“Like the kind you painted for Frederick’s summer house,” Patrick confirmed, gesturing to the photographs in the books. “Except instead of a house, it’s a sixteenth-century monastery perched on a hilltop. You’ll have to guess at the colors, but it’s in the southern part of Spain where the climate is dry and arid.”

The book before them had a grainy photograph of the monastery, and Patrick pointed at the hillside below the old stone walls. “Leave out those houses and the goat farm because they’re all new. I’d like you to cover the hillside with groves of date palms instead. That’s where the monks once had their groves before they cut them down in favor of grazing land.”

A librarian showed them some botanical drawings of date palms, so Joshua had everything he needed to re-create the image of what the monastery probably looked like centuries ago when they supported themselves through growing dates. Joshua’s face held a spark of enthusiasm as he studied the various images.

“I can have it done within a week,” he said.

The painting was only one part of Patrick’s carefully planned proposal of marriage. The biggest part had taken Father Doyle’s help. Those Spanish monks had been unmoved by Gwen’s offer to buy the ancient date seeds she wanted so badly. They were getting rich off their three-percent stake in the Blackstone Bank and were impervious to monetary temptation. The academic appeal from professors at Blackstone College had failed too. Patrick and Father Doyle put their heads together to think about what the monks truly wanted, and after a few weeks of transatlantic cables, a bargain was struck.

The monks wanted converts. Their denomination had recently founded a new monastery in Kentucky, and they needed students who were willing to consider embarking on the unconventional life of holy orders in a rural monastery. Father Doyle couldn’t promise them new disciples, but he agreed to alert students preparing for holy orders at Saint Boniface of the chance to spend a season of contemplative prayer at the new monastery. It might ultimately lead to new converts who wished to join their community.

And with that, the monks promised twelve of the rare date seeds on the next ship. A sack of three-hundred-year-old seeds arrived the last week in November. To Patrick’s eye, they looked so dark and shriveled that it was hard to imagine they could be resurrected, but if anyone could do it, Gwen could.