A Harvest of Nightshade

The Gathering In

For the first time in fifteen months, Dilys Ashcroft had turned off the greenhouse light on purpose the night before, and had lain awake until two in the terror of a woman who has just done something brave.

It was a very small light. A single low bulb over the propagation bench, forty watts of amber that Hugh had left burning through every winter of their marriage so the cuttings would not sulk, and which she had left burning through every night since the ambulance took him and did not bring him back. She had told herself it was for the plants. She had known, in the way one knows the things one refuses to look at directly, that it was so the house should not be entirely dark on his side of it; so that if she woke at four and could not breathe, there would be one lit window in the world that was his.

And last night she had walked out across the wet grass in her nightgown and Hugh's old gardening jersey, and she had put her thumb on the switch, and turned it off, and stood in the sudden dark listening to her own heart do something complicated, and then she had gone back to bed. That was all. A woman of sixty-four in a cold garden, turning off a light. It should not have taken fifteen months and the fright of a lifetime, and it should not have left her sleepless with a kind of appalled triumph until the small hours. But grief, she had learned, keeps its own accounts, and pays out its coin in units no one else can see.

"You've not slept," said Miriam Pardoe, over the rim of her teacup, in the manner of a woman stating the weather.

"I never sleep," said Dilys. "It's one of the great compensations of widowhood. One gets so much reading done."

Miriam was not deceived, and did not pretend to be, which was one of the several hundred things Dilys had come to value about her in the six weeks since a summer that neither of them would speak of directly. Miriam Pardoe had spent three days last month believing she might be arrested for a murder she had not committed, and had come out of it the way a good bulb comes out of a hard frost — checked, chastened, and somehow the more certain of what she was. She sat now at Dilys's kitchen table with her broad reddened hands round the cup and the low October sun coming in sideways off the frost on the panes, and she had that look about her, the patient immovable look, that meant she had come with a purpose and did not intend to leave without it.

"I've had an idea," said Miriam.

"You always have. It's the most exhausting thing about you."

"Apple Day."

"Is next Saturday. I am aware. I have been asked to judge the longest-peel, which is a responsibility I take more seriously than my marriage vows, God rest them."

"The greenhouse." Miriam set the cup down. "Yours. Hugh's. Open it. For the day. A cuttings-and-seed swap — everyone brings a rooted slip or a paper of seed and takes one away, and they come through and see the ferns and the salvias and that great absurd lemon tree he was so proud of, and you tell them what everything is, because Lord knows you can't help yourself, and it does some good, and it —" She stopped, and chose the next words as carefully as a woman lifting a seedling by its leaf and never its stem. "And it lets the village in. On your terms. One day only. Doors shut again at dusk."

The kettle ticked as it cooled. Out in the garden a blackbird was going through the fallen crab-apples with the single-mindedness of a customs officer.

Here is the thing Dilys did not say: that the greenhouse was the last room in the world that was entirely Hugh's, that his handwriting was still on the labels and his reading glasses still folded on the shelf above the misting bench where he had put them down one ordinary Tuesday, and that to open the door to fifty pairs of well-meaning feet and fifty kind curious faces was to admit that it was now, irrevocably, only hers. And here is the thing she had learned about herself in a certain airless week in August: that a part of her — a part she watched the way one watches a plant one suspects of being not quite what its label claims — had come alive in the presence of a death, and had liked it, and that this frightened her more than any amount of grief. She had seen, this summer, what a grief could curdle into if you fed it in the dark and never let the light at it. She had seen Pru Merridew. She did not intend to become a thing that lived behind a locked door with a light left on.

"Yes," said Dilys.

Miriam blinked. She had plainly prepared a second and third assault, and now stood, as it were, with her siege-ladders in her hands and the gate swinging open.

"Yes," said Dilys again, and heard the word settle, and found she meant it. "Don't look at me like that or I shall change my mind and take up embroidery instead. Cuttings and seed. Doors shut at dusk. And you will help me label, because if Marion Kettleby carries off a Salvia under the impression it is a fuchsia I shall not be answerable."

"I'll help you label," said Miriam, and there was a brightness in her that had not been there in the summer, and it was good to see, it was very good to see. "Now put your boots on. I promised Clemency we'd walk down and look at the church before the light goes flat, and you've been indoors with your grief so long you've gone the colour of a forced endive."

"That," said Dilys, standing, "is the single most botanically apt insult anyone has ever paid me, and I shall treasure it."

---

The village lay below Foxglove Cottage the way it always lay, folded into the elbow of the Hemble valley with its back to the wind, and this morning it lay in the particular light of a bright cold late-October Saturday, the light gone low and long and the colour of the inside of a russet apple. Woodsmoke stood straight up from three or four chimneys. The trees along the lane had turned — the field maples all butter and flame, the ash already half bare and letting the sky through its black rigging — and the whole valley had that smell, that indescribable middle-of-October smell of leaf-mould and cold and the sweetness of things going over, that always made Dilys's chest tighten with a happiness she could never quite separate from loss.

Wellington went ahead of them, as Wellington always did, a long grey disreputable question mark of a dog nosing under the hedge for windfalls, dragging back at intervals with a bruised apple held sideways in his soft mouth and the profoundly unrepentant expression of a creature who has never in his life understood the concept of theft. He had been Hugh's dog and was now, in the way of lurchers, everyone's and no one's and chiefly his own; but he slept across Dilys's feet, and there was that to be said for him.

The hedges were doing their October work. Sloe hung dusty blue-black on the blackthorn, so thick this year the branches bowed with it; damsons dropped their fruit into the long grass at the field edge where the old orchard trees had seeded out along the lane; the last of the blackberries had gone soft and dark and past their best, the way the old people said the Devil spat on them come Michaelmas. Rose hips, hawthorn haws, the wine-dark globes of the elder gone by. A generous county, in October. A county that emptied its pockets.

And there, where the lane rose over the shoulder of the headland and the ground went thin and pale and chalky over the ribs of the old lime kiln — there, in the tumbled disturbed spoil where the burnt lime had leached the soil forty and a hundred and two hundred years ago and nothing quite grew right — there was the other thing.

Dilys stopped walking. She did it without deciding to.

It stood taller than the bramble, a great sprawling shrub gone leggy and dark, its leaves a dull unwholesome green and its flowers over — but the berries were on. They hung singly under the leaf-joints, each in its little green five-pointed star of a calyx, and they had ripened to that particular black, that wet, swollen, gleaming, purple-black of a fruit that means to be eaten, that has spent all summer becoming as sweet and as glossy and as pretty as it knows how, precisely so that a bird, or a beast, or a child, will take it. Atropa belladonna. The beautiful lady. Growing exactly where it liked to grow, on the ruined ground, on the disturbed and the buried and the forgotten places, hanging its lovely black lamps in the low gold light with the patience of something that has nowhere at all to be.

"That'll want cutting back before the school walks come by," said Miriam, following her look, and passed it without a second thought, the way everyone passed it, the way it wished to be passed.

Dilys did not pass it so easily. She looked at it a moment longer, at the sweet black fruit and the sweet blue sloe on the same stretch of hedge under the same generous sky, and thought — not for the first time, but never before quite so clearly — that the countryside in autumn was the great liar of the year: it laid out the loveliest table and salted three of the dishes with death, and smiled, and let you choose. Then Wellington barged her knee with an apple, and she came away.

---

The Glebe Orchard lay below the manor, an acre and a half of ancient half-standard trees, gnarled and lichen-silvered and heavy this year with fruit — Blenheim Orange and Court of Wick and a dozen sorts no one living could name — and at the heart of it the low stone press-barn where fifty autumns' worth of pomace had steeped the very timbers with the smell of cider. It was the oldest working thing in Little Hemlock, older than the church tower, and it belonged, freehold and outright and to the profound inconvenience of a great many people, to Silas Crabbe.

He was up a ladder against a Warrior tree when they came through the gate, seventy-two years old and built like a blackthorn stake, all knuckle and sinew and grievance, and he did not look down.

"Mind that dog off my windfalls," said Silas Crabbe, to the orchard at large.

"Good morning, Silas," said Dilys.

"Is it." It was not a question and did not want an answer. He came down the ladder one deliberate rung at a time, the way a man does whose heart the doctor has spoken to him about, and stood among his fruit with a look on him like a small king surveying a rebellious province. "Come to gawp like the rest. There's a man down there with a leather folder wants me to sign my grandfather's grandfather's orchard over to a firm of housebuilders so he can put up nine executive homes with double garages where that press has stood since Waterloo, and he's been at me an hour, and I've told him what he can do with his folder, and now he's stood at my gate telephoning about it." He said it with enormous satisfaction. "Prosser. Thornfield Homes. You'll have seen him."

They had. At the gate, a smooth-coated man of forty-something in unsuitable town shoes was pacing the verge with a phone at his ear and a leather folder under his arm, and the particular set of his shoulders was that of a man being told, at some distance, that he had not closed a deal he had promised to close.

"He'll not have it," said Silas. "Not while I've breath. They can measure that field up top till they've worn a path in it —" and this, Dilys understood, was the Glebe Field, the manor's, the one everyone said Freddie Quennell had all but signed away already — "but they'll not have my orchard nor my press, and they'll not have it after me neither, for I'll tie it up so tight in the will that yon housebuilder'll be in his box before the lawyers are done." He seemed to relish the whole prospect — his own death, the lawyers, the developer's rage — with equal cheerfulness.

A younger man came round the end of the press-barn with a hod of apples on his shoulder — thirty-odd, unshaven, with a good face gone tired and wary and a way of holding himself as though bracing for a blow. Jasper, the great-nephew, come back to the village in the spring from wherever it was things had gone wrong for him. He tipped the apples into the sorting bin.

"Uncle, I'm going down the Green Man for a bite. Can you—"

"You can go where you like on your own coin," said Silas Crabbe. "You'll get none of mine. Great grown man cadging the price of a pint off a poor old orchardman. When I was your age I'd have been ashamed."

The younger man's jaw worked. He said nothing. He went.

"He's in debt to his ears," Silas confided, watching him go, "and thinks I don't know, and thinks I'll die soon and leave him the lot to sell to yon Prosser, and he's half right." The dry laugh again. "Which half he'll not find out till the will's read."

---

They found the pleasanter half of the morning at the orchard's lower gate, where a knot of children in wellingtons and hand-me-down coats stood clustered round a small neat elderly man with white hair and a canvas satchel, and the whole tableau was so exactly the opposite of Silas Crabbe that Dilys felt her shoulders come down an inch.

"—and that one," Aubrey Vellacott was saying, holding a spray of black berries at a careful arm's length, "the shiny black ones, all on their own under a little green star — what do we do with those, Alfie?"

"Don't touch," chorused the children, and one small boy at the front, gap-toothed and solemn, said, "'Cause they're the deadly nightshade and they're the very worst of all, they'll stop your heart, my nan says—"

"Your nan is nearly right, which for your nan is a triumph," said Aubrey gravely, and the children shrieked with laughter, and Alfie Bunce glowed. "Not your heart, exactly. But the very worst, yes. Sweet as anything to taste — that's the wickedness of it — so you'd never know till it was too late. Which is why we never eat a berry, not one, not ever, unless a grown-up who truly knows their plants has told us it's safe. And who truly knows their plants?"

"You do, Mr Vellacott," said Alfie, with the flat confidence of catechism.

Something crossed the old schoolmaster's face — there and gone, quick as a cloud-shadow over the orchard — and he said, more quietly, "Well. We all make mistakes, even grown-ups. That's why we're careful. Now — the blue ones, the sloes, all dusty — sharp as sin and safe as houses, so tell me what your gran makes with those…"

Dilys warmed to him at once, entirely and without reservation, in the way one plant-lover knows another across a crowded room. Here was a man who thought in leaves and fruit as she did, who could not pass a hedge without reading it, who had plainly spent a lifetime handing that reading down to children so that not one of them should ever come to harm. He caught her eye over the small heads and gave her a self-deprecating little smile, one expert to another, half-apologising for the lecture, and she smiled back and thought: there, now, that is a man I should like to know.

"Dilys Ashcroft," he said, straightening, coming to shake her hand with real warmth. "Miriam. Aubrey Vellacott — I taught, once, before the flood. I hear you have a lemon tree that is the wonder of the parish. I have been longing to be introduced to it, and to you."

"Then you must come next Saturday," said Dilys, before she could weigh it, "for I am — apparently — opening the greenhouse to all comers, and you shall meet the lemon and give me your opinion of my ferns, which is more than my late husband would ever do."

"I should be honoured," said Aubrey Vellacott, and looked as though he meant it. "It teetotals a man wonderfully, a good fern," he added, obscurely, and then, seeing her puzzlement, laughed. "Forgive me. I don't drink — never have — and I'm forever finding I've nothing to do with my hands at these harvest suppers but hold a glass of elderflower and admire the pot plants. A greenhouse full of ferns will suit me down to the ground."

---

The Reverend Clemency Odell came up through the trees at that, cheeks red with the cold and an armful of gathered greenery for the church, and the talk turned, as it always did with Clemency, gently toward the things the village would rather not look at.

"We plant the memorial apple on Apple Day, as ever," she said. "Only this year it's the fortieth. Forty years since the poor Yeo boy — Georgie — you'll not remember, Dilys, you were away then, but the older ones do. Ate berries on a school nature walk and was gone by the next morning, eight years old, and the whole village never quite the same. His mother's still living — Sabine — over in the sheltered flats at Kingsbourne now, very frail, but her niece is bringing her back for it. She's asked to see the tree planted." Clemency's kind tired face clouded. "Forty years. Some wounds only skin over. They never close."

"Forty years," said the vicar softly, of the tree they would plant for a boy long dead, and Silas Crabbe laughed his dry laugh and said, "Aye — forty years, and some folk hereabouts sleep the better for it than they've any right to," and looked, as he said it, at no one at all, in the particular way of a man who is looking at someone very precisely indeed.

Apple Day

There is no season so generous or so double-tongued as an English autumn, which offers you a hedge full of fruit and, in the same green breath, three separate ways to die of it.

Dilys Ashcroft stood at her own front gate a little after nine, in the low gold light, and considered the proposition. The Hemble valley had turned in the night the way it always seemed to — not gradually, whatever the almanacs said, but all at once, as though some tired god had gone round with a brush after the pubs shut. The beeches above the orchard were the colour of good cider. Woodsmoke lay along the lane. And the hedges, oh, the hedges: sloe and haw and the last blackberries, damson gone that dusty violet-black that made your fingers ache to strip it, and here and there, in the disturbed places, on the old broken ground, other fruit besides. She knew every one of them by their Latin the way other women knew the birthdays of grandchildren, and she did not, this morning, want to think about the Latin at all.

Because the greenhouse doors were open.

She had done it herself, at half past seven, her heart going like a rabbit's, and had stood a moment inside among the smell of tomato leaves and damp grit and the ghost of Hugh, who had kept the light burning in here all night for forty years and whom she had finally, this autumn, learned to leave in the dark. Then she had propped both doors wide with two flowerpots and pinned a card to the gate — cuttings & seed, all welcome, take what you'll cherish — and walked back to the house to be sick with nerves over a cup of tea she did not drink.

"They'll come," said Miriam Pardoe, arriving with a trug and a look that dared the morning to disappoint her. Six weeks ago the village had thought Miriam Pardoe a poisoner. Now she stood in Dilys's garden as though she had always stood there, which was, Dilys thought, the whole of what the autumn had given her. "Marion's told the WI. When Marion tells the WI, it's law."

They came. That was the terror of it and the triumph. All morning the village trooped up the path between Apple Day and the orchard — because Foxglove Cottage sat square on the way down to the Glebe, and a body could not get to the press-barn without passing Dilys's gate — and they came in ones and twos and whole gossiping clots, and they went into Hugh's greenhouse, into the place Dilys had kept shut like a held breath for fifteen months, and they touched things, and asked for slips of the scented geraniums, and went away carrying bits of her old life wrapped in wet newspaper to plant in theirs. She gave away pelargoniums and a division of the good hellebore and a paper twist of the tall white foxglove seed that had named the cottage. Grief, she understood, watching Enid Purslowe bear off a rooted cutting like the Host, was not a thing you got over. It was a thing you put in soil.

"You'll have nothing left," said a voice at her elbow, sour as a windfall, and she turned to find Ambrose Cardew scowling at her borders with a plant pot held against his chest in both arms, the way a man holds something he is embarrassed to be caught loving.

"I'll have more than I started with," she said. "That's how it works, Ambrose. You of all people ought to know a specimen multiplies by being cut."

"Hm." He thrust the pot at her. It was a fern, small, exquisite, its fronds cut fine as lace and glaucous underneath — a hart's-tongue crested thing, no, a Polystichum, a rarity, and he had carried it three miles under his arm rather than let it go in a box. "It wants a north wall and to be left alone. Two things this village is constitutionally unable to provide." He looked at the open doors, at the people going in and out of them, and something in his retired-pathologist's face, which was built for delivering bad news gently and had forgotten how to do anything else, worked at the problem of being pleased and could not quite manage it. "You've opened it, then."

"I've opened it."

"Foolish," he said. "Sentimental." And then, because he was a fair man before he was a rude one, and because the fern was already in her hands: "It suits you." He walked off up the path towards the cider before she could make anything of it, and Dilys stood holding a rare fern and the first warm thing anyone had said to her in a fortnight, and found she could not, for a moment, have named a single plant in Latin if her life had hung on it.

Down at the Glebe Orchard, Apple Day was in its full and roaring glory.

The press was turning. That was the sound under everything, the slow groan and gush of the old screw press in the barn, where Silas Crabbe's hands — brown, knotted, magnificently sure — laid the cheeses of pulped apple in their cloths and cranked the beam and let the juice run out amber into the tubs, sharp and sweet and thick enough to stand a spoon in. He would not let a soul touch the press. He never had. Fifty years he had kept the Glebe Orchard and its trees and its press and its mysteries, the last man in the valley who could graft and prune and coax a dead maiden tree back to bearing, and he did it all with the particular scowling contempt of a man who has decided the world does not deserve his gift and means to give it anyway, expensively, so everyone shall know the cost.

Children ran with toffee-apples glued to their faces. Clive Sowerby had a barrel of his own cider going and was pressing tastes on all comers with the desperate hospitality of a man who suspects his product. The longest-peel competition had drawn its usual grim knot round Marion Kettleby's table, where the vicar, Clemency Odell, was even now unspooling a single unbroken ribbon of Bramley skin to a length that made strong men wince, her sleeves pushed up and her dog-collar askew and her tongue between her teeth. And along the whole east side of the marquee, running the length of it like a battlefield map of the parish, stood the WI preserves table.

Dilys read it the way she read a hedge. The high ground — the two centre trestles, the good light — belonged to Marion, whose damson cheese and quince paste sat behind little handwritten cards in a phalanx. Miriam had been given a place this year, an honest place, mid-table; that was new, and Dilys marked it, and marked Marion pretending not to have granted it. And down at the far cold end, where the canvas sagged and nobody stood, was a single neat row of jars, dark and clear and beautifully labelled in an educated hand — rowan & crab jelly, hedgerow, elderberry rob, Redfern — with a good clear space on either side of them, as though the village had drawn a line in the grass. Nobody was buying Bryony Redfern's jellies. Bryony Redfern stood behind them with her arms folded and her chin up and the particular stillness of a woman who has decided not to mind, and is minding.

"Two years," Miriam murmured, following her look, "and they still put her by the tent-pegs."

"She grows the best rowan jelly in the valley," said Dilys. "You can taste she doesn't over-sugar it."

"You'd best not say so out loud. They'll have you burnt with her."

But the real theatre of the day — Dilys had learned this already, in fifteen months of being the plant lady on the edge of things — was the wine class, and it was conducted, as everything of importance in Little Hemlock was conducted, with immense solemnity in a very small tent.

The judging marquee was closed while the judging was done. That was the rule, and the rule was Aubrey Vellacott's, and nobody argued with Aubrey Vellacott. The retired schoolmaster judged the wine-and-preserve class as he had judged it for twenty years, alone, with the flap laced shut, so that no maker might catch his eye and no eye might catch his hand. Dilys glimpsed him through the gap as she passed: a spare, upright, gentle old man in a good tweed jacket gone soft at the elbows, moving down the trestle of dark bottles with a schoolmaster's unhurried care, holding each to the light, sniffing, taking the smallest sip and turning it against his palate and spitting, thoughtfully, into an enamel jug, and writing a number in a notebook with a pencil he licked. He touched every bottle. He was alone with every bottle. And he drank not one drop, in the end, of any of it, for Aubrey Vellacott had not tasted alcohol in forty years — swallowed it, that is; he judged by nose and tongue and the spat sip, and everybody knew it, and everybody thought it rather fine, a teetotal man judging wine, like a monk keeping bees.

He came out at noon, blinking in the light, with his verdict, and the verdict was, as it was every single year, Silas Crabbe.

"Damson," Aubrey announced, when the little crowd had gathered, and his soft classroom voice carried without seeming to try. "Class one, first prize, and I don't mind telling you it's the finest he's made. Depth, clarity, a wine that knows exactly what it is." He held up the presentation bottle — the good one, the stoppered clear-glass bottle Silas decanted each year expressly for the judging, dark garnet-red in the sun and beaded with damson bloom — and Silas came and took it out of his hands as though reclaiming property from a man he did not trust to hold it.

"Aye," said Silas Crabbe, and that was all his thanks. He held the bottle up, turned it, and put it under his arm, and he would carry it now, Dilys knew, untouched, corked, all through the afternoon and up to the Harvest Supper tonight, where he would set it at his own right hand at the top table and drink it himself, every last glass of it, grudging the neighbours he despised the smallest thimbleful decency allowed. It was his ritual. It was, so far as anyone could tell, the single unmixed pleasure of his life.

"Fixed," said Clive Sowerby, loudly, three feet away, red to the ears. "Fixed, that's what it is. Same result every year and the same tongue tasting it. My cider'd win in a fair —"

"Your cider," said Silas, without turning round, "tastes of the barrel you didn't scald. Go home, Sowerby."

"You want to watch yourself, old man." Clive's voice cracked up out of its register. "One of these days —" He got no further; Sadie Bunce from the Green Man took him by the arm and steered him barrelward, murmuring, and the moment folded away into the general noise, one more feud in a village made of them. But Dilys had seen Clive's fist, and heard the one of these days, and she filed it, the way she filed a plant out of place, without yet knowing why.

The frictions ran all afternoon under the gold light, the way water runs under leaves.

By the press-barn, Jasper Crabbe — the great-nephew, thirty-odd and hollow about the eyes, home these six months with nowhere better to be — leaned close to his uncle and said something low and urgent, and Silas's answer came out flat and public and cruel: "It's not yours to sell and it never will be, so you can stop the arithmetic." Jasper's jaw worked. "I only meant, the money'd set you comfortable —" "I am comfortable," said the old man, "and I'll not be made otherwise to clear your debts." And he walked off with the wine under his arm, and left his heir standing in the sawdust with his hands opening and closing.

Along the top of the field, where the orchard ran up to the contested Glebe boundary, a man in a good town coat and unsuitable shoes was pacing off distances with his eye and pretending to admire the trees. Damian Prosser, of Thornfield Homes, had the look of a man measuring for curtains in a house not yet his. He caught Dilys watching and gave her a smile with a great deal of tooth in it. She did not give him one back.

And Bryony Redfern, having sold, by the look of it, exactly nothing, came up the field with her empty trug just as Silas passed, and stopped him. "The hedge along the kiln headland," she said, without preamble. "The elder and the haws. I only want gathering rights, an afternoon —" "You'll not forage my ground," said Silas. "I know your sort. You'd have the bark off the trees for your witchery and sell it back to us as physic." "It's medicine, Mr Crabbe, not —" "It's the same hedge my grandfather kept and you'll keep off it." He went on. Bryony stood very straight, holding her empty trug, and said nothing at all, which was somehow worse than anything she might have said.

It was drawing on towards three, and Silas had plainly had a good deal of his own winning wine already — the level in the presentation bottle was down, his colour up, his tongue looser and meaner — when the last friction of the day came, and it was the one that Dilys, afterwards, could not stop seeing.

Silas came upon Aubrey by the memorial ground, where a young apple whip stood tied to its stake, this year's tree, and old Mrs Yeo sat in a borrowed chair beside it with a rug over her knees, brought back from Kingsbourne to see it planted for her boy, forty years gone. Aubrey was crouched by the whip, gentling the soil round its roots with his hands, murmuring something to the frail old woman that made her smile. And Silas Crabbe stood over the pair of them, swaying a little, glass in hand, and said, "Very touching. Very touching, master. You always did love a nature walk." A pause. "Old walks. Old accidents. Some men can plant a tree for a thing and sleep sound, and some men —" He drank. "Some men know what's under the tree."

And something went still in Aubrey Vellacott's face.

Dilys, ten feet off with the fern still absurdly in her hands, watched it happen — watched the gentle, self-deprecating, endlessly patient schoolmaster's face empty of everything, all at once, the way a pond goes flat and black when the wind drops, some deep cold thing rising and looking out and then sinking again before it could quite be seen. Just for a breath. Then Aubrey stood, and dusted the soil from his knees, and smiled — a good smile, a real one, she could have sworn it — and said, "You've had a long day, Silas. Get some water in you," and turned, quite calmly, and led old Mrs Yeo away towards the tea tent, one hand under her elbow, and did not look back.

She thought no more of it then. There was too much day. And the best of the day was still to come, for at half past three Aubrey rang the hand-bell and called the children for the hedgerow-harvest walk, and Dilys, who could not resist a hedge and could not resist watching a great teacher teach, went along at the back with Miriam.

He was wonderful at it; there was no other word. He walked the children slowly along the lane hedges in the long light, and he named the fruit for them the way you would name kings, with reverence and a joke folded in — the blue-black sloe that would strip your mouth to leather ("but wait for the frost, and it'll flavour your granny's gin"), the wine-dark damson, the coral haw that the fieldfares would want, the last soft blackberries low down where the fox couldn't reach. Alfie Bunce, aged eight and sharp as a bill-hook, stuck to the master's heels and repeated every name. And as he walked, Aubrey gathered as he went — a handful of this, a spray of that, dropping them into the flat gathering basket on his arm as naturally as breathing, the naturalist harvesting his own hedge, and no more remarkable than the sun going down.

Then the lane bent by the old lime kiln, where the ground was broken and chalky and disturbed, spoil turned up decades back and never healed, and there, glossy in the hedge-bottom, hung the other fruit — the fat single berries, black and shining as spilled ink, each cupped in its five-pointed green star, sweet-scented and lovely and patient. Atropa belladonna. Dilys's mouth went dry at the sight of it, the old reflex, the Latin rising like a hackle. The beautiful lady. Named for the ladies who once dropped its juice in their eyes to make the pupils huge and dark and swimming and lovely.

Aubrey stopped the children well short of it. He reached in himself, carefully, with two fingers, and picked one single berry, and held it up in the flat of his palm.

"Never, ever the shiny black ones," Aubrey Vellacott told the children, so gently, so surely, cupping the deadly little berry in his palm like a jewel he had spent his whole life keeping them from — and Alfie Bunce, aged eight and missing nothing, looked from the beautiful lady in the master's hand to the master's own basket, and opened his mouth, and then the toffee-apples came round and he forgot.