For Sorrel’s part, she required some time to measure Andrew’s feelings for her, to weigh them in her hands and heart and calculate whether what had sprung up between them was enchanted by Patience or by each other. And then she had no idea what might happen. But right now Poppy was talking, and Sorrel needed to listen so she turned her attention away from Andrew and let the murmur of the words resolve into a story.
Poppy held out the scrapbook. “You see, this is what Gabe steered me to. And look”—she pointed up at the chapel windows—“Is that where it was, the stained glass? Did Thomas the Hateful destroy it because it told a story he didn’t want told?”
“Or did the weavers, the nuns, I presume, just make it up on their own?” Stella asked. “I’ve seen no mention of it anywhere in the records. A Kirkwood, certainly not Thomas, must have communicated with them. This is all making my head ache.”
“It’s a stealthy way to tell the true story, the victim’s story,” Sorrel added. “If you ask me, the only one who could have shared that story was Elizabeth. Let me see what’s in that vignette.”
Poppy handed Sorrel the book. “Can we go back to the house with all this?” Poppy asked. “I’m feeling peckish.”
“I have never met such hungry people,” Sorrel said.
“It’s a Kirkwood thing,” Poppy said.
There was no resisting, so Sorrel tucked the scrapbook under her arm and everyone walked back to Kirkwood Hall.
OF COURSE SORREL could identify all the plants in the stained glass with ease and she knew their meaning, and that is where the story lay. She spread the book out on the table.
“Anemone: forsaken,” Sorrel touched each plant as she described it. “White rose: innocence, secrecy; purple hyacinth: sorrow, forgive me; edelweiss: courage and purity; freesia: innocence and trust, and here”—she tapped the page—“monkshood: a deadly foe is near.”
Andrew listened to Sorrel’s voice and let it become music that soothed him. Surely this feeling was stronger, better than his earlier disappointment? There had to be a chance that theirs was nothing more, or less, than a love story.
“I do feel a bit dim that I didn’t parse the truth out of this illustration when I first found it,” Stella said and moved the book to the center of the kitchen table. “What we’ve got here,” she said as she whisked eggs and cream in a bowl, “is some crafty nuns who wanted to be sure the truth came out about this witch.”
“Alleged witch,” Sorrel said.
Andrew snorted.
“And then there’s the book,” Poppy said and pointed at the page. “If it is Elizabeth’s diary, what’s it doing with the alleged witch unless Lady Kirkwood was trying to right a wrong before she died?”
“I can’t stand another minute of this frivolous speculation,” Andrew said and left.
“Let him go,” Stella said when she saw Sorrel rise from her chair. “Today has been a bit of a shock to the system.”
“I am rather enjoying this whole mysterious thing we’ve got going,” Poppy said.
“The point of all of it is to gain some insight into the Shakespeare Garden,” Sorrel said. “Let’s keep that as our focus, Agatha Christie, OK?” She stood and took a plate over to the stove where Stella was stirring the eggs and toasting bread in a vaguely steampunk contraption over the wood fire. “While I am sorry that this garden has such a sad and complicated history, and I can’t imagine the pain that was Elizabeth’s end, my job is to restore it as best I can and then leave you all to enjoy it.”
Poppy watched Sorrel walk off with her plate and wondered if she hadn’t just schooled them all in the art of grace under fire.
Andrew was on the couch in his living room with Wags sitting on his feet when Sorrel came in. He hated himself for it, but the smell of the food on the plate she held made him lick his lips.
“I come bearing buttery, chivey eggs,” Sorrel said. “I am irresistible if only as a conveyance for food.”
Andrew slid sideways on the couch. “I am helpless before you . . . and your eggs,” he said.
Sorrel knew it was past two, but somehow the velvety eggs sprinkled with chives and parsley and tumbling over toast made from one of Delphine’s boules were precisely what she found herself hungry for too.
“You haven’t put anything in them?” Andrew asked.
“Very funny,” Sorrel said and took a huge bite.
“Step away from my eggs!” Andrew said and sat up, reaching for the plate.
“We could share.”
“We could,” Andrew said, “but I don’t really want to do that.”
“Selfish boy,” Sorrel said and sat down with him.
Together they cleaned the plate, and poor Wags watched with such longing that Andrew jumped up and got her a piece of clearly moldy cheese.
“This has been a ghastly day,” Andrew said. “I seem to have let all that anger and ill temper back out to play. I mean, what was Gray thinking? Are you feeling well or should I get the leeches?”
“You know what,” Sorrel said, “let’s go over. I think we can dispel some of the poor attitude if you see that it is nothing but an irritable garden waiting to be told how to behave.”
While Andrew agreed to come along, he reminded Sorrel that she had once thought the garden was disturbing, and she reminded him that he, in a matter of an hour ago, had made fun of her sister’s ability to take plants and turn them into remedies that some people called magic.
“Neither one of us can have it both ways, you know,” Andrew said. “Either we believe in all the tales from the crypt and your ability to change nature or we don’t.”
Sorrel had no answer for that, so she just kissed Andrew and made him forget what it was that he meant to say next.
After Sorrel’s ministrations the garden was already feeling less unsettled, but the enormous pile of spent soil that had been taken out was festering not far from its walls. Sorrel took a stick and poked at it, sending up grit and a faintly coppery smell. There was something bothering her about this drift of waste. There was the problem of how to get rid of it, but she supposed Gabe and his men would take it away and dump it somewhere far from the house. Still, Sorrel worried that the spoiled soil might somehow sully wherever it ended up. Of course, that was a possibility only if one believed Graham’s stories and, no matter what Sorrel told Andrew, the shadow lingered.
Andrew wondered anew at the orderly plots, dark composted soil mounded between crisp chalk lines. It had a beauty to it that was akin to the rows of polished, empty pews in his chapel. He understood that this was Sorrel’s church and this was where she found both peace and direction. With a start he realized that he missed his own church. Maybe not the one in London but certainly the rewards of walking his congregation through the Anglican rituals, of leading a lost parishioner back to faith. He needed to feel his faith again and, standing beside Sorrel, Andrew understood that he could never really turn away from service.
“Will you begin planting today?” he asked, thinking that perhaps it was the perfect time for him to begin to tend to his own seeds so carelessly tossed aside in the wake of the breakup and ensuing mess.