the hills until the distant spot where the planting fields end and the line of the forest begins. For five hundred years these fertile acres teemed with people and animals and life. No more though. Now Father and I live in the chapel; the rest of the monastery is rubble, and all the Catholics are in Ireland and France.
Sometimes, when the weather is fair, I lie on my back in the grass of a nearby field. I close my eyes and try to imagine that last, terrible day, in the hours before it was all laid waste. But even the grandfather of the oldest person in the town of Alnwick was not alive to see it. There is no one who can tell me what it was like to hide at the edge of the forest, as I imagine I would have done, watching in terror and fascination as the king’s soldiers smashed the ancient buildings to bits and then hunted down the fleeing monks like so many helpless rabbits.
Father often says he wishes they had torn down the chapel and left the monks’ library standing instead, but I like our home just as it is, a long, rectangular structure made of rough-hewn blocks of stone. Long ago Father divided the interior into rooms. My bedchamber is small and up a long flight of stairs, in the old bell tower. On the main floor is a bedchamber for Father, a study in which he does his work, and a front parlour where we take our meals. It is where I write my garden diary too, at the end of each day’s labours.
Of all these rooms, the parlour is the largest, and the one that still looks most like a church. There is a high, vaulted ceiling, and tall, arched windows that Father says once had stained-glass pictures in them. Now they are filled with thick, plain glass that is divided into many small panes. On sunny days the light slants through the panes and makes narrow, glowing pathways across the dark wood planks of the floor.
I used to play hopscotch with those paths of light when I was small – if I leap over the light without touching it, Mama will live, I would say to myself. But if my foot touches the light she will die.
My foot never, ever touched the light – to this day I will swear it – but Mama died anyway.
Oh, how I wept! I was only four, so perhaps the outburst can be forgiven. But I remember how Father’s voice stayed calm.
“That is the way of things,” he explained to me at the time, “All creatures die when their time comes. No matter what we do, or how we may feel about it, nature always gets her prize in the end.”
Father is always so strong and wise. Sometimes I wish I were more like him. I wish I could accept that the way fate has arranged things is both right and good, and that living here alone with him, sewing and cooking and tending the garden, and perhaps, when I am old enough – perhaps, in my mind I can hear him say it! – learning to help him with his work, as I am beginning to do now with the belladonna seeds, is exactly the way my life was intended to be.
But, other times, the scent of bread baking, a remembered, loving smile, or an especially lonely winter night, with no one to sing me to sleep, leaves me weeping in secret for Mama, and filled with a kind of fury I cannot name.
It happens less often as the years go by though.
16th March
THE WEATHER CONTINUES DAMP AND COLD;
I built a strong fire in the morning and still could not get warm. Peeled potatoes and parsnips for soup. Cleaned and oiled all the boots. Changed the soaking water for the belladonna seeds.
Still no word from Father.
From the tower window in my bedchamber I can see quite a distance: over the crumbling stone wall that encloses the courtyard and cottage, past the quilt pattern of farmers’ fields marked by hedgerows, to the narrow path that snakes through the hills to the main crossroads where the four directions meet.
Down the road to the south is the town of Alnwick, where the duke’s castle stands guard over Northumberland. To the north, the Cheviot Hills and Scotland. The westbound road will carry travellers to Newcastle, if they are not murdered by highwaymen along the way. To the east lies the sea.
If I happen to be looking out of my window when Father returns, I will be able to see him coming two miles away, a lone, stoop-shouldered figure walking from the crossroads down the winding footpath that cuts across the sheep fields.
Even when the need for his services is urgent, Father prefers to walk. He likes to stop and examine whatever grows by the side of the road. There he might find a rare type of wildflower that he covets for our garden beds, or some creeping plant whose properties are unfamiliar to him, or a strange mushroom growing on the back of a rotted stump.
Many times he will return home from a journey with his satchel full of specimens. I always offer to sketch them for his plant notebooks. These notebooks fill many shelves in his study, but none of them contain the formulas for his medicines. That information is secret. The recipes for making his tinctures and tisanes, oils and ointments, smudge pots and poultices are recorded in a leather-bound volume he keeps in the locked bottom drawer of his desk. I have only seen it once, years ago, and then only because I walked in on him while he was writing in it – a mistake I have not made since –
I burst in without knocking and stood in the doorway to his study, a breathless, saucer-eyed girl with mud-spattered legs and a five-legged frog cupped in my hand.
“Look, Father! I found it in a puddle at the foot of the wall, that great stone wall that hides the ’pothecary garden! I ran straight back to show you. Have you ever seen such a freakish creature? Will it live? Should it live?”
As soon as he saw me he shoved the book away, locked the drawer, and pocketed the key.
“Set it free, Jessamine.” His eyes stayed fixed on his desk as if they would bore two holes in it. “The frog’s destiny is no business of yours.”
Now there are two men in the distance, but neither of them is Father. One is too short, and the other is too fat. They are the Wesleyan preachers, a loudmouthed pair from one of the nonconformist sects. They used to come to the door now and then, in their long coats and strange hats, saying, “The end of the world is nigh!”
I find them funny, to be truthful. “The end of the world” – what a notion! As if there were anything to be done about that. Surely it would be better not to know.
I do not think the preachers will pay a call today though. The last time they came, Father spoke to them very harshly, “That it will someday be the year eighteen hundred, rather than seventeen what-you-please, is a simple mathematical fact of the Gregorian calendar. It is a new century, not a harbinger of doom!” he bellowed. “Take your superstitions, and be gone!”
They have not knocked on our door since.
I watch through the window as the two figures disappear into the valley at the foot of one hill and reappear a short time later, as the path rises over the slope of the next. But there is no Father, not yet.
I awaken in Father’s chair, the one in the parlour nearest the hearth. I had not meant to fall asleep, but an hour’s sewing made me close my eyes to rest them. Now the cloud-veiled sun is low in the sky, and the skirt with the torn hem that I was in the midst of mending has slipped from my lap to the dirty floor.
Father is not home. Could some misfortune have befallen him? It makes my chest tighten to think of it, like a heavy rope has been coiled around my body and pulled hard, until I can barely breathe.
If something happened to Father, then I would truly be alone.
I would be alone with the cottage that once was a chapel, and the gardens, and the ruins, and whatever ghosts of dead monks still wander the fields. I might never have cause to speak aloud again.
Unless I left. I could leave, I suppose, if something