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Eliza.
    â€œNo, this is for you,” she said. “And this.” She handed him the bag of coins. “Keep it safe.”
    The boy looked shocked and scared.
    â€œMr. Shawcross wanted to surprise you,” Eliza said, “and it looks like he did. After what happened to your parents, we want you to start fresh in America. You’ll have clothes, money, and this.” She gave him a letter of introduction, which she had written in the style of her husband. Who would know so far away?
    â€œKeep it safe, by your heart,” she said, steeling herself as she folded the letter and put it in the small leather case that had been her mother’s.
    â€œMissus,” Sean said in a whisper, his eyes brimming with tears.
    â€”
    When the
Eleanora
sailed out of Queenstown for New York, hours later on the afternoon tide, the snow was coming down in thin petals, like the blossoms of the Ballykinsale whitebeam savaged by the gale.
    Eliza leaned on Padraig, trampling the white blooms into the snow as she hobbled from the stable yard to the kitchen, wracked with silent grief. The startled cook settled her before the fire and poured her a mug of hot, sweet tea flavored with a strip of lemon peel and laced with brandy.
    Slowly Eliza came back to herself. She took another sip. It would do. But it couldn’t begin to thaw the cold place that had settled in her heart.
    EARLY SPRING 1820
    AUGUSTA, KENTUCKY
    When the viburnum—the wayfaring tree—bloomed a creamy white, it would be time to prune the roses, but he wouldn’t be there to do it.
    Sean O’Neil threw the last of the boxwood clippings into the bonfire. He had once again restored order to the garden, a sun-warmed refuge from the dark wildwood on either side of the river and as far as the eye could see in the hills beyond.
    He could clear his head in a garden, where the sunlight could make its way in and the plants could breathe.
    He straightened up, brushing the debris from the linen shirt he wore like a smock. When he arrived in New York, his clothes had been the clothes of a gentleman, but his old work boots told a different story. Soon, he had sold the fine bottle green coat to a tailor and had bought instead a dead man’s buckskin trousers at a market stall. They better fit his new life.
    Traveling on a flatboat from New York to Philadelphia, he had kept his letter of introduction safe in all weather, and there had been all weather, such like he had never known in Ireland.
    Melting heat, sodden heat, dry heat. Bone-jarring cold, rain that fell sideways, waterspouts on the river.
    But the letter from Charles Shawcross had opened doors at the Bartram family’s botanic garden across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. He would have liked to stay there and study the native plants that the Quaker John Bartram had brought back from his travels. In the Bartram garden, Sean had seen the beautiful magnolias, mountain laurels, azaleas, and rhododendrons flower in spring and the sugar maples, black gums, viburnum, and sumac blaze with color in autumn, a world of difference from the plants he had learned to cultivate at home.
    He could have learned so much.
    But there was always that bit of unpleasant business about being Irish, and Sean had had to move on.
    And now he had to move on, yet again, from Ezekiel Peabody’s garden in this little village on the banks of the Ohio River, although this was not about Sean’s accent or his clothes or the presumption that he was as low as a Negro.
    The herb woman had come that morning to dig the last of Mr. Peabody’s comfrey root, the plant Sean knew by the Gaelic name
lus cnámh
. The root was black, but its inner flesh was almost stark white. She once used it to make liniment to ease the old man’s aches and pains. But no more. Mr. Peabody had been dead a fortnight.
    Peabody’s son and his wife now occupied the home—and thegarden. They had brought their slaves, a housemaid