The Hemlock Cup

The Name on the Map

The greenhouse light had been off since ten the night before, and Dilys Ashcroft lay a moment in the grey dawn taking pleasure, still cautious about it, in the small ordinary fact that she had not, for once, sat up till two with the dead.

She knew the trick of it now. For a long time after Hugh she had kept that light burning across the garden like a votive lamp, telling herself it was for the seedlings, and knowing quite well that it was because a lit greenhouse at midnight, with its shelves of green striving upward, was the one window in Foxglove Cottage that did not look like a widow's. She had sat up under it night after night, potting and pricking out and repotting things that did not need it, arranging her grief the way some women arrange the mantel, until the arrangement was so tidy and so complete that there was nothing left to do in it but dust.

Last night she had switched the light off at ten because she had been at the Green Man, in the settle by the cold hearth, drinking Sadie Bunce's indifferent house red and laughing with Miriam Pardoe about the sexual habits of the early purple orchid until the church clock struck the half. She had walked home in the long blue dusk of nearly-Midsummer with the swifts still screaming somewhere overhead, and she had gone to bed, and she had slept.

The empty half of the bed still ached. It ached the way a tooth aches that the tongue cannot leave alone — she had put out her hand in the night, as she still did, to the cool unpressed pillow, and found it cool, and drawn the hand back. That would not stop. She no longer expected it to. But the house around the ache was a house again and not a museum, and that, at sixty-four and getting on for two years widowed, she had decided to count as a victory, and to be suspicious of, in about equal measure.

Because she knew herself. She knew that a woman who could learn to keep a light on for grief could just as easily learn to keep it off for show — could arrange even her recovery into something pretty and finished and safe. She had watched other women do it. She was resolved, in a stubborn unspoken way she would not have said aloud to Ambrose Cardew or to anyone, not to become one of them.

Wellington resolved the morning for her by arriving on the bed with the graceless enthusiasm of forty pounds of leggy grey lurcher who had also, it seemed, decided the day should begin. He put his long cold nose against her collarbone, sighed the sigh of the perpetually disappointed, and lay down across her feet as though pinning a difficult patient.

"You," said Dilys, "are on the good side. You are always on the good side."

He was Hugh's dog. That was the whole of him and the point of him. He thieved, he dug, he disobeyed with a mournful dignity that suggested the fault lay always with the world, and he was the last of Hugh left in the house that moved and breathed and needed feeding, and she loved him past all reason and would not have told him so for the world.

By eight the valley was already warm, the still, held warmth of a day that means to be hot and knows there is no rain in it. Dilys took the field path down, Wellington quartering ahead through the seeding grasses, and Little Hemlock arranged itself below her the way it did on such mornings — a thing so pretty it looked painted, and painted by somebody with a weakness for it.

The church first, St. Anselm's, its squat Norman tower rising out of the churchyard yew that was older than the tower, older than the village, old as anything Christian in the county. This morning the great south door stood propped wide and there was traffic in and out of it, women with buckets and women with trugs and one man with a stepladder, because it was the week of the flower festival and the whole parish was being emptied of its lilies and delphiniums and stuffed, bloom by bloom, into the cool stone dark. The Best-Kept sign still stood at the green's edge, three years running now, a small enamelled boast that the village wore the way Marion Kettleby wore her good brooch.

Below the church the ground fell away to the Hemble, running low and warm and brown between its willows, and beyond the river lay the water-meadow and the Glebe Field under the long brick face of Hemlock Manor. And there this year, white and enormous and faintly obscene against all that green, stood the pageant marquee, half-raised, its guy-ropes flung out like the legs of something that had died on its back. The heritage year. Clemency Odell had said the words heritage pageant to Dilys in March with the particular brightness of a woman committing herself to something she has not yet understood the size of, and had been paying for the brightness ever since.

Between the church above and the meadow below ran the whole apparatus of a village performing itself: bunting not yet hung, trestles being carried, a hand-lettered board reading LITTLE HEMLOCK CELEBRATES 800 YEARS with the eight painted over what had plainly, at an earlier and more optimistic stage, been a seven. It was, Dilys thought, all very lovely, and all faintly ridiculous, and she was fond of every foolish inch of it, and that fondness was itself a thing she had had to learn again from scratch.

And along the edges of it — along the field path and the churchyard wall and the rank verge above the river, and thickest of all where the meadow ran out to its far unmown corner — stood the hemlock in flower.

She noticed it the way she noticed everything green; helplessly, expertly, before she noticed anything else. Conium maculatum. Poison hemlock, the plant the whole village was named for and mostly never saw, standing man-high and higher along the wet ground, its stems smooth and hollow and hairless and freckled all up their length with the little purple stains the old books called Socrates' blotches, its great flat lace-cap heads of tiny white flowers frothing over everything, and — if you put your face near it, which the village did not, and which Dilys did, out of forty years of habit — the smell coming off the crushed leaf, that low animal reek, the smell of mice, of something not quite clean.

It was everywhere. It was June, near enough Midsummer, the longest week of the year, and the cow parsley that had foamed white along these same verges in May was long gone over, brown and skeletal and going to seed, and the wild carrot was barely up in feathery leaf, and so the only umbellifer standing fresh and green and lush and flowering along the whole valley was the poison one. There was, at this precise turning of the year, nothing green and lacy in Little Hemlock that was not hemlock. Any villager would have told you the meadow was full of cow parsley. Dilys, who could not help what she knew, corrected them silently, always, and thought nothing of it.

It grew thickest, as it always grew thickest, in the meadow's far corner. Down where the ground was richest and rankest, where nothing was ever mown and the cattle would not go, where the hemlock stood in a dense white-topped thicket taller than a man and the nettle and the elder and the comfrey crowded up under it, all the great gross feeders, all the plants that mean disturbed ground and buried richness. There was an old dry well in that corner, its lip long since fallen in and grown over, and the corner had a name on the tithe map though nobody living used it: Maidenwell. Dilys had seen it on the map in the parish chest, once, years ago, in Hugh's company, and had thought no more of it than that it was a pretty name for a corner nobody went to. The village did not mow it. The village did not, in a way it would have found hard to explain, quite look at it. It was simply the far corner, the rank corner, the bit of the meadow where the hemlock was, and the eye slid over it and went back to the marquee and the bunting and the pretty parts.

Named for a poison, thought Dilys, coming down the last of the field path with the dog, and grown over with it, and gone on being the prettiest village in the county regardless. There was a joke there that the village had made about itself for three hundred years — oh, Little Hemlock, mind what you eat — and it was a joke, and it was also, if you stood on this path on this morning and let yourself think it, not a joke at all.

At the churchyard gate she met Clemency, who had a delphinium in one hand and a clipboard in the other and the harried radiance of a woman doing three jobs while apologising for not doing a fourth.

"Dilys. Bless you. You're for the flowers? The cool-room's open, Hester's had it unlocked since seven, though I'd creep, she's in there arranging the arrangers." A wisp of hair had come down over her face and she blew it up, unsuccessfully. "I've the pageant committee at ten and the festival stewards at eleven and somewhere in between I am meant to write a sermon about, God help me, rootedness."

"Root vegetables would be easier," said Dilys. "And more honest."

"Don't." But she laughed, and some of the harriedness went off her, and Dilys thought — as she often thought now, watching people — that this was the work, the actual work, more than any greenhouse: to be the sort of person whose passing lightened somebody by a stone. Hugh had done it without trying. She had to try. She was trying.

Beyond the gate the green was filling. Outside the Green Man Sadie Bunce had set a jar on the sill of the open window with a hand-inked label — SAVE OUR MEADOW: FIGHTING FUND — and was leaning in the pub doorway with her arms folded, missing nothing, the true intelligence service of Little Hemlock taking its morning report. She lifted her chin at Dilys.

"Heard you were merry last night," she said, with satisfaction. "Miriam's put you on the committee, you know. The proper one. Against them." A nod, minute and eloquent, toward the meadow, toward the marquee, toward the two men standing at the meadow's edge with their heads together over a rolled paper. "That one's back. The agent. Prosser. Third time this month he's had poor Freddie down there by the river looking like a man who's swallowed a wasp."

Dilys followed the nod. At the far side of the Hemble, where the Glebe Field met the meadow, Freddie Quennell stood in his good and slightly too-tight jacket, hands going, and beside him the land-agent from Thornfield Homes — younger, smoother, in the wrong shoes for a meadow — held one end of a large rolled plan and pointed with the other hand out across the grass, out toward the marquee, out, Dilys noticed, toward the far corner. Freddie's whole posture was the posture of a man being shown the size of his debts. The planning appeal had stalled in the spring; the village had cheered; and it had not gone away, only gone quiet, the way such things did, and here it was again down at the water's edge on a festival morning, being conducted in murmurs over a rolled-up map.

"They'll not get it," said Sadie, comfortably, which meant she was not at all sure they would not.

"Not this year," said Dilys, and meant the walled garden, and Sadie knew she meant the walled garden, and let it pass. That was Dilys's own front in this war — the old bricked kitchen garden up behind the Manor that Freddie's grandfather had walled and Freddie's poverty had let go to ruin and that Thornfield's plan showed, in a bland dotted rectangle, as Plot 7. Dilys had gone from writing polite letters about it to standing up at the parish council and saying, out loud, in her clear dry lecturing voice, that a two-hundred-year-old walled garden was not a brownfield site, and had discovered, to her surprise, that she had a taste for it. Another light left off. Another window that did not look like a widow's.

The pageant field, when she came down onto it, was chaos in its cheerful early stage. Marion Kettleby had the WI tent half up and was directing its erection like Wellington directing traffic, from a position of total authority and no useful information, and she broke off, astonishingly, to say, "Dilys. There's tea in the urn and I saved you the good chair," which from Marion was a declaration very nearly of love, and which Dilys had learned this last year to receive at face value, because the pomp, she had come to understand, was armour, and under the armour Marion was lonely and fierce and kind. Clive Sowerby was there too, of course, having carried nothing and advised everyone, holding forth by the trestles about his midsummer marrow — "size of a spaniel already, Dilys, I'll not say more, but you'll want to be sitting down at the show" — and Dilys said she would look forward to being seated, and meant it, because the marrow feud was the most restful thing in her life.

And it was there, by the half-raised marquee, in the thickening warmth of the morning, with the hemlock frothing white along the meadow's edge not ten yards from him, that Barnaby Gathercole was holding court.

She heard him before she saw him. Everyone always heard Gathercole before they saw him. He had a knot of pageant helpers around him — two of the younger stewards, a couple of the WI, one visibly regretting it — and he was in full pomp, big and ruddy and bearded, in the disreputable waxed coat he wore in all weathers as a sort of costume of authenticity, a trug of foraged greenery on his arm as a prop. He was correcting somebody about something. He was always correcting somebody about something.

"—no, no, no, that's your garlic mustard, dear lady, hedge garlic, Jack-by-the-hedge, you can't move for it, but this—" a great blunt finger held up a torn leaf "—this is your lady's smock, and there's not a soul in this village but me could tell you the difference, and I'll tell you for nothing that half of what your generation eats out of a bag was picked by hand off a hedge a hundred years back and nobody the worse—"

Dilys stopped, ostensibly to let Wellington investigate a guy-peg, and listened, and was visited by the two feelings Gathercole always produced in her, arriving together and refusing to resolve.

He was insufferable. He was a self-taught man made permanently furious by forty years of being condescended to by people with letters after their names, and he had turned the fury inside out into this — this loud, ceaseless, hectoring performance of knowing, in which every fact he possessed had to be brandished in somebody's face, because facts brandished were the only revenge he had. He talked over women. He talked over Dilys, when he could, which she permitted with a botanist's patience, the way one permits a jay to mob a cat.

And he was right. That was the maddening thing, the thing nobody who only heard the noise ever stayed to learn. He genuinely knew the countryside as few living men knew it — every hedge and ditch and field-name for ten miles, every plant and, better than the plant, every plant's poison, because that was his real love, the edge of danger, the thing that would kill you that he alone dared to know and to eat. He had lectured children in this very churchyard on the smooth blotched stem and the mouse-reek of hemlock and the folly of the amateur who confused it with anything at all. Under the ego was a man who loved this valley more truly, and more lonelily, than the born-here people who mocked him at the pub. She could see it in the way he handled the leaves. You could not fake that.

"—and I'll tell you something else." He had noticed his audience thinning and he raised his voice to hold it, the way he always did, the showman feeling the room. He tapped the side of his nose with the blunt finger, a gesture he no doubt believed was roguish. "This pageant. Everyone bustling about with their eight hundred years and their bunting. I've been in the parish chest, I've had the old maps out, Reverend's own maps, and I'll tell you—" he swept the finger round, taking in the meadow, the far corner, the whole complacent green valley, and dropped his voice into the register of a man about to sell you something "—come pageant day, I mean to show this village something it has forgotten. Something right under its feet. Names, you see. It's all in the old names, if you know how to read them, and there's not a one of you does."

One of the WI ladies said, "Ooh, Barnaby, what sort of something," in the tone of humouring a child, and he tapped his nose again and would not say, delighted, and Dilys clicked her tongue for the dog and moved on, up toward the church and the cool-room and the delphiniums and her own quiet plans for the day, thinking that he was a fool who wanted watching and a genius nobody watched, and that she had flowers to do and a walled garden to fight for and no intention whatever of getting mixed up in one of Barnaby Gathercole's productions.

The hemlock nodded along the meadow's edge in the first stir of the day's heat, tall and white and ancient over the corner nobody mowed.

"Named for a poison," said Barnaby Gathercole to his little court, waving a hand at the white lace of hemlock frothing along the meadow's edge, "and not one of you knows the half of what that means." And Dilys, passing with the dog, thought him insufferable and thought him quite right, and did not yet know that both of those things were about to get a man killed.

The Master of the Hedgerows

There is no monarchy on earth so absolute or so gracious as an English flower guild at festival, and Hester Vane had reigned over this one, unopposed and beloved, for forty midsummers.

Dilys knew it the moment she came in out of the June glare with her armful of alchemilla and delphinium, before her eyes had even settled to the green underwater cool of St. Anselm's. You could feel the order of the place the way you felt a change in the weather. Buckets stood ranged along the north aisle in a line so straight it might have been surveyed, each with its label in a small upright hand: PORCH, FONT, LADY CHAPEL, TOWER ARCH. Oasis foam sat soaking in the stone trough by the vestry, exactly enough of it, not a block wasted. Somewhere a child had been told once, kindly, not to run, and had never needed telling again. And at the centre of it, at the chancel step where the light came down amber through the old glass, stood Hester.

She was seventy-four and did not look it and did not disguise it either, which was rarer. Straight as a delphinium spike herself, in a lavender cardigan and secateurs on a ribbon round her neck like a chain of office, she was turning a great urn of foxglove and cow parsley — no, Dilys corrected herself, glancing again: that was the false Solomon's seal and the last of the guelder — turning it a quarter-inch at a time, considering, the way a portrait painter considers a nose.

"Alchemilla," Hester said, without turning round. "Good. Miriam said you'd bring the delphinium and I said, if Dilys Ashcroft brings delphinium it will be the right blue, and it is." She looked then. Pale grey eyes, very steady, that took Dilys in from hair to hem and gave nothing back but a small settling, as of a thing found to be in order. "The tower arch, I think, for the blue. You'll know what to do with it. One doesn't tell a plantswoman what to do with her flowers."

It should have been nothing. It was, Dilys thought, walking her bucket down the aisle with her heart doing something absurd and warm, precisely the trick of it — the way the woman handed you a duty and made it feel like an honour and a freedom in the same breath. Forty midsummers. You did not hold a village's flowers for forty midsummers by being kind. You held them by knowing exactly, to the inch and the stem, what beauty the place would bear, and by making everyone believe the arranging of it had been their own idea.

Against every intention she had walked in with, Dilys began to enjoy herself.

That was the danger of it, the greenness. She had come only to deliver and to stand her hour and go home to Wellington and the walled-garden papers. But her hands knew delphinium the way other hands know a piano, and the stone was cool, and the swifts screamed thinly beyond the high windows, and the whole church smelt of bruised greenery and damp foam and beeswax, and before she had noticed herself doing it she was stripping lower leaves and cutting stems on the slant under water and losing, for whole minutes together, the particular tiredness she had carried for two years like a coat she'd forgotten she had on. Hugh would have laughed at her. Hugh would have said, there you are, and meant it kindly.

Through the south door came the other half of the festival, in gusts, whenever it opened: the thump of mallet on marquee-peg down on the water-meadow, the WI's tea-urn arguments from the porch, a recorder consort of children being taught a pavane they would perform in ruffs on Saturday for a county that came, every year, to admire Little Hemlock admiring itself. Best-Kept Village three years running. This year, heritage, the whole valley dressing up its own past — tableaux of the wool trade and the drovers, the vicar in something Tudor, a pageant of the pretty story the place told about itself.

And, at the pretty story's loudest edge, Barnaby Gathercole.

He came in mid-morning like weather, with two apprentices carrying his boxes and a following of the idle and the curious, and the good order of the church rearranged itself around him without his once acknowledging that it had. He was a big man gone slightly to seed, russet-bearded, in the sort of waxed and pocketed coat that no working forager wears in June and every performing one does, and he had a voice built for a field, which he did not lower for a nave.

"Now then, my lovelies." He set a trug down on the trestle by the vestry with the tenderness of a man laying down an infant. "Who wants to learn something before they die of not knowing it?"

Dilys, who did not, drifted nearer with everyone else.

He had brought his greens for Saturday's feast — the hedgerow feast, the centrepiece, a great communal cauldron of wild-green soup he would make on the meadow with the whole village watching, cultivated herbs and safe pot-greens for the common pot. But first, always first, the thing that had made his name up and down the district: the forager's first bowl. Before the crowd, before anyone else was served, the master would eat a single bowl dressed with his own raw garnish of freshly gathered wild leaves — the master proving, in his own mouth, that he knew what would kill you and could eat it anyway.

"Fear," Gathercole said, laying out his bundle on a damp cloth, "is ignorance wearing a coat. You're all frightened of the hedge because you don't know it. I know it." He spread the leaves. "So I eat first, in front of you, off the same table. And then you'll trust the pot. That's the whole of it. That's the covenant."

He lifted a fistful of green and made them look.

"This," he said, "is what kills you." And he held up, between two thick fingers, a length of stem Dilys knew before he named it — knew the way she knew her own handwriting. Smooth. Hollow. Hairless as glass. And along it, unmistakable in the amber light, the dull purple mottling, thumbprints of a wine-dark bruise. "Hemlock. Conium. The stem's your first tell — smooth, no hairs, and these." He ran a nail over the blotches. "Socrates' blotches, my old teacher called them. Purple as a drunkard's nose. And crush a leaf—" he did, and held his fingers under the nose of the nearest apprentice, a boy who flinched— "and it stinks. Mouse. A hutch that wants cleaning. That's death you're smelling. Learn that smell and you'll never be fooled."

"Now this." He held up a second stem, dry and ribbed and going brown at the joints. "Cow parsley. Anthriscus. Grooved, see — like a stick of celery — and hairy as your grandfather's ears. And it's over. Look at it. Flowered in May, seeded in June, it's brown to the ground by now. Every fool who poisons himself does it in the spring, when the parsley's young and green and the hemlock's young and green and they look like sisters. But it's midsummer, my lovelies. There's no fresh cow parsley in the county today. The only umbellifer standing up fresh and white and green in that meadow right now"— he jabbed a thumb toward the south door and the water-meadow beyond it— "is the one named for this whole blessed village. And I know the difference in the dark."

Someone laughed. He liked that; he milked it.

"And this fellow's the joker." A third: a stem faintly bristled, an umbel with — Dilys leaned to see — that single dark red floret set like a fly at the centre of the white lace, the three-forked bracts beneath. "Wild carrot. Daucus. Hairy stem, one dark spot in the middle of the flower — Queen Anne's pricked her finger, they used to say — and it smells of carrot because it is one. Barely in leaf yet, this year. But learn your umbellifers, all three, hairless and hairy and pricked, and you can eat half your borders and dine on the other half."

Dilys stood at the edge of it with her wet hands and said nothing, and thought two things she did not say.

She thought: every word of that is true, and he knows it better than any man alive.

And she thought, watching him lay the deadly stem down with a showman's flourish exactly where the children could see: a man who knows all that could not make the mistake he is inviting us to imagine he might.

She put the thought away. It was midsummer and she had delphinium to arrange.

He built his mix for them, then, because he could not help teaching even when no one had asked. Into the bundle for his own garnish — his, the raw one, the first bowl — went the safe wild greens he'd gathered the evening before from lane and verge: young sorrel, the tender tips of nettle, a fistful of chickweed, hedge-garlic. "And then," he said, and here his voice went almost fond, "the ones that lift it. Wild garlic — smell that, that's the whole of spring in a leaf. Lovage, for the meatiness. And this—" he crushed a frond of the ferny, feathery green and the whole vestry corner went suddenly sweet, aniseed and hay and something like a memory of aniseed balls in a paper bag— "sweet cicely. Myrrhis. Cicely, like the writer. It sweetens everything it touches, and it'll carry a strong flavour clean over the top of a shy one. My secret. Nobody else round here bothers with it."

Dilys, who grew a great fountain of it by her own back step and loved it past reason, felt her heart lift at the smell and thought nothing whatever of the other thing it did — the way that sweetness would ride clean and high and total over the top of any smaller, meaner scent a leaf might carry. Over mouse, for instance. Over a hutch that wanted cleaning. She would think of it, later, and be sick.

"And where," said Hester Vane, arriving among them with her secateurs and her stillness, "will you be keeping all this greenery overnight, Mr. Gathercole? It will wilt to nothing in this heat by morning."

"In your cold store, dear lady, with your blessing." He bowed to her, not entirely mockingly. "The cool-room. Best cold hold in the parish and locked against thieves — I gathered it this evening on purpose so it's freshest for the feast, and it'll sit snug among your lilies till I want it. If your ladyship keeps the key."

"I keep the key," said Hester. She said it simply, and it was simply true, and no one in the church thought it worth remarking that one woman had, for four decades, held the only senior key to the one locked cold room in Little Hemlock, because of course she did; she did the flowers. "I shall be in and out all night and half of it, with the pedestals. Your bundle will be quite safe."

"There." Gathercole spread his hands to his audience: settled. "The good lady's cold-room. Wrapped in a damp cloth on the low shelf and forgotten till morning."

It was all done in the open, in the amber light, with children watching and the WI's urn hissing through the wall, and not one soul present thought a single thing of it.

The friction came in with the heat of the afternoon, when the church door stood propped and let the meadow's arguments in whole.

The first was a young man Dilys didn't know, lean and stubbled and expensively casual, who came up the aisle too fast with a phone already half-lifted. "Barnaby. A word. Now, or in front of your admirers, your choice."

"Bevis." Gathercole didn't turn from his boxes. "Come to photograph the competition."

"You told the Kingsbourne food editor my wild table's half Booker's cash-and-carry." The young man's voice climbed. "You said it to her face at the market."

"I said a man ought to forage what he serves and not buy hedgerow salad off a van and call it foraged. If the cap fits, Bevis—" and now he did turn, enjoying it, the crowd's eyes swinging to him, "—I'll say it Saturday, into the microphone, with the county listening. You learned everything you know from me and half of it you've forgotten and the rest you've dressed up for the internet."

"You're finished," Trescowe said, white about the mouth. "You're a fat old man doing a turn. People are catching on." But he went, badly, backing down the aisle under two hundred years of stone and Gathercole's grin, and everyone saw that he went, which was the point.

The second came before the young man had cleared the porch: Ned Massey, the tenant farmer, in muck boots that had no business on the tiled floor and a temper that had no business in a church.

"You've been on my water-meadow again." He said it low, which was worse than shouting. "Gates open. Beasts loose on the lane. And I've a heifer three weeks dead of eating summat it shouldn't down your end of the field, Gathercole, and I'll have the vet's bill off you or I'll have you off the land with a solicitor's letter and a gun, and I'm not particular which."

"I forage where I've always foraged." Gathercole's good humour thinned. "The commons of this village—"

"It's not common. It's mine to graze and Quennell's to sell and neither of them's yours." Massey's finger came up. "You keep off Maidenwell end. There's nowt down there for you but trouble." And he too went, heavily, past a Freddie Quennell who had appeared in the south door wringing his soft hands.

"I say — must we — all this, today of all—" Freddie's voice, when it worked at all, worked at the pitch of a man watching his roof fall in. "There are people from the county coming Saturday. The appeal's at a — a delicate — one doesn't want scandal, one wants it all to go off beautifully—" He seemed to be pleading with the church at large. Nobody attended to him. He drifted out again, toward the meadow and the marquee and the survey pegs, and Dilys watched him go and thought, without unkindness, that here was a man being crushed slowly under something too big for him and too quiet to name.

And in the pause after all of them, Hester Vane began, gently and immovably, on the corner.

"Mr. Gathercole." She had a spray of guelder in her hand and did not look up from it. "The marquee. And your — trenching, for the fire-pits. It's set for the far corner of the meadow, and it must be moved. The ground's wrong there. It always floods, it's rank, the footing's bad. Nearer the gate would do you far better, and be seen better besides."

"The corner's exactly where I want it." He said it easily, buttering it with charm. "Best backdrop in the valley, all that greenery."

"That greenery is hemlock and nettle and elder over bad ground." Something had come into her voice under the mildness, a stone under still water. "It's no place to feed people. I've asked the committee. I've asked twice."

"And I'll un-ask them." He grinned, hugely, the master indulging a fussing hen. "Because that corner, dear lady, is exactly where I mean to show this village something it's forgotten. I've been reading the old tithe map for the pageant — the corner's got a name on it, an old name, and there's a reason nobody's mowed it in living memory, and it's not because it floods." He tapped the side of his nose, delighted with himself. "You'll see Saturday. All of you will. The Master of the Hedgerows'll give Little Hemlock back a bit of its own history, and won't that be a turn."

Across the church, unnoticed by anyone but Dilys, another woman went very still.

Lady Estelle Quennell had come in ten minutes before to disapprove — she attended the festival every year for the sole purpose of finding it vulgar, and said so, grandly, to whoever could not escape her. She had been holding forth, in fact, at that very moment, to the vicar, about the whole pageant — "a heritage, Clemency, is not a thing one dresses up in ruffs, it is a thing one has the tact to leave alone" — when someone near the font, apropos of the old photographs pinned up for the tableau, said the harmless village thing, the thing said a hundred times a year for forty years without a soul weighing it: "—that's the Endicott boy, that one, the good-looking one, went off to Canada donkey's years ago and never wrote, they said—"

And Lady Estelle Quennell stopped.

She did not gasp, or drop anything, or say a word. She simply stopped, the way a clock stops, all the grand machinery of her arrested between one tick and the next; and her hand, which had been resting on the font's cold rim, closed on it. Then she said, to the vicar, in a voice gone flat and small and terribly even, "Canada. Yes. A long time ago," and gathered herself back up into her grandeur, and swept out into the light, and Dilys — who noticed things, who could not help it, who had spent forty years learning to read what a living thing was doing by the smallest change in how it held itself — filed it away without knowing she had, the way she'd file a plant out of season.

The light in the tall windows went from amber to honey to the long low gold of a midsummer evening that would not end, and the church emptied by degrees, and Dilys stood back at last from the tower arch and found the blue was right. Hester came and stood beside her a moment, and looked at it, and said only, "Yes," which from Hester was a decoration, and Dilys felt again the absurd warmth of it and was ashamed of how much she wanted it.

Gathercole was the last but for the two of them, wrapping his greens in their damp cloth, whistling. He carried the bundle to the cool-room in the north transept, the low door the guild kept locked, and Hester unhooked the ribbon from her neck and gave him the key to turn — her key, the only one, worn bright at the bit with forty years of the same hand.

"The corner's wrong for it," Hester said again, gently, of the far meadow where the hemlock stood thickest, and smiled her whole guild-mistress's smile; and Gathercole laughed and said the corner was exactly where he'd show them what they'd forgotten, and set his bundle of green in the cool-room for the morning, and turned the good lady's key in the lock, and neither he nor Dilys thought a thing of it.