Spiral Path (Night Calls Series Book 3) (30 page)

o0o

It turned out that the herb class was designed a lot like
Cousin Esme’s sanctuary. Slate flooring supported open shelves rising above my
head, as in a potter’s green room. Here individual student desks reigned, like
the one I had sat in to take my tests.

I was grateful for those single desks. If the boys had to
reach to smack each other on the back of the head, at least I had a fighting
chance of spotting them and separating them.

Two fireplaces warmed the huge space, one at the far end,
where decocting and infusing was done, and one at the long side, shared with
another chamber. It was a deep fire pit, however, and between that and the roar
of the flames, we did not hear the other group. Several large tables with
chairs completed the mixing area.

This room had several slates mounted on oak legs, like
Cousin Esme’s board. My plan was to use long, thin bandages across each corner
to tie my great-grandmother’s drawings upright. It worked better than I had
thought it would, holding the pictures without damaging them. I placed the
drawings so that the names of the plants were hidden. Then I closed up my
herbal journal to protect the other drawings and found a long stick with a
sharpened point and rubber wrapped around the grip.

I’d put on my mother’s older green dress. Working with
herbs, I didn’t want one of the nice dresses. I smoothed my face, because you
can’t smile for the first month of classes, or the students might run roughshod
over you. Then I braced myself for the arrival of my class of eight.

It turned out that I had met three of them. There was tiny
Moira O’Donnell, all flaming hair and huge blue eyes, and Daniel Williams,
Cathrin’s brother. The third student I recognized was “Mr. Smith,” the boy who
had created the biscuits with teeth. The other five, two girls and three boys,
were new to me, though I had seen them in the dining room.

“
Welcome
to Herbalism,” I announced. “I am Miss Sorensson. As we don’t know each other
yet, I would like you to identify yourselves before you first speak. We’re
going to start right up here with these herbs. I’d like you to come up and tell
me what they are.”

Well, I got lucky: in a ragged chorus of voices, mixed with
hands up in the air, I heard half a dozen different answers, including two
correct ones.

Excellent.

“
Everyone
sit down, now, and we will talk about it,” I said, moving to the blank slate
board and picking up some chalk. “Now, Mr. Williams, you said ‘Queen Anne’s
lace’. Which plant is Queen Anne’s lace?”

“
Ah . . .
all of them?” he suggested.

I wrote the answer down on the board. “Anyone else? Hands
please. If you shout I can’t hear anyone.”

And so it went. I soon had a good-sized list on the vertical
slate, ranging from Daniel’s guess of “all of them” to a boy who recognized cow
parsnip, although he insisted the drawings were wrong because cow parsnip
flowers always had a lavender tinge. The herb Angelica cropped up, too.

Moira O’Donnell, the smallest and also the youngest, was
actually the closest to a correct answer. “The third one is the Queen,” she
said. “I don’t know what the other ones are.”

This provoked a brief skirmish about whether the queen had a
single drop of red or purple in its flower petals—or no color at all.

“
Miss Sorensson, does the Queen have any color, or is it
just white? Is the color red or purple?” Jane Adams asked, her strong, sharp
nose and cheekbones and black curls making her look like a foreign
princess—which I did not think she was, but at Windward, you could never be
sure.

I
considered her question, and answered: “Yes.”

They
all looked puzzled.

“
The queen can have a red dot, or a purple dot, or no dot
at all.”

Several
groans and one “Oh, no!” were my reward.

“
Now, we have some strong opinions here. My next question
for you is this—how sure are you about your answer? Sure enough to eat the
roots of the plant you have chosen?”

Silence.
One young man’s hand moved toward his books, and I said: “I do not want
Anathema Nightroad’s opinion about these plants, Mr. Evanston. I want yours.”

Finally
Mr. Ian Riley, the oldest in the class and almost as new to Windward as I was,
said: “You’re not going to feed us those plants, are you?”

“
No.”

“
Then I don’t know which one is the queen, although I
suspect that one of them is. You don’t look like a person who enjoys the game
of asking for something that is not there.”

“
Mr.
Riley changes his vote to ‘I don’t know,’” I said briskly, writing it on the
slate.
A suspicious sort, are we, Mr.
Riley
?

The verbal wrestling match went on for a while, and as it
briefly died down, I said: “I think it’s time to tell you the answer.” Using
the pointer, I touched the third of the drawings. “This is the queen.” Moira
clapped her hands together in delight, while several other students looked
disappointed. “Now you may take your herbals and search through them for the
other herbs. You may come up to the drawings to look again, if you wish. No
helping each other with this, and please do not touch the drawings!”

Soon they were all at the board, heads bent over their huge
herbals or, in Moira’s case, on tiptoe to see a detail about a plant. I studied
them all, different in height and build, some of them confident, others shy. It
was good to see them all at the board. At least for now, I had their attention.

“
Fool’s
parsley is also called dog poison? One of these is
poisonous
?” a boy exclaimed loudly.

“
Not
just that one,” Daniel muttered, and then clamped his hand over his mouth.

When I finally got them to talk about what they had learned
today, it was plain that they were very excited about learning what hemlock
looked like, and that cow parsnip could be white or lavender.

It took a while to get them thinking on a larger scale.

We were out of time. I asked: “Which of the Rules of Magic
sums up what we have talked about today?”

The closest fire crackled and gave a pop, as it rushed
through a drop of resin. The two older girls looked at each other.

“‘
It
is not what we do not know that is dangerous; it is what we do not realize that
we do not know that is dangerous,’” Daniel Williams said clearly.

“
Or,
more simply, ‘You may not realize how much you
don’t
know.’ Thank you,
Mr. Williams—that was my meaning. Learning potions of any kind is the other
side of learning Latin. If you use the wrong word in a spell, you may endanger
your own life. If you use the wrong herb, you may injure or kill a patient.
This is a powerful art, ladies and gentlemen. I trust you will treat it with
respect. Tonight, look closely at these four plants. Compare their differences
and similarities. Tomorrow we will draw peppermint from a living plant, and I
will show you the difference between a tea made from fresh ingredients and one
made from dried ones. Remember to bring your colored pencils!”

The sound of scraping chairs came through the fire pit from
the other class. “And you are excused for today.”

They rushed from the room like a wave, sweeping out the
door. I leaned back against the solid teacher’s desk and sighed. And I thought
Latin was going to be the biggest challenge! Even doing that ritual wasn’t as
hard as keeping the attention of eight children for an hour.

And they wanted to be there . . . at least I thought they wanted
to be there. If the worst that would happen was Mr. Riley constantly arguing
with me, I would be fortunate.

Being the adult was hard.

o0o

People tell stories of the terror of being in a dark
vegetable cellar. Our cold storage areas were always shallow things, scarcely
as tall as my mother, and not too deep. I had wondered why people had a problem
with them; just leave the doors open, and go down during the day.

Then I saw what a cellar
could
look like.

Saturday approached: the day for my punishment, and Margaret’s.
We would have to cook. Mrs. Gardener showed us what we could use.

The cellar of Windward was larger than the kitchen and
service wing above it, spreading back like a spider’s legs in every possible
direction. There was even a passage that led to the river, Mrs. Gardener
informed us, but that was an exit only. Spells prevented anyone from entering
the house through that opening.

No windows, even tiny ones, let light into the cellar. Deck
prisms hid in the ceiling, like in Cousin Esme’s herb solar, beautiful carved
pieces of glass with flat tops and fat, turnip-shaped bottoms that were part of
the passageways above, reflecting light into the cellar below.

Before a winter’s dawn, however, those prisms were useless.
We depended on the footman, Roger, who carried a lantern down a staircase twice
the height of a man, and waited at the bottom until we had all safely descended.
Mrs. Gardener knew the way, and moved with the surety of a boat in its own
harbor. Margaret and I, however, had our skirts to manage on a strange ladder,
plus Margaret had brought hard charcoal and writing paper.

I hated skirts. They were designed to make women useless.

The cellars were dark, the walls stone, the ceiling barely
taller than Roger. Here I saw the only cobwebs allowed to stand at Windward. “Spiders
are our friends, you know,” Mrs. Gardener confided as she walked. “They catch
tiny insects that might threaten our vegetables and grain.”

True enough. But I hated brushing through a web. It took
forever to remove the clinging strands from my hair and clothing.

The passageway was fairly narrow—our dresses could catch at
any point—and the stone lining the walk was cold through my thin leather
slippers. Raw wood shelves and bins, some with the bark still peeling from
their edges, held everything needed by a busy household. Containers of
vegetables and apples, sacks of grain and of dried beans, cones of sugar, dried
herbs, barrels of fresh eggs preserved in salt . . . almost anything we’d want,
except the meat, which hung in a smokehouse outside.

Several bins glowed. I wanted to ask about that, but decided
it was not the time.

“
As
you can see, Miss Sorensson, we have plenty of apples. You are welcome to use
as many as you need.” She gestured into a small room off to one side. I ducked
in, and the footman held the lamp higher so I had a tiny gleam of light.

I saw at least three kinds of apples, maybe more. I took one
of each variety, placing them in the pocket of the apron I had tied on after
dressing that morning.

“
We
can taste them and decide which for the breakfast bread, and if we want a
cobbler for dinner,” I said to Margaret.

“
All
of those are good cooking apples. They hold their shape,” Mrs. Gardener said,
reaching past me and into a bin immediately to the right of the entrance. “This
is a good sauce apple. You might want some in your cobbler.” She handed me a
firm green apple with red stripes. “That’s a Northern Spy, that is. It is a new
apple in these parts. You may use up the Rhode Island Greenings, that
greenish-red round one you took. They won’t keep much longer; they’re at the
end of their life. It’s a good, tart cooking apple, those Rhode Island
Greenlings. That orange-colored one is a Blenheim Orange. Doctor Livingston
brought that sapling from Blenheim itself, when they first planted the orchard.
Nice, nutty flavor to those. We spell the lot of them, so they keep longer.”

I smiled at the orange apple I held in my hand, wanting to bite
into it right away. I had a feeling that Mrs. Gardener was enjoying this trip a
little too much. Margaret and I did need to eat something before our first
classes.

“
Mrs.
Gardener, we can’t take up your entire morning. Is there anything in the cellar
that we should not use? That you have plans for?” I asked as I placed the
Blenheim Orange into the apron pocket.

“
Well,”
she started, walking back into still another cellar room. “I would not want you
to
use up
anything—except the Rhode
Island Greenings. You may use them all. You girls are the first to have the
sense to plan a menu. If you would like, I will look at it before Saturday.”

“
I
am not sure that we can decide on the menu until Friday night,” I said quickly.
“We won’t know how many hands we have to help until then.”

“
Well,
you already have eight, I can tell you,” she said, smiling at us both. “Three
of them are young ones, but if you handle them well, they will make themselves
useful. Just don’t let James Smith wave that wand of his around!”

“
I
will teach him how to make biscuits without magic,” I replied, gently touching
Margaret’s back as I urged her to turn around.

“
Good.
I’ve been itching to have cooking classes, but part of the punishment is to
remind them that they don’t know everything. Still, it’s such a waste of food,”
Mrs. Gardener said mournfully.

“
My
mother used to say after a cooking lesson ‘That is what the pigs are for,’”
Margaret offered.

This idea tickled Mrs. Gardener so much that she burst out
laughing. Her response gave me time to capture Roger the footman’s attention
and start shepherding folk back to the stairs.

“
The
meat?” I went on.

“No
pork on Saturday.
If you want beef for stews, I will have the meat
brought in on Friday for you,” she answered, starting up the long staircase. “We
are low on venison right now, so don’t use any venison. No roast beef or veal,
mind. That’s for special occasions.”