For a time, I hadn’t been able to go up to it without a sense of waste and terrible sorrow, but I did go there now and then. To remember. To pray, sometimes. And frankly, if some of the more hidebound Presbyterians of the Ridge had seen me on some of these occasions, talking aloud to the dead or to God, they would have been quite sure they had the right name, but the wrong witch.

But the woods had their own slow magic and the garden was returning to them, healing under grass and moss, blood turning to the crimson bloom of bee balm, and its sorrow fading into peace.

Despite the creeping transformation, though, some remnants of the garden remained, and small treasures sprang up unexpectedly: there was a stubbornly thriving patch of onions in one corner, a thick growth of comfrey and sorrel fighting back against the grass, and—to my intense delight—several thriving peanut bushes, sprung up from long-buried seeds.

I’d found them two weeks before, the leaves just beginning to yellow, and dug them up. Hung them in the surgery to dry, plucked the dry peanuts from the tangle of dirt and rootlets, and roasted them in the shell, filling the house with memories of circuses and baseball games.

And tonight, I thought, tipping the cooled nuts into my tin shelling basin, we’d have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for supper.

THERE WAS A breeze on the porch, and I was grateful for it on my face after the heat of sun and hearth. Also a little welcome solitude: Bree had gone with Roger to call upon the tenants I still thought of as the fisher-folk—emigrants from Thurso, a dour lot of rock-ribbed Presbyterians who were deeply suspicious of Jamie as a Catholic, and much more of me. I was not only a Catholic but a conjure-woman, and the combination unsettled them to no little degree. They did like Roger, though, in a grudging sort of way, and the liking seemed reciprocal. He understood them, he said.

The children had done their chores and were scattered to the four winds; I heard their voices now and then, giggling and shrieking in the woods behind the house, but God only knew what they were doing. I was just pleased that they weren’t doing it right in front of me.

Jamie was in his study, enjoying his own solitude. I’d passed by, carrying my big basin of peanuts outside, and seen him leaning back in his chair, spectacles on his nose, deeply absorbed in Green Eggs and Ham.

I smiled at the thought, and pulled off the ribbon to loosen my hair so the cool breeze could blow through it.