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June.

Linnet woke to light. Not the grey, rationed light of a Bath winter but the long, golden, unreasonable light of a June morning — five a.m. light, the kind that gets through curtains and finds you whether you want to be found or not.

She lay still. Left side of the bed — old habit, hard to break, though the whole bed was hers and she knew this and still woke on the edge, and that was fine, because not everything changes at once, and some habits are just habits, and not every holdover from a previous life needs to be corrected or analysed or assigned meaning. Sometimes you just sleep where you sleep.

Birds. A blackbird on the chimney pot — not singing so much as performing, a complicated liquid sequence that sounded like showing off and probably was. Traffic on the London Road, distant, a hum rather than a sound. And underneath those, faintly, from somewhere nearby — the bright rhythmic guitar of highlife. She didn’t need to identify the source. She knew where it was coming from. She’d known for months.

She got up. Made tea. The blue-glazed mug Ansel had brought her from a pottery in Stoke — the one that had replaced the handleless one, the replacement that had arrived without announcement, unnarrated, just there when she reached for it. She stood at the bay window and drank it, watching Vinegar Lane. The man with the dachshund — a different man, actually; she’d realised last month that there were two dachshund men on Vinegar Lane and she’d been conflating them for half a year. The woman on the bicycle. The postman with his trolley.

She dressed and walked to work. The route had worn itself into her body: left on Vinegar Lane, right at the newsagent, downhill past the shop on Chandos Row. The light was on inside. The silhouette at the bench. She lifted a hand as she passed. The silhouette lifted one back.

The lab. Her bench. Cressida already there, which was unusual — Cressida didn’t arrive before nine unless something had either gone wrong or gone very right.

“You’re early,” Linnet said.

“So are you.” Cressida set her mug down. “New acquisition on your bench. Private donor, seventeenth century, French. Water damage.”

“Of course water damage.”

а𝘤𝗍𝗶𝘷е c𝗈𝘮muո𝗶ty 𝗈𝘯 𝘨𝖺𝘭𝗻𝗼𝘷els.со𝘮

“They all have water damage. It’s the human condition expressed as paper degradation. You’ll enjoy it.”

Linnet went to her bench. The manuscript was in its acid-free box, waiting. She opened it and felt the pull — curiosity, respect, the low thrill of meeting something that had lasted three centuries and needed help lasting three more. The damage was extensive. Tide lines. Foxing. Mould along the lower margins. The illustrations were watercolour — medicinal plants, painted with a fidelity that made her chest tighten, because someone three hundred years ago had loaded a brush and placed each stroke with the conviction that getting the leaf veins right mattered, and they were right, it did matter, and she was holding the proof of it in her hands.

She worked all morning. Lost in it. The brush, the solvent, the swab — the physical rhythm of conservation, which was not thinking but a cousin of thinking, a state where the hands know more than the mind and the mind, for once, is content to follow.

At lunchtime, she walked to the shop.

The bell chimed. Ansel was at his bench. He looked up and his face did what it always did when she arrived — nothing dramatic, nothing cinematic, just a shift at the corners of his mouth and a settling of focus, the expression of a man who has been waiting for someone and is glad, plainly glad, that they’ve come.

“I brought lunch,” she said, holding up a bag.

“What is it?”

“Jollof rice. Your father’s recipe. I made it myself.”

His eyebrows went up. Delight crossed his face, followed by something more complicated — amusement, affection, the recognition that she had done something for him that involved his father’s kitchen and his father’s instructions and that this meant more than the rice.

“He’ll be furious you didn’t make it in his kitchen.”

“He can supervise next time.”

They ate at the bench. Side by side. The rice was — she had to be honest — slightly thin in the tomato base and not quite enough scotch bonnet. It was not as good as Amos’s. It would never be as good as Amos’s. But she’d cooked it from his instructions — a mix of Igbo and gesture and the occasional exasperated grab of the spoon — and she’d stood in her kitchen on Vinegar Lane and stirred the pot and thought of the Saturday in January when she’d cried into a bowl in a bookbinder’s kitchen and been handed a spoon and told, without words, this is how you come back to yourself: you stir.

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