Anything—wild ginger, mushrooms, hawthorn, violets, honeysuckle—might have caught her mother’s eye, or tantalized her nose, sent her clambering over hill and dale, filling the many pockets of her apron. As well, she might be napping under a bush. Or walking to town in her old clamming boots to buy a fish or a book. Sometimes Emma missed her completely, had to leave a gift and a message on her table in greeting.
That afternoon, Hesper was easy to find. Emma saw her from a distance among the trees, working the debris out of a new patch of garden near her house. Her arms and legs were bare, golden; the hoe wheeled and flashed around her in the light. Her hair, a mass of long, gray-brown curls, streamed in the wind like the tree boughs. She wore an old dress with the sleeves torn out, and the skirt raggedly shortened to her knees. As though she sensed someone’s eyes on her, she let the hoe drop abruptly, turned, shading her eyes with her hand. Emma heard her voice, deep and delighted, blown up the hill by the wind.
“Emma!”
“Dr. Grantham has sent for Lady Eglantyne’s heir,” Emma said breathlessly after they hugged, news tumbling randomly out of her, for she hadn’t seen Hesper for nearly a month. “Mrs. Haw thinks we might all be discharged.”
“Good,” her mother said, washing her hands in a bucket beside the door. “Then you can come and live with me.”
“Lady Eglantyne is still alive, though she hardly eats, and mostly sleeps. The doctor said if you have anything left for him to try, bring it up to the house.”
“I will.” She dried her hands on an old apron, smiling at Emma. The lines were deep around her eyes and mouth in her lean, sun-browned face. But her smile seemed younger than ever. “How are you, girl? You look a little shadowy around the edges. Come in, and I’ll make you a tea for that.”
She disappeared into the crazed house, the huge, hollowed tree trunk with a thatched roof, smaller huts and lean-tos built up around the openings hewn into its bole, the whole looking like a weird colony of mushrooms burgeoning off one another and held together by climbing roses and flowering vines. A chimney smoked improbably amid the thatch, attached to the thick stone hearth within the tree. One of the lean-tos, Emma knew, was entirely filled with books and papers.
Emma followed. A thought shook her as she stepped across the threshold, and she froze. “The princess. What will happen to her if I leave? If someone else—some stranger wanting towels—finds her behind the linen closet door instead?”
“I’d worry more about the stranger,” her mother said cryptically and pulled a stool made of unstripped white birch saplings out from under an oak door laid on trestles for a table. “From what I can tell, that’s a very dangerous house.”
Emma sat down on the stool, staring at Hesper. “For Ysabo?”
“For any stranger that chances in.”
“What have you found out about it?”
“Well, for one thing it’s very old magic,” Hesper said, putting this and that from her jars into the teapot. “I don’t know how old, and I don’t know whose.” She paused, a spoonful of rose hips suspended above the pot; lines rippled across her brow. “There’s so little to be found . . . It’s all secrets, between lines, allusions in letters, hints in diaries. But for at least a couple of centuries, if not longer. People writing about stories their children invented, ghosts their servants or some lord in his cups saw. Doors open, they get a glimpse—but nobody sees the whole of it. Ever.”
“How much did you see?”
“Enough to astonish me. Enough to make me wonder . . .” She turned to unhook the steaming kettle hanging above the fire, added water to her mix. She hung it back up, then sat down herself, elbows on the table, gazing at her daughter. “You be careful, girl. Don’t even think of crossing into that.”
Emma shook her head vehemently, braid bouncing on her shoulder blades. “No. I did invite the princess here, though, after the knight hit her. She said she couldn’t abandon the ritual.”
“What knight?”
“The one she asked why. Why she had to marry him.”
Hesper, absolutely still on her chair, echoed the word silently, “Why?” Then she said abruptly, “Wait. Wait. I have to write this down.”
“You didn’t know this part?
“Not the part where anybody ever asked why.”
Emma told her that part, sipping tea with a dollop of honey in it, holding the warm cup against her cheeks, her forehead, like a soothing hand.
“I guess I wouldn’t mind so much,” she said, while Hesper scribbled the last of her tale into the end papers of an apothecary’s remedy book.
“Mind what?”
“Leaving Aislinn House, after Lady Eglantyne dies. I could get a job in town, take care of us both. Especially if there’s nobody I know left in the house after the heir comes and brings her own staff.”
Her mother gave her a skewed look above her raised cup. “You don’t really think Miss Miranda Beryl of Landringham would settle herself into this backwater.”
“How do you know her name?”
“Ah, gossip. It holds the world together. The doctor’s been asking around town about her, who might know her.” Hesper took another sip. “Strange that even Lady Eglantyne’s own solicitors are reluctant to write to Miss Beryl. As though they know she’d never stay, and Lady Eglantyne’s death might mean the end of the family affairs in Sealey Head.”
“She’s Lady Eglantyne’s family. She should be here.”
“Have you heard Lady Eglantyne talk about her great-niece?”
Emma sighed. “No. She doesn’t talk much at all. She mostly dreams. Maybe nobody wants Miranda Beryl here. Nobody wants any changes.”
They ate bread and curds and a spicy beef sausage someone had given Hesper in payment. Then Emma took off her shoes and stockings, tucked up her skirt, and helped her mother clear the garden for cabbages, carrots, spinach, beans, and radishes. Hesper had already weeded the herb garden; scents of rosemary and sage teased Emma’s nose as she worked.
“You should walk into town,” Hesper protested as the sun, going its way, began to shift the patterns of tree shadows around them into the garden. “Breathe the sea air, see some younger faces.”
“Right now I’m doing this,” Emma answered, attacking a prodigious burdock root with satisfaction. “I’m seeing you.”
Later, when they had downed tools, washed off the dirt, and perched themselves on a sunlit log for cups of mint tea and a bowl of wild strawberries, Emma asked her mother, “Why did you leave Aislinn House if you were only going to sit in the tree house thinking about it? There, you could just open a door and see more pieces of the mystery.”
Hesper shook her head. Her thick, springy hair had collected an assortment of petals, twigs, a couple of insects trying to find their way out, sprigs of herbs she had tucked behind her ear for later. One of the insects, a tiny red beetle, flew away at the movement; Emma reached out and brushed the spider off.
“I never saw like you did. I caught glimpses of a great many people doing incomprehensible things. Some of them made me uneasy. The knights fully armed. That great pack of crows flying rings around the tower. Once when I opened the stillroom pantry, I thought they would come streaming through the doorway after me. I couldn’t say for certain that anyone even saw me. Except the crows. Maybe it’s a rare thing in her world that your friend Ysabo sees you as clearly as you see her. I left Aislinn House because I wanted more time of my own to find out about it. And because—” She smiled, tilting her face into the light. “I like being outdoors. I guessed that people would come seeking my remedies no matter where I kept myself. And out here, I can go barefoot.”
Emma stayed for supper, which was great fat dried mushrooms plumped up with water and fried in butter, a salad of dandelion and violet leaves, and the curly tips of ferns, fish from the market her mother had smoked, and ale—another payment. Emma, a bit sore from her exertions and pleasantly relaxed from the ale, heard the bell on her way through the woods. The light faded around her. The trees thinned, opened to reveal the unkempt hedges and overrun gardens of Aislinn House, all but lost in wildness.