It ran the length of the house in a narrow brick-walled strip, the way Beacon Hill gardens do β more courtyard than garden, a private green room with the sky for a ceiling. Eleanor Doyle had kept it the way she had kept everything in that house: generously, and with her hands. Now the beds were a tangle of last year's stems and this year's weeds, the little fountain was choked with leaves, and the bench under the rose arch held a fine grey coat of city dust that no one had disturbed in twenty-four months.
Nora found the door key on the third morning of her month, in the mudroom drawer where Mrs. K kept the keys nobody claimed.
"That garden is not part of the house routine," Mrs. K said, without looking up from her list.
"No," Nora agreed, and put the key in her apron pocket. "It's part of the house, though."
She took them out after lessons, the three of them, with a bucket and the kitchen's old scissors and a pair of her own gardening gloves gone soft at the fingers. Jack surveyed the wilderness the way he surveyed everything, from the threshold, hands behind his back.
"It's a lot of dead," he said.
"It's a lot of sleeping," Nora said. "Gardens do that. Come and see."
She taught them to pull by the root, to shake the soil off over the bed and not the path, to leave anything green until they'd asked it its name. Maisie worked with the total, silent concentration she brought to everything, hauling weed stems taller than herself to the bucket in both arms like firewood. Jack, once his hands were dirty, forgot to be a sentry. He found a worm and held it up with the solemnity of a boy presenting evidence, and Maisie leaned in close to look, and neither of them flinched, and Nora filed that away with the other small currencies she was counting in this house.
It was Jack who found the gloves.
They were in the little potting shed at the wall's end, hanging on their peg as if their owner had stepped out for tea: women's gardening gloves, canvas, printed with faded poppies, the right one worn nearly through at the thumb. He brought them to Nora held out in front of him, not touching them more than he had to, the way you'd carry something out of a church.
"They're my mother's," he said.
"I know," Nora said.
"She used to β " He stopped. "Mrs. K says she was out here all the time. In the summer she had tomatoes. She grew them in the bit where the sun gets in, by the wall. Shay said she used to give them to people. Just β people passing, sometimes. Tomatoes, to strangers."
"That sounds like her," Nora said, though she had never met Eleanor Doyle, and was beginning to feel she knew her better than anyone else in the house.
She didn't take the gloves from him. She waited, and after a moment Jack laid them across the bench, side by side, palm up, like a pair of hands at rest. Then he went back to the weeds with a ferocity that was not about weeds, and Nora let him have it. Grief in a nine-year-old looks like work, if you let it.
That evening Mrs. K found the bench wiped clean and the gloves gone from their peg, and she stood in the garden doorway a long time without saying anything at all. At dinner she put an extra spoonful of everything on Jack's plate and did not comment on the dirt still under his fingernails, which in her government of the house was roughly equivalent to a state apology.
"We'll want string," Nora said, washing up. "And sticks. For when things start growing."
"Things are not going to grow," Mrs. K said. "Nothing has grown in that garden in two years."
"No," Nora said. "That's why we're starting with the part we can do."
By the second afternoon they had cleared the sunny bed by the wall, and Maisie β who had said almost nothing for two afternoons, who said almost nothing ever, in the flat, careful way of a child rationing something β appeared in the kitchen doorway holding a paper packet she had plainly been given by Mrs. K, who plainly had a softer administration than her rules suggested.
"Seeds," Maisie announced.
"What kind?" Nora asked.
Maisie turned the packet over and read, with enormous care, off the back. "Sunflowers. The tall kind."
"The tall kind need the sunny bit," Nora said. "By the wall. That's the best place in this whole garden. Do you want to do the planting?"
Maisie nodded, and went down the cleared bed on her knees, and with the end of a pencil made her holes in a row so straight it bent Nora's heart, and dropped her seeds in one by one, and covered every one with both hands, patting, the way you settle a blanket over something you love. Then she stood up, dirt to the elbow, and regarded her work with a critic's eye.
"Why sunflowers?" Jack asked. He had appeared at her shoulder, his mother's gloves now tied by their strings to his belt, where they bumped against his leg when he moved. "There were other packets."
Maisie considered the bed, the wall, the narrow slot of sky above the Beacon Hill rooftops.
"Because they're the tallest," she said at last. "We plant them low, and they grow up high, and then the sky can see them." She nodded once, satisfied. "Even over the wall. The sky will see them from up there."
On the other side of the garden, at the study window, a curtain stood open that had been closed for two years.
Marcus Doyle watched his daughter pat the earth over seeds in his dead wife's garden, watched his son trail around behind the nanny with Eleanor's gloves at his belt like a favour, and something went through his chest so plainly that Shay, coming in with the afternoon's messages, stopped in the doorway and waited.
"Sir?"
"Nothing," Marcus said. "The meeting at the Meridian. Move it to four."
"You don't have a meeting at the Meridian," Shay said, after a moment.
Marcus looked at the garden a moment longer β the woman on her knees in the dirt laughing at something, the children orbiting her like she'd been installed there by gravity β and then closed the curtain, gently, the way you close a door on a room where someone is sleeping.
"Then find me one," he said.
Chapter 7: What the Street Sees
Frankie Doyle came up the kitchen steps on Friday night the way he always came β without knocking, with a bottle by the neck, and with his opinion already formed.
"Whisky," he announced to Mrs. K. "The good bottle. My brother's in a mood and I'm going to find out why."