Chapter 17

Adrian's POV

That afternoon I couldn't settle to anything, and in the end I went out to the little rooms on the west side.

The old woman who kept the key came hurrying, flustered. "The Luna meant to have these rooms done over, my lord, only she hasn't got round to it. There's nothing in there now."

I held out my hand for the key, and she gave it to me and went away.

The chain came off the gate with a rattle. Inside, the yard lay white under the Midsummer sun. Weeds had come up between the flags and wilted in the heat. The pear tree that had dropped its blossom when I first came home was hung now with small hard green fruit, half hidden in the leaves.

The rooms had been swept bare and scrubbed, and they smelled of lye and closed shutters and nothing else at all, as if no one had ever lived there.

I could barely remember her face. Thin and pale, and young, and looking up at me in the torchlight. That was all I had kept of her. Standing in that empty room, I wanted more than I had wanted anything in a long time to be able to see it properly.

If I hadn't ridden away that night. If I had sent the messenger back to wait an hour. She might have been sitting here now, by this window, waiting for me to come in.

Three years she had lived in these two rooms, watching the pear tree flower and fruit and drop its leaves, and flower again.

And then a stable hand, my mother said.

I didn't believe it. I found, standing there, that I had never believed it.

Something rustled in the next room.

I stepped back into the shadow of the doorway. A small figure came creeping through from the yard and slipped into the narrow room at the end, and I followed and looked in at the gap by the hinge.

It was Posy. She knelt in front of an old linen press against the wall and worked a board loose from under it, and reached into the space behind and drew out a tin box. She opened the lid and looked inside, as if to make sure of something. Then she closed it, slid it back, fitted the board into place, and let out her breath.

I pushed the door open. "Posy. What are you doing in here? What's in that box?"

She spun round, white as milk, with dust on her hands. Her mouth trembled, and then she burst into tears.

She had been barely three when I rode north, a baby in leading strings. I went down on my heels in front of her.

"Don't cry. I'm not angry. Tell me what you've hidden."

"It's Sister Wren's things." She scrubbed her eyes with her sleeve. "Things she gave me. Mother said everything she gave anybody had to go, because she was a bad woman and she'd make me bad. But she wasn't. She was pretty, and she could make anything, and she always talked quietly, and she smelled nice, and she never once shouted at anybody. She wasn't a bad woman."

I held out my hand. After a moment she went and got the box and put it in my hands.

Inside, laid out carefully, was a little purse of pomegranate red, worked all over with twining vines, every leaf and tendril so close and even that I couldn't see where one color turned into the next. Beside it was a sachet of pale yellow silk with two butterflies circling a sprig of pear blossom, their wings done in five or six shades of thread, so that when I tilted the box they seemed to lift. There was a white handkerchief with a few stems of wild orchid in one corner, only a few lines, and a small embroidered picture of Duskmere lake at dusk, the water done in long flat stitches of gray and rose.

"Orchids are her favorite," Posy said, close beside me. "She said I'd understand the picture when I was bigger." She lowered her voice. "She made clothes for Mother and Lyra and Bella, too. Mother's blue gown with the swallows, and Lyra's skirt with the butterflies, and Bella's shawl with the clouds on it. Whenever they wore them, all the other ladies asked which shop. And after Sister Wren went away, Mother made them put them all in the chest and not wear them ever again."

She took the box back from me and held it against her chest.

"I'm keeping them for her," she said. "She'll want them when she comes back."

Something turned over heavily in me. She was six. She didn't understand yet what dead meant.

"Put it away safe," I said. "And don't tell anyone what happened here today. Not anyone."

She nodded hard and put the box back in its hiding place and fitted the board, very carefully. When she was at the door, I called her back.

"Posy." I kept my voice low. "The last time you saw her. Did she look any different? In her body?"

She thought about it, frowning. "She was thinner. And whiter. She was tired."

"Her belly?"

"Her belly?" She stared at me. "It was the same. You couldn't see anything, with her skirts."

I shut my eyes. I was losing my mind. The woman in the Green Lamp was days from her time. Wren had left this house barely two months ago, before anything had even begun to show. It didn't fit, however I turned it.

I put my hand on Posy's hair and told her to run along. She shut the door softly behind her.

I stood there a while. Then I went back to the linen press, worked the board loose myself, and took out the yellow sachet. When I lifted it to my face, there was still the faintest breath of dried meadowsweet in it.

I put it in my sleeve. I couldn't have said why.

* * *

Two days later I gave the sachet to Lyle and sent him to the Gilded Thimble to ask whether anyone there could make me another just like it.

"She turned it over and looked at the back, my lord," he told me in the carriage. "A long while. Then she said nobody in her shop could copy that, but the woman out past the north gate who mended the Hale gown might. Only she's near her time and takes no more work. If I was set on it, I could go to Little Fallow and ask for Old Hester." He paused. "I think she knew the hand, my lord. She didn't want to say so."

"Shall I send someone out to Little Fallow, my lord?" Lyle asked.

I didn't answer. I had the sachet back in my hand, and I could feel the raised stitches of the wings against my palm.

"No," I said.

But I went on turning it over in my hand all the way home, and none of it made sense.

* * *

The next morning I rode out alone before it was light.

The village was still asleep. I found the cottage at the end of the lane and knocked, and after a while the door opened on an old woman in a nightcap with a shawl round her shoulders, blinking at me. When she had looked properly, she gripped the doorframe.

"Sir? Who is it you're after?"

"The seamstress who lives with you," I said. "The one who went to the Hales' house the other day."

"Oh. You'll be wanting some work done? There's not a better needle in ten miles. Only you're unlucky." She sighed. "That's my niece, from the country. Her husband's been trading down south, and she was stopping with me till he got back. He came for her. Took her home yesterday. She's near her time, and it's no place for her, this."

"Her husband," I said.

"Only yesterday. If it can wait, sir, you might ask again in a while."

At first there was nothing in me at all, as if something had been lifted out and left a hollow. Then, under it, something that was almost relief. So it was only chance after all. She was not who I had thought.

The mist was thinning over the fields, and somewhere behind the cottages a cock began to crow. I stood in front of the old woman's door with the sachet in my sleeve, against the inside of my wrist.