Dead Man's Bells

The Gates Thrown Wide

The greenhouse light had burned all night again — but for the first time in two years Dilys Ashcroft had not been in it, having spent the small hours where she now spent most of them: on her knees in another man's ruined garden, coaxing a hundred years of neglect back toward the light.

She had left the bulb burning out of pure forgetfulness, which was itself a kind of progress. There had been a time — not so long ago that she could pretend to have forgotten it — when she had left it on deliberately, all night, every night, because Hugh's seedlings had needed the warmth and because a lit greenhouse at the bottom of a dark garden was a thing that looked, from the kitchen window, very like company. Now it burned because she had gone up to the manor at four in the morning with a torch and a trug and had simply not come back to switch it off. That was the difference. The light was an accident these days, and not a vigil.

She stood in the walled garden at Hemlock Manor as the sun came up over the eastern wall, and she looked at her hands.

They were a labourer's hands now — a sixty-five-year-old labourer, admittedly, with a labourer's grievances in the knuckles by nightfall — brown to the wrist, the nails cracked and rimed, a long white scar across the left thumb where a bramble root the thickness of a wrist had fought back in April and lost. There was soil worked so far into the creases that no brush would shift it, and she had stopped trying. Hugh would have laughed at them. Hugh had loved her hands filthy and hated them idle, and for the better part of two years they had been scrubbed, folded, and useless, laid in her lap like two things she was minding for somebody else.

The heat was already coming up off the brick.

It was not yet six, and the walls held the warmth of yesterday and gave it back, so that walking the length of the border was like passing an oven with the door ajar. A true heatwave, the wireless had promised — a ridge of high pressure sitting stubborn over the whole soft border country, Cotswold edge and Marches both, and no rain behind it for a fortnight. The valley below the manor lay under a haze the colour of skimmed milk. In the hedges the foxgloves had gone up like candles overnight, spires of them, deep pink and white and freckled, and the comfrey lolled purple and heavy along every ditch, and the meadows stood knee-high and breathless before the men came to cut them. It was the kind of morning that made even Dilys, who distrusted lyricism the way she distrusted salesmen, stand still with a trowel in her hand and forget to use it.

Tomorrow the gates would open.

That was the astonishing part — the part she still could not quite hold in her head without turning it over to check it was real. Tomorrow, for the first time in living memory, in the memory of anyone alive in Little Hemlock, the great walled garden of Hemlock Manor would throw its door wide and let the whole county walk in. And the garden was ready — or ready enough, which was the whole point of it — because she and a hundred others had made it so.

They had come up through the spring like an army. That was not Dilys's word; that was Sadie Bunce's word, and Sadie ran the whole campaign out of the snug of the Green Man like a field marshal running a war, so she was entitled to it. But it was the right word. The garden had been a wilderness when they broke into it in March — the door rusted shut, the paths lost, the espaliered pears reverted to thorn, elder and bramble and ground-elder standing higher than a man where once there had been a parterre. They had cut and hauled and burned; they had barrowed out cartloads; they had found, under the green, the bones of a Victorian pleasure garden of real distinction, box hedges gone feral but alive, a lily pool half full of leaf-mould, and against the south wall the glasshouse — a great cast-iron cathedral of a glasshouse, most of its panes gone, its ridge sagging, magnificent even as a skeleton.

Half of it was re-glazed now. Only half. They had run out of both money and reclaimed glass at the same moment, which was so exactly the shape of the whole enterprise that Dilys had laughed aloud when it happened. But half a re-glazed glasshouse with vines going in along the back wall and the smell of tomato leaves already sharp in the warm was worth more than any argument on paper, and everyone knew it, and that was precisely why it mattered.

Because the garden was not only a garden. The garden was the case for the defence.

Down in the Green Man the snug was papered wall to wall with it — the planning notices in their dreary official grey, the letters of objection, the copies of the appeal, and over the fireplace the great hand-drawn map that Clemency's Sunday-school children had coloured, showing the whole green heart of the village: the water-meadows, the allotments, the churchyard yews, the manor grounds, and, dead centre, inked and cross-hatched and labelled in Sadie's furious capitals, THE WALLED GARDEN. All of it under threat. All of it inside the red line that Thornfield Homes had drawn on the map that mattered, the one in Kingsbourne, in the offices where such things were decided by men who had never smelt a comfrey leaf in their lives.

And the road. Everyone understood the road now. Dilys had not, at first — she had thought, as most of them had thought, that it was the meadows Thornfield wanted, that the houses would go there and the garden was safe behind its walls. But the houses could not be built without a road, and the road could not reach the meadows except across the manor grounds, and the manor grounds meant the walled garden. There was no other line for it. The engineers had said so themselves, in a document Owen had photographed for her before he went off to Kingsbourne to be a detective. The developer's road ran, of geometric necessity, straight through the very ground where she was kneeling, and out the far wall, and away.

So they had opened the garden to prove it was worth keeping. That was the whole of the strategy, and it was Dilys's strategy as much as anyone's, and she was fiercely, unbecomingly proud of it.

"You've got that look," said Miriam Pardoe, arriving along the path with a barrow of biscuit-brown compost and a face already pink under her hat. "The one where you're pleased with yourself and cross about being pleased. Move your foot, I'm coming through."

Dilys moved her foot. Miriam tipped the barrow beside the long border, where they had been getting a hundred and forty pots of annuals into the ground before the sun made it impossible, and the two of them fell to it without further conversation, which was the great pleasure of Miriam. Three years ago the village had thought Miriam Pardoe a suspicious sort of incomer, a woman who grew saffron of all peculiar things and kept to herself; and three years ago the village had been, on the subject of Miriam Pardoe, spectacularly and shamefully wrong. She and Dilys understood one another now down to the last root-ball. They worked the border in a silence broken only by the chock of the trowel and Miriam's occasional oath, and the sun climbed, and the day's noise began to gather beyond the walls.

For the village was waking up to itself. All morning the sounds came over the brick: a van reversing, the church clock, the flat aggrieved bleat of the tannoy Sadie had borrowed from the cricket club and was testing with the words one, two, one, two, is this blessed thing on. Somewhere a marquee was going up with the particular percussion of mallet on peg, and somewhere else Marion Kettleby was already at war.

You could hear Marion at a hundred yards. She had the tea rota, which in Little Hemlock was less a duty than a throne, and she had the stewarding, and she moved through the readying village like weather, redirecting trestles and correcting the placement of signs and requiring, of the poor souls of the Women's Institute, standards. The teas would be in the village hall and there would be a plant stall by the manor gates and a trail of a dozen open plots threading the whole village, from the vicarage borders to — God help the discerning visitor — Clive Sowerby's allotment, which Clive was pleased this year to open as a garden.

It was not a garden. Dilys had walked past it yesterday evening on her way home and had been obliged to stop and hold the fence. It was a cathedral of monstrous vegetables — leeks like drainpipes, a marrow the size of a slaughtered pig lying on a bed of straw as though in state, onions swollen to a grossness that was almost frightening, and a single parsnip that Clive had grown down a length of buried plastic piping to a length that he intended, he had told her with terrible sincerity, to take to the shows. There was not a flower in it. There was not, so far as Dilys could see, a single thing in it grown for any reason but size. And Clive would open it, and stand among his engorged marrows in his good waistcoat, and be as proud as any man in England, and the visitors would come and marvel, and it was — she conceded it, laughing to herself in the warm — exactly, precisely, gloriously the point of the whole day. A village threw open its gates, and you took the marrows with the roses.

By nine Judith Woodruff had arrived to do the herbs.

Dilys straightened from the border to watch her come up the path, because watching Judith Woodruff work was one of the quiet pleasures of the spring. She had come to the village a little over a year ago — a soft-spoken, capable, unremarkable-looking woman in her early sixties, a widow, taken the end cottage down Physic Lane and turned its scrubby back plot, in a single season, into the best small herb garden Dilys had seen outside a botanic collection. And she had done it without fuss and without ever once putting a foot wrong, which in a village was the harder trick of the two. She had a cutting for everyone and a tisane for anyone poorly and a way of listening that made people tell her things, and Little Hemlock, which could be slow and cruel with a newcomer, had taken her clean to its heart inside a twelvemonth. Even Marion approved of Judith. That, Dilys thought, was the true measure of it.

"You've been up since the owls again," said Judith, setting down her flat baskets of divided plants by the plant-stall table — pots of thyme and sage and hyssop and lemon balm, each one labelled in a neat schoolroom hand, and behind them, cut and bunched and misted with water against the heat, the herbs for use: mint, chamomile, the great grey rosettes of comfrey. "You'll do yourself a mischief, Dilys, and then where will the border be."

"The border will be exactly where it is, waiting," said Dilys, "and I'll be under the yews with Hugh, and serve me right. Is that the comfrey for the stall?"

"For the stall and for the lady, they tell me." Judith set the bunches out with the same unhurried exactness she gave to everything, turning each so its best face showed. "Mrs Fanshawe's people rang the pub last night and left a list as long as your arm. She's brought her own of everything, apparently, but she's run short of comfrey on the journey and won't have it dried, so." A small dry lift at the corner of her mouth. "So the village must produce it fresh by four o'clock or the sky will fall."

"She drinks it?" said Miriam, from the border, without much interest.

"By the pint, I gather." Judith misted the leaves again. "Her tea. She swears by it — keeps her heart steady, she says, though by all accounts her heart's given the doctors a merry dance for years and she won't hear a word about tablets. Comfrey and comfrey only, brewed fresh, and woe betide the one who brings her the wrong leaf." She said it lightly, drawing a bunch through her fingers to strip a bruised leaf away, and dropped the leaf into her apron pocket, and moved on to the next. "There's a deal of faith goes into a cup of tea, up at the great houses."

Dilys let it pass without remark, because it was only village talk, the ordinary froth that ran ahead of any grand arrival, and because she had a hundred and forty annuals still to plant and the sun was already unkind.

She went back to her knees.

And there, working the base of the south wall where the ground was rich and the shade would come in the afternoon, she found them growing together — as they so often did, in ground like this, both of them lovers of a good disturbed loam — a stout clump of comfrey coming into its purple bells, and beside it, low and flat and modest against the brick, the first-year rosette of a foxglove that would not flower until next summer. Symphytum officinale. Digitalis purpurea. The knitbone and the dead man's bells, elbow to elbow, keeping company as they had kept it in English ditches since long before anyone thought to name them.

She sat back on her heels and looked at the two of them, idly, the way you look at an old puzzle whose answer you have known for forty years.

For they were so alike. That was the thing that always caught the eye — how a first-year foxglove, before it ever thought of a spire, put out a low rosette of soft grey-green leaves, downy, wrinkled, and how a young comfrey did just the same, and how, to a hand reaching down without its mind attending, the two were as like as your two hands. She turned a comfrey leaf over: rough as a cat's tongue on both faces, the margin whole and unbroken, the stalk running down into the stem in those two flat wings that were the sure sign of it, the veins going out straight to the edge. And the foxglove leaf beside it: softer, its underside net-veined in a spread web, the margin finely and evenly toothed all round, no wings on the stalk at all. Different as chalk from cheese — once you knew, once you had them both in your two hands in the light and were minded to look.

But the foragers did not always look. Every few summers the paper carried a paragraph about it — some earnest soul who had gathered "wild comfrey" for a tonic tea and got the wrong grey rosette and steeped a heart poison instead, and it was a mercy if they only sickened. Withering had had his foxglove from an old wife's dropsy cure; the same leaf that mended a failing heart in the right grain would stop a sound one in the wrong. The cure and the poison, cheek by jowl in the same warm corner, wearing very nearly the same soft grey coat.

A careless business, foraging, thought Dilys, and dug her trowel in beside the comfrey to lift a violet that had seeded itself where it was not wanted; and she stood up, and eased her back, and forgot the whole thing entirely. There was no reason on earth to remember it. It was only two plants in a border, and she had a stall to help set and a friend up a ladder in the glasshouse and a marquee to admire and a day to be got through before the great day itself.

Someone was coming up the lane below the wall with the particular gait of a man who disapproved of where he was going and meant to arrive anyway. Dilys knew the walk before she knew the hat. Ambrose Cardew came in at the garden door with his stick and his old panama and his expression of settled scepticism, and stopped, and looked about him at the marquee and the tannoy and the bunting some optimist had strung between the pear trees, and his eyebrows told her everything he thought of it.

"They tell me," he said, "that we are to be graced. The president of the county horticultural society, no less, come to bestow herself upon us for a weekend." He said bestow the way another man might say infest. "I have met Rowena Fanshawe, Dilys, at three separate flower shows and a funeral, and I can report that she is a woman who could reduce a bishop to tears and call it constructive criticism. You have all my sympathy."

"You could stay away," said Dilys, not looking up from the violet.

"I could," Ambrose agreed. He did not move. He stood in the warm doorway with the light on him, watching her work, and something in the set of his mouth had gone from the professional dryness he wore for the world to something a good deal less guarded and, she thought, a good deal less comfortable to him. "But then I should miss whatever you make of her. And I find, God help me, that I have got into the habit of not wanting to miss things you are in the middle of." He tapped the brick with his stick, once, as if annoyed at himself, and looked away up the border. "The garden looks well. You have done a great deal here."

The village had begun to arrive at the gates in earnest now — Clemency the vicar going past at a hunted trot with a clipboard and the air of a woman holding three conversations at once and losing all of them, and calling out that the appeal stood at nine thousand and she had hope, real hope; and somewhere the tannoy achieving speech at last with a shriek that scattered the jackdaws off the manor roof. And through the door in the wall came Freddie Quennell, the squire of it all, mopping his broad pink face with a handkerchief that had given up the fight, wringing his hands in the way he had, half apology and half prayer.

"There you are, Dilys — the garden looks — good Lord, doesn't it look splendid —" and then his face crumpling into the anxiety that never left it long these days, because the garden was his, and so was the mortgage, and so was the man from Thornfield who had been seen again this very morning down by the boundary with a rolled paper under his arm, measuring, always measuring, no longer content to keep to the lane. Damian Prosser. Bolder every week. Dilys had watched him herself, a fortnight since, pacing off the width of the far wall as though he already owned the ground the other side of it, which, if the appeal went against them, he very nearly would.

"She arrives at four," said Freddie Quennell, mopping his face, "and God help us all, because Rowena Fanshawe has never in her life set foot in a garden she didn't improve, or a village she didn't frighten." And Dilys, dusting comfrey and foxglove leaves alike from her knees without looking twice at either, thought only that she could not remember the last time she had looked forward to a day.

Open Gardens

There is no generosity on earth quite so total, or quite so exposed, as an English village that has thrown every one of its gates wide open on the same hot Saturday and dared the world to come and look.

By nine the lane was already loud with strangers. They came in linen and sun hats and entirely the wrong shoes, clutching the buttercup-yellow map that Clemency Odell had drawn and photocopied until the toner gave out — a dozen village plots, the allotments, the vicarage, and, at the top of the sheet, a little cast-iron gate inked in the vicar's hopeful capitals: THE WALLED GARDEN, HEMLOCK MANOR, OPEN THIS DAY FIRST TIME IN LIVING MEMORY. On every gatepost hung a jam jar of sweet peas and a slotted biscuit tin. Honesty box. Two pounds a garden, or five the trail. Thank you, and mind the bees. Little Hemlock had turned out its pockets and its borders in the same breath and now stood back, half proud and half appalled, to be looked at by the world.

Dilys walked the trail early, before the sun found its edge, with Wellington on a lead he considered a personal slander. He had already, by the horse trough, lifted a cocktail sausage clean off a paper plate held by a child too astonished to cry, and swallowed it whole and blameless, and looked up at Dilys with the wide grey innocence of a dog who has never in his life done anything at all. She did not scold him. It was too fine a morning, and the sausage was gone, and there is a limit to what a woman can pretend to regret before ten o'clock.

The gardens undid her a little, if she was honest, which she tried to be with no one but the dog. Here was a village turned inside out and generous with itself. Enid Purslowe, two years a widow and lately blooming like something staked and fed, had her cottage garden open and a hand-lettered card by the door — Please do come in, the delphiniums are showing off — and was pressing a cup of "a lovely healthful herbal tea, dear, so good for the joints" on every soul who paused, arthritic fingers curled round the pot. Beyond her, the vicarage lawn had gone over entirely to the WI, whose trestle tables ran with Victoria sponge and lemon drizzle and an urn the size of a font, and over which Marion Kettleby presided in a straw hat of real gravity, directing the tea rota as a general directs a difficult retreat. And past that, past the churchyard wall foaming with valerian, Clive Sowerby had thrown open the gate of his allotment and stationed himself beside it with a jam jar and a face of terrible pride.

"Tuppence to view," said Clive.

"Tuppence to view what, Clive?"

"The marrow." He said it the way other men say the Grail. It sat in a wheelbarrow lined with straw, green and glossy and vast, a vegetable of frankly obscene proportions, big as a bathchair and about as much use, and a small queue of visitors had genuinely formed to pay two pence and stand before it. "Biggest in three counties. There's a man coming from the Kingsbourne Courier." Wellington strained toward the marrow with intent, and Clive stepped smartly between dog and vegetable. "Not for him it isn't."

"Nothing is," Dilys agreed, and dropped a coin in the jar for the pleasure of it, and went on up the hill.

The heat came on as she climbed. She could feel it settling into the day like a decision, a hard white glare off the manor's honey stone, the sky bleached at the edges, and along every bank and border the foxgloves stood up in their thousands — Digitalis purpurea, dead man's bells, folk's-glove, the tall pink-purple spires nodding their thimbles over the hedges as though the whole valley were ringing a silent peal. Below them, wherever the ground ran damp, comfrey sprawled and flowered, its coarse leaves and drooping cream-and-mauve bells at the ditch's edge. The two of them grew half a stride apart, as they always had, all the way up the lane, and Dilys read them the way another woman might read faces in a crowd, and thought nothing of it, and walked on.

On the manor terrace, the county had assembled to be reigned over, and Rowena Fanshawe reigned.

She stood against the balustrade in oyster silk with her back to the drop and the whole restored garden below her, a tall handsome ruin of a woman, sixty-eight and got up to be fifty, pearls at her throat and a stick she used as a sceptre rather than a support. She was magnificent. Dilys granted her that at once, the way one grants a hard frost its beauty. A knot of visitors and a scattering of the horticultural society hung on her, and she dispensed to them, in a voice pitched to carry, the settled verdicts of a lifetime.

"—no, no, that is not a montana, whoever labelled it should be ashamed—" This to a young steward in a Save Our Gardens sash, a girl of perhaps nineteen who had done nothing all morning but her honest best, and who now held the offending label like a summons. "Look at the anthers, child. Do they teach you nothing? A clematis mislabelled is worse than no clematis at all. It is a lie told to the public in Latin." The girl's chin went, and her eyes filled, and she fled toward the shrubbery with her sash askew, and Rowena turned back to her audience with the satisfied air of a woman who has upheld a standard. "One must be firm," she told them. "Standards are all we have left."

At her elbow, not listening, a sleek dark man of fifty-odd murmured into a telephone with a finger in his other ear. Crispin Dole — Dilys had him by sight and by reputation, Rowena's agent, manager, maker of the brand, permanently mid-call to somebody more important than the person in front of him. "—the Sunday piece, yes, but only if they run the walled-garden line the way we drafted it—" he was saying, and then he saw Dilys watching and turned smoothly a quarter-turn away, out toward the gate, and lowered his voice to nothing.

And behind them both, half in the shade of the house, a small grey woman in a cardigan too warm for the day carried a tray of cups and set it down and picked it up again as instructions changed, and flinched, minutely, each time her name was used.

"Babs. Babs. The water was not off the boil, I could taste it. Do it again." Barbara Tuke said yes, Rowena to the flagstones and took the tray away. She had the folded, apologetic posture of a person who has spent ten years being made smaller, and she was, Dilys thought, so practised at not being seen that the crowd's eyes slid off her as off a well-known wall.

"Isn't she marvellous," breathed a voice at Dilys's shoulder, meaning Rowena, and Dilys turned to find Miriam Pardoe arrived beside her with two cups of the WI's tea and a face of pure mischief. "I've watched her make three grown men apologise for their own delphiniums. Here. You look as though you've walked up a hill."

"I have walked up a hill." Dilys took the cup. Miriam had a smear of compost along one forearm and the particular gleam she got only during a plant emergency or a good murder, and Dilys loved her for both. "How is the walled garden?"

"Weeded within an inch of its life and terrified. Reuben's been up since four glaring at anyone who breathes near the peaches." Miriam nodded down the terrace at a gnarled figure in the far border, old Reuben Mallow, forty years the manor's head gardener, standing among his foxgloves with his arms folded and his opinion of the entire proceeding written plain across his weathered face. "He caught a woman from Cheltenham deadheading his roses to be helpful and I thought he'd have her committed."

Below the terrace the garden did, in fact, take the breath — the great walls warm and rosy, the old glasshouse re-glazed and blazing in the sun, the borders that Dilys herself had planted in April now surging up green and generous, delphinium and geranium and the white 'Iceberg' roses just breaking bud along the south wall. Two years of it. Two years of clearing bramble and re-laying paths and coaxing the dead ground back, the village's answer flung down like a gauntlet in front of the developer's fence. Worth fighting for. Worth, she let herself think for once, being alive for.

It was Sadie Bunce who brought the poison into the morning, and she brought it low.

The landlady of the Green Man came up the terrace steps with a tray of the pub's lemonade for the stewards and a face that had heard something, and she got Dilys and Miriam to one side of a rose arch before she said it, quiet as a person passing a lit match.

"You'll not believe what's come to me this hour." She glanced at the silk figure holding court. "Prosser was in my snug last night, thick as you like with that agent of hers. And what I heard — mind, I only heard the half — is that our grand patron up there, the very woman come to save our garden, has been paid. Thornfield's money. Through the sleek one. To write some report saying this place—" a jerk of the head at the borders, at all of it, at two years — "isn't worth the bricks. No heritage, no merit, knock it down and lay your road. She's been bought, Dilys. The head of our appeal has been bought to sink it."

Miriam went very still. "That's a filthy thing to say without proof."

"It is," Sadie agreed grimly, "and I'd not say it to any but you two. But watch the squire's face this morning, that's all. Somebody's told him."

Somebody had. They saw it not ten minutes later, and the whole terrace saw it too, though it was over in a moment. Freddie Quennell came up the steps two at a time, ashen under his sunburn, sweat standing on his forehead, and got Rowena by the elbow and drew her aside to the balustrade, and said something low and furious with his back half turned. And Rowena — Dilys was near enough to catch it, over the chink of teacups — Rowena laughed. A small, indulgent, killing laugh.

"—my dear Frederick, you signed nothing you didn't understand—"

"You front this appeal," Freddie got out, strangled, keeping his voice down and failing. "You cut the ribbon in an hour. And all the while you've had their—"

"I have a reputation," she said, "for saying what a garden is honestly worth. Which is more than can be said for most of the sentiment attached to this one." She patted his arm, once, as one pats a dog off the furniture, and turned back to her audience with her chin up, and Freddie stood a moment with his mouth working and nothing coming out, and then went white and blundered away down the steps, and the crowd, well-bred, looked at the roses.

By the gate, Dilys saw, the land-agent Prosser had drifted in with his clipboard and his measuring habits and stood now murmuring to Crispin Dole with the two of them turned out toward the lane, toward the very ground the road would cross. Neither man looked at the garden they were discussing. That, Dilys thought, told a person most of what she needed to know.

The war with Marion Kettleby broke out over the queue for the walled garden, and was, at least, comedy.

Marion had stewarded that gate with a rope and a system and a lanyard of real authority, letting visitors down into the restored garden in parties of twelve so as not to trample the new borders, and had run it beautifully for an hour until Rowena descended and pronounced the arrangement absurd. "Let them flow, woman, one does not ration a garden—" and Marion, who had rationed harder things than gardens in her time and buried a husband and chaired the WI through the Great Trifle Schism of 2019, drew herself up under her straw hat to her full stewarding height.

"With respect, Mrs Fanshawe, the borders are three weeks planted and I'll not have them flattened by a stampede because you'd sooner make an entrance than protect them. Twelve at a time. There's a system."

For one glorious instant the grande dame of the county gardens met an immovable object in a sun hat and had no verdict ready, and a small ragged cheer went up from two stewards and a lemonade seller before it was decently smothered. Rowena's smile set like sugar. "How very thorough," she said, and swept off, and Marion, scarlet and vindicated, tightened her rope and did not smile, which was the same, on Marion, as dancing.

And it was in the wake of all this — the row, the whisper, the war of the queue, the heat now beating flat off the flagstones so that a St John's volunteer had begun handing out water and a stout man from Cheltenham had gone the colour of putty and been sat down in the shade — that Rowena Fanshawe raised her voice over the terrace and announced her want, and the village, honoured and helpful, hurried to supply it.

"I am out," she declared, to no one and everyone, holding up an empty caddy of pale dried leaf as though it had personally failed her, "of my comfrey. Barbara, I said to pack more — no, don't, don't fuss, the dried's no good in any case, it must be fresh, it's quite useless dried. I brew it fresh every morning of my life, my own comfrey tea, and it is the one thing that keeps this poor flutter-prone heart of mine steady." A pearled hand at her breast. "My cardiologist — I have had four — each one wanted to fill me with nasty little pills, and I sent every one of them away, and here I am at sixty-eight taking nothing at all but what the good earth grows. Nature's own physic." She said the last three words with a curious relish, and then a flicker, gone at once, as though she had reached for something she meant to keep buried and touched it by accident. "Well. Someone in a village this green must grow comfrey. Fresh. This morning. I shall need it by noon."

There was a small competitive stir among the horticulturally minded, and Enid Purslowe was heard to say she had some by the compost, and someone else that Judith would have the best of it, Judith always did, and the word went out and down the terrace and along the trail — fresh comfrey for Mrs Fanshawe — the way a village passes a favour hand to hand, glad to be of use to greatness.

Judith Woodruff had her own cottage garden open on the trail that day, given over to the Gardens, half the parish drifting through it with their programmes and their teacups; and it was there, when the patron's slow progress fetched up at her gate, that she brought the comfrey out herself.

She was the village's own herb-woman, a soft-faced comfortable body of sixty-odd with earth under her short nails and a physic corner she'd built up in barely a year until half the parish swore by her tisanes for this and her salves for that. She was beloved, and Dilys understood exactly why, watching her come — because Judith Woodruff was kind, plainly and reliably kind, the first up a ladder at the restoration and the first with a warm cup when anyone was low, an incomer who had made herself indispensable so gently that no one had noticed her arrive. She came now with a great bunch of leaf cradled in both arms, soft grey-green rosette leaves gathered fresh and generous, and a smile of real pleasure at being asked.

Dilys, drifting nearer with the dog, caught the moment whole, and would carry it, though she did not yet know it, for the rest of the summer.

For as Rowena took up her theme again for the gathered crowd — "the gentle way, you see, the natural way, none of your knives and your drugs, I have seen what the gentle way can do" — something moved across Judith Woodruff's face and was gone. She went still. She went, under her weathered colour, faintly grey, as though for one held second the sun had stepped behind something, and her eyes rested on the fine oyster-silk figure with an expression Dilys could not read and did not try to, and then she smiled again and it was only Judith, only kind Judith, holding out her arms full of leaf.

"There now," a child's voice piped, one of the trail children who had been eyeing Welly and edged up close, "that's foxglove. My gran's got foxglove. That's the same as up the lane."

"Bless you, no." Judith laughed, easy and warm, and turned the leaf in her hands so the light ran along it. "Common mistake, my duck, catches out half the county — but see how the leaf runs right down the stem, like little wings on it? Foxglove doesn't do that. And feel—" she let the child touch it — "rougher, this. Comfrey. Knitbone, my nan called it. Good for the heart, so they say." She said it lightly, over her shoulder, to the child, and the child was satisfied, and the grown-ups smiled at the herb-woman's easy authority and thought no more about it, and neither, quite, did Dilys — only, far off in the back of her mind, a leaf turned once and settled.

At the compost heap at the garden's end, Wellington had begun to whine.

He would not come. Dilys felt it through the lead, the whole leggy grey weight of him set and refusing, ears flat to his skull, nose thrust toward the heaped grass and trimmings behind the herb-woman's table, and a low sound in his chest that was not a growl and was not a whimper and was nothing she had heard from him before. "Welly. Welly. Leave it." He would not leave it. He stood four-square with his lip just off his teeth at a heap of garden rubbish, of all the foolish things, on the finest morning the village had thrown in years.

"Comfrey, dear — see how the leaf runs down the stem?" said Judith Woodruff, laughing, and pressed the great soft bunch into Rowena Fanshawe's arms as gently as a christening, and the whole trail beamed to see one kind woman do another a kindness; and Welly alone, at the compost heap at the garden's end, stood with his ears flat and his lip just lifted, and would not be called away.