The lavender was at the height of its season, which meant I had been up since five and would not stop until the light failed.
The lower terrace rows were ready. I could tell before I reached them — the fragrance hit me at the gate, concentrated and warm, a potency that means the oil has peaked and the cutting cannot wait another day. I had learned this from reading, initially, and from three seasons of practice after that, and the combination had produced for me a certainty about lavender that I trusted more than most things I trusted. When the lavender said now, I cut.
Jory Nancarrow was already in the upper rows when I arrived, which was either the result of genuine diligence or the result of his having slept in the barn again when he ought to have gone home to his mother's cottage. I decided not to investigate which.
"Morning, Mrs. Penrose." He raised a hand without turning around. He was cutting, which was correct; the angle of the cut was ambitious, which was not.
"Closer to the base," I said. "An inch below the foliage."
"I thought shorter was better for drying."
"Shorter stems are better for bundling and worse for oil yield. You want to keep the stem length." I came up the row and demonstrated: blade at forty-five degrees, clean motion, just below the leaf-line. The cut stalk came away satisfactorily. "You're not pruning roses."
"Right." He adjusted. The next cut was better. The one after that drifted back toward optimistic. I left him to it.
Cut and carry; carry and hang. The drying barn filled with new bundles as the morning warmed, each one releasing scent when it was handled — a brief, sharp freshness that faded as the oils began to concentrate in the heat. By eight o'clock, the barn smelled extraordinary, which is to say it had the scent of the inside of a surreal dream if such dreams were generally considered pleasant. I had grown accustomed to it. Visiting villagers never entirely did.
Jory tied his first bundle with what I can only describe as architectural ambition. He had gathered the stalks correctly, but the tie itself was a complex invention of his own devising, involving three separate loops and what appeared to be a bow.
"That will fall apart in four days," I said.
"I thought it looked quite secure."
"It looks like something a sailor tied with both hands occupied. Figure-eight, backed by a reef knot. I've shown you twice." I took a fresh bundle from the pile and tied it while he watched. The knot closed cleanly, the lavender compressed into a tight cylinder that would hold through the drying and the journey to market. "Now you."
He managed it. Mostly. The reef knot was slightly crooked, but the figure-eight knot was sound, which was the important part.
"Better," I said, and hung it.
He beamed with the pride of a young man who has done a thing correctly and knows it. I had learned to allow this. Jory's cheerfulness was simply a feature of the environment one learned to work with.
We worked the upper rows through mid-morning. The bees arrived around nine, as they always did, moving through the remaining uncut flowers with a focused industry that I found professionally sympathetic. The salt came off the sea below the cliffs in occasional gusts, underneath the lavender and under the heat — the cliff was forty yards from the lower gate, the ocean simply the next thing after that.
I was checking the second terrace when I found the seedlings.
I had planted this row a fortnight ago — a second propagation from the original French stock, intended for next year's expansion into the eastern slope. At a fortnight, they should have been two inches at best, fragile, the lavender's characteristic silver-grey barely established. They were five inches tall, fully leafed, with the root systems visible at the edge of the tray where I'd checked this morning's watering. Five inches in fourteen days was not, botanically speaking, possible. The French stock was vigorous, but not this vigorous.
I stood and looked at them for a moment.
Good soil, I thought. Good drainage, good aspect, and a warmer July than last year. I moved the tray into slightly more shade and went back to the cutting rows.
"The London lot arrive tomorrow," Jory said, approximately an hour later, when we had moved to the middle terrace and were in a comfortable working silence. He said it with the way of a young person conveying information he thought was interesting and not quite managing to conceal that he found it interesting.
"I'm aware." I was counting rows. Fourteen cut, eleven remaining. At our current pace, we would finish the middle terrace by late afternoon if Jory's knot-tying did not deteriorate further.
"They say Lord Trevithick's invited eight from London. A doctor and some lawyers and — Mabel Tregenna says one of them is a real society woman, the sort you read about in the papers." A pause. "Are you going to go up to the Hall at all?"
"I'm delivering a medical order tomorrow morning." I moved to the next row. "After that, I have work to do."
"Right." Another pause, slightly longer. "Only Mabel said you might find it interesting. Meeting Londoners."
"Mabel Tregenna says a great many things." I cut a fine stalk, the oil already visible on my fingers, and added it to the bundle. "Most of them are entertaining. Very few are accurate."
Jory laughed, an easy, uncomplicated sound, and went back to cutting.
By late afternoon, I had locked the barn, changed my apron, and installed myself in the apothecary workroom with my preparation journal and the Hall order spread out on the worktable.
The apothecary was the heart of the farmhouse in a way the other rooms were not. The kitchen was where I lived; the parlour was where I worked with accounts; the apothecary was where I thought. Three walls of shelving, floor to ceiling, held the summer's accumulation: dried bundles at graduated stages of drying, labeled jars of oil, tincture, and infused vinegar, the flat pressed-specimen boxes arranged by family and common name. The north wall held the medicines proper, graduated from the most common preparations — valerian, meadowsweet, rose hip — to the more specific at the far end.
I sat down with the Hall order and my pen and began.
Lady Madeleine's valerian tincture was straightforward: she had been taking it for six months, with the dosage established and the preparation reliable. I measured it from the stock bottle, decanted it into a small brown glass vial, labeled it with the date, dosage, and her initials, and set it aside. The wound salve for the kitchens I prepared from the calendula stock I'd infused in June. The Hall's cook had a persistent habit of burning herself, which I suspected was less clumsiness than the natural consequence of managing a range that was approximately twice the size one person could sensibly oversee. Three jars. I sealed them with wax and added them to the box.
The lavender oil for the guest rooms was the last item, and the most straightforward of all: I had six bottles ready from this summer's distillation, the oil a pale amber that meant a good extraction, the fragrance precise and clean. I added three to the order.
That left the garlands.
I had three Midsummer garlands to finish for the market at the end of the week — working garlands, twenty inches, the lavender twisted and compressed into the dense braided rope that village housewives hung in wardrobes and over doorways, and that the summer visitors bought as decoration and then discovered, to their surprise, that they actually worked. I had been making them since I was eleven years old, having watched my aunt make them before that, and the process was entirely muscle memory: three bundles of dried lavender, stripped to the lower stem, twisted together while still fresh enough to hold, the characteristic knot securing each join.
Figure-eight, backed by a reef knot. As I'd told Jory.
I finished the first garland in six minutes, hung it on the hook above the workbench, and began the second. The workroom was quiet except for the bees outside the window — they were moving to the clover now as the lavender rows thinned — and the occasional sound of the sea, which on still afternoons came up the hill as a low, patient rushing.
I was finishing the third garland when it happened.
The dried bundle nearest my left hand — hanging from the pole that ran the length of the north wall, hanging there as it had been hanging for three days — released a sudden pulse of scent. Strong. Much stronger than the background warmness of the room, sharper than the oil I'd just bottled. I looked up. The bundle was still. There was no air movement I could detect; the window was latched; I had not knocked the pole or touched the hanging.
I stood for a moment with the unfinished garland in my hands.
I put the bundle down on the workbench and examined it. Lavender, Lavandula angustifolia, the English variety, dried correctly and hanging as it ought. No explanation for the intensity of the release. Possibly I had rubbed it without noticing. Possibly the temperature of the late afternoon had done something to the oil that I had not observed before. Possibly I was tired, having been on the farm since five o'clock, and had envisioned the intensity of it.
I had envisioned the intensity of it.
I finished the garland, tied it, and hung it with the other two. Three garlands on their hooks, and the delivery box packed and ready by the door, and the apothecary smelling exactly as it constantly smelled when a day's work was well done.
I carried the delivery box to the front step, where I would collect it in the morning, and straightened up.
The Hall was visible from here on clear evenings, which this was: the grey granite of it caught the last of the light from the west and held it, the upper windows turning briefly gold before the angle shifted. I had grown up within sight of it, in a different sense and a different life, and had returned to within sight of it again two years ago.
"They'll be here tomorrow," I said. The lavender rows were still, and the lane was empty, and the bees had long since gone home.
I went inside.