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They started before dawn. Gerald woke to the kitchen — not the sounds he knew, not the low scrape of Mary’s first pot or the grate being cleared, but something bigger and earlier and already moving. Voices. The heavy drag of a bench across stone. Wynn’s instructions coming through the floorboards in a rhythm that

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The basil had true leaves. Gerald saw them when he crouched at the row for the morning circuit, the brass watering can still cold against his palm. The seed leaves were there — the pale, round pair he had been watching since they appeared — but between them, pushing up from the centre of the

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The square fell behind them, and the streets began. Gerald had watched Strathcove arrive on the way in — the hedgerows thinning, the houses pressing closer, the sound of Barrel’s hooves changing from packed earth to cobblestone. Going back, the order reversed, but it did not feel like the same road unwound. Streets he had

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The wagon was already moving when Gerald got his second boot on the step. He grabbed the side rail and pulled himself up onto the bench. Tom did not slow down and did not look over. The reins sat loose in his left hand, his right holding a folded list against his thigh, and Barrel

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The basil had leaves. Gerald crouched at the end of the row and looked at them. Two small lobes, pale green, each one no wider than his smallest fingernail. They stood on a stem so thin that a water drop would bend it flat against the soil. The lobes were spread open, turned toward the

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Gerald was at the gate when Millie came across the yard. He had finished the morning circuit — chickens, woodbox, hall — and watered the basil row before Sable arrived. The soil was dark where he had poured. The greenhouse had held the night’s warmth in its panels and the air inside was thick and

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Pim woke him in the dark. Not with a shake or a call. Gerald opened his eyes to the sound of boots on the stairs — two careful steps, a pause, then the creak of his bedroom door swinging just wide enough for a voice to reach the bed. “Wagon in twenty minutes. Dress warm.”

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