he cannot have said what he was called when he came into this household. Perhaps he has another name, his own, by which he was known when he was born and now perforce keeps locked away with his other memories of childhood. Perhaps he longs to hear it spoken now. I asked my lord my husband if he remembered the renaming of Lambert, but he did not. He did not think that it was on this same saint’s day that the boy was found, three-quarters starved, asleep on the kitchen doorstep.

Unbroken days of sunshine in September are a cordial sent by heaven to fortify the people and the land against the coming winter. We cannot store heat in us, as if it were wheat in a barn, and must make the most of it now. It is working like a spell on my husband. His legs are less rigid than they were two weeks ago and for the first time since midsummer’s eve he can walk as far as the garden. This time has a dreamlike feel, a time that is not of an ordinary season, a time suspended between the last of the grain harvest and the winter sowing, a time of leaves becoming gold and ripe fruit falling from the trees. In this household it also marks the end of Roland’s long vacation. At Michaelmas he will go back to Lincoln’s Inn, taking Henry Martyn with him, I suppose.

To sundew that was gathered in summer, add cinnamon, ginger, cloves, fine sugar, red rose petals and dates without their stones. Steep in aqua composita for twenty days precisely. Then, if you have it, add some gold leaf too. Rosa solis, it’s one way to cage a little of the summer in a glass. A poor way, yes, but what else is there to do? Hold the bottle up to the light and catch the glow of sun in the depths of winter. Gleam of sunlight and fire also in the jars of quince and crab-apple jelly that Joan keeps in her still-room; they were in my mother’s too, my memories of childhood, those scented liquids that were cloudy in the pan but then miraculously clear, as bright and shining as panes of coloured glass.