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magnifying glass. Its eyes drew me even as they repelled me. What tool had been used here? A bodkin? Too fine. A knitting needle? Too blunt. The slim end of a finger-saw? The point of a surgical hook? The tip of a short-bladed amputation knife?
    One by one we unwrapped the bundles. Each was the same – the same tattered and bloody bandages, the same repulsive black-eyed doll, the same scattering of desiccated petals.
    ‘These are mostly rose petals,’ said Will, poking the rustling fragments with a pencil. He picked one up. It was as dry as dead skin.
    ‘I think these are petals from a black rose,’ I said. I examined one through the glass. ‘No rose in nature is truly black, but there are some exceptionally dark red varieties, fed with ink, that purport to be so.’
    ‘How contrived,’ said Will. ‘D’you know anything about the language of flowers?’
    But I had already been thinking about that pastime of the vain and idle, and had been trying to recall the meanings attributed to various flowers. Eliza Magorian, the Great Surgeon’s daughter, had been schooled by her mother in these obscure codes of middle-class sentiment, and she had once insisted on giving me a lesson. Drifting through the physic garden, she had made me an eccentric posy of purple-tufted lavender and fuzzy-stemmed borage.
    ‘Lavender for devotion, starflower for courage.’ Then, wrapped in a handkerchief to prevent its poison from touching my skin, she had given me the beautiful white and yellow flower of the bloodroot. ‘Celandine,’ she said. ‘A symbol of the pleasures yet to come.’ She had not smiled as she spoke, but had looked me directly in the eyes, so that I was almost sure that she knew my secret; almost sure that she was speaking about me, about both of us.
    Almost sure.
    Now, I reached across the table for my tweezers. Between their pointed tips I plucked up a small, fist-shaped seed capsule. ‘This is rue.’ I pinched at a withered shred of vegetation. ‘Here are the flowers that go with it.’
    ‘Rue,’ said Will. ‘Even I know what that means.’
    ‘Regret,’ I said, ‘is what it means. What it
is
is a herb that promotes menstruation and uterine contractions. The oil is a known abortifacient.’
    ‘The taking of a life before it is even born,’ said Will. ‘The law would call it murder.’
    ‘The law is made by men for their own ends,’ I replied. ‘Besides, I doubt these flowers are the fragments of a misplaced prescription.’
    ‘Can you identify any of the others?’
    ‘Hops,’ I said, pointing to a browny-green cone. ‘We use hops to improve the appetite and promote sleep, and as a liver tonic. In the language of flowers it signifies injustice.’
    I picked up a small, hard, triangular nub. ‘
Artemisia absinthium
,’ I said. ‘Also a medicinal herb. There’s undoubtedly meaning here, but why go to such lengths? Why bother with meaning if the flowers are hidden? What use is a message if it’s so obscure, and so secret? And was there more than one person involved? A language, even if it’s the language of flowers, is meant to be spoken to others.’
    ‘So what’s artemis absinthum?’ said Will.
    ‘
Artemisia absinthium
,’ I said. ‘Also known as wormwood.’
    For a moment, there was silence between us. I heard Will swallow. Then: ‘“
The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood
.” Revelations, chapter eight —’
    ‘Quite so,’ I said. ‘But in the language of flowers, wormwood means “bitter sorrow”. My father planted wormwood on my mother’s grave – at first, anyway. But nothing else would grow – it poisons the earth, you know – so I took it out. There are daffodils there now.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Will.
    I could tell that he was puzzled by my matter-of-fact tone. But my mother’s death had changed my life forever in the most