Here is the next conversation, though I'm not sure what anyone will make of it. It is one of the few chapters in this story I have been anxious about submitting.

It was in the pinking of an evening shortly after Carl's going that Persis had found Una out in the herb garden, mechanically trimming the flowers back from the boarded they were trying to escape and broached the conversation that had threatened to surface as they had washed up the evening they first spoke of Oxford. It was July then, and the irises and lilies were assuming the splendour that the lilacs had lost, but here, at the front of the house were only what might have been said to be useful flowers, things that did for cooking or else for tea in its various iterations. The exception was a cluster of hyacinths, scattered in such a way as to give the suggestion that the seeds had been dropped at random by some absent-minded gardener in years gone by. It was the rue, though, that was undergoing scrutiny just at that moment.

'What are you doing?' Persis had asked, slipping out the front door and coming to sit by Una. It was hardly a question that needed asking, but Una abandoned the battle she was waging against the deceptively pretty yellow flower that was the rue and said, 'I am thinking of uprooting those entirely,' and she indicated with her hand the massy yellow flowers.

'I haven't quite forgiven them their purpose –I shall never quite trust myself to cook with them again.'

'My dear, if you uproot every flower with a double purpose,' Persis began, almost smiling, but Una had covered her eyes with the inside of her wrist, so that Persis noticed for the first time the places where the yellow of the rue had caught on the cuffs of her cardigan and left little yellow marks where the pollen kissed the cloth, and had said, 'I know, I know, there would be very little left.'

'There would, too,' said Persis, and as though to make good her point she began,

'If pennyroyal will not do,

You always have recourse to rue;

And if for you rue you are too late,

Herb Robert should your fears abate

Though should you find he with you sports,

Do not forget there's Laserwort.

Laswerwart –'

'Persis,' Una pleaded, 'If I never know more than the names of your flowers and what they do, I'll be happy.'

'Yes, it does rival 'Ten Little Indians' for grimness, doesn't it?' said Persis, crossing her arms below her breast and touching her hands to her arms so in a show of warding off the cold that was absent. Una, still dividing the rue, nodded. She was thinking, how could she not, of the little girl tucked up at Haven, who buttoned her eyes in sleep and had a laugh like the sound of the bells in Rainbow Valley.

'Don't they ever seem sinister to you?' Una asked bringing her fingers into the Trinitarian cluster of index finger, pointer and thumb, as though about to cross herself, to the space between her eyes.

'Sometimes,' Persis confessed, 'and never more so than when I reach the end of that rhyme -if none of these can be had /leave well alone and be glad. It's your rue that's made me think of it,' she said after an over-extended moment.

'That rhyme I mean, and the memories that are tied up in it. It's curious, because rue had nothing to do with any of it.'

'No?' said Una uncertainly to the unruly herbs. She only half understood what it was they were talking of, but thought it was not all to do with the flowers in front of her.

'Yes, I think I know entirely too well what you mean when you talk of not trusting your own garden; I don't always either, I know too much about what grows in it, even if I haven't wanted or needed - well your herb of grace for instance –presuming of course it can ever be that again –to work that way.'

'I can't imagine anyone should want it to work like that' said Una, who had long wondered what else there was in this lovely outmoded herb garden of hers that might unwittingly wreak destruction on her home if it so chose. 'Least of all you.'

'I didn't realize you knew–you never said,' said Persis, not without some surprise, never taking her eyes from the silo of the Taylor farm, which grew pink then orange and then red in the setting sun and almost relieved that there might be no need to explain. Una, who had only been thinking of Nora and the memory of that afternoon one November as recalled by the little yellow flowers of the rue, wondered how Persis had come to know about Nora's brush with non-existence.

'I might have said much the same of you,' Una said, beginning to feel they were having two conversations at once.

'Could you?' said Persis watching, as she thought, the prospect of a conversation go down with the sun.

'Yes. You were so reluctant telling me about the rue and pennyroyal in that letter, that it struck me you were writing more for the sake of sending the idea somewhere than for my benefiting by it. You might tell me what you were thinking of though, as we've been talking to cross-purposes just now, or we seem to have been. I did wonder how you'd got to hear about…'

'About what?'

'Nothing that signifies. You were telling me something else.'

'It hardly matters either; it was so far away. But then, a minute ago you seemed to know, the way you were talking over those flowers…I wondered if perhaps Carl had written you after all. I think he had half an idea of it, once.'

'Carl's letters,' said Una, still seemingly to the flowers, needing as ever to work and talk at once, 'are a bit like blue moons, and I think those happen with more frequency. The last time I had anything from him properly it was the note he appended to the Christmas card the pair of you sent, and somehow I can't see how that has any bearing on your flowers.'

'No, it hasn't,' agreed Persis, 'no, I was thinking of something else. You remember I wrote to you about rue and pennyroyal and what –how –'

'Never how,' said Una, pausing in her gardening and putting her fingertips to her eyes as though to block out the memory of the thing. 'And if I never find out Persis…the prayers I have said that I never shall…But the rest of it –as if I could ever forget.'

'I never should have written you of that,' said Persis, turning round and touching a hand to Una's shoulder.

'You were hardly likely to want the knowing of it, and goodness knows I've never needed anything from the garden for that.'

Una had almost said to her I nearly did, almost resurrected that awful afternoon of long ago and might have done so had not understanding rushed in suddenly over the sound of the sea and the Taylor cattle and displaced the memory and the air resounded instead with the sound of I've never needed anything from the garden for that.

'Persis,' she said softly, 'Persis,' as she had been used to say Bruce's name to him when he could not sleep and had come to her with a bad dream or a night terror.

'When was this, that you never said?'

'Not so near as I've made it sound; do you remember when we were in India?'

'Yes –and for a while your letters fell off –I thought it was the post –was that about the time?'

'Did my writing to you fall off? I never realized –it must have been about then. There were weeks where I don't remember much of anything, like Dorothy writing in her journal, I forget today. 'In Alfoxden, I think. I can't remember who put me onto it, someone who knew about my flowers, because they told me she shared my preoccupation with the moon in that journal –Una if I ever write you a letter half so unreadable as that journal was, you must tell me.'

Una duly promised, almost smiled and Persis nodded approval.

'That's all right then. Yes, twice in India, it seems odd to think we were there long enough for things to go wrong twice over, and once travelling, over the water.'

'But then you must have come to us –you always have done when you've come back to visit,' said Una, lacing and interlacing her fingers as she paused in her work. The light had almost died, it was spread wispy and crimson across the sky and a full strawberry moon could be glimpsed through the clouds, making her vaguely aware how long they had sat out talking.

'No, it was when we were between places, travelling between being away and coming home, I mean. Besides, even if it hadn't been, I was a long time losing the idea that if I'd known less about those flowers, about pennyroyal, rue, and saffron, how they could be used and made to work, then perhaps none of it would have happened. Don't look so –I don't think it now, really.' Persis, who was by now beating an unspecified pattern against her arms; she said, 'and besides, there's always Oxford.' Persis, exhausted with the effort of giving birth to the words and stilling her fingers so that they rested flat upon her elbows. The air seemed in that moment to be pregnant with the possibility of the place, of the very newness of Oxford and what it could mean.

Una heard herself saying, 'there is. I wish you had said.' Then, having paused a quaver beat and not after all stopped, as Persis had supposed, 'the other evening, when you talked of Oxford, I had half an idea that perhaps…'

'You thought of a child, I know, it was in the way you looked and the question you almost asked, and not without reason, given the fuss I make of your Birdie.'

'That was part of it,' said Una.

'I thought it might be, but you were hardly likely to think of the natural opposite, were you? Besides, it's not all senseless fussing, my making such a favourite of her. The first time…it will sound fantastic, I suppose, but these things always do, I dreamed her. Not Birdie, she didn't look at all like her, she had mother's hair and mine, and it was almost 'living' as Aunt Anne would have said, and eyes Carl's colour, though your shape…and I woke from dreaming her and knew. Afterwards I wondered I should have been allowed that glimpse of her –but I'm glad of it now. Birdie reminds me of her a little. It's her music, her voice; there was music with her in that dream.' The jasmine, Una thought, smelt uncomfortably of heaven.

'I told you it would end up proving an earnest conversation,' said Persis into the expanding quiet and instinct won over rationality.

'Persis,' Una said quietly, coming and sitting by her, 'why didn't you write? I'm entirely too trusting of you, aren't I, expecting you to tell me things.'

'Sometimes,' Persis conceded, the suggestion of a smile in her eyes. 'It wouldn't fit in a letter; I did try and write –in the between moments where I was not forgetful but wanted to be doing – not to you though. Mother wrote once asking –gently, she's never anything but gentle –but I couldn't tell her that. She has had so many unhappinesses in her life, I couldn't add to them. She would have, she always has, taken our grievances for hers. She said once she wanted the world to be soft for us, I suppose because she was so long finding out it could be anything but sharp edges. It's not that she wouldn't have understood, she does have an ear for understanding, my mother, but she wants to take the corners off of the world for her children. And after all,' said Persis, laughing a little, 'I'm not so unlike her –I'm trying yet to keep her world cornerless. Certainly I never meant to bring you into the middle of this.'

'It had to go somewhere,' said Una reasonably, 'and I would have wondered, just a little –as you say, I had an half an idea that night when we talked about Oxford that perhaps there would be a cousin for John and Birdie some day, though I don't imagine I'd have mentioned it again if it hadn't been for this evening.'

'No,' said Persis, 'at the time I was relying on you not to. But I'm glad, somehow, that we've talked. There's been meaning in the words, or else between them.'

Somewhere down in the Glen could be heard the voices of children singing;how ma-ny miles to Ba-by-lon? Three-score miles and ten…It was so easy to mishear, from the way all of their voices echoed and re-echoed against the trees and the choppiness of the rhythm that for a moment both women heard something else and reflected that after all Babylon was not the only place you could get to and from by candlelight.

'I wonder,' said Persis, 'did you ever have cause to read 'Tam'?'

'Read it, no, but I've heard it read,' said Una meditatively, interlacing her hands and resting them at the back of her neck.

'Do you remember 'two span-lang wee unchristened bairns'?'

'Vividly.'

'That's a hand's length I think. I wonder if any of those children would have been so long.' Una shivered and it was only partly, she suspected, due to the treading of a goose over her grave.

'It's funny, I felt sure that Burns was distinctive to the school in Toronto. Did they set it across the country, do you suppose?' It was so unlike anything that had gone before, that Una could not think what to do but answer accordingly.

Drawing her arm through Persis's, because this in the end proved easier than taking a hand in her own, said, 'it wasn't in school I heard it, so it can't have been the whole country that set it. Walter took a fit of reading everything Scottish, don't you remember? There was Scott, Stevenson, Burns... I wonder why the witches and Meg were the thing that stuck, in all of that.'

'So do I,' said Persis, laughing for the first time that evening and uncrossing her arms.

'It must have been while I was in Toronto that you were subjected to that. I remember Stevenson anyway. Was it Kidnapped he read out that summer?'

'Among other things'

In the ensuing silence, punctuated only at intervals by the would-be music, Persis tried to cast her mind back to the days when Walter had read aloud to them, recreating the scene in her mind's eye; there was Walter under the White Lady, book in hand, Jem fussing noisily over the fire and Faith helping, Jerry was some way up the brook cleaning fish for frying, Nan and Di had been chattering, hadn't they all been? No, no, because in the memory Persis had conjured, she could see Una too, stiller and quieter than any of them and listening to Kidnapped –if indeed it had been that – with the same rapt attention the devout gave to the gospel reading on a Sunday. The memory dissolved jerkily and Persis turned to look thoughtfully at her friend.

'And you were telling me I oughtn't to be so close. You might have said.'

'Said what?' Una heard herself ask, though really she had no need to, the look Persis had turned on her was answer enough to that.

'I wasn't wrong before, was I, about you having more than your portion of waiting –you must have had it twice over, the way things turned out, to say nothing of Carl's eye or Jerry being wounded.'

'Let's say nothing then. We can leave it and have a nice conversation.' Una said, herself drawing inward now, not liking to drag up long-ago memories, especially so complicated as these ones were.

'We're about due one, I think.'

'We are, but isn't this a nice one?' and if it had been clear before that Persis had stumbled upon her well-kept secret of years ago, it was equally clear now from the light in her eyes that she had misunderstood; they would have to have talk it through after all.

'It's an old story, Persis, and like tapestry in the wrong light, much of its colours have faded, did so years ago. It's not at all what you're thinking it was –it was never any more than the unsubstantiated dream of my growing-up years; I had no reason to hold it so close or hope so hard.'

'You can't possibly know that,' said Persis, wanting wildly for this to be true. It would hardly be the first time, she reasoned, that Una should have misconstrued another person's perception of herself.

'I can,' said Una quietly, 'and I do. I knew it even then, I think. But like your angel wending its way back to Heaven, it doesn't matter now; it hasn't in a long while. You don't really think I'd have come to be here in the first place if such a dream hadn't gone the way of all other girlhood fancies?'

'You know I didn't mean that,' said Persis, pressing the arm that still rested in the crook of her own.

'I know you don't, and I don't especially mean that's what it was –only that one dream gave way to another. There's only so long anyone can go on waiting, I think.'

'There is, yes,' said Persis, thoughtful again. 'But why didn't you ever say? I can understand not liking to at the time but –'

'By the time I knew you well enough it had long ago ceased to govern my life the way it once did, and there hardly seemed sense in dredging the thing up for the sake of it.'

'I can see that, yes,' said Persis, more to the landscape, the river and the farm across the river than to anyone in particular. 'All the same. I wish I'd known.'

'Rather how I feel about you and yours this evening,' said Una. 'And I have more cause to feel so –it matters more with you in the moment than my long ago would-have-beens ever could. Do let's go in, sitting out here and talking of ghosts is getting to me, even if it is hardly witching hour.'

'Yes, all right,' said Persis, choosing not to argue over the weightiness of the past and its importance in the present.

'But it's a comfort to know I've come to the right person after all –that the impossibility of wanting something is something you know about.'

'I don't think you are wanting impossibly,' said Una firmly, 'life can't help casting long shadows, and it often does, but there are always other things to make up the difference, to balance the scale for life and God, and you too.'