Epilogue
A few years later, the bell above the shop door rang, and the spring air came in with it, and so did a great deal of laughter.
Benjamin ducked under the lintel with a boy of four on his shoulders — barefoot, wild-haired, a wreath of rosemary and daisies gripped in both small hands like a crown that had been fought for and won.
"Steady, Your Majesty." Benjamin kept a hand on the boy's ankle. "I believe the Queen would like her flowers back."
"Faster, Papa." Small heels drummed against his chest. "We must rescue Mama."
Behind the counter, Amelia looked up from a row of glass bottles, each labelled in the same exact hand that had once written comfrey along the north wall on a page left under a stone. Her sleeves were rolled. There was ink on two fingers and she did not appear to have noticed.
"Rescue me?" She set down her pen. "From what, precisely?"
"From work." Benjamin came up to the counter and bowed as well as a man can with a child on his neck. "From tinctures and powders and patients who have no manners. Your kingdom misses you, madam."
"You have conspired again."
"We have a standing alliance."
She came round the counter, wiped her hands on her apron, and kissed them both — one on the cheek and one on the forehead. Their son attempted her nose and missed by a considerable margin.
"That is enough healing for one day," Benjamin said. "Come home."
She looked at the bottles. She looked at the boy. She untied the apron.
◆◆◆
He ran ahead of them the whole way up the lane, stopping only to inspect a puddle with the seriousness of a magistrate, and by the time they reached the gates of Russell Hall the front door was already open and Mrs. Miller was standing in it with her arms folded.
"Oh, good," she said. "Doctor Russell has decided to come home."
"Only just."
"You keep those hours and you will be an old crone before you are thirty-five."
"I am nearly thirty."
"Precisely my point." Mrs. Miller unfolded her arms and pointed the finger of doom at the boy, who was attempting to climb the gatepost. "That one was in the chicken coop again this morning. I am short two eggs and I am not entirely certain about the hen."
"You do know," Amelia said, "that you are not actually his grandmother."
"Tell him that. He calls me Nan, he eats my jam, and he has tantrums in my kitchen." Mrs. Miller sniffed. "That will do for grandmother in any court in England."
"You are too soft with him."
"And you have grown too clever with words.
All those books." But she let herself be embraced, and held on a moment longer than a woman does who is merely tolerating it, and when the boy came back with his pockets full of snails and something unidentifiable on his chin she took out a handkerchief without a word and dealt with the chin.
"You," Benjamin told his son, "are going to be the reason I go grey."
"I will make you a salve," said Amelia.
"There. She never stops." Mrs. Miller was already turning back into the house. "Go on. Take him to the garden before he takes the house apart. Your mother is home, which means she may clean him this time."
◆◆◆
The garden gate stood open. There had been a fence here once with a hole in it, and then a fence with no hole in it, and then — the year the two estates became one — no fence at all.
Now there was a gravel path, and roses on either side of it, and the path ran straight from Benjamin's door to the south wall of what had been Whitfield's garden and was simply the garden now.
The boy was through the gate before either of them could speak.
He went straight to the corner where the poppies had grown, and where nothing had grown at all for one black autumn, and stopped in front of the flowerbed there and crouched, the way he had seen his mother crouch a thousand times.
The Aegis Bloom stood in it. A dozen of them now — small, blue, five-petalled, entirely ordinary to look at unless one knew what one was looking at, and rooted in soil that had been ash the year they were planted.
Amelia stopped at the boy's shoulder. Benjamin stopped at the gate.
"Do not laugh," she said without turning round. "And do not put your boots in that soil. I mean it, Benjamin Russell."
He raised both hands. "Yes, Doctor Russell."
The boy looked up. "Mama. What is this one called?"
Benjamin came down the path and knelt beside his son in the gravel, careful of the edge of the bed, one hand flat on the small back.
"That one," he said, and looked up at his wife, "is called Amelia's Bloom."
She stilled.
Nobody outside this garden would ever hear it called that.
Nobody outside this garden would ever be told where it had come from, or who had given it, or what it had cost. That had been the promise, and the promise had been kept, and it would go on being kept by a boy who would grow up knowing only that his mother had a flower nobody else in England could grow, and that it had his mother's name.
Amelia knelt down on the other side of her son, in the gravel, and put her hand over Benjamin's on the boy's back.
The boy, finding himself thoroughly surrounded, put an arm round each of their necks and pulled, and the three of them stayed there a moment in the sun with a flower in front of them that had once been a drawing in a book, and a house behind them that had once been a ruin, and a name between them that had once been something a man could not say aloud.
Then the boy announced that he was hungry, and that Nan had jam, and the moment was over — which was, Benjamin thought, getting to his feet with a snail in his coat pocket he had not put there, exactly as it should be.
And in that quiet moment, surrounded by sunlight and petals and laughter echoing through the joined halls of two once-divided homes, they held each other close.
Together.
Whole.
And finally… they were home.