Zen, their newly nine-year-old daughter, was downstairs in the kitchen. She had made tea, apparently expecting her father because the concoction in the glass teapot was red and herbal, just as he liked it.

“Where’s Dad?” she asked.

“He’s . . . resting this morning.”

“But is he all right?”

“Yes, he’s fine. Tired from all those questions you ask him, I expect.”

She smiled, hoping to end the inquisition before it started. Zen considered the statement and returned to stirring honey into her drink. Prudence reached into the giant box of tea bags above the stove. Pushing the kettle to the middle of the hot plate, she turned and stared at the back of her daughter’s head; her hair was scruffed into what look like a bulldog clip with teeth. She felt a rush of emotion and told herself not to be silly.

Sometimes she found it hard to believe that she had given birth to this little creature. Seeing the perfection of her made her feel grateful in a way she could never have put into words. As she watched her daughter scribbling intensely in her dream diary, she thought about the day she had announced to Zeno that she was pregnant.

Her announcement had triggered a previously unseen energy within her husband. He began by withdrawing both caffeine and wheat from her diet; he even gave them up himself by way of encouragement. He searched for and found little-known herbs and plant oils, which became part of her everyday life. They were measured into her bath—which he drew for her himself—and dropped onto the four corners of her pillow at bedtime. He also rubbed them into her handkerchief, to be sniffed during the day. These special potions would vary, and he prepared the combinations with the tender loving care of an ancient alchemist.

She absent-mindedly put some breadcrumbs on the counter near the open window, the starling’s feeding table. Her husband had arrived with the damaged fledgling one morning so that their daughter could have a pet. With one foot in its world and the other in theirs.

Prudence never understood much of what Zeno talked about, but she always listened intently, and this seemed to satisfy him—at least for a while. Then a change had occurred in their relationship, which she felt long before anything actually happened that she could pinpoint. He did not stop talking to her, but he began explaining to her rather than just talking. Spontaneity was something she missed—especially when she noticed it being lavished on others (it was about this time that Prudence consulted her mother, who advised her to stop taking the pill).

In an attempt to explain the function of the oils—they took on an element of magic after their daughter was born—he told her how, in ancient times, herbs and other naturally occurring substances were used by women—the herbalists, nurses, midwives and GPs of the day—as they spent their lives planting and gathering. The alchemy of herbs was understood and used throughout the ages simply because there was nothing else—empirical knowledge (which she looked up in the dictionary) being acquired by practice so that a real herbal lore was passed from generation to generation.