Do these volumes even exist? Father believes they do. He believes passionately and without proof, the way other men believe in God. He often talks of these books in the evenings in our parlor, a glass of absinthe and water in his hand. When he speaks of them, his speech quickens and his eyes flash.

“The monastery hospital was famous throughout Europe,” he begins, as if I had not heard this tale from birth. “The monks’ power to heal the sick was so great that the people called them miracle workers, and sometimes even saints.” Then he laughs. “Anyone could be such a saint, if they had access to the same information as those long-dead holy men! Someone must have saved the volumes that contain all the monks’ wisdom. It would have been madness not to.”

He sips his green, licorice-scented drink and continues in this vein until the fire dies and my head nods forward on my chest.

Sometimes I think Father’s hunger to know what the monks knew is a madness all its own. Once, long ago, I watched him dig up a ten-foot square in a distant field to twice the depth of his spade. He planted nothing, but visited the place daily for weeks, to see if anything unusual had sprouted in the freshly turned earth.

“Did you think your shovel might wake the bones of all those dead monks, until they rise and tell you their secrets?” I joked nervously as I watched him sift through the dirt with his fingers.

“The monks may be dead, but their medicines still lie sleeping in the ground.” There was an edge to his voice. “Hidden deep in the cold, dark earth, a seed can be nearly immortal. Even after so many years, if exposed once more to the light and air and rain, there is a chance some long-forgotten plant of great power may yet reveal itself.”

I had meant only to tease, but instead I seem to have stirred Father’s anger, for he kept muttering furiously to himself: “But what of it? Any discovery I make will be useless, unless I can learn the specimen’s properties, its uses, its dangers….”

“No one knows more about plants than you do, Father,” I said, to calm him.

He climbed to his feet, dirt clinging to his knees.

All at once he was shouting. “Compared to the monks I know nothing! I dig blindly to rediscover what they took as common sense. The formulae all burned, the wisdom of centuries in ashes…. To kill such knowledge is itself murder—it is worse than murder—”

Father raged on. I stopped listening and let his voice turn to a wordless buzz, a hornet floating near my ear. All I could think was, But how could a puny seed be immortal, when it was so easy for Mama to die?

Wait, I hear someone at the door—it must be Father home at last—

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