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our guests departed, I unrolled Willow’s last embroidery and scrutinized its stitches. I couldn’t see what Caroline did. I took a broad sheet of paper, my pencils and watercolor paints and spent day after day in our old schoolroom, reproducing as best I could Willow’s artistry. Perhaps if I retraced the marks her hands made I could understand them.
    Daisy abandoned me to befriend the new curate. I suspected her of only practicing her wiles and was sorry to see his painful blushes.
    When my map was finished I took it with me along the paths through the Marchgate Wood to Willow’s meadow. I stood with her pond behind me, like the satin stitched blue oval at the bottom left of her embroidered linen. The far wood was to my right, a swath of countless green crosses on the map. Beyond that was couching in gold, then thickly woven green crosses, shadowed with brown silk. The delicate fabric was stiff with them.
    I made my way through the far wood and into the meadow thick with golden grain. I squinted at the figure of a man coming toward me. It was Dickon Scard, just as it had been so many years before.
    “You’re home now?” I asked him, smiling while I held out my hand.
    “My father is poorly. What have you there?”
    I gave him my paper. “Willow stitched this for me in silk on linen.”
    “There’s more than one way to make a map.” He too saw Willow’s purpose. His manicured fingers, the mark of a city man, touched on a circle of white woven lines. “Do you know what this is?”
    “A fairy ring is my guess. We loved the fairies.” I had no shame to confess this to him.
    “Come with me.” We plunged into a darker, wilder piece of woodland, and yet beneath our feet were traces of an overgrown path. I paused when a shaft of sunlight blazed into the green darkness, and saw that a single line of black led through the thicket of crosses, Willow’s fanciful trees. I thought it was shading, but now I saw evidence of the trail we followed.
    Dickon and I climbed higher as the path grew steep. Then it flattened. I looked around for Willow’s circle of open ground, but beyond a circle of birches was something that stopped my breath.

Chapter Eight
     
    Hethering celebrated Jeremy’s coming of age with a formal ball. Daisy’s mother helped Father with the arrangements. Daisy was eighteen and this was her introduction to society. I was seventeen and overlooked in the planning, but I did have a new dress of silver white silk with a thin periwinkle sash.
    Father sent invitations to local society, distant relatives and Jeremy’s schoolmates. Our only disappointment was Caroline Fforde, homebound with a broken leg suffered in a fall from her horse. Hethering’s ballroom was opened, cleaned and polished, and I helped decorate it with garlands of Jemmy’s favorite roses. He and Christopher Fforde arrived late the night before the party. I was already deep in sleep from my exertions and didn’t hear the pebbles he tossed at my window.
    I entered the ballroom well after Daisy’s formal arrival, just in time to hear Father’s toast his heir presumptive.
    “I give you Jeremy Marchmont, the next master of Hethering.” Amid a chorus of ‘hear hears’ Father spoke on. “Jeremy has made us proud…at school. We look forward to his return.”
    Across the length of the room, I saw that Father’s hair was now completely white and that his hand trembled when he raised his glass. He turned to Jeremy, clearly expecting a gracious reply, but when I too looked at Jem, he was smiling at me.
    Nodding to the orchestra leader, he crossed the room, took my hand and led me into the first dance. Christopher Fforde hurried to claim Daisy and Jemmy’s birthday ball began the way he wanted.
    Father had to put a pleasant face over his fury, but I didn’t care. Jem was of age and out of his control. The estate wasn’t entailed, we could make our life together until Father saw reason. Father must give way to us, just as our teachers had