“The thing about a tree that I often marvel at,” he went on, “is that when it’s young, well, it’s only natural that its first fragile branches die and fall off, buds don’t blossom, but burls seal their wounds like a scar.”

“What wounds?”

“Insects, floods, drought, an ax. Trees suffer more than we know.”

“And survive all that?”

“Yes. But even more cunning, the tree grows up around the dead spots, around its own scars, and makes new branches that are better branches, and nearer to the sun. While the dead places get pressed upon, and grow stronger.”

I linked my hands behind my back and looked at the ground. There was always a sense when he talked about the natural world that he was talking about the inside of us as well, one the echo of the other.

“They’re still dead places,” I said.

He stopped and faced me. “Yet cut open a burl, Miss Wollstonecraft, and instead of straight grain one finds waves and swirls of wood, marbled and feathered, even ‘eyes’ staring back at us. It’s the most prized wood, above everything.” He waited for me to meet his gaze. “Our knots are the strongest part of us. And our burls the place of our greatest beauty, if we but grow up around them, and reach for the sun.”

I willed away tears, grateful for his gentle wisdom. I understood that I was to let Jane go, and grow because of it. I’d decided as much myself. But in that final moment in his presence, I knew that as much as I would suffer giving her up, the absence of John Arden in my life would be by far the greater loss. I might never know such a man again.

“I have no right, no place,” I said, wiping my eyes. “But may I ask of you one last thing?”

“He’s not mad,” I told Marmaduke Hewitt the next day, moving day. “He’s not stupid. He can learn and do things. Maybe in his own way, not the way we would, but in a way that works somehow. And he adores the natural world, the bugs and birds and trees, the way you do.”

I stood in the middle of Hewitt’s drawing room, pleading for my brother. We both looked out the window to where Henry was clapping at spits of rain that shone in a narrow glimmer of sun.

“John Arden says I should take you at your word. And your brother looks like a lightsome young man,” said Hewitt.

“He’s always in good spirits. Always willing. And I know you to be a good man. Not like—”

He put up his hand to save me. “I understand,” he said. “You needn’t say it.”

I shook his hand with both of mine, thanking him with tears instead of words.

When I went outside to fetch Henry, I explained the best I could.