Many times he will return home from a journey with his satchel full of specimens. I always offer to sketch them for his plant notebooks. These notebooks fill many shelves in his study, but none of them contain the formulas for his medicines. That information is secret. The recipes for making his tinctures and tisanes, oils and ointments, smudge pots and poultices are recorded in a leather-bound volume he keeps in the locked bottom drawer of his desk. I have only seen it once, years ago, and then only because I walked in on him while he was writing in it—a mistake I have not made since—

I burst in without knocking and stood in the doorway to his study, a breathless, saucer-eyed girl with mudspattered legs and a five-legged frog cupped in my hand.

“Look, Father! I found it in a puddle at the foot of the wall, that great stone wall that hides the ‘pothecary garden! I ran straight back to show you. Have you ever seen such a freakish creature? Will it live? Should it live?”

As soon as he saw me he shoved the book away, locked the drawer, and pocketed the key.

“Set it free, Jessamine.” His eyes stayed fixed on his desk as if they would bore two holes in it. “The frog’s destiny is no business of yours.”

Now there are two men in the distance, but neither of them is Father. One is too short, and the other is too fat. They are the Wesleyan preachers, a loudmouthed pair from one of the nonconformist sects. They used to come to the door now and then, in their long coats and strange hats, saying, “The end of the world is nigh!”

I find them funny, to be truthful. “The end of the world”—what a notion! As if there were anything to be done about that. Surely it would be better not to know.

I do not think the preachers will pay a call today, though. The last time they came, Father spoke to them very harshly. “That it will someday be the year eighteen hundred, rather than seventeen what-you-please, is a simple mathematical fact of the Gregorian calendar. It is a new century, not a harbinger of doom!” he bellowed. “Take your superstitions, and be gone!”

They have not knocked on our door since.

I watch through the window as the two figures disappear into the valley at the foot of one hill and reappear a short time later, as the path rises over the slope of the next. But there is no Father, not yet.