“Is it really the same stream, then? Or is it just two streams fairly close together?” Jack said.
“It’s—” Hazel paused. She was going to answer that of course it was the same stream—how could anyone be ridiculous enough to insist that it wasn’t?—but she wasn’t sure she had a good reason that proved she was right.
“Sometimes things just end,” Jack said. “Hey, look there.” He pointed toward a small cluster of flowers with small light green petals, so light they were almost pearlescent. Each flower had a pop of white at its center.
Hazel didn’t recognize them. Though she had walked this trail hundreds of times, the green flowers were so small and close to the ground that they just disappeared into the underbrush and moss.
“What are they?”
“I don’t know their proper name, I suppose, but my mum called them wortflower. She used to make teas from the roots. Said they were good at keeping us strong.” Jack hadn’t thought about his mother making him tea in years, but as soon as he conjured the recollection, he could smell it: the tea’s distinct, tannin bitterness. “I guess now that I think about it, maybe weeds were the only things she could afford to make tea out of.”
While Jack was still lost in his reverie, Hazel hopped off her horse and started to dig up a handful of the flowers, being careful to keep the milky white roots intact. “Folk medicine is often far more effective than the bleeding and cupping procedures they do at the hospitals,” she said. “Your mother must have learned it from somewhere.”
“I suppose so.” Jack didn’t offer anything else about his mother, or where he had come from, and Hazel didn’t pry. Jack was grateful for that. He didn’t want Hazel to look at him with pity, which to her credit, she never did. Hazel was one of the few well-to-do people Jack had ever met who didn’t act as though she were doing him a great service by deigning to interact with him.
When they got back to the stables, Jack lingered, brushing the horses even though the stable boy always groomed the horses at the end of the day. Betelgeuse tossed his mane in approval. The two had become fast friends after all. “Did you name him?” Jack asked, patting Betelgeuse’s neck. “Betelgeuse. Fancy star name.”
“My brother George did. He used to love the stars. When I was a child, he would sneak me up through the nursery window onto the roof and teach me the shapes in the stars. He was different than I am. I remember facts and figures. I have memorized all the bones of the body, and the acids I can use to dissolve flesh away. He knew stories. He was … kind.”
“I’m sorry you lost him,” Jack said.
“Thank you.”
Jack had run out of clever things to say—he had run through his stable of words, and if he stayed any longer, he would humiliate himself. “I’ll see you Sunday night,” he said abruptly and a little too loudly. “If you still want to dig, I mean.”
“I do,” Hazel said.
* * *
SUNDAY NIGHT, WHEN JACK ARRIVED AT Hawthornden, he found only one horse, Miss Rosalind, already saddled and with the cart attached.
“I figured that with you still being a beginner, we should probably ride just the one horse,” Hazel said, looping her foot into the stirrup and hoisting herself onto her horse’s back. “The road is a bit more treacherous than the castle property.”
“You’re sounding pretty smug for a girl who let me do all the digging last time,” he said, throwing his equipment into the horse’s cart. He reached out his hand to pet Miss Rosalind’s back haunches, but thought better of it.
“Someone has to be the brains of the operation, and someone has to be the brawn,” Hazel said.
“I assumed I was the good looks,” Jack said.
“No,” Hazel said, patting the velvety side of her horse’s neck. “That’s Miss Rosalind.”
The ride to the kirkyard seemed to take only a fraction of the time it had the week before. Hazel felt as though they had ridden for mere moments before the trees parted to reveal the spire of Saint Dwynwen’s. Jack’s hands had been around Hazel’s waist the entire ride, warm and comfortable. It was as if the curve of her back had been designed to press up against his chest, and she felt something like regret when she realized they needed to dismount and head toward the graveyard with their spades.
“He died of the fever?” Hazel asked when they had been digging long enough for a thin layer of sweat to have beaded on her forehead.