Writing a story about fae and the adoption system, Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic, I found that magical realism and Celtic traditions offered fertile ground for the myths around identity and belonging, Stella’s story. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

My father was one of five sons of Irish immigrants to New York City. He shared recordings of traditional music with me. My mother surrounded me with British and European fairy tales, folklore, and fables. I learned to read inside those worlds. I still do.

Many years later, a DNA test revealed my ancestry is rooted in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. My full-length memoir explores what it means, as an adopted person, to learn and live in both my native and acquired heritage, and whether it is possible to accept both as gifts.

As a retired landscape gardener, I have long felt the deep connection between humans, wild, and cultivated spaces. We ignore that relationship at our peril. The Silverton Estate imagines a world where such liminal spaces are honored. Elizabeth Silverton’s work as a botanist, herbalist, garden designer, and medieval historian draws from British horticultural traditions and medieval monastic gardens. Sarah Caldwell follows in her footsteps, making the Estate her home and living laboratory. Sarah’s scientific approach and Cedra’s Magic are part of Stella’s life, not in opposition, but somewhat in dialogue.

In the worldview and practice of the eminent 13th-century Myddfai Physicians of Wales, Rhiwallon the Physician and his sons, healing takes place when ways of knowing are aligned with the empirical and the intuitive, the botanical and the spiritual, the rational and the mystical. Although boundaries between the supernatural and human world exist, they are permeable, with various consequences. The Myddfai Physicians were descended from the Lady of the Lake, according to the legend.

I am not a folklorist like Helen, nor an herbalist. I approach these traditions with respect, while also trying to tell a truthful story about adoption from an adoptee’s perspective; about the systems that act on human lives.

Stella’s gifts are real. Her half-fae heritage is linked to the Tuatha Dé Danann, a mythic people of Ireland with the skills of demi-gods, artistry, and druidic magic. After a final battle, they retreat into the Otherworld, where they are transformed into the Irish fairy folk. Their legacy is chronicled in The Invasions, set down by Medieval Catholic clerics, offering the Irish a sense of origin, identity, and belonging.

In the novella, the Fae Council: Cedra, Selwyn, and Eleris are complex, capricious, and unreliable. Cedra’s training method is bizarre, but Stella needs her guidance, like she needs Sarah’s observations and notes. They both seem to have a benevolent aim: to see Stella as a whole person.

Celtic tradition recognizes the power of naming, and of holding more than one truth at once. Either-or thinking can fracture identity. We are complex, nuanced. Imperfect. Can’t be fixed. Ruth Ann, Stella, Questa. Three names, dual nature, one life.

Thank you for reading,

I’d love to hear from you. What resonated? What did I leave out? How do we honor traditional stories while also shaping new ones?

Have you read the novella, either in the series on Substack or the ebook?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Like the best hybrids, the Silverton Estate’s Medieval Monastery Garden is a liminal space where growth thrives with both structure and a bit of the wild, where roots connect past to present. Where boundaries blur.

Stella, an adoptee, begins to sense her half-fae nature as her metaphysical abilities awaken, stirring longing and confusion about her place within her extended family. From her omniscient–transcendent perspective, she explores identity fracture, the ethics of adoption, the right to one’s true story, and the tension between what we observe to be true and the myths we choose to believe.

In this enchanted tale, ancient cedars serve as anchors, black roses mark thresholds, and morning glories bloom between worlds. The narrative shifts, like the Cedar Dryad herself, between clarity and lyricism, between forest wilds and manicured medieval garden, weaving botanical wisdom, fae magic, folklore, and the ache of adoption, identity, and the longing to belong.

Through the Yew Hedge is a coming-of-age story for anyone who understands what it means to live between worlds: caught between love and loss, concealment and radical truth, Stella must claim her entire inheritance.

Magical Realism and the Language of Adoption

As an adoptee, I’ve found that writing magical realism helps illuminate psychological experiences, offering a way to explore interior fragmentation, inherited trauma, and identity formation through images and metaphor. When I sat down to tell Stella’s story, I realized that the stark language of adoption law, severance, sealed records, and legal erasure didn’t capture the full texture of what it feels like to live inside that rupture. What little I know of the clinical language doesn’t hold the dislocation, the sense of being divided from yourself, the strange double-consciousness of belonging and not belonging simultaneously.

That’s when magic entered the telling.

Through the Yew Hedge is my attempt to make visible what is masked in infant relinquishment and the transfer of the child to strangers, the pre-verbal fracture that occurs when origin stories are stolen and sealed. My young adult experience was marked by identity bewilderment and fragmentation, a nonsensical state of straddling two worlds: one lacking an intrinsic bond and one entirely faceless and disembodied. Yes, that was a scary story!

Many adoptees will recognize this duality. I hope I can give a voice to these sensations where diagnoses and ordinary language fall short and can be hard to articulate to others.

The Story as Framework

When botanist Sarah Caldwell finds an infant in the fairy ring of Silverton Estate on a Winter Solstice morning, she names her Stella and raises her with love and scientific curiosity. But Stella possesses “mirror-sight,” the ability to see across time and through reflections, to perceive the thresholds between worlds that others walk past without noticing. I use this as a central metaphor for the adoptee experience: the sense of holding multiple realities at once, of perceiving fractures in identity that others cannot see, of living in a kind of heightened perception that can feel isolating.

Through Stella’s journey, the story explores several interlocking themes:

Severance and Reunion

At fourteen, Stella meets her first mother, Ellen, whose own mirror-sight shaped her impossible decision at a bus station on a winter morning. The reunion doesn’t erase the years of separation, and it doesn’t resolve the grief. But it begins the work of integration; the slow process of learning that you can love the person who raised you and grieve the person you were separated from, that these two truths don’t cancel each other out.

What I wanted to show was reunion as it actually is: complicated, tender, sometimes awkward, and necessary. Ellen is not the savior who “makes it all better.” Sarah is not the villain who stole Stella’s life. They are both women who loved Stella in the best ways they knew how, within impossible constraints. Stella’s task isn’t to choose between them. It’s to learn to hold them both. That is no easy task.

Identity and Wholeness

Stella carries three names: Ruth Ann (the identity sealed away at birth), Stella (the name given to her by the woman who raised her), and Questa (the name she chooses for herself, albeit with guidance from her fae guardians, her own reclamation). Her movement toward wholeness reflects what happens when an adoptee finally gains access to her full origin story. It’s not that one name is “real” and the others aren’t. They’re all real. They all matter.

Withholding a person’s vital information, whether for convenience, protection, or by state seal, is an injustice with lasting psychological impact. When Sarah keeps the adoption papers hidden, she believes she’s protecting Stella. But what Stella experiences is a theft of self-knowledge, a message that parts of her own story are dangerous or shameful. The book doesn’t ask us to condemn Sarah for this. It asks us to see the cost clearly.

Adoptive Parenting Across Difference

Sarah struggles to support her adopted daughter’s abilities, which she cannot fully understand. As a scientist, she measures, documents, and tries to make sense of Stella’s unusual gifts. But Stella’s mirror-sight isn’t a disorder to be managed. It’s an inheritance to be cultivated. Sarah has to learn this slowly, through watching her daughter work with Cedra, the Dryad guardian who understands what Sarah cannot.

This mirrors what many adoptive parents face: the reality that your child’s inner experience may remain partially opaque to you. You cannot access their genetic history, their family patterns, the invisible inheritances they carry. You can’t know what triggers might surface years later, the sensitivities that might emerge from their neonatal loss. We hope to have the space and support for naming those experiences without shame or disappointment, without them being explained away.

Patterns

Ellen’s uncontrolled mirror-sight shaped her entire life and her devastating choice to place Ruth Ann. What goes unnamed in one generation often reappears in the next, demanding acknowledgment. Stella inherits not just Ellen’s gifts, but also the weight of the decisions Ellen made under conditions of crisis.

This is where the magical realism deepens the story. The ability to see across worlds isn’t just poetic. It’s a real inheritance that carries real consequences. And learning to work with that inheritance rather than running from it or denying it becomes part of Stella’s healing.

Belonging Without Choosing

The story resists “either/or” thinking. It imagines belonging, not by choosing between identities, but by building bridges between them. To learn to hold both truths at once. Stella doesn’t have to decide whether she “really” belongs to Sarah or to Ellen. She belongs to both. She is both Ruth Ann and Stella. And when she chooses the name Questa, she’s not erasing the previous names. She’s integrating them.

This matters because so much adoption discourse forces people to choose: Are you grateful? Are you angry? Do you belong to your adoptive family or your birth family? The real answer is always more complicated. The real answer is yes to all of it.

The Garden as Sanctuary

Elizabeth Silverton’s medieval monastery garden serves as both a literal sanctuary and a symbolic container. It is a space intentionally designed: water systems, plant selection, and architectural intention for those with heightened perception. Where differently abled is not a pathology but a gift. Where unusual ways of seeing can be cultivated rather than suppressed.

I spent fifteen years working as a horticulturist, and I learned something essential: plants respond to attention, to intention, to the person tending them. A garden isn’t passive scenery. It’s a relationship. The Victorian botanist, Elizabeth, understood this. She designed The Garden not just as a beautiful space, but as a healing space, where the plants offer solace and comfort, medicine in the ancient monastic tradition. Where water channels mark thresholds, and the cedars hold memory.

Nature becomes teacher, witness, and stabilizer in the narrative. The cycles of growth and dormancy help us understand grief and healing: the slow return of what seems lifeless, from the patient roots beneath the surface. The healing that happens in the quiet tending, in the presence of something older than one’s own confusion.

For the Adoption Community

The adoptee’s dual consciousness. The simultaneous belonging and not-belonging. The feeling that you’re never quite fully here or fully there. Stella’s mirror-sight literalizes this: she can see both worlds at once, but moving fully into either one requires grounding and intention. This is the psychological reality of many adoptees: you’re always perceiving multiple realities. The work is learning not to get lost in the reflections.

The adoptive parent’s navigation of unknown, invisible inheritances. Sarah can provide love and protection and botanical expertise. But she can’t know Ellen’s story. She can’t fully understand the fae inheritance. She has to hold space for knowledge that will always be partially opaque to her. This is the actual work of adoptive parenting across difference; not trying to fully understand your child’s invisible inheritances, but creating a sanctuary space for them to be explored and honored.

The birth parents’ impossible choices were made under conditions of crisis or coercion. Ellen’s decision to place Ruth Ann comes from desperation, from the whispered promises of the fae that her baby will be safe and found. She doesn’t have access to the information or resources that would have allowed her to parent. The story doesn’t excuse the systems that created this impossibility. It honors Ellen’s humanity and her ongoing love.

What wholeness can look like when identity has been legally and emotionally severed. Not “getting over it.” Not “moving on.” But integration—the work of learning to hold Ruth Ann and Stella and Quella simultaneously, without choosing between them, without erasing any part of the story.

Sarah’s character arc, using her botanical expertise to support her daughter’s development, reflects something I believe is true: professional passion can meet personal mission when parents learn to work with rather than against their child’s essential nature. Sarah doesn’t try to “fix” Stella’s mirror-sight. She creates conditions where Stella can develop her gifts safely. She bears witness to her daughter’s integration. She learns to ask Cedra for help. This, I think, is what adoption-informed parenting looks like.

Thank you for following Stella’s journey through all twelve episodes. Whether you’ve walked through the yew hedge with Questa from the beginning, or you’re discovering the garden now, we’re grateful you’re here.
More to come on Behind The Hedge, Roots & Branches, and Seasons.

The complete novella is available as an e-book. The illustrated serial version remains here on Substack for reading at your own pace.

There’s space in the comments, if you’d like to share: What resonated with you in this story? What did you recognize as your own experience?

With gratitude,

Leave a comment

Welcome back!
Our story began on a Winter Solstice when a botanist found an infant in an enchanted garden. We close at Solstice and the Third Council, in the same fairy ring, with the integration of Ruth Ann’s inheritance and identity. The ceremony does not repair what was shattered in severance, undo the system’s erasure, or deny grief. It affirms continuity.

Cedar and Iron
As the days grew shorter, Cedra began to train me to prepare for the Third Council on the Winter Solstice, to commemorate the day Sarah found me in the Fairy Ring when I was three months old. It would mark a new threshold.

The first time Cedra trained me at the Iron Fountain, before Ellen came to live at the cottage, Sarah and Helen supported me. Helen said, “Just like in the old story of The Three Wells, how the middle well shows things as they truly are, but requires a proper approach.”

Cedra had said: Elizabeth Silverton chose this Iron Fountain. She understood the protective properties of cold iron, how it anchors and stabilizes reflections.

Helen had added, “Like the iron horseshoes in old folklore, they weren’t just luck, they were boundaries.”

The folklorist understands that iron creates a frame that constrains the opening. Without such boundaries, water reflections become... unpredictable. Remember the sequence: First, ground yourself through the cedar memory. Second, establish your tether, pattern, and purpose, protection through design.

Today, we would work in Cedar Grove, where iron-rich soil provided grounding against the disorienting effects of advanced mirror-walking, the combination of elements, living cedar, buried iron, and snow, creating ideal conditions for developing mastery.

Cedra explained as we practiced navigation through all reflective layers:
The tree represents life, connection, and continuity. The iron provides stability, protection, and grounding. Together, they teach balance; how to move between worlds without losing anchor.

These exercises challenged me more than any yet presented to me, requiring active manipulation of mirror passages, temporary doorways, stabilized reflections, keeping clear return paths, while exploring possibilities. My grief strengthened me.

Loss deepens the sight, Pain creates cracks in perception, giving awareness to emerge.

I was learning to access the deep sight. I later would understand the qualities of empathy and intuition. As half-fae, half-human, I would know this higher truth to be the ability to seek and help lost souls like Emily, for bridging gaps that mundane mirror-walking could not.

The iron in the soil taught me about integrity, about boundary protection. This ability would allow me to hold onto my identity when confronted with collective consciousness, a vital skill in resisting easy and dangerous pulls to escape sadness, which would permit the dissolution of self. Cedars live for many centuries, showing their connection to life-force.

I felt ready for the Third Council ceremony, where I would receive the Fae’s blessing and become an active participant in the magic that this turning of the year requires. My training transformed me from a protected child into a young adult member of the mirror-walker community. I would carry Ellen’s legacy while being true to myself and accepting a role in my human family.

The household awakened before dawn to greet the day of my Third Council. Sarah stood at the AGA cooker, coaxing steam from our old kettle. Tiny Morning Glories, the petite blue cups, were opening against the cold glass, like a memory of the Winter Solstice dawn Sarah had found me in the Fairy Ring.

Helen set out the scones she’d baked the night before. We three were as solemn as the occasion seemed to demand, like the hush of heavy snowfall.

Charles tapped on the kitchen door. He and Margaret stepped in, bundled up. “We’d like to be there, if you’ll have us.”

My chosen family was there, ready to witness the completion of a journey they’d all helped make possible. James had come around with the big sleigh to ride us all to The Garden for what was expected to be a brief ceremony. Charles had wrapped hot bricks in burlap to toast our feet on the wooden floorboards. Margaret tucked wool blankets around us all, and we settled in.

The two ponies knew the way, parting the deep snow like a sea to let us pass. James pulled the reins to a gentle stop outside the Yew Hedge. “We’ll wait here,” he said.

Charles, Margaret, James, and Helen thought it best to witness the ceremony from the warm comfort of the sleigh, while within earshot. Margaret poured tea from her thermos into the four awaiting mugs, steam silvering in the frosty air. “Take your time!” she said to me. “We’ll be right here with the ponies.”

The boundaries between worlds grew thin as I stepped across the herb rings, this time with Sarah. Like my first entrance at three-months, when my Fae Guardians delivered me there in a Moses basket, tepid vapors rose, softening the snow of The Inner Sanctum.

Sarah gasped in surprised recognition of Cedra, who wore snow pants, heavy boots, and a woolen hat with ear flaps. My Mentor announced:

Today marks Questa’s identity integration, the day she completes what began when she arrived in this place.

Several blue morning glory flowers opened on the vine as Selwyn materialized through the arbor, saying:
Fourteen years the seasons have turned, and you have grown to be a Seeker, ready for full integration.

Eleris: Speak your name given at birth, child of Ellen’s line.

“Ruth Ann,” it carried on the vapors.

Selwyn beckoned: Speak the name chosen in love, daughter of Sarah’s heart.

“Stella,” snowflakes as stardust alighted on my shoulders.

Cedra: Now speak the name discovered through seeking, Bridge-Walker Between Realms.

“I am Questa!” My voice powered through the morning stillness, across the Silverton Estate.

Three Fae: Speak your integrated truth.

I felt my words rise:
“I am Ruth Ann Stella Questa, born of fairy blood, raised in human love, walking between worlds as Guardian and Guide.”

The Fairy Ring glowed like the Aurora. The herbs shone like silver moons. Above and around us, the blue winter air pulsed, and the Cedar Grove swayed.

Cedra intoned:
So you are named in all realms, Guardian of Thresholds, Keeper of the Sight, and Bridge Between Worlds.

From the sleigh, I heard Margaret, “Oh my.”
Charles and James responded in unison, “Well, I’ll be.”
Grandma Helen, who had nurtured my love of storytelling, held a hanky to her eyes.

The two ponies whinnied and tossed their manes back in pride.

My Three Guardians, as they passed through the Yew Hedge, bowed their heads toward my family before fading back into the second grove into their cozy, mossy-roofed hut.

Sarah and I climbed into the sleigh, James clicked to the ponies, and we started for home.
“Well,” he said, breaking the stunned silence, “that’s certainly going into the Estate’s Archives!”

Seeing Ellen
At breakfast, I’d invited Helen and Sarah to the Hidden Library for a quiet remembrance of Ellen. I led them after the Council Ceremony through the Manor’s quiet south wing and drew aside the tapestry that concealed the entrance. As always, Elizabeth Silverton’s ancient volumes breathed a welcome and the excitement of learning into the otherwise stale air.

At my request, Sarah brought three white candles and a chip of cedar.

Helen carried a tiny crystal bowl of snow water. I had on the triskelion pendant and chain that Ellen took from her neck and hung around mine in the days before her passing, insisting I wear it for protection. I carried Ellen’s silver-backed table mirror and the obsidian worry stone from her grimoire box.

“Ellen’s family had a tradition of mirror scrying,” I said in a reverent library whisper. We sat in Elizabeth’s reading alcove around the low, round oak table inlaid with Celtic runes. “She taught me the safe way, with proper anchoring and clear intention.” Sarah was concerned, but I assured her this wouldn’t be like the event that caused such consternation during Ellen’s autumn lesson. Helen placed the candles at three points around the mirror. Sarah sprinkled snow water, and tiny prisms danced in the crystal bowl and candlelight.

“Ellen,” I said to the mirror’s surface, “we honor your passage and celebrate the integration you made possible.”

The mirror’s surface rippled like disturbed water, then cleared to show Ellen’s hands— hands that had written in the grimoire, hands that had held me as an infant, hands that had taught me to read frost patterns for safe reflection only a month ago.

“She’s acknowledging us,” Helen whispered.

“She knows Stella—Questa—is safe,” Sarah said.

In the mirror’s depths, Ellen’s hands held a single morning-glory blossom that bloomed and faded in an endless cycle— a symbol of an ongoing connection across the boundary of loss.

“Thank you,” I whispered to the reflection. “For the name that connected me to our lineage. For the courage to let me go. For teaching me that love transcends separation.”

The morning glory in Ellen’s hands blazed with blue light once, then faded as the mirror returned to ordinary reflection. A sense of her presence, the awareness of her love, lingered.

“The circle is complete,” Helen said. “Birth mother, adoptive mother, and integrated daughter, all honored.”

We blew out the candles and stood to leave the Hidden Library. In a wall mirror, a motion—a blur—caught my eye. Three figures were walking together through a garden. Ellen was not alone.

This Winter Solstice marked my integration as well as the completion of a pattern generations in the making. The Garden remembered everything.

The mirrors reflected the truth. And love, I had learned, was the strongest magic of all.

We hope you have enjoyed the novella-in-series.
Thank you for walking this path with Stella — Ruth Ann — Questa over the past twelve weeks, through severance, reunion, and integration — Through the Yew Hedge.

e-book

Coming soon in illustrated softcover.

What Comes After:

Future posts in Behind The Hedge will include thoughts about adoption from the adoptee’s perspective, process notes about the author’s link from personal essay and memoir to fairy tale, and the myth of the Chosen Child.

Leave a comment

With the Third Council complete, the Garden rests, but not all thresholds close.
For those who sensed that Stella’s integration was not the end,
but the beginning of a deeper reckoning, a sequel is forthcoming…
Thank you!

Subscribe now

Family Patterns

Sarah’s academic world had expanded to embrace the changes. Her study transformed from her academic sanctuary into a liminal space where truths coexisted. Medieval herbals and ancient texts about family magic lived with Botany textbooks. Embellishing the margins of her notebooks and folios with symbols and florals wasn’t unusual, but now she recorded what she once considered peculiar phenomena as mundane occurrences. Most importantly, Sarah showed her acceptance of my reunion with my natural mother after our long, unnatural separation, and my inherited fairy sight.

The Garden’s Essence

Sarah and James, taking a slow Saturday afternoon out of the heat, were chatting in the Archives lab. James set aside the file of genetic reports. “Do you remember that soil sample you collected several years ago? It’s been in the back of the specimen refrigerator all this time.”

Sarah blinked, “What? You kept it? It’s got to be covered in Rhizopus!”

“Yes. I did. It seemed... important. And I’ve compared a sample against Stella’s DNA results. I thought you should know, the fungal DNA fragments show patterns just as unusual as her markers.”

“Don’t try to tell me Stella’s genetic makeup is akin to bread mold...”

Sarah’s chuckle and facetious tone didn’t surprise James. Lately, she seemed freer, more accepting of the magic around her. Still, James rolled his eyes.

The Garden’s blood, bottled in a beaker, had waited for the right moment to speak. “Even the soil remembers,” James said.

Extraordinary Results
On a bright July afternoon, James visited The Guest Cottage with the DNA test kit he’d ordered for Ellen. She’d agreed to provide a saliva sample, as I had the previous fall. The combined results of our genetic tests could help me understand my heritage and bridge ancient lore to modern science.

“What we have learned from Stella’s test is that your family’s genetic pattern is extraordinary,” James said. “There are markers that appear in less than 0.01% of the general population...”

“My grandmother called it ‘the old blood,’” Ellen replied. “She said it came from beyond the mirrors, but I always thought that was her way of explaining what she didn’t understand.”

James said, “Science and folklore may describe the same phenomenon in different languages. What matters is accurate translation between systems of knowledge.”

Shimmering Sequences

Ellen needed more rest on the hottest days, preferring the cedar breezes through the cottage windows. I’d retreat to the cool, quiet of our high-ceilinged first-floor library, and the comfort of Elizabeth’s antique sofa, as I had on hot and rainy days with Helen since childhood.

One stifling late July afternoon, James set Ellen’s results with mine on the reading table. I noticed a silver presence from the library looking glass – Eleris, overseeing us with her spectral gaze.

James said. “There are records, if you know where to look,” a pet expression of his. “It seems that the mirror-sight manifests differently through generations,” James continued, perhaps sensing something beyond ordinary perception. From my point of view, the results glowed; the markers highlighted colors that seemed to shift. Perhaps it was scientific truth reacting to fairy sight—the genetic markers revealing the magic of heredity.

“The markers remain remarkably consistent: what your mother called ‘the old blood’ shows up here—” he pointed to a specific sequence, “—and here. Both locations are associated with neurological structures involved in visual processing and perception filtering.”

While James spoke, the ancient Sansevieria, “Snake Plant,” that rested on the mahogany side table, perhaps since Elizabeth’s day, but never bloomed in my memory, sprouted a long stalk and produced tiny lily-like buds that burst open within ten seconds. It was Selwyn’s presence manifest in the language of flowers.

“The most fascinating aspect is the correlation between these genetic markers and historical records of the Silverton Estate,” James added, gesturing to ancient family trees and property documents where certain names appeared with special notations—symbols I now recognized as private language indicating mirror-walkers in previous generations.

Had James seen the plant bloom? A faint cedar scent filled the room. It was Cedra to acknowledge the connection between bloodlines and land, inheritance and place. The three fae converged as witnesses to the scientific confirmation of magical lineage.

The afternoon light filtered through the sheer library curtains, across the papers, and I leaned forward when I saw something unusual in the printed sequences.

“These markers here,” James pointed to a section of the results, “show maternal lineage from regions with the highest concentration of documented ‘sight’ accounts: Northern Scotland, Western Ireland, and the Isle of Man. It’s the Celtic triangulation where accounts of fairy sight remained strongest into the modern era.”

I wasn’t listening to the geographic explanation, but I was transfixed by what I saw on the page. The silver-blue highlighted sequences now shimmered and pulsed like morning glories outside the library window; that now seemed to beckon in response.

“Stella?” Sarah had entered the library and noticed my fixed gaze.

“The sequences,” I whispered. “They’re moving.”

James saw nothing more unusual in the test results than what he’d noted earlier. “What do you mean?”

“These particular markers,” I repeated, pointing to the sections he had identified, “they shimmer like they’re written in moonlight.”

Sarah exchanged a glance with James. “What do they look like to you?”

“Like Celtic spirals,” I said. “Triple spirals, similar to the ones in the Garden, but alive.”

James took notes, documenting the locations of shimmer to markers. We mapped a pattern that, when traced onto paper later, formed an intricate Celtic knot, like one repeated in the stones of the Monastery Garden.

“Your DNA must carry a signature invisible to standard testing,” said James, holding up his hands, shaking his head, “evidence of your dual fae and mortal heritage, that only mirror-sight reveals.”

Blood Remembers

After James’s analysis, I thought about the silvery patterns that pulsed with life beneath the printed results. That evening, the sweet pea vines in the Keeper’s Cottage Garden drew my attention. Their tendrils curled not only in response to their support but also in double-helix patterns. Like they were telling me something. The Estate had inhaled the day’s discussion and now exhaled in stillness.

I rested on the cedar bench under Margaret’s arbor. In the fading light, I saw the luminescent silvery-blue pattern that James identified as unique to mirror-seers from the Celtic triangulation.

Your mother had this same marker...

The voice came from behind the arbor. I didn’t startle when Cedra stepped from behind a column of sweet peas, her form like moonlight.

...as did her mother before her, and back through your line to when our worlds were one.

A rustling in Margaret’s cut flower beds was Selwyn and Eleris, coming to join us. They flowed toward the arbor, translucent in the deepening twilight. It was rare to see all three fae together outside a formal council, but since the trio had been present in the library earlier, I wasn’t surprised to see them. Their presence made the air feel thinner.

The Garden responds to blood knowledge. Plants recognize what flows in your veins. The sweet pea vines trembled in their spiral patterns.

“Is that why the plants always reacted to me? Because of my blood?” I asked.

Blood remembers, said Eleris, bending to look at the charts beside me on the bench. Silvery trails connected markers. What science has only recently discovered, the ancient ones always knew. She circled the arbor, and in her breezy voice, continued: Your blood carries memories older than human words. Memories of when boundaries between worlds were permeable.

The three spoke in turn, in a rhythm that resonated through Margaret’s garden:

Morning glories bloomed impossibly in the twilight, their blue-purple flowers opening in sequence to form a garden path. I gathered my charts—it was time to go home. Margaret stepped out of the Keeper’s Cottage, smiling and waving.

The nearest window of The Manor House gleamed, although not from light within. In its reflection, I could see the pattern of my Celtic heritage connecting me to both mortal and fairy lineages. The quiet fire of Brigid’s forge and hearth braided with older currents of the Tuatha Dé Danann. I discovered my inheritance was a weaving of song and flame, soil and story, blessing and burden. I stood between worlds; not accident, but memory. My Guardians dissolved into the forest, merging with the shadows.

August Storms

Thunder rattled windows, and pools lay all over The Estate, in reflective surfaces that Ellen warned me to approach with caution:

“Water reflections are the most dangerous,” she admonished, shaking her head, her face shadowed with old grief, lines deepening around eyes that had seen too much across too many reflective surfaces. “They’re less stable than glass or metal, more likely to create false passages to places from which return becomes impossible. Emily found a passage but lacked the training to maintain her connection to this side.

“Without an anchor, she couldn’t find her way back. I was too young to help her then, barely understanding my abilities. By the time I realized what was happening, she had already released her tether to this world.”

I grieved my half-sister and heeded Ellen’s warning. I was learning to anchor.

Season’s Change

At the Autumn Equinox, I turned fourteen. This thin time of seasonal change brought its magic to The Estate. Margaret and Charles hosted a party at their Keeper’s Cottage, saying, “This threshold day needs a celebration among all who have become family through choice, and by blood.” My birthday party would be a blended family reunion, and Charles extended the weathered oak table with its extra leaf. I arrived early to help Margaret with the preparations. Comfortable in her kitchen, their family home was my second home, and as next-door neighbors, Margaret and Helen exchanged recipes and household tips. Margaret shared herbal remedies advice with Sarah and served me tea on many occasions when my mirror-sight troubled me.

The Equinox yielded mixed late summer and early autumn blooms in blue jars on the stone mantlepiece and for a table centerpiece in a white stoneware jug. Margaret’s home-crafted beeswax candles cast golden light from her heirloom pewter holders that stood beside the chunky, brown crock of sunflowers glowing on the sideboard. Garlands of rosemary, thyme, and lavender wound between the place settings, herbs that seemed to respond to the Equinox energy with extra fragrance. “Protection and happiness, according to tradition. They know it’s a threshold day,” Margaret said. We all knew that the Hawthorns wove protective elements into their everyday life with the shared wisdom of those who live close to the land.

James set aside his work to escort Ellen to the party. “No work tonight,” he promised as the two walked through the door of the keeper’s cottage, his home since birth. I could sense his enthusiasm about the genetic genealogy that had revealed so much about mine and Ellen’s ancestral heritage. Ellen was getting around less, taking tentative steps that demanded a bit more of her by the week. She had enjoyed a boost in health and energy when we began training with Cedra in April, but her stamina waned after Midsummer. It hurt my heart to see her limitations, apparent in her every gesture.

“Birthday traditions matter in our family,” Ellen said, her spirits brighter than I’d yet seen them, as she placed a gift on the sideboard.

Our family. It was so good to hear that I was included in another family, my first.

Sarah and Helen arrived together, Helen carrying a layer cake decorated with sugared violets, blue icing, and fresh morning glories encircling the plate. “Mom’s idea,” Sarah said, her smile holding both affection and the scientific curiosity that had led her to research traditional birthday symbolism in Elizabeth’s journals.

As Charles ladled Margaret’s hearty autumn vegetable stew into our bowls and she served warm brown bread with butter and cheese, conversation flowed among this constellation of people who had become family through choice rather than blood. Sarah offered her botanical observations; Helen shared folkloric insights; Charles provided practical gardening wisdom, and Margaret’s gentle household knowledge anchored it all.

Ellen put forth a few Fairchild family anecdotes in a surprisingly strong voice. “My grandmother taught my mother to read folklore and frost patterns.” And “My mother tried to teach me mirror-stabilization...” I sensed there was much more to my birth mother’s family history that she guarded; memories of trauma or shame, knowledge that might be essential to me.

“Stella has already mastered basic stabilization.” Sarah sat a bit taller.

She shows an unusual aptitude for cedar resonance.

The voice caused us all to turn to the kitchen door, where Cedra stood at the threshold, her appearance causing no alarm. We were accustomed to Faes’ visits, both announced and not, especially from Cedra. On this birthday, Cedra’s inclusion might have been expected, and I felt sure Margaret and Charles had invited her: my Mentor, Ellen’s Guide.

I was pleased to see her, dressed in garments far brighter than her usual earth tones: a chartreuse vest, a tartan kilt over heavy black leggings, a white balloon-sleeved shirt with laces, and canvas knee boots. The Dryad stepped toward me, holding a simple circlet woven from cedar twigs and morning glory vines.

The Council acknowledges your progress. You stand now between childhood and completion, knowing all three of your names. Soon you’ll be ready for integration.

I didn’t feel ready to accept more accolades, having only recently passed Second Council. But I bowed my head graciously as Cedra placed the circlet like a crown.

“Ruth Ann, by birth. Stella, by choice. Questa, by destiny.” I echoed the mantra established at the Summer Solstice to gentle applause.

“Names carry power in traditional cultures,” Helen observed, as she had many times in my memory, “both given names and chosen names.” Her expression grew nostalgic. “I have such fond memories of your Naming Ceremony, Stella.”

Sarah smiled at the recollection, though I noticed her glance toward Ellen with a hint of uncertainty. “I cherish the memory; the way you handled the ceremony, Mom.”

Ellen’s eyes darted around the table and focused on Sarah. “A naming ceremony? I wasn’t aware...” She knew that Sarah had changed my name, but must not have been told about the ceremony.

Sarah blushed. Her eyes met Ellen’s. It was awkward to talk about the singular event that Ellen hadn’t attended in my infancy.

“I wanted to celebrate Stella joining our family; I wanted to add more meaning to the moment besides paperwork.” Sarah looked down: The paperwork. Was my tone a bit harsh? Did I sound defensive?

I felt the familiar sting of resentment at the mention of the paperwork; the documents Sarah had hidden from me.

Ellen speared a carrot chunk in her bowl of stew, and raising the fork to her lips, she chewed as she processed Sarah’s words. She then spoke with restraint: “A celebration for your natural child, Ruth Ann. You welcomed her into her new extended family.”

Sarah recovered, “It was a joyful, cool, sunny day,” but her description felt rigid.

Charles leaned back in his chair and sipped his cordial, settling any tension with the peaceful creak of wood. “I remember when Sarah chose your name. We set up the white canopy on the terrace by the Iron Fountain, as we did at Midsummer.”

All shared their memories while Ellen listened. Margaret served more bread. Helen poured elderflower cordial into small glasses, and the candles flickered gently as the story unfolded.

Sarah began: “The adoption had just been finalized. I look back now on the excitement and happiness, as much as the anxiety and fear of failure. Raising a child is a tremendous responsibility.”

Ellen’s face was composed, but I imagined her pain and regret as she heard details about my new beginnings.

“I suggested we do something special,” Helen continued. “The legal aspect felt so clinical. I’d been researching naming traditions, and they all emphasized community acknowledgment.”

“Margaret made a special cake with star patterns,” Charles added warmly, and Margaret smiled.

Sarah continued. “I’d been calling you Stella while I waited for you, and it felt good to make your new name official.”

“The morning glories were blooming early that year,” Charles recalled. “All around the fairy ring, though it was barely spring.”

“I’d written something to say,” Sarah admitted, “but when we gathered with Helen and Charles and Margaret and James, different words came out. I held you up and said, ‘This child came to me as Ruth Ann. I name you Stella, my star, found in darkness, bringing light. May you grow knowing you are both born of one family and chosen by another.’”

“And the Garden responded,” Helen added softly. “The morning glories opened wider, and a black rose bloomed at the edge of the fairy ring.”

“Black roses mark significant transitions in our family line,” ventured Ellen.

Helen was tactful. “What I loved most about it was how complete it felt to affirm Ruth Ann’s origins and Stella’s new beginning. Not erasing her birth name but adding to it.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, willing Ellen to remain composed.

Each birthday present was personalized and unique. Sarah gave me a journal decorated with tiny crystals and sapphires. It had sections for recording mirrorwork, plant histories, and personal observations.

Helen’s beautifully wrapped gift was a collection of her annotated folktales.

The Hawthorns presented a cedar box carved by Charles and lined with velvet embroidered by Margaret.

James’s gift was a silver locket, which, he said, held “an etched representation of your genetic markers,” science transformed into a personal talisman.

Ellen’s gift was a pewter hand mirror engraved with a triple spiral pattern. “This belonged to my grandmother,” she said, as I unwrapped it. “The design creates boundaries that stabilize what you see.” Its weightiness and warmth suggested my responsibility ; a tangible connection to my newly found lineage of women who had carried mirror-sight.

Margaret lifted the cake server to cut the first slice, but she paused and looked around the table at all of us. “Wait,” she said with her warm practicality. “We’ve done and said all but the most important part. Happy Birthday, Stella!”

“Happy Birthday!” came the chorus from around the table. The words were a reprieve from the weighty significance of the evening, bringing us back to the center. My cheeks were warm as I thanked them, returning their smiles. Cedra accepted another glass of blackberry cordial from Charles’s decanter.

Margaret served the cake, and the evening wound toward its close, the cottage having expanded with warmth and love. Ellen took James’s arm, and he followed her painfully slow pace home to the Guest Cottage.

Charles escorted us three Manor-dwellers home along the well-worn path to our kitchen door. His swinging lantern cast dancing shadows at our feet and through the rose edging. “Your birthday matters to all of us,” he said in his straightforward way. “Not just because we care for you, but because each year brings you closer to understanding who you are meant to be.”

I nodded, and the cedar circlet bobbed on my head. That night, placing Ellen’s mirror on my bedside table, I reflected on the layers of meaning that had emerged during the evening:

Ruth Ann, the name connecting me to Ellen, to bloodlines that carried mirror-sight through generations, often without understanding its nature. Stella, the name given by Sarah, recognizing the light she saw in me even as an infant, claiming me as daughter through both a legal certificate and a garden ceremony. Questa, the name revealed by The Council, represents integration rather than division, both/and rather than either/or. Three names. Three aspects. Three truths forming a single whole.

The Garden understood this completeness before any of us could. The morning glories had bloomed for my naming ceremony, as they bloomed through snow when I was first discovered. The Black Roses marked transitions that legal documents missed. The mirrors showed reflections that existed between worlds.

Legacy

In the weeks following my fourteenth birthday, as autumn deepened, Ellen focused on sharing the Fairchild family inheritance. There was little in the way of material possessions, but my first mother wanted to ensure that their history, and the mirror-sight legacy of the half-fae, would be imparted to me. So, she approached our lessons with renewed urgency.

The Guest Cottage had become a sanctuary of quiet rituals. Ellen rarely ventured beyond her immediate surroundings now, her strength conserved for essential activities and, most importantly to her, my continued training.

Ellen’s doctors had given her a poor prognosis: weeks, perhaps months. Her spirit and body, weakened by years of grief and suppressing her abilities, were failing, even in the Garden’s protective embrace, surrounded by the magic she had once fled. But her awakening magic proved too powerful against the long denial of her true nature, and channels had been dug too deeply for her power to flow safely.

Under a raw, pale late autumn sky, The Garden became an eerily silent stage for a spontaneous lesson in controlling feral magic. Ellen, despite her frailty, and I, determined and precise, ventured into the labyrinth of manicured boxwood and rogue blossoms. Ellen’s magic flared, and a blooming black rose cutting undulated into our path, stirred by an unseen current. I moved among the trembling flora and softly instructed my birth mother, “Hold steady! Let nature and magic become one,” as my fingertips brushed against dewy leaves that pulsed with an uncanny warmth; the untrained power wrestling with disciplined guidance; a wild blend of inherited wonder and impending loss.

The exercise was urgent and exhausting. Ellen had limited strength and felt pressure to learn and to teach, in what would likely be little time, what Cedra had been training me as a life skill. Working together among the plants, though, our roles had shifted. No longer student and teacher, we had become partners, navigating dangers, and this lessened our anxiety.

“Evergreen is a constant,” she pointed to the boxwoods. “Some things remain unchanged across seasons. Remember that when reflections try to disorient you.”

Cedra insisted on supervising all mirror-work since the September feral event. Ellen’s moments of instruction on ordinary skills that required no reflective surfaces were precious to us both.

October’s frosts caused the morning glories to retreat, all except those surrounding Ellen’s cottage. They still bloomed defiantly against the chill. Ellen arranged her cozy quarters with intention: An afghan she knit in a blend of warm colors, a patchwork quilt sewn by her sister, Ann.

The spicy scent of cedar bundles cut by Charles and crafted by Margaret hung from the ceiling beams. Charles kept the woodpile stacked for the brick fireplace. Ellen lined up her collection of blue Mason jars filled with dried herbs on the kitchen windowsill.

“Today we’ll discuss anchoring without tools,” Ellen explained to me, as I arranged dried meadow wildflowers on her kitchen table, “for the times you can’t access cedar or iron.” She moved her fingers with the precision honed by habit, stripping the ferny dried yarrow leaves from brittle stems with dedication and care.

Ellen labelled her herbs, botanical bunches, and dried flowers with their names, properties, and uses for mirror-work. “Rosemary strengthens memory anchors,” she told me, placing a sprig in my open palm. “Rub it between your fingers and inhale deeply.”

I obeyed my first mother, and the resinous scent filled my senses. “Now close your eyes and recall The Cedar Grove—the Sentinel Tree where you first trained with Cedra. Hold that image while keeping the rosemary scent in your awareness.”

My visualization was vivid: the Ancient Cedar’s rough bark, the pattern of frost, and the quality of light filtering through its branches.

“The memory itself becomes your anchor,” Ellen continued. “Rosemary creates a sensory bridge when physical contact isn’t possible.”

We worked through the herbs: lavender for emotional stabilization during difficult visions, thyme for awareness of time and reflecting different eras, and the bracing scent and taste of mint to steady us in the present.

“My grandmother taught these to my mother,” Ellen said softly. “Who taught me... but knowledge can fragment over generations if training isn’t consistent.”
As the afternoon light softened, Ellen shared her lore. “I want to show you something important,” she said. “I need the box...” she pointed to it under the iron bedstead. I jumped to assist and knelt on the floral hooked rug, lifting the light maple box onto the table. It was lovely, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “It will soon be yours.” It was about the size of a legal-sized tablet and opened on silent hinges to reveal objects nestled in tissue paper: a silver thimble, a lock of bronze hair tied in a slender blue ribbon, “my mother’s,” and a thumb-sized stone of obsidian, “a worry stone.”

On the bottom were several sheets of parchment folded in half, “our family’s grimoire,” with rows of handwritten notes. The oldest legible entry was from over a century ago. “You’ll see our family history of mirror-sight...”

The changes in writing styles and inks over time: these were my ancestors, too, by blood, if not by bond.

Our ancestors recounted morning glories’ response to emotions; Black Roses appearing at significant transitions, mirrors most active near thin times, and anecdotes the likes of which Cedra had been warning, and teaching safety—trials and tragic errors.

Ellen’s windows grew dark, but she wanted to show me more family tradition, like how to create protective sachets with the right herbal combinations, how certain crystals could stabilize erratic reflections, how morning glory seeds could be prepared to enhance dream clarity without endangering mirror walking.

Her legends empowered me as Helen’s stories did, and I was grateful for my four mother figures: Sarah, Helen, Ellen, and Margaret. We were all family, each fostered learning and imparted their individual personality strengths.

Ellen’s determination seemed to sustain her as her body weakened. I noticed how she occasionally lost focus, her gaze drawn to reflective surfaces as if seeing or hearing something not in the room.

“Is it getting stronger?” I asked, recalling the signs from our frightful September experience. With a half-smile of sadness and acceptance, she answered, “The call? Yes, as Samhain approaches, the boundaries are growing thinner.”

“Do you hear them? Emily, Ann, your mother...?”

“More clearly now.” Ellen closed the grimoire box on silent hinges. “But I won’t answer until I’ve finished what I came to do.”

I understood that Ellen’s teaching sessions were meant to prepare us for both my growth and her absence.

“There’s one more thing,” she said as I put on my sweatshirt, ready for my walk home. She lifted the silver chain with the iron pendant she always wore, a simple disk engraved with a triple spiral. “I’ve had it most of my life for protection. I want you to have it—it’s yours now.”

“But you need it,” I protested, “for stability near reflective surfaces.”

“I’ve made other arrangements,” Ellen assured me, fastening the chain at the back of my neck, under my braids. “And you’ll use it more effectively; you’ve already shown that. You have a long life ahead of you.”

The triskele pendant felt both cool and warm against my skin. It came with responsibility, not only for my safety in mirror-work, but for the continuity of Ellen’s family legacy, now part of mine.

I hugged her with the care I would give to a fragile doll. We were still about the same height, and I was more athletic from my life in the Garden. I noticed that my mother’s frame seemed less substantial than it had even a week before. Yet her green and amber eyes were clearer than I remember.

“Tomorrow we’ll discuss the specific differences between water reflections and glass,” Ellen said as I stood on the front porch. “Cedra has agreed to supervise a practical demonstration.”

I was aware that each meeting might be our last, and Ellen was planning our next lesson despite her fatigue. Still prioritizing. I blew her a kiss and took the path past the Keeper’s Cottage to our kitchen door. Whatever happened in the coming weeks, Ellen had ensured that the broken chain of heritage was restored.

The Crisis

The Celtic wheel turned toward Samhain. Ellen was determined to pass her family’s heritage and half-fae knowledge. I was getting ready to leave her one evening, and she embraced me with unusual intensity. “The triple spiral protects,” she said with an ominous whisper. “Remember that, when reflections begin to pull.”

“I will, Mom,” I said, and left her in the cottage doorway, silhouetted against the warm light. Walking home, I sensed Ellen’s balance was disrupted by the weight of memories, and her cryptic warning called to mind her times of restlessness and instability, and her tendency to stare into reflective surfaces. The edges of her purposefully controlled demeanor seemed to be fraying. As her daughter, not long reunited, I felt the strain of her demeanor. Did Sarah have second thoughts about offering my birth mother respite?

“You’re certain Cedra knows you’re practicing tonight?” Sarah asked me after tea the next evening. I put on my sweatshirt to walk to the Guest Cottage. “The council is meeting, but we’ll only be reviewing stabilization. Ellen worked with me months ago on the techniques.”

“Okay,” Sarah said, but her face said, I’m worried.

“Just simple reflective anchoring,” I said, to reassure her, as I opened the kitchen door.

The tremor in Ellen’s hands while she positioned a small silver-backed mirror at the center of the kitchen table alerted me to a potential problem. Ellen, seeing my concern, said, “Nothing that requires Cedra’s direct supervision,” and continued to prepare the space, showing unusual attention to detail. She checked that iron nails hung at compass points around the room, and cedar bundles hung over each doorway and window.

“Extra precautions never hurt,” she said. “Especially during thin times.”

Twilight settled over the cottage, and Ellen lit beeswax candles infused with herbs from Margaret’s kitchen: rosemary for memory, lavender for clarity. Their flickering glow comforted me.

“We’ll start with simple reflection anchoring,” Ellen said in the formal cadence she used during lessons. “Remember: one point of contact with cedar at all times, eyes never leaving the mirror’s surface once engagement begins.”

I positioned myself as she directed, my right hand on her cedar block and my left hand free to adjust the mirror. Ellen sat opposite, mirroring my posture. Between us, the small silver-backed mirror reflected the candlelight in kaleidoscopic patterns.

“Begin breath alignment. Inhaling and exhaling. Our breaths synchronize. The mirror deepens, becomes dimensional.”

“Anchor visualization now!”

Ellen’s voice is steady, though her hands trembled. I picture the grove’s ancient trees, feel their roots extend beneath the soil. Shadows shift like cedar branches past the edge of the mirror...

This was as expected, until Ellen departed from the formula. “Tonight we’ll try something slightly different.”

Her eyes never left the mirror. “My mother once showed me this technique.” Her voice trailed while adjusting the mirror’s angle. She sprinkled a glistening powder on the mirror.

“Ellen?” I reacted with sudden uncertainty.

“Just a refinement.” Her voice became resonant, both younger and older. “Watch the silver surface now, not the glass. The backing shows things the reflection hides.”

The mirror’s silver edging begins to glow with an inner light. I see a landscape, unfamiliar trees, twisting paths, and distant mountains beneath a twilit sky, but it’s not my sky.

“Where is that?” My eyes are wide with a wonder that borders on fear of the unknown.

“The otherworld,” she whispers, leaning closer to me and to the mirror. “My mother, Ruth, your aunt Ann, and your sister, Emily, are all there. See how beautiful it is? See how different the light is?”

Ellen’s hand slips from the cedar block as she reaches to touch the mirror with her index finger. A breeze through the cottage, and it becomes cold. The candle flames stretch in a sudden wind.

“Ellen, you’re not anchored!” Each gesture of Ellen’s brings me closer to panic. But Ellen doesn’t seem to hear, and her eyes reflect mirror-light with an intensity I’ve never witnessed.

“I hear my mother’s voice... Emily’s laughter... through reflection...” One touch of the mirror and it ripples like disturbed water for what seems like hours...

I held to my training despite my mounting alarm, keeping cedar contact while reaching with my free hand to touch Ellen’s shoulder. “Ellen, remember the anchoring. You taught me—always maintain a physical connection.”

But it was no use. Ellen’s awareness had shifted elsewhere. When she finally turned toward me, her eyes had changed, her pupils dilated, irises reflecting silver rather than amber. “The mirrors don’t just show, child, they offer passage—if you’re willing to follow.”

The cottage walls receded, and the space between worlds was thinning. I remembered and acted on Cedra’s emergency protocols. My iron pendant would have to do if I were to keep contact with Ellen and the cedar block. I lifted it over my head and pressed it against the mirror’s frame.

“By iron and cedar, by blood and breath, the passage is denied,” I recited, voice steady despite my fear. “Return to true reflection, shadow to substance, boundary restored.”

The mirror’s surface shuddered, then abruptly returned to normal reflection, showing only our faces and the cottage interior. Ellen collapsed backward in her chair, the unnatural light fading from her eyes. Exhausted and disoriented, she asked me what had happened.

“You lost anchoring,” I said, expressing no concern, as if it were a normal occurrence. I slid the mirror across the table, out of my range of vision. “The reflection started to... open.”

Ellen covered her face with her hands. “It happened again,” she whispered. “I thought I could control it this time.”

“You weren’t yourself,” I said gently, helping Ellen to a more comfortable position on the sofa. “You were calling people on the other side.”

Ellen’s eyes were tearing up. “The mirrors are stronger near the equinox. I should have known better than to attempt this without Cedra.”

Sarah’s intuition advised her to check on me. She could see from the Manor an uncanny silver light glowing in the Guest Cottage. She let herself in just as I was making Ellen comfortable. “What happened?” Sarah noted the disarray of ritual materials.

“The mirror-sight went feral,” I tried to seem calm, using Cedra’s term for uncontrolled reflection work. “The boundary started to dissolve.”

Sarah checked her tone before asking, “Are you both alright?”

“I stayed anchored,” I responded. “Ellen lost contact with the cedar block, and I had to use the emergency protocol.”

Ellen looked up at Sarah with haunted eyes, and in a barely audible voice, she said, “Now you understand why.”

Sarah and I both knew.

Satisfied she was alright, we left Ellen to rest. On the way home, I saw Cedra walking from the Cedar Grove toward the Cottage, and she acknowledged us with a nod.

The Balance Breaks

Three days after the mirror crisis, I found Ellen in the Moon Garden of The Guest Cottage, on her knees, her body rigid and dazed.

“Make it stop,” she gasped between spasms. “Too many, too fast!”

She was surrounded by spectral images swirling like visible thoughts. Morning glory vines grew rapidly across the Cottage exterior. Without full protective geometry, Ellen had lost control. The Cottage lacked the alignments that Elizabeth designed into the Medieval Garden.

I shouted for help.

Ellen’s pain and passion for life surged violently with fragments of memory, glimpses of places beyond normal perception, visions of what might have been. Her voice hitched between sobs and whispers,

“I must tether these wild winds!”

I employed Cedra’s emergency protocols, hearing her voice in my memory: To contain wild magic, first establish boundaries. I sketched the main garden’s protective geometry with a stick on the ground around Ellen.
Next, anchors. At cardinal points, I traced the elements: carrying cedar wood, black rose petals, morning glory seeds, and iron filings. Make a connection.

I knelt beside Ellen, taking her trembling hands in mine, and recited an ancient incantation of Cedra’s, the language of thresholds beyond ordinary speech, connecting those with the sight. Words to calm disturbed boundaries and stabilize passage between worlds.Not suppression but redirection, not denial but integration.

Ellen’s body relaxed, and the spectral images slowed their frantic motion. Morning glory vines retreated to normal size and position.

“I’m sorry,” Ellen’s breathing steadied. “I thought I was stronger.”

“You are strong, you’ve survived this alone for decades. I’ve had guidance from the beginning.”

Sarah and Cedra trotted toward my shout for help. I’d been able to help Ellen to her feet, steady her toward the door, and safely inside. Sarah stood aghast while Cedra surveyed the aftermath: the wall mirror covered with a pillowcase, its frame bulging, dried flowers flung on the wooden floorboards, the hearth fire left with only a few glowing cinders.

Sarah composed herself, noting details in her research journal while the kettle boiled for tea. “We need to incorporate the Cottage into the Garden’s full protection. I’m surprised Elizabeth hadn’t seen to extending the alignments from the main garden,”

Cedra tightened the boundaries I’d drawn outside. Yes, and the morning glories can help. They remember the patterns, Cedra said.

Ellen was in awe of the exchange between the scientist and Cedra, a phyto-dryad, who collaborated without argument. “I never saw this, always one extreme or the other, all or nothing,” she whispered.

“But you have it now and for as long as you’re here with us,” I responded, feeling mature and capable for a fourteen-year-old.

This was the complementary support Sarah studied and now practiced. She had grown into her profession. And I, too, was coming into my own.

I had hoped that, since Ellen had learned a modicum of control, her wild-sight episodes would become less frequent and less intense. That by midwinter, she’d be navigating mirrors without fear. And that a year after our first training together, by next Beltane, she’d flourish in a new spring of health, and safely walk the labyrinth alone.

But the years of uncontrolled sight had taken their toll. What Ellen gained in mastery, she lost in physical strength. The integration she attempted to achieve had come too late. Her crossing approached not as a tragedy but as a transformation. The final threshold she would teach me to understand.

Samhein

On the Celtic New Year, when the veil between worlds reaches its thinnest point, and ancestors are honored across the threshold, Ellen prepared for her crossing. Though she never explicitly stated it, she gauged my emotional readiness.

“You’ll continue working with Cedra,” she said matter-of-factly. “She understands the sight.”

The Council Fae manifested more often during this period. We might see them watching a private session from the edge of the Cedar Grove.

Cedra would step in if she saw that Ellen needed further guidance or deeper mythological grounding: The sight existed before mirrors. It began as the ability to see between worlds without reflective tools, to perceive what lies beyond ordinary reality. Your ancestors carried this gift when they crossed between realms during what humans call pre-history.

Ellen nodded in agreement; her thinning frame wrapped in shawls against the chill.

Mirrors make it easier for you to focus, Cedra continued, and like a telescope, enhance natural vision, but they don’t create stars. Mirrors are merely tools of perception.

Weak but determined, Ellen asked to meet with The Council in a setting with the people who had become critical to her well-being during her stay at the Silverton Estate. “I need to establish certain things before I cross.”

Ellen’s Farewell

On November’s Eve, the night of Samhain, Ellen prepared for her ritual of transition. I helped her step into her mother’s black wool dress; its Celtic knot-work, embroidered by her mother’s mother. I tenderly placed Ellen’s grandmother’s iron pendant over Ellen’s head for her protection. Although she’d stopped wearing her leather pouch to hold cedar bark and various herbs, Ellen wanted to honor Brigid, the Healer, so she asked me to draw her leather belt through the slide, positioning the pouch at her waist.

The anticipation I’d experienced before our reunion had been softened by hope. Helping Ellen prepare, I had a sense of dread, thinking about what a funeral must be like. Sarah and Helen would be there, but Ellen’s inevitable passing reminded me that our separation would again bring grief.

And I thought, I must not cry—I must help Ellen.

James met us outside with the wheelchair he kept in his car trunk for Ellen’s appointments. I wrapped her black wool shawl around her for the way down the brick path. Swathed, surrounding her like a shroud, her appearance was somewhat frightening, as it was Samhain. The sky took on the foreboding grey and black of the new November, darkening clouds spreading over the Estate. I’d rarely seen James wear his navy woolen dress coat. He turned up his collar and steered Ellen through the Yew Hedge gate, onto The Terrace. She had chosen the Iron Fountain for our gathering place. James set the brakes and took his leave.

When all were present, Ellen proclaimed:

“I come to establish continuity of knowledge, to formalize what has begun through blood and teaching.”

Though we had discussed this ceremony in advance, at the sound of her formal farewell, my eyes watered.

“To you, Sarah, who found my daughter in the Fairy Ring, who raised her with wisdom and protection, who opened your home and heart to her, I offer thanks beyond measure.” Sarah accepted with humility and grace.

Ellen took both of my hands. “To you, daughter born of my body, I affirm the gifts of our lineage; the sight that bridges worlds, the blood that connects generations, the knowledge hard-won through trial and loss.” I held back tears.

“Dear Helen, your research preserved knowledge that might otherwise have been lost. Stories are pathways no less real than those the sight reveals.”

Ellen addressed the Fae Council: “As my ancestors did before me, I recognize your guardianship of those with The Blood. I ask that you continue to guide my daughter as she develops her abilities and discovers her complete identity.”

Cedra, Eleris, and Selwyn respond, manifesting in myth and magic: The Garden knows its own. The Grove remembers its children. The boundaries will be maintained. The passages will be marked.

The Faes’ voices echoed water flowing through the Iron Fountain. The close connection between us all felt sacred. Ellen’s formal transition was established, responsibilities acknowledged, and continuity assured.

Ellen had further weakened, and we were concerned she would collapse. Cedra wheeled her home, Sarah accompanying them to help Ellen to bed. Sarah explained to Helen, “She asked to be alone to rest for a while.”

We respected Ellen’s request; I returned to the House with Helen.

At sundown, when Sarah went to the Guest Cottage to make tea for her, Ellen was gone. On her pillow lay a single Black Rose stem.

“She crossed,” Sarah told me when I arrived moments later.

Crossed—the word seemed right. My mother had crossed the portal, like from one room to another.

Like a haze, grief hung over the Estate. Moments stretched or contracted without purpose, as time followed by no calendar. The Garden, first despondent, now responded with unexpected blooms despite the deepening chill. Black Roses and morning glories spiraled up Ellen’s cottage, lending a pathway for her anticipated return.

At breakfast, I took the chair opposite Sarah at the kitchen table. Steam rose from two mugs of tea as we sat with our mutual loss. “I only had her for eight months, so why does it hurt this much?”

Sarah reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. “Loss doesn’t measure itself by time. Ellen carried you for nine months, so her absence shaped both your lives.”

I couldn’t cry then, as I had most of the night, but the well stood ready without warning. Sarah came around to my chair and held me the way she had when I was small, and a dream frightened me.

In the days ahead, grief moved me between moments of piercing clarity and foggy disbelief. The Black Rose that had appeared on Ellen’s pillow now grew beside the Guest Cottage door. Charles found me there on the third morning, and his words consoled me.

“The Garden will hold your grief when you cannot,” he said, his weathered hand gesturing toward the beds where Morning Glories had appeared despite the season. “Plants remember differently than people.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, grateful for the conversation that pulled me from my circle of thoughts.

“We remember with stories, from beginnings through the endings. Plants remember through cycles.” He knelt to brush frost from the blooming Black Rose. “Nothing truly ends here,” he said. “It transforms.”

That afternoon, Cedra called me to Cedar Grove. Although the ancient trees stood silent in the early winter stillness, my palm against the rough bark felt a faint vibration. I murmured something between a heartbeat and a whisper, and my Fae Guardian stepped beside me in the shadows.

You seek her...

“I don’t know what I’m seeking. Ellen wanted to teach me so much more—about the mirrors, about my heritage. Who will guide me now?”

The teaching continues, child. Death is merely another reflective surface.

“I don’t understand.”

Ellen gave you something no one else could—the beginning of your story. But she hoped others would help you write the rest. Child, these trees were growing long before any of us walked here. They’ve witnessed countless losses. Yet they remain. Let the cedars comfort you.

At the end of the day, Helen stopped by my bedroom to offer comfort; Elizabeth’s wise words in her letter to a friend:

“The Garden taught me that grief is not linear but a spiral. We return to the same point, yet never quite the same way. Each cycle brings new growth alongside the remembrance.”

“Did she lose someone, too?”

“She had many losses, but found ways to keep them present in her life.”

It had been a week since Ellen left us when Sarah suggested we clean the Guest Cottage. I hadn’t gone inside since her passing, unable to face the emptiness.

“We don’t have to,” she said, “but sometimes handling the material things helps process the spiritual.”

Sarah and Helen understood grief. Robert Caldwell, my grandfather by adoption, whom I never knew, died about a year before I was born. I had learned bits and pieces about his neurological condition that caused his demise, but it never occurred to me until that moment that Sarah’s father could have had a form of the sight.

Sarah, Helen, and I spent the afternoon sorting Ellen’s few possessions. In a small tin box on her nightstand was a tiny silver pocket mirror with intricate engravings around its frame. “She kept this private, I guess. I’m surprised that Ellen kept anything hidden from me at the end of her life, after all she went through with reflections.”

“Perhaps she was saving it for you—for when you were ready.” Sarah’s words had a familiar ring.

I replied, “I think I’m ready for the Third Council.”

Sarah and Helen exchanged a knowing glance. Sarah said, “Yes, I’ve heard a few hints of your Winter Solstice Integration.”

I looked at these two women, my anchors: one who raised me with unfailing love, and one who continued to share her wisdom.

Behind them, I felt the presence of other guides: Charles, with his quiet understanding of the Garden’s language; James, with his scientific validation of magical heritage; and Margaret, with her practical knowledge of plant medicine. Ellen, too, not in the pain of recent loss, but in our shared genetic heritage, and the abilities awakened in me.

Alone in my room that night, I sat with Ellen’s mirror and attempted what Cedra had warned me against: seeking a person through reflection. It caught the moonlight, reflecting it in spirals. The surface clouded, then cleared, but showed only my face.

Disappointed but not surprised, I set it on the nightstand and closed my eyes. Sleep came quickly, and with it, dreams of walking with Ellen through a medieval garden I’d seen somewhere between memory and imagination.

I awoke to the first pale light. The mirror on my nightstand no longer reflected my room. It showed a black rose in full bloom against an image of our home, the Tudor Manor House. As I gazed, the image faded to mirror my room.

My thoughts turned to Ellen. I miss you. I think I always will.

I recalled Sarah’s words, “That’s what love does. It remains.”

I dressed in layers and went down to the Garden to find Sarah kneeling beside new growth emerging near the Fairy Ring.

“The Black Roses are spreading!”

“James thinks they’re responding to our emotions.”

I’d heard him express this theory in the past couple of years, and now I didn’t doubt it. “He’s been tracking magical plant responses,” Sarah added.

“And what do you think?” I asked.

She considered. “I think grief changes the landscape, both inside us and around us. Maybe the roses are mapping changes in our hearts and minds.”

I went directly to the Archives to see James. He was at the worktable with genetic charts and botanical drawings in front of him. Without looking up, he slid a notebook toward me. “I’ve been comparing Ellen’s DNA markers to yours again, now with historical soil samples. The patterns match in ways that statistical probability can’t explain.”

I paged through his notes, finding some comfort in the scientific validation of Ellen’s connection. “So there’s proof she’s part of me.”

“More than part,” James said, finally meeting my eyes. “These patterns don’t diminish with time or distance...or death.”

My grief had transformed from a weight that threatened to drown me into a current that would carry me forward.

Release

The Guest Cottage was now emptied of Ellen’s belongings. The twin bed, kitchen table, pull-out sofa, and a few chairs remained with my memories.

Charles brought Ellen’s steamer trunk to my bedroom, but I continued to avoid sorting through her clothing and other stored items. Another week passed before I was ready. Fragments of her life: old photographs, partially filled journals, trinkets. More of her memories. A green silk scarf triggered the time I shifted to a long, flowy green skirt, a poet shirt with full sleeves, shimmering thrift-store jewelry, and Grandma Helen’s paisley print scarf.

“...Poor, single women worked in factories for a menial wage. If a baby came along, without family support, the single mother couldn’t go to work. This has always been the plight of poor women. Agencies persuaded single women in need to leave their babies, to give them up for adoption. These mothers were promised that their infants would be placed in good homes. The heartbroken mothers felt they had no choice. The agencies urged them, saying they were unfit to be mothers. Whether family circumstances or financial trouble, they were told the baby would have to be “put up” for adoption. Better to have married men and women, couples who could show they were qualified, raise these motherless babies. Deserving couples would have the means to provide for these children.

Does society as a whole benefit? From my experience, the Adoption System does not guarantee a natural mother a better life. If I sound bitter, infant surrender did not help me have a better life. Reunion is my best hope.

My home life was beyond frugal. My father was a millworker and rented a shanty, and Mother did what she could to make it a happy home. They pulled me out of school to go to work, and I never graduated. My older brother, Roland, lived at home. He couldn’t hold down a job because of “spells of behavior”. Ann, my sister, said they were “blackouts.” He couldn’t get along with anyone and was in and out of jail. Finally, he was put in a state hospital. After a few years, he died there. His death certificate said it was due to an “unattended seizure.” Ann, the youngest, had vivid dreams and “spells.” Our father called her “simple,” and I never knew her to work outside the home. She loved to cook and made a recipe book for me when I left home. She grew herbs and flowers, and made herbal remedies, “for the sight.”

My first baby was born in City Hospital, and my husband, Emily’s father, left us soon afterward. Emily had “visions”—the sight. She was sixteen when she walked into a reflection pool in the park. She never came back to me. I’ll never be the same.

My second child, Ruth Ann, was born in Mercy Hospital while I was living in Mercy Shelter. I was eight months pregnant when I admitted myself. We stayed there until she was three months old, and I signed us out and walked through the snow to the downtown bus depot on the Eve of the Winter Solstice. I planned to start a new life with Ruth Ann, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t think she was safe alone with me, with my spells, my mirror sight. Ruth Ann was taken in by a single woman named Sarah. She must have had the means to support herself because she lived in a grand estate.

When I said goodbye to Ruth Ann, I took the bus to a town called Leastways. I had no work and stayed with friends. Nine months later, I appeared at the Kindness Shelter and Hospital for Indigent Care and gave birth to a tiny, sickly boy. I named him Angelo, but I don’t remember seeing him. I was told he had “little seizures,” and that “he’ll grow out of them.” I refused to give the shelter and hospital my family history. I heard that with a few details, it would be easier for them to place the child. Just the birth mother’s signed release was all that was required. No names would be revealed to either party. Only show you can afford the agency fee; have the ready cash and an income statement, and the charity case child would be theirs. As soon as I could get up, I signed the release of Angelo and signed myself out. I left that wretched place and left him behind with the nurses. A couple was ready to adopt a newborn, and I was told they took him home.

I might have wanted to go to my family if I had one. I had no contact with the adoptive couple and never heard from Angelo, although I heard his illness worsened in elementary school. The last thing I heard was that he had to live in an institution because of his seizures and aggressive behavior. The mirror-sight is a burden.

Ellen Fairchild, on my final Samhein

I turned the paper over and wrote my reply:

Dear Ellen,

I couldn’t conjure you without a picture. I couldn’t imagine who you might have been to me. But there could be no one in your place. You didn’t mother me—you admitted you couldn’t—but my adoptive mother couldn’t fully replace you. You were, and still are, the space, the unnamed void.

When the record of my birth was sealed by law, you and I were both undone. Now you are fully gone. Gone soon after my birth, gone eight months after we reunited. When we met that afternoon in your lonely apartment, you were my first mirror. Flashes of long copper hair, amber and green eyes; the gleam in yours weakened by uncontrolled sight, we searched each other’s eyes for mutual recognition.

Once strong and tall like me, your body had grown frail from years of effort and grief, pain, and yearning that lingered. My longing remains unresolved, even after our reunion. Our time was all too short for our complex souls. The well of emotion is too deep. We both wondered, Where are you?

I hope you found peace in knowing what became of me. The ones in power make it hard to find each other. In time, I’ll be content in the belief that eight months was better than none. The spirits intervened again, leading me back to you. You struggled to reveal your whole story, but I now understand how both circumstance and choice determined yours and your children’s fates. It was all happenstance.

Your loving daughter, Ruth Ann / Stella / Questa

As I signed all three names, the puzzle pieces settled into their true arrangement. Outside my window, Black Roses bloomed out of season, their petals carrying secrets—spoken, at last. I folded my letter, placed it in Ellen’s manila envelope with her other memories, tightened its metal clasp, and replaced it in Ellen’s trunk.

End of #11 ~
Thank you for reading the next to last installment of Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic. Stella’s letter to her deceased birth mother ends a season of discovery and turmoil. What was hidden has been named. What follows will ask how to carry that knowledge forward, and what it costs to protect it.

If you’re new to the page, or want to start over:

We always appreciate your comments!
Mel & Islay

Leave a comment

© Mary Ellen Gambutti All Rights Reserved 2026

The Estate has begun to speak unspoken stories. What was once myth has become mystery, hinting at deeper work: a record of survival, of watchfulness, of bloodlines that endured by adapting. As the sun reaches its height, the living and the not-quite-forgotten gather. What has been hidden is no longer content to remain unnamed, and Stella claims her powers.

Midsummer

Fifty days from our spring celebration of Ellen’s homecoming, our reunion, and the start of her new life on the Estate, I awakened to Charles’s and James’s calling to each other across the lawn. From my window, I saw father and son at work wrestling with the Estate’s white canvas canopy, like worker ants on the Medieval Garden terrace. It was a repeat performance; its premiere having been the day of my infant naming ceremony, on the occasion of my adoption at age six months. Today, my birth mother, Ellen Fairchild, would be with me, and our extended family would celebrate high summer, sharing a meal in the shade of the canopy.

Large festive gatherings on the Estate had taken place several times during my childhood. Sarah and James invited friends from the Village and the university to picnic and lounge on the wide lawns. Winston enjoyed the company of a few friendly fellow canines, chasing a ball or frisbee. Sarah and James homeschooled me, so there weren’t many opportunities to socialize with children my age. Although it wasn’t discussed, I knew our Estate family was insular and that Sarah’s discomfort with my mirror-sight influenced her decision to limit my interactions off the Estate. Yet, I don’t recall being lonely. Considering my relationship with the Garden, Grandma Helen, the Hawthorns, and my companion, Winston, not to mention my mentor, Cedra, my days were full, and my adopted childhood was, if not carefree, somewhat contented.

I overheard Sarah and Margaret say that it would be best to keep the day sedate, since Ellen might find it difficult to cope with a true carnival-like Midsummer event. Nonetheless, the Estate hummed with preparation. Margaret and Helen were busy in their kitchens preparing dishes that honored the solstice: savory casseroles and quiches with vegetables from the Keeper’s Cottage kitchen garden, to be served with Helen’s whole-grain bread studded with herbs, honey cakes fresh from the wood-burning AGA, and fresh strawberries.

“Threshold days deserve proper marking,” Margaret noted.

Charles’s pony wagon made several basket-laden forays with the essence of summer down to the terrace. Margaret recruited her lean and limber son to decorate the Medieval Garden for our gathering. She planned for him to wind and weave wild meadow flowers across and amongst the quadrants’ boxwood edging through the herbs and Yew Hedge. So James did, and reached with his long arms, looping and trailing stems and festoons over the arbor.

When the rented camp table signalled dinner’s readiness with a sigh — was it a gentle groan? —- Charles and Margaret ushered us to the buffet, coaching us with a familiar, “Help yourselves. Plenty to go around, and don’t be shy!” So we each filled plates and took our chosen seats, and we all “tucked in” at Charles’s urging.

Music floated across the terrace: the ethereal sound of Celeste’s Celtic harp. She was a graduate student of musicology. Her draping satin green dress, as she perched on the wide edge of the Iron Fountain’s reflection pool, seemed to reflect the gleam of the slanting light. Strings chimed under her lithe fingers; their graceful bardic tones reverberated against the ancient iron.

As the sun began its slow descent and the harpist’s music wove through the evening air, Helen cleared her throat.

“I’d like to share a story, if you’re willing to listen. One that feels appropriate for this place—and this moment.”

We settled into our chairs. Sarah leaned forward, her skeptical eyebrow appeared as it did so often when her mother prepared to tell an old tale. The Garden, too, leaned in to listen.

Folklore of The Estate
Helen’s story was new to us. The Folklorist, whose sparkling hair shone as the sun dipped behind the Cedar groves began, and all of us were politely hushed.

It’s local lore from the deeper origins of The Silverton Estate: the. story of three sisters and something unusual in this land long before Elizabeth Silverton’s crew laid the first stones. Rumors of the sisters’ odd ways aroused suspicion in the Village. Worse yet, there were threats of retribution for perceived wrongdoings. For fear of persecution, the sisters retreated to The Cedar Grove, where they were said to dwell beneath the roots of one of the largest trees. It was believed that the Cedars’ magic sustained them.

One sister was said to be a guardian of growing things. She understood the language of roots and branches. She knew that the trees bridge the earth and sky. As the legend goes, the second sister was a keeper of thresholds and transitions; veils between moments, between seasons, what was and what might be, and between day and night. The third sister was said to tend the blossoms that bloom between worlds; messengers between seen and unseen realms.

Folklore tells us that when Elizabeth planned The Garden, she preserved what remained of the vast primeval Cedar Forest. The legend goes that she was aware that the sisters dwelt there, and rather than disturbing their sanctuary, she preserved it, designing The Medieval Garden to honor their ancient guardianship.

James interjected, “I’ve heard that Cedra, or maybe a predecessor, was key to the preservation and conservation of the Forest remnant. I heard that on campus from the time I was an undergrad. We know that Elizabeth’s bequest ensured her Estate would be maintained as a botanical paradise where study, physical and contemplative nurturing could continue.”

“Yes, James,” Sarah said, “I recall you mentioned that when you first showed me around, before Mom and I moved in – before Stella came to live here.”

Margaret nodded slowly. “My grandmother used to say something like that. She believed Miss Elizabeth knew about things not written in books.”

Helen added, “Folklore often arises around the qualities of rare settings. Whether these stories are preserved as literal truth, symbolic, or the wisdom of generations, is for each listener to decide.”

Our storyteller lifted her hands in a soft expression of conclusion. I saw the glint of perhaps in her eye, as she turned toward the forest’s swaying branches beyond the Yew Hedge.

The harp, the spray and trickle of the Iron Fountain and in its reflection pool were the sound and light that had accompanied Helen’s ancient tale. I thought of the three sisters who had chosen love over fear, sanctuary over suspicion, and how their choice rippled down to this moment. This garden, this gathering of people who had found their way to each other across time and space.

“The light’s changing,” Charles observed. “Perhaps it’s time,” without specifying the time for what, but we took his cue. James gathered the remains of our feast, while Margaret and Helen collected the dishes, loading the remnants onto the pony cart.

“We’ll leave the canopy for tonight,” said Charles. Ellen, Sarah, Helen, and I watched the terrace settle into twilight. The harpist packed her instrument. Helen stood, extending her hand to Ellen. “Shall we?” Ellen responded, “I’d like that very much.”

The spring of reconnection had bloomed with a promise of power, and the boundaries were brilliantly permeable. On the morning of our Midsummer festivities, the Council summoned Ellen, Sarah, and me to an evening ceremony of reconciliation. Helen was warmly welcomed.

Sarah and I walked arm in arm with Ellen between us; Helen had my right hand. We needed no lanterns; twilight stars and the day’s last gold lit the sandstone paths from the Terrace to the Concentric Circles, our appointed meeting place.

The Rings drew me inward, as they had attracted the Fairies who transported me through the mirror portal on a Winter Solstice dawn. I stepped over the outermost herbs, the barrier of Rosemary, Sage, and Rue, and faced my Mentor where she had instructed me with dewdrop reflections so long ago.

Wearing the long, brown, hooded robe of The Silverton Monastery Garden, Abbess Cedra proclaimed:

The Council recognizes this gathering as sacred. Here, diverse bloodlines converge. Ruth Ann, Stella, Starlit Bridge Between Worlds, you stand in a line older than the Cedar Forest, a lineage that knew Brigid as The Flame, as Keeper of Thresholds, and Healer. You have proved to be a Seeker of Truth and Change. Your Earth Mother, Ellen, bears within her the dormant fire of the Tuatha Dé Danann, gods who once walked among the green hills of Éire.

We three women stood in the Fairy Council’s midst: the adoptive mother, the birth mother, and the halfling daughter. An Adoption triad. A Constellation. A living spiral of entwined love, loss, and finding.

Stella’s Response: I was born under crossing stars. The child, Stella, rode her tricycle on the sandstone walks and dabbled in the fountain pool. I was called to rekindle an ancient Fae line by Cedra of the Cedar Root, Eleris of the Shifting Veil, and Selwyn of the Blooming Flame. In shadow and silence, they guided me to this place. At the height of sun and season, my Guardians bear witness to what was written in The Garden’s bones.

Puca on the Spiral Path:

Eleris and Selwyn join Cedra, and together, we shape-shift into black velvet horses with glowing red eyes. We are Púca, with good fortune and felicitations, with a breath of ominous. The paths have aligned. Watch us move!

The long-legged creatures walk a slender path on The Garden’s rings, their hooves leaving traces of silver Summer Solstice light. Wearing crowns of cedar greens and rowan berries, the Púca weave a path—the triskele—the triple knot. As each hoof rises, frost-light forms a translucent and solid reflective wall, a mirror held by The Garden’s Sacred Geometry. They spiral inward, circling the Fairy Ring; the frosted wall of light, visible only to those with the Sight. The Púca reach the center and return to their Council forms: Cedra, now in Cedar Dryad shape, Eleris and Selwyn return to Elven folk, as they carried me here one long past Winter Solstice Eve—all of us more or less human.

Cedra: Ruth Ann, Stella, the Seeker—Questa, now witnessing your single self. You were found here at the Winter Solstice. Now, at the Summer Solstice, you’ve found yourself.
Eleris: Names hold power in our realm, the name given at birth, the name grown into, and the name chosen— all are facets of your true self.
Selwyn: What do you call yourself, Child of Two Worlds, Daughter of Two Mothers, Keeper of Three Names?

Cedra: Questa, by choosing, so shall you be known in all realms.

With that, the Fae Council returned to their home in The Cedar Grove. The glow of triple-spirals lit the Garden paths to the Potting Shed, Manor House, Guest Cottage, and the Keeper’s Cottage.

No longer in shards or fragments, my facets whole, I felt a reconciliation between Ruth Ann’s human heart, Stella’s fairy sight, and Questa’s full acceptance.

I turned toward Ellen’s sigh to see Sarah take her arm to steady her. I saw wonder in her eyes. Her soft whisper had grown in strength, and she called to me across the Herb Circle:

“The name was in my dreams before you were born, Questa, ‘The One Who Seeks.’”
Sarah replied, “The perfect name for a bridge-walker. Protect, love, and teach.”

Gentle Iron Fountain music drifted in the faint glow of the triskele lights, from the place where our Midsummer celebrations had begun. The longest day was ending, but this reconciliation was the beginning of a love that transcends the boundaries between worlds.

We hope you have enjoyed this episode! Ahead, there is much more to learn, celebrate, and grieve. Next Wednesday, the work turns inward and backward: to family patterns carried in silence, and DNA as evidence and inheritance, as we read what is revealed when biology, history, and love speak to one another.

Please join us! Begin at the Prologue or anywhere in the story that suits. All episodes are free in advance of my release as e-book and softcover.

We’d love to hear your comments!
Mel and Islay

Leave a comment

© Copyright Mary Ellen Gambutti 2025-2026

Uncertainty and longing: We adoptees understand the weight of not knowing. The need behind the urge to search. Today’s episode brings a spring reunion and the mother and child who celebrate a new beginning; a new life together. We start with a poem that expresses an adoptee’s dilemma.

The Search

James followed Ellen’s paper trail: “Mercy Shelter,” he murmured. “Ellen (redacted), was admitted at eight months pregnant, and released in December with her three-month old daughter.” He photographed the faded intake and discharge forms, adding them to his timeline with Ellen’s bus ticket from that day. The police report, and a missing person’s report, were both closed when a social worker reported seeing her in Leastways, a town at the end of the bus line. Not yet discovered were the time and circumstances of the baby’s separation from Ellen, and how or why Ellen disappeared from the Leastways bus station. James was putting together the details and documentation; The Fairy Council recently had revealed their magical transportation -- how Ruth Ann arrived in The Garden of The Silverton Estate.

James eventually connected all the dots. Finally, an address—an apartment building on Willow Street, across from the Silverton campus. The Black Rose petal he used as a bookmark fluttered in agreement: Ellen Fairchild was again residing in the Village of Silverton. She’d been living a parallel life to her daughter, while still separated from her.

That day, James met with his search team in The Archives. He, Sarah, and I gathered at the conference table with our contributions: James’s paper trail research, Sarah’s journal entries about possible magic, and I had my Blue Book of Aunt Ann’s herbal remedies, and the gifts I’d received from the Fae at the Potting Shed Council on my last birthday. I always wore Ellen’s forget-me-not bracelet.

The Silverton Street map James placed at the table center marked Ellen’s apartment building with a red circle. “Three blocks away,” he said, shaking his head.

Sarah reflected his disbelief: “How long?”

James replied, “According to public records, she’s lived in the Village for six years, this time. Before this move, there were multiple temporary addresses, or post office box numbers over the years.”

“Six years,” Sarah echoed. “I bet she returned to be near you, Stella.”

“The Council told me that Ellen is anxious,” I offered. “They said she felt she had no choice but to give me up. Maybe she returned to see if I’m safe but she keeps her distance to protect me from harm.” I wasn’t sure what I meant by that.

James asked, “Well then, what’s our next step?”

“A letter, perhaps,” Sarah suggested, “instead of showing up on her doorstep.”

“No.” I was emphatic. “The mirrors show that she’s unwell. We don’t have time for writing.”

James and Sarah looked at me in surprise. James asked, “The mirrors?”

All I could say was that glimpses appeared in mirrors of a sad woman, too thin, moving slowly and warily.

“We’ll all go tomorrow,” I decided.

The black roses in The Garden turned toward the apartment building, as though they knew the importance of what was ahead.

“Tomorrow then,” Sarah agreed, supportive. Rather than hyper-protective, she wanted to help me restore my fragmented self.

Eve of Reunion

The night before meeting Ellen, unable to sleep, I stood at my window, watching moonlit garden shadows and reflective black roses. In the mirror was not just my face but echoes of Sarah’s determined chin, Helen’s thoughtful eyes, and features I knew from mirror-walking visions. I saw Ellen’s high cheekbones, the slight point to her ears like mine.

“Will she recognize me?” I wondered aloud.

She will know you immediately, Cedra’s voice answered from the mirror, blood calls to blood, especially blood mixed with fairy magic.

“What should I say to her after thirteen years have passed? What possible words could matter?”

Names. Begin with names. Ruth Ann. Stella. Both are true.

My Forget-me-not bracelet glowed in the dark room.

“What if she won’t see me?”

Then you will have your answer, painful though it may be.

Below my window, The Garden sighed, stilled while it listened, poised on the edge of something momentous. Soon, the reunion of two bloodlines. The un-severing begins; the Celtic trinity knot from Helen’s folklore, three interlocking loops with no beginning or end. Past, present, and future. Birth mother, adoptive mother, and daughter. Human, fairy, and the bridge between. Remember that you are neither just Ruth Ann, nor just Stella. You are becoming someone new.

Cedra vanished, and I slept.

The Reunion

The next morning, I stood with James and Sarah on the corner of Juniper and Elm, on the other side of the campus. “Number 42 Willow, Apartment 3B,” confirmed James. “Are you ready?”

My heart fluttered in response. As we set off north to Willow Street, I noticed a sparrow land on a picket fence, then she flew ahead to perch on a street sign with another sparrow. At the intersection, another bird joined, and the little flock watched me before flying off to Willow Street.

“James, do you see the birds?”

He glanced up. “Just ordinary sparrows.”

I knew otherwise.

Out of the corner of my eye, the signs seemed to shift to Threshold Lane instead of Third Street, Keeper’s Way instead of Maple Avenue. At a storefront, the display window showed me the path to follow: “We need to turn here, into this courtyard.”

“That’s not what the map shows,” James said.

Mom replied, “We should follow Stella, James. Let’s trust Stella—it is her search, after all.”

I had walked ahead and turned onto the path only I could see. They followed me through a courtyard that opened to a narrow alley that intersected with 42 Willow Street.

“This is it, but I could have sworn...” James couldn’t imagine how the paths that had gone awry led us to our destination.

A black iron fire escape zig-zagged against the four-story red brick façade of the apartment building. I saw a third-floor window with wavy glass. “Ellen’s apartment. I see it from here.”

Sarah coached, “Are you ready?” My forget-me-not bracelet pulsed like a second heartbeat. My yes sounded uncertain. James said he’d return to The Estate, leaving Sarah and me to the plan.

Five concrete steps led to the landing and the wooden door with a privacy-glass pane. Sarah took hold of the brass thumb-latch door handle, and we crossed the threshold into the dimly lit lobby. Tarnished mail slots were fixed to the metal wall panel on our left. I slipped off my spring jacket.

Sarah led the way up the grimy linoleum stairwell. All the way to the third floor, my thoughts cascaded, tumbling like stones in a noisy stream. Like viewing multiple-exposure photography, I saw myself as abandoned and chosen, lost and found, human and someone other. When would I finally be whole?

Outside 3B, Sarah whispered, “Here we are.” I sensed awareness of our presence and hesitated before lightly knocking.

The woman who held the door ajar was about my height, five and a half feet, with a slight frame that seemed too thin. Copper hair, streaked with silver. Green and amber eyes, wide with surprise. Her plain, royal-blue dress accentuated the pale smoothness of her complexion. Somehow, I knew the Celtic-knot pendant. She whispered, “Ruth Ann.”

“Ellen...”

She opened the door and motioned to us.

No knick-knacks, no photos, no mirrors in her studio apartment.

“You found me.” In both statement and question, her voice was steady, but her hands shook slightly. I was relieved to hear, “I hoped you would.”

I replied, “You’ve been here for a long while. So close.”

Ellen said, “I didn’t want to interfere in your life, I just
wanted to know you were safe...”

“After your older daughter, Emily? The Council told me...”

Ellen’s gasp said she was surprised I knew about the fairy realm, let alone Emily. “They spoken to you. The three who watch from mirrors?”

“They’ve been teaching me about controlling the sight.”

Relief washed across her face, followed by something more complex I would later learn was regret and grief—mourning what she had missed.

“You learned what I couldn’t teach you.”

Sarah extended her hand. “Thank you,” she said, “for trusting us with Ruth Ann.”

My two mothers—one who bore me, one who raised me—regarded each other across the gulf of thirteen years. When their hands met, I felt the resonance of a chord struck in another realm. My forget-me-not bracelet’s tiny flowers were hopeful that this fracture between mother and daughter could mend. This rift could heal.

We three shared Ellen’s humble space over tea that seemed to brew itself. For the first time, my first mother and second mother spoke together—with me. And the moment held only a little strain.

The Guest Cottage

A week after our April reunion, Ellen waited in her apartment building lobby for James to pick her up in his car. Since she decided to accept Sarah’s invitation to stay at The Guest Cottage until she felt better, she cancelled her lease. Long before, she’d pared her life down to essentials, and two suitcases held all her possessions. She lived on alert, ready to flee from reflections or perceived threats.

The Guest Cottage stood at the edge of The Cedar Grove, its windows strategically placed to catch light and opened to a soothing forest breeze. “Thank you so much! It’s perfect,” Ellen said to us, touching the cottage door with wonder. “I can feel the protection already.”

Charles had prepared for Ellen’s arrival by hanging cedar boughs above the entrance threshold.

Sarah gave Ellen two sets of keys: The Guest Cottage and The Manor House.

“The Estate welcomes you, Ellen!”

My first mother’s health had deteriorated from years of suppressing her abilities, Cedra had warned me. Her medical doctors said an early demise was likely, due to a neurological condition of unknown source. What doctors hadn’t suggested was that her symptoms might lessen if she allowed herself to stop fighting her true nature. Neither did her doctors suggest what her “true nature” might be.

As Ellen settled into The Guest Cottage, a curious change began in The Garden. Plants that had always responded primarily to me now oriented themselves equally between the cottage and The Manor House, as if they recognized Ellen’s fairy nature.

In the library that evening, I found Sarah with her journal. “Are you writing about Ellen?”

Sarah smiled. “I’m reviewing my earlier entries from a new perspective. What I had recorded as mysteries now makes sense. I can see them as inherited traits.” She showed me a page where she had annotated her original observations with her new insights.

“Do you regret taking me in? Keeping secrets?”

“I regret the pain my secrecy caused you. But taking you in? Never. You were meant to be my daughter, Ruth Ann Stella. Just as Ellen was meant to find her way back to you when the time is right.”

Sarah’s perspective had surely shifted. We were meeting halfway.

Imbolc

Green promises unfolded as Ellen taught me to read the subtler signs of our shared lineage. “Watch how light moves through leaves,” she said, her copper hair catching sunlight like Brigid’s remembered fire, the same way mine did. My first mother showed me how to notice what lingered: the way frost traced the edges of shadow at dawn, how light lengthened without insisting on warming, how the soil breathed but did not promise to bloom. Imbolc, she taught me, was not a date but practice. The tending of inner fire. The patience of women who knew that survival came before celebration.

We bridged years of separation with Ellen’s Guest Cottage windowsill herb garden where rosemary, thyme, sage, and parsley seeds sprouted and quickly flourished. Speaking of rituals older than language, she set a small bowl of water and a braid of dried grass on the sill. Morning light struck the bowl; bounced and scattered yellow reflections on the kitchen table and across the wall. “Fire and water,” she murmured. “That’s how our people kept faith. Warmth without burning. Sight without surrender.” I would later understand that this was a ritual of dedication; our lineage remembering how to hold light safely; how to prepare for what was to come.

Spring Song

Two weeks after Ellen moved into the Guest Cottage, she and I joined Cedra for our first formal training session. “The trick is not to fight it,” I explained, guiding Ellen’s hand to the frost mirror, which Cedra had placed despite the mild late-April day.

“Let the reflection become a doorway rather than an image.”

Ellen’s hand trembled from habit. “The reflections have always pulled at me. That’s what happened to Emily. She couldn’t resist their call...”

What claimed Emily’s life was not reflection itself but her untrained response. She stepped through without knowing how to return.

Ellen flinched at Cedra’s authoritative voice.

Mirror-walking requires three skills. Recognize thresholds, stabilize your passage, and anchor your return. Today we begin with the first.

As the session progressed, Ellen’s trembling calmed down, and her breathing steadied. When she finally touched the frost pattern with purpose, the reflection responded, like a door ajar, cracked open to share a glimpse of what lay beyond.

“I can see it,” she whispered, wonder replacing terror. “A path, not just an image. Not pulling me in.”

“Yes,” I encouraged. “That’s it exactly.”

For a brief moment, mother and daughter stood with hands extended toward the same frost mirror, seeing the same pathways through reflection—genetic inheritance made visible in shared perception.

As she, Sarah, and I walked Ellen to The Guest Cottage, she appeared to be subtly transformed. Although physically frail, she stood straighter, her eyes clearer.

“All these years,” she said, “I thought the sight was a curse, and something to fear and suppress.”

“As did many in your family before you,” I reminded her.

“If only Emily had this guidance. If only I had understood sooner.”

“You understood enough to protect your second daughter,” Sarah said gently. “That wisdom saved Stella.”

Ellen, the mother who bore me and tried to protect me, turned to the mother who raised me, saying, “We both did what we thought was best. Perhaps together, we did better than either could have alone.”

Bealtaine

Ellen’s color had returned. At times, she walked from the Guest Cottage alone, down the brick path through the Yew Hedge, into the apothecary beds with what seemed to be a renewed steadiness.

On May Day, we celebrated The Garden’s awakening and life’s abundance, all of us gathering in the Manor House dining room. Helen and Margaret prepared a simple meal with the Hawthorn’s spring vegetables, and Helen’s freshly baked bread. Relaxed, but lively conversation and the last bottle of winter mulled cider warmed the table.

Charles was the first to move into the parlor after dinner, where the fire he had set in the stone hearth had begun to blaze, making the room too warm for a few of us. I opened a window to taste the spring evening air, while Ellen and Helen adjusted their shawls higher up on their shoulders, drew up to the fire, and sipped peppermint tea.

Quietly, I removed my Blue Book of Herbal Remedies from the Walnut secretary. Ellen had surrendered it to the Fae at their insistence when I was still an infant, and I wanted to return it to my mother’s hands that evening to honor our new beginnings. I saw her eyes moisten as she leafed with tender reverence through the old, rumpled, water-stained pages; her recollection of Aunt Ann’s herbals she intended to ease the “sight” that troubled our half-fae family. Firelight caught the glow of her copper, shoulder-length hair, and the glisten of her green and amber eyes.

She could have been my twin except for her weakened stature. Her weight hadn’t changed much since her arrival in April, but Sarah and I knew she wasn’t eating much, preferring to prepare her meals and dine alone in the tiny Guest Cottage kitchen; solitude and grief having dampened her appetite for food and life.

Meanwhile, Helen unfolded a six-inch square sketch of the herbal quadrants, saying, “Elizabeth tucked this map into her field journal with these sprigs of rosemary.”

Ellen said, “I couldn’t have imagined I’d one day live where these traditions were kept. If only I had been taught. If only Emily had been trained.” The scent of peppermint tea, rosemary, and wood fire drifted and mingled in the flow of Ellen’s wistful thoughts and the season’s turning. She closed the Blue Book and pressed it to her heart. “It is, indeed, a beginning.”

©Mary Ellen Gambutti 2026

Leave a comment

We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Tenth in the series will bring us to a Midsummer celebration, Summer Solstice, and the Second Council with Ellen, Stella, Sarah, adoption Triad —reconciliation and a fearless name-claiming. At least for now, the searching is over.

This novella-in-series is free to read. The ebook, print, and sequel are forthcoming. Please consider a free subscription or follow to support indie efforts. Thank you!

Subscribe now

Peace and Love,

Please allow me ~
In this Tale of Identity Magic, the main character is Stella, an half-fae adoptee whose journey is marked by her changing names.

Names are thresholds, marking stages, or based on family or tradition. For Stella, it is her adoption that is honored by the star symbol. Her birth name is erased. She is briefly called Seeker, a hint of her third name: Questa.

In our Garden’s magic, you’ll have seen that what is foretold may not have been spoken aloud. And what is spoken aloud is not always fully claimed.

Like many adopted persons, Ruth Ann’s story is complex. The Returning of Stella to her full, integrated self begins now.

Boundaries blur, like the best hybrids, in the Silverton Estate’s Medieval Monastery Garden. In this liminal space, growth needs both structure and wildness. Roots connect the past to the present.

I offer this fantasy as an exploration of identity fracture, the myth and ethics around adoption, the right to one’s true story, and the tension between scientific observation and magical thinking.

Through cedar groves that serve as anchors, black roses that mark thresholds, and morning glories that bloom between worlds, I’ve penned a fairy story in botanical language to enrich its emotional landscape and shift like the Cedar Dryad character between narrative clarity and poetic lyricism, between ancient cedar forest and the manicured medieval monastery garden. Between literary fiction and magical realism.

Stella, whose half-fae nature is revealed at age thirteen, narrates from an omniscient-transcendent perspective, allowing young adult readers access to themes of self-discovery and identity formation. As Stella’s metaphysical abilities emerge, so does her longing and confusion about her place within her extended family and community. Her need to integrate her dual heritage rather than choose between worlds appeals to the fantasy of possible, unlocked potential.

© Mary Ellen Gambutti
All Rights Reserved

Start the Series Here:

Subscribe now

Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic. Today is the start of Part Three: Questa - The Returning.

All posts in this series are free.

Episode Seven Recap: The petals of Ruth Ann’s infancy unfurled as Stella, like the Morning Glories that had entwined her baby basket on an icy Winter Solstice dawn. In The Growing Seasons, Stella thrives in the shelter of early childhood on the Silverton Estate under the watchful care of her adoptive mother. Sarah hopes to shape her by scientific observation, even scrutiny. Grandmother Helen nurtures her with stories and the deeper meaning. Through age twelve, The Garden quietly instructs Stella by a design meant for more than beauty.

You’ve seen Sarah record and question, the Garden respond with persistence in shifting paths and black roses, and the Manor in troubled mirrors and forgotten hallways. You’ve witnessed Stella’s powers awakening in patterns of inheritance. Her questions are no longer content with observations once the urgent Blue Book surfaces.

In Part Three, Cedra steps forward to demonstrate the need for new skills, instructing in what can no longer remain unspoken.

Cedar Training
It was early autumn, and I’d soon celebrate my thirteenth birthday.

Adolescent intensity steered my emotions since Winston’s discovery in The Yew Hedge, and tensions with my adoptive mother added intermittent fuel to my volatility.

I waited at the edge of The Cedar Grove for my Dryad Guardian. It would be a routine lesson in mirror safety. Golden light streamed toward me down the rooted path, between the ancient trees. Cedra emerged in true form: long hair, the deep red brown of cedar heartwood, skin like smooth patterns of bark. and honest green eyes.

You’re changing; your sight is strengthening faster than we expected.

I knew this was true, since my mirror episodes occurred daily. Instead of fragments, reflective surfaces showed scenes of The Estate’s past.

Changing the subject to an immediate concern, I reported to Cedra, “Sarah’s been monitoring me again.” I settled cross-legged on the cushion of cedar needles. “She takes notes about everything I do, it seems.”

Cedra: Sarah’s analytical mind seeks patterns. Mortals can be uneasy with the unfamiliar when they feel they have lost control. Today, we will begin formal training. No more games, no more gentle practice. You need to learn control before the sight overwhelms you.

Cedra redirected me to a cedar frost mirror that had formed despite the mild weather, and obedient, I untwined my long legs and stood from the soft floor. The frost mirrors showed me a steady, complete picture. My eyes seemed older and wiser. I was viewing a future self, looking back in time.

Place your hand here. This tree holds memories. Do you feel them? Cedar grows and remembers every storm and season. Everyone who has sought shade and shelter beneath its branches.

Cedra pointed to the tree trunk, so I pressed my palm against the rough bark and sensed the flow in our connection. I saw an image of a vast forest. I saw Elizabeth Silverton as a young woman walking these paths and finding comfort and tranquility here.

The cedars offer an anchor. When reflections threaten to pull you too deep, the trees will hold you steady. This is why your training must happen here, in this space between cultivated and wild spaces.

Cedra produced a hand-mirror from a pocket in her bark-like clothing. The mirror’s silver backing held a profound depth, extending beyond the frame’s edges.

Look into this, but keep in contact with the tree that grounds you. Remember your time and your place.

I forced a deep focus into the mirror while pushing my hand against the cedar tree. The scene within held startling clarity: a copper-haired woman sitting by a window, her hands working delicate floral embroidery. I knew her but had no conscious memory of her.

“Who is she?” I whispered.

You’ll meet her when the time is right. Now you’ll practice dual awareness and the Cedar’s strength: one foot in each world.

The mirror image shifted, like a slide. The woman held a bracelet woven through with tiny blue flowers with yellow centers. I recognized Myosotis sylvestris—forget-me-nots—the bracelet I’d seen in my dreams. At the sight of the bracelet, my hand slipped from the cedar, and the reflection began to pull me, blurring the boundaries between reflection and reality.

Anchor!

Cedra’s command was sharp, and I scrambled to press my palm back on the tree. Its steadiness held me, grounded me. At last, the mirror returned to my reflection; The Cedar Grove was behind me.

That is what can happen when your tether loosens. The sight grew strong and threatened to draw you in and through it. Without anchoring, you could be lost between worlds.

My heartbeat was the panic of how close I’d come to harm. “The woman in the mirror; she’s important, isn’t she?”

Very important. But you’re not yet equipped to receive her story. First, you must master control. Tethering.

For the next hour, we practiced a new set of demanding techniques. Cedra taught me to regulate mirror-sight and manipulate dual realities. We’d tested this visual game years earlier.

In the future, I would see the importance of anchoring in Cedar memory; how it steadied me when both my fae and mortal essences collided. I’d then realize that Sarah’s dual documentation, her journal-keeping from two perspectives, served a similar purpose to balance her when she faced what appeared to be impossible.

We have guided your bloodline for generations, but the Fae cannot protect you from unwise choices. How you advance through our sessions will determine the richness of your abilities, whether they’ll be expressions of your gift or a liability to you. Do you understand me, Little Seeker?

Wordless, I nodded. Was that a nickname? Seeker. In the Blue Book.

As we started for the edge of the Grove, I noticed Cedra’s bark-like brow furrowed.

Soon you’ll be tested. Soon it will be time when The Council teaches you your heritage.

“The Council?” I might have heard those words in my dreams.

Guidance. They guide threshold crossers like you. When you’re ready, The Three will introduce themselves.

As I passed The Yew Hedge and the perennial borders, Cedra was gone. The pungent fragrance of mixed fall herbs and flowers made me glad to be between worlds.

I heard Cedra somewhere behind me, above me:
Be patient with Sarah: her love expresses itself through worry.

The protected simplicity of childhood was coming to an end, soon to be replaced by the complexity of adult choices. I trusted that those around me would continue to keep me safe.

Discoveries, Complexities
The Estate’s basement Archives held a century of files and secrets. At Sarah’s request, James was searching for the person whose name was in the book that Winston had uncovered in The Yew Hedge a few days earlier. A methodical researcher, James had worked through Silverton’s historical records, property ledgers, and social-service directories until he found himself at home in his own archival system.

He headed to the furthest range of green file cabinets, which held obsolete records in drawers where he might find mystery files. He took a chance on the last cabinet in the row, labeled Estate Operations 1950-1975, and forced open the jammed top drawer.

“What a mess,” he said out loud to no one. “It’s a wild-goose chase! We don’t know who this person, Ellen, is. We need a better lead.”

James had an instinct for the misplaced and mistakenly filed, but his meticulous system had spared this back-file room from scrutiny. His hands alighted on an elastic-bound paper portfolio that looked newer than its neighbors, labeled Medieval Herbal Remedies. The writing looked to be Sarah’s, but it made no sense that she would have filed her research with mid-century administrative records. Balancing its bulk on his left arm, trying to unloop the elastic, the folder slipped, spilling its contents onto the tile floor. “Drat!”

On his knees, forced to fumble with the disarray, he picked up a piece of archaic cardboard with what seemed to be notes to “future curators” scratched by Elizabeth Silverton.

I’ll mention it to Sarah... What’s this now? Legal documents?

Police and medical reports. County Court records: Ruth Ann, Petitioner through Guardian ad Litem, for Adoption by Respondent Sarah Jane Caldwell. Nothing about the child’s natural mother, but several pages torn from Sarah’s journal.

Did Sarah hide these where there is the least archival traffic?

James’s first inclination was to return the folder with its documents to the jumble in the file drawer. After all, these official records were none of his business. He tried to put himself in Sarah’s position. The official record couldn’t capture her otherworldly witness—finding an alert child in the snow on a Winter Solstice dawn. He considered my urgent queries. He slid the papers back in place—this secret was consequential—and returned the discolored fragment like a bookmark in the gap left by Sarah’s folder. The file drawer screeched. He latched it.

James was resolute. Sarah needed to know he’d found what she had concealed in The Archives, and he carried the folder up two flights to Sarah’s study. He couldn’t be complicit in keeping Stella from her truth once it was in his hands.

“We need to talk,” he said when Sarah looked up from her desk.

He placed the folder before her, watching recognition and then resignation cross her face.

“I found these while researching Ellen Fairchild.”

Sarah closed her eyes briefly. “I should have told her years ago.”

“Yes,” James agreed, more firmly than he intended. “She has a right to know her history, Sarah. Not just the parts you’ve deemed safe or appropriate.”

“I was protecting her,” Sarah said, defensive despite her guilt.

“Were you?” James asked, his voice now subdued. “Or were you protecting your role?”

The words struck home. Sarah’s hand was heavy. She opened the culprit folder.

“I’ve justified it a thousand different ways,” she admitted. “That she wasn’t ready. That the truth was too complicated. That I needed to understand it myself before explaining it to her.” She looked at James.

In her voice, there was a plea for understanding. “The reality is hard to face. I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“That Stella finding Ellen would force a choice between us. If she finds out her unusual origins, she’ll feel she doesn’t truly belong here.

That if she knew the full truth, she’d reject me.”

“She’ll be thirteen tomorrow and has been asking for years about her origins, Sarah. Don’t you think she’s able to handle complex truths?

Don’t you think she already senses the secrets and wants to learn the missing pieces of herself?” He tapped the folder. “Identity isn’t something we can curate for others, Sarah. It’s their fundamental right.”

“And if she chooses Ellen over me?” Sarah’s voice was unsteady.

“Then you trust that thirteen years of love and care have created bonds stronger than blood,” James replied.

James considered how Sarah’s secrets had snowballed.

“She has a right to be angry about the concealment, but continuing the deception only compounds the betrayal.”

He thought of his own work as an archivist, the sacred responsibility of preserving others’ histories. “Documents like these are pieces of someone’s soul. Keeping them from their rightful owner is like a theft of self.”

Sarah winced. “You’re right. I’ll give them to her tomorrow, on her birthday. It’s time.”

I was standing in the hallway outside Sarah’s study door and heard it all. I’d come to her to ask what had become of the book of herbs and names Winston had unearthed. When I heard them, I stopped cold.

It was too much! I ran to my room, shutting the door with force, and flung myself across the bed. It wasn’t only James’s discovery of Sarah’s hidden papers. It was that she had been recording what might have helped me to talk about with her. My sense of disconnect. My feelings of otherness. She might have answered my questions.

The mirror that was my borderline had shattered, leaving me with broken truths and beliefs. Fragments. Sadness and dread pressed on me. My fear of the unknown. I ignored Helen’s gentle tap with her offer of dinner.

I didn’t yet have the words to express what I would write in my diary years later:
Adopted people must rely on morsels from parents and kin. The secrecy and distortion around Adoption pacts must stop. Barriers to our truths will be broken.

Otherness
I recalled an upsetting incident about a year earlier. I went to Sarah’s study, as I often did, for a ballpoint pen from the narrow top drawer of her desk. As I stood selecting one, I noticed paper protruding from the lower edge of the desk blotter, and I lifted the mat for a peek; a wide sheet of blueprint, a map of the Medieval Garden showing weather conditions, temperatures, bloom times, and other phenological data. A key with colored dots and dates was aligned on the left margin.

Interesting. Mom made a chart for our botany homeschool class.

Until, with a sick feeling, I recognized locations and times of my “episodes” and “anomalous botanical responses.”

• Black Rose and Morning Glory blooms: spontaneous growth of cedar saplings.

• Unusual bird sightings –

• Reflective surfaces – frost mirrors, greenhouse windows, fountain reflection pool—seeing rippling surfaces or other places

This was tracking. I’d never felt worse about myself. She was studying me like a specimen. Attempting to figure out my nature.

I sensed Mom’s presence by the desk. “Stella, I can explain...”

I was sitting cross-legged like a bewildered pixie, engulfed by the wooden antique swivel chair. I stared trance-like at the blueprint. The blotter had slid to the floor.

“You’ve been experimenting on me.”

“No, Honey, I have not. I’ve been trying to understand, so I can help you.”

Sarah’s margin notes smacked of curiosity and fascination rather than protection and caring.

“I’m not a specimen. I’m your daughter. Why don’t you understand that about me?”

Decree and Do-Over
The party of the first part hereby gives and grants the party of the second part the complete custody, management, care, and control during its minority, together with the complete right and power as one in loco parentis to provide for and consummate the adoption of the said child by such person or persons as in the sole discretion of the party of the second part it may deem proper for the best interests and welfare of the said child.

The child petitioner is Ruth Ann. In Hebrew, the name Ruth means friend. Ruth, a Moabite, great-grandmother of King David. Ann is from the Latin for Anna, which, in turn, comes from the Hebrew Hannah, or Channah, grace or favor. The Guardian ad Litem speaks for the child. The child’s rights have been subsumed and sworn over. Under the official seal, one child’s life is replaced, substituted for another. The adoptive parent is Sarah. The birth mother’s name is omitted and deleted from the process; Ruth Ann becomes Stella, and “Ruth Ann” as a legal entity is effaced. Vital Statistics locks away the original birth certificate. What does Ruth Ann lose besides her name? Her mother, her family, her heritage, her medical history, her true place of birth, her origins: her identity, because she has been remade, rebirthed, rebranded, fictionalized, and exchanged in a do-over. In one fell swoop, Ruth Ann became Stella. A Child of the Silver Stars.

Wound of Betrayal
Despite my dark mood and the darkness outside my window, I knew the Black Rose bloomed, and I knew my questions were validated, if not answered. The severance of adoption had kept me from my truth, from myself.

Early the next morning, Sarah tapped and looked around my bedroom door with “Happy Birthday!”

I thanked her, though far from cheerful.

“I have the folder for you. I’ll put it here, if you’d like to see it.” She placed it on my desk and glanced at my open diary. “You know how much I love you, I hope.”

I answered, yes, I knew she loved me.
Of course, I want it. I’ve wanted it for a few years!

She offered a reprieve: “Would you like to go with me to The Archives after breakfast? James got a start on your search for Ellen.”

My eyes were red from tears and lingering resentment.

After breakfast, we met James downstairs. On the research table, he showed me a DNA registry kit: a test tube to collect my saliva sample, and a genetic genealogy website open on the desktop computer.

“We can look at what I’ve found so far.” The Cedar Grove stirred in approval.
I processed Sarah’s betrayal. I didn’t have the words yet, but knew intuitively that by her secrecy, she colluded with the System that blocked me from knowing myself.

The DNA-testing kit was James’s birthday present to me, and he later mailed it off for processing. He promised he’d help me set up a family-heritage tree when the results came back, and chromosome matches to other testers began to arrive at my DNA account. I wanted to be hopeful, and I did appreciate how James looked out for my interests.

I just wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. Helen had packed my rucksack with fruit and her homemade cookies, reminded me to be home for tea and birthday cake, and kissed me goodbye. I planned to take a walk in Cedra’s neighborhood.

My thirteenth birthday had dawned with a continued need to be alone with my thoughts, and I’d spent the afternoon in the Cedar Groves. At twilight, I knocked and opened the potting-shed door.

Since childhood, I’d visited Charles in the same way I spent time with Margaret on her cottage-garden bench, talking about important and unimportant things. This time, I found myself alone. There would be tea and cake at home later, but I wondered who the person Mom and Grandma Helen wanted to celebrate. In the deepening evening, I sulked and tended to my sensitivity.

I should have brought my sleeping bag. It will be chilly later.

In jeans and a sweatshirt, I sank to the floor among clay pots and garden tools. Every year, Charles harvested and hung certain flowers, like yarrow, to dry from the beams; their pungent fragrance, like transition, was between fresh and finished; maturity and beyond; between ripened and crumbly. I couldn’t yet express why that meant anything to me, only that Charles’s weathered wooden sanctuary was where I needed to be just then.

Autumnal Equinox energy thrummed through the estate; the boundaries between worlds were gossamer thin.

A sudden streak of light spilled through the grimy windows, and the air hummed with a charge that lifted the hair on my arms. Shadows in the corners began to shift and move.

A scent like cedar filled the shed—earthy yet ethereal. Three figures materialized, appearing through some invisible threshold. I didn’t recognize them: the fairy folk who appeared to Ellen in The Silverton Bus Depot when I was a baby.

Impossibly tall, their forms shifted between solidity and translucence as they moved toward me. I sprang up and pressed my back against the potting bench.

The first bowed slightly. I knew my Mentor’s voice, like wind in the cedars:
Greetings, daughter of Ellen, daughter of Sarah. I am Cedra.

Then:
I am Selwyn. Your bloodline is well known to us.
I am Eleris. We are the Guardians of thresholds, the Keepers of passages between worlds. The time has come to tell you why you are here and why we intervened.

“You’re all from the Fairy Book!”

Selwyn read the inscription aloud:
From the Fae Who Know You Well.

“Winston found it in the Yew Hedge, I said, and the last time I saw it was that night on Sarah’s desk. How did you get it? Did Sarah give it to you?”

The answer came from Selwyn:
Yes, it was Ellen’s record of her sister’s herbal remedies to quiet the mirror-sight when it grew too strong. It was Ann’s attempt to manage Ellen’s mirror-sight that now awakens in you.

Mirror-sight! I finally heard the name of what had troubled me all my life.

Eleris:
Yes, the ability to see beyond mirrors. To perceive thresholds between worlds—and eventually, to cross them.

Cedra:
Dangerous when untrained.

Selwyn:
Sarah wants to protect you. She’s an observant scientist. A critical thinker. She documents even what she cannot fully explain, like your closeness with plants and out-of-season blooms.

“Why did Ellen give me up?” I asked, still raw from the recent discovery.

Selwyn:
She surrendered you to protection, because she saw what happens when the sight is untrained. She sought to give you what she never had—guidance, safe boundaries.

Eleris:
We guided Ellen to allow us to bring you where Sarah would find you. Elizabeth Silverton’s garden is right for mirror-walkers, with its iron boundaries, reflective elements, symbolism, and its position between cultivated design and wild growth.

Cedra:
The truth you seek lies not in choosing between worlds, but in understanding how both have shaped you. I will help you.

I drew a shaky breath. This would be hard, trying to make sense of my heritage.

Selwyn:
In recognition of your right to know your full story, we offer gifts to help you navigate between worlds. A pendant of light. A silver disk etched with spirals shimmered in her hands. It will help you tell the difference between true and false reflections, between doorways and mirrors.

Cedar-scented air surrounded me, steadying me.
This is a carved fragment of the Sentinel tree. Place it beside any mirror you wish to stabilize. It will prevent unwanted passages and anchor your journeys.

The wood felt warm in my palm, vibrating softly.

Eleris:
I return the Forget-me-not bracelet to you, as it appeared on your wrist one morning. Each tiny flower holds a different light: dawn glow for Ruth Ann’s beginning, midday for Stella’s growth, and twilight for what is yet to be learned. Ellen made it, and she wore it while carrying you. The flowers are alive and never wither. I kept it safe for you until you were ready to know all of who you are. Until you were ready for it.

Eleris slipped it on my wrist, and I touched the bracelet, feeling its connection to the mother I’d never known.

“I need to understand all of who I am.”

Then it struck me: I was a child in their eyes. Those who knew me had the power over what I could know. To reveal answers only when I was ready to bear them. It didn’t seem fair that what I knew must come from outside myself. Cedra with her ancient wisdom, Eleris with her fluid grace, and Selwyn with her nurturing calm, had the authority to withhold my truth. Whether to control me or for my own good, they would share my identity when the season was right.

Cedra:
The three fairy wishes written in Ellen’s book were her hopes for you.

“What were they?”

Cedra’s voice rustled like branches in the wind:
Safety, Understanding, Reunion. You are acquiring each. We provided you with the first. The third remains to be fulfilled.

“Wait!” I called as they began to fade. “How do I find her?”

Cedra continued:
The Archivist has begun to search. We will help you find her. Your reunion will strengthen both your abilities. We will teach you what Ellen could not learn in time: how to see through reflections safely, how to return to your anchor point. But know that meeting Ellen will bring both healing and pain. Are you prepared?

“I need to know myself!”

Use our gifts wisely, Stella – Ruth Ann – Seeker. You are neither one thing nor the other. You are both mortal and fae, and that is your strength.

Outside, nightfall welcomed me. The moon was glowing, and the stars seemed brighter than I’d ever seen them; the spaces between them were less empty, as if I were seeing not just pinpoints of light but the pathways that connected them: my constellation, Virgo, and her bright binary, Spica.

Sarah met me on the way home. “I’m sorry I kept the truth from you,” she said quietly; her face seemed pale in the moonlight.

“Which truth?” I asked, looking over my shoulder. My Guardians still stood in the doorway. Sarah didn’t suspect I had been to a magical event in The Potting Shed.

“All of them, I suppose. The ones I knew about, the ones I couldn’t see, and those I refused to believe.”

I touched the Forget-me-not bracelet, its flowers glowing faintly in the starlight.

“Where did you find it?” Sarah asked, surprised.

I held back -- some revelations follow their own timing; I had just learned that from the Fae.

“We’ll find her together,” Sarah said. “I won’t let you struggle alone. We’ll find out everything we can.”

Above us, the equinox stars wheeled in perfect balance between summer and winter, light and dark, ending and beginning. Just as I now stood balanced between two worlds, my first step was taken toward understanding myself.

Helen waited in the kitchen with tea and birthday cake, ordinary comforts bridging extraordinary revelations.

“…the spaces between them were less empty, as if I were seeing not just pinpoints of light but the pathways that connected them: my constellation, Virgo, and her bright binary, Spica.”

Reconciliation
The Forget-me-not bracelet glowed softly on my wrist as I stood outside Sarah’s study door that evening. I knocked and entered to find her surrounded by her journals: sixteen years of documentation spread across her desk.

“These belong to you now.” Mom seemed exhausted. “Every observation, every question, every moment I tried to understand what was happening without having the right framework.”

I touched the nearest journal, opened to an entry from my fourth birthday:

S. spoke to the roses today. They turned to face her as if listening. Must research if medieval accounts of plant communication have a scientific basis.

“You were trying to make sense of it,” I said, with not quite forgiveness, but perhaps a willingness to understand Sarah’s motives.

“I was trying to protect you the only way I knew how: through objective science.” Her eyes met mine. “But I was wrong to hide your birth information from you. Everyone deserves to know their full story.”

My Forget-me-not bracelet warmed at her words.

The Garden Smiles
I dreamed of a garden unlike my mother’s practical plots of herbs and vegetables. This Garden grew wild and impossible, with flowers that chimed like bells, vines that wrote poetry on the walls, and trees that danced when no one was looking. I awoke to impossibly blue Morning Glories sprouting from my bedroom ceiling, and Black Rose petals on the floor trailing to my bedroom door. Windows caught light from impossible angles, showing scenes of other seasons. Mirrors reflected rooms that might exist tomorrow, while stairs might climb to never-before spaces.

Sarah merged her two journals as though to assert her new perspective. She noted my developing abilities alongside her botanical studies, not in separate entries, but as she observed them. The new journal detailed the Manor House’s shifts, referencing her late father’s architecture books. Most important to me was her openness about her recordkeeping. She asked my opinions and my permissions, making no assumptions. She ceased her surveillance, acknowledging my need and right to privacy.

Everything was changing: The Manor, The Garden, and my self-understanding.

Neither Here nor There
The Cedar Forest held a strong lure for me for as long as I could remember, though Sarah had warned me not to venture alone too deeply among the towering trees. Their massive trunks and whispering branches pulled me more strongly since James discovered my adoption papers.

I found Cedra waiting at the Grove’s edge. She had shifted from Elf to Cedar Phyto Dryad since the Council meeting. Not quite human, not quite a plant; she was a being at the portal between worlds. And there I was, at the threshold, accepting my dual nature.

You’ve been troubled lately.
Her voice was like the roughened rustling of forest ferns. Like breezes through branches.

“I still have questions,” I admitted.

Cedra motioned to me, and I sat on the mossy fallen log.
Some answers come only when we recognize patterns.

I couldn’t be sure what she was telling me. We sat in the stillness of birdsong, as sunlight filtered through feathered boughs. I wanted to talk about a memory fragment: Sarah carried me out under the starlit sky. Terrified of tumbling into the blackness, into depth and distance. She returned me to my crib.

Into the solace of moonglow, I float among the wallpaper flowers, chasing a dream that returns and repeats, and I rise above the highest branches.

Cedra: What you felt that night was the clash of your dual nature. Human children fear separation, openness, and the void. They seek containment, walls, and boundaries. But fairy children fear confinement, and are drawn to open spaces, to the stars and sky.

“Was I afraid and not afraid?” I asked.

Yes. Your human self was fearful of the vastness of the night. Your fairy blood recognized it as home.

Cedra reached toward me, her fingers elongating like cedar twigs to touch my temple.

Pattern floating was your first try at mirror-walking; using repetition to toggle between realms, you could say.

“Then my fear wasn’t about being adopted?”

It was about being divided, with one foot in each world, not comfortable in either. You felt the severance from not only Ellen, but from half your fae nature. This is much like Ellen would feel as half-fae, being separated from you – her natural child.

A cedar branch above us swayed without wind, dappling light across the lines on my palms, forming patterns similar to Cedra’s bark-like skin. It was an exciting sensation, but I didn’t tell my Mentor.

“Is that why I’ve always been drawn to this place?”

Cedars are boundary trees. They grow where worlds meet. Like you, they belong to multiple realms at the same time.

At dusk, walking home under a vast sky just beginning to reveal its stars, I didn’t look away.

End of Episode Eight Through The Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic

Next Wednesday Episode #9 Reunion and Reconciliation
Coming Soon
Behind the Hedge ~ glimpses around the Cedar Gate about the novella and the Sequel in progress.
Through the Iron Gate:

Leave a comment

We’d love to hear from you! Have you enjoyed the series? New here? We welcome you!
Thank you, and have a magical week!

Mel and Islay

I’m so glad you’re here for another episode of our magical realism novella, “Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic.” It’s a long post this week, friends, and it’s free, as will be the rest of the series.

The Garden has always responded to Stella’s attention, but her adoptive mother, Sarah Caldwell, botanist and resident plant curator of The Silverton Estate Garden, must learn new ways of wondering when she witnesses the impossible. Part Two draws to a close when a mysterious blue book reveals truths that have been waiting beneath the yew hedge all along...

Sarah’s Garden Wonder

The late afternoon light slants golden through The Garden, creating long shadows across the lawn. Stella moves through The Garden with confidence that belies her ten years. She pauses to caress a leaf, to touch a blossom, or converse with the natural world. Flickering catches her eye. An iridescent blue butterfly alights on her pointed finger. Her face is lit with wonder; her smile is like a blooming rose.

Now, a monarch butterfly circles her twice and settles on her forehead. She converses with delicate creatures. They stay on her finger and head as she walks to a wilting Echinacea. I’d noted this morning that it is weak despite the conditions.

She lowers herself to the plant, the butterflies still balancing, and the drooping purple petals straighten in time-lapse; its soft green stem, nearly bent to the soil, rises to its proper stature. The plant now appears to have recovered its health. Stella is a child of mystery, a living bridge between the realms of possible and impossible.

When the butterflies took flight, disappearing over The Yew Hedge, I noticed the black rose appeared among the herbs. It was a variety I’ve not been able to identify. It seems to bloom when Stella is near—astonishing!

Helen once told me, watching me struggle to document the Garden’s responses to Stella’s presence, that what happens, even though you can’t explain it, may be real in another realm. My knowledge of soil and microclimates can’t always account for the wonder I witness. When there is magic, I can let the documentation rest...

“Mom? Is dinner ready?”

“Almost, Grandma will call us soon.” She looked at the echinacea and said, “I see it’s doing better. Did you... do something to help it?”

“It was thirsty, but not for water. It needed attention. Plants are like that sometimes. They just need to be seen. Like people,” I continued with the straightforward wisdom of childhood. “You can give someone food and clothes, but they still need to be seen to grow properly.”

How many times have I measured and documented Stella’s development, height, weight, and verbal milestones, while missing what an essential quality?

As we walked toward the house, Sarah noticed how The Garden responded to me. The morning glory vines extended beyond their support. The roses turned like faces following the sunlight. Herbs seemed to release their fragrances more strongly in my wake. I was a nurturing presence in her life, as she was in mine. I needed her for physical care, it’s true, but her love and affection were life-affirming.

The black rose is in the herb bed, its petals absorbing rather than reflecting the evening light. Might this oddity deserve a new category? Perhaps what is out of the ordinary isn’t always an error to be corrected or changed, but a path to understanding.

“Mom? Are you coming?” I called. “Right behind you,” she replied.

Adoption Matters
At the edge of the herb garden, Sarah watched me transplant seedlings, placing each tiny plant into prepared soil. The afternoon light caught my copper hair, highlighting that I was a child from another woman’s body.

“You have good hands for this,” she said, “you have dexterity and patience.”

“The plants like me handling them. They like my touch. Plants tell me what they need.”

Sarah nodded, struck by the parallels between our task and our relationship.

“You know, gardening has taught me as much or more about raising you than parenting books have.”

“How? I’m not a plant, Mom.”

“Of course not, you’re a human child, Sweetheart. The designer must choose the right plant for the soil and light conditions to give the plant a good start. For plants to grow and thrive, the gardener’s routine must include nourishment in the form of food, water, and a healthy environment. Some plants require the sun, and some need shade. And yes, Stella, touch. That is love.”

Sarah touched the tiny thyme plant. “When I adopted you, I had ideas about who you would become. Now I understand that your nature is your own. Raising a child not born to you means that when you arrived in the world, you were another woman’s natural child.”

“You’re saying I’m like a garden you didn’t plant?” I asked, amused.

Sarah replied, “Gardeners and parents participate in something larger than ourselves.”

I had an answer: “Something like, Elizabeth designed these gardens, but they keep changing and becoming something new?”

“Exactly!” Sarah said with a surge of pride at my insight. “The Garden stays part of its original design while it responds to its caretakers. I may never know everything about you, Stella, but I try to learn how to respond to your unique needs, and care for you with love.”

She brushed soil from her hands, a scientist finding words for what her heart had known for years. “That’s not a limitation of our relationship. It’s what makes it beautiful.”

Need for Truth
Sarah had always been honest about my adoption, although not always straightforward.

“I was happy to find you,” she would say, pressing her forehead to mine.

“Out of all the babies in the world, I chose you.”

But she never disclosed how she found me, or why she didn’t show me my birth certificate. I wouldn’t learn the limits to adoptees’ access to their truthful origin stories until much later. “A closed adoption,” I overheard her say to Helen.

“What else do you know about me? Are there papers about me?”

“Yes,” Sarah answered in that careful way. “There are papers that are kept safe until you need them. Until you’re older.”

“Where? Where are the papers?” The questions lingered like the pain of separation.

Buried Secrets
Sarah’s protective instincts had heightened after my first major mirror incident. She told herself I wasn’t ready for the facts of my original circumstances, yet she questioned her objectivity.

Are my emotions overriding my good judgment? What would Helen say?

Her mother would argue that children deserve the truth when it’s presented appropriately.

I know secrets can be unhealthy. Can reveal themselves at inopportune moments.

She buried her fears. No one had witnessed the impossible blooms surrounding the infant in the Ring. Except Charles! She recalled that he drove us to the house in the one-horse sleigh that Winter Solstice morning. The legal documents couldn’t possibly capture the magic of how the black rose appeared as if it were announcing my arrival. Some truths require context to be properly understood.

Sarah’s ambivalence churned her thoughts until she concluded that the adoption decree and related papers, with their sterile language and the conspicuous absence of birth parents’ names, revealed nothing of importance to me. At eleven years old, there was nothing in them that I needed to know. I sensed she was holding back an important part of my story; the story that was vital to me, not to her.

My questions about documentation and origins had become precise. More pointed. More difficult to deflect with comforting generalities. It was no longer enough that I be told “You were chosen” and “You were loved above all the others.” Perhaps it was a maternal angst that triggered her impulse to hide my vital papers. Perhaps it was her self-righteousness: “I’m in control. I make the choices about what is best for my daughter.”

Concealment
One night, Sarah waited until my bedroom door was closed for over an hour before unlocking the file drawer in her study to remove a thick, elastic-bound manila folder. She took the back stairway down two flights to the basement Archives’ back room, to the least-used range of six-foot-tall steel file cabinets; the farthest cabinet, and slid the steel step stool over so she could reach the top drawer. She clutched the chrome handle and yanked. Force needed to open the old metal drawer. She winced at its protesting screech. In the process, while wedging my records in among file folders of out-of-date receipts, catalogues, and antique inventories, a loose piece of backer board slid to the floor.

Sarah stepped off the footstool and bent to pick it up. She knew it was the material used to mount pressed flowers and other botanical specimens, but it wasn’t a finished herbarium floral plate; it was a blotchy note scrawled in ink on water-stained backing, in what appeared to be Elizabeth Silverton’s handwriting. A draft of enumerated items, ideas, some underlined, some crossed out.

This is how she sees and wants to present the medieval monastery-style garden’s structure and function. Why does my heart jump? Was this fragment intentionally filed in this remote cabinet? Picked up by someone who thought it was important enough to save, but didn’t know the Archives? Was it found on the grounds or under the potting bench, Elizabeth having dropped it while she worked? Was it stashed here like I stashed the papers?

1. Garden as a sanctuary. Not only plants → adults? children?
2. Cedar Groves: choice to build a garden near; fragrance holds spirit memory clarity.
3. Black Rose: threshold marker. Thorns = protection, not ornament.
4. Herbal rings: outer = strength - protection / middle = focus / inner = calm. (All beneficial aromas - not edible).
5. Thresholds: water emerging / disappearing. Solstice markers?
6. Stress the need for guidance! Future guardians—who will understand?
7. Protect innocence until ready. Not for all eyes. Need for secrecy? Discretion is required.

This list rings a bell. Maybe Elizabeth was aligning her thoughts, preparing to write the personal note I uncovered in her private Herbarium a while ago, softened for others’ view.

It was the coarse, card-like material Elizabeth would have had on hand while pressing flowers, perhaps left behind in haste, picked up by a gardener, former curator, or groundskeeper; it was tucked away aimlessly. Memorabilia of the Foundress. Once confidential, it had become public. Hidden among mundane, antique files. Uncovered in Sarah’s act of concealment.

Elizabeth wouldn’t have anticipated that a trusted future curator might struggle with similar decisions about disclosure. That’s crazy, Sarah. Snap out of it!

She cast a worried glance at the open file drawer where she had just buried my personal records, where Elizabeth’s jumbled, misfiled fragment of truth was hidden for fear of controversy; academia masking her lack of convention. For a female scientist of the Victorian era, credibility meant conformity.

Sarah was also constrained by convention and how she appeared to her peers, and she documented my unusual responses to plants as botanical anomalies. Her choice, now that her concealment mission had become more complex, was whether to trust that the truth might serve me better than her protective secrecy.

I should give it to James...

Briefly, she considered that the note should be kept with its polished counterpart in the Archives. But she chose to replace it in the drawer from whence it had flown when my thick folder jostled it.

Sarah, now morose, retreated to her bedroom, leaving my adoption decree, the police report, and evidence of my birth mother’s name in the top file drawer.

To protect my daughter.

In the end, Sarah’s sympathy and respect for Elizabeth’s work, and for her own role as curator, were deepened by all that she’d learned. She resolved to keep her commitment to her unmet mentor.

She rationalized that her documentation of my unusual responses honored Elizabeth’s work. She, too, researched and recorded phenomena that her contemporaries wouldn’t condone nor couldn’t explain. A capable, single woman whose academic work masked her private projects.

Elizabeth’s note demonstrated her courage to trust that curators would one day validate her observations, with or without explanation. Sarah tortured herself with the notion that she could be limiting a child, not hers by birth. Yet she stood in the way of my learning about myself.

Regardless of Stella’s origins, doesn’t she have a right to know?

Sarah had a plan for my future, sure. But did it align with my inherent needs? Perhaps my adoptive mother was faced with a moral dilemma.

Under the Microscope
Once again, Sarah’s approach to me became intrusive, as she moved from casual notes to structured experiments. We had traveled this route several years earlier after my first strange mirror perception.

Always reserved, I became more self-conscious, sneaking around the edges of The Estate, seeking interactions with plant life, hiding my moments of quiet joy. The black roses ceased to be my magical companions. To Sarah, our connections were “anomalous botanical responses.”

When I returned from an afternoon’s wander in the Cedar Grove, she confronted me:

“You documented a half-hour with the trees. Did you notice any changes in reflections or in the breeze? Bark patterns?”

Her questions weren’t merely social. She scrutinized me. She was judgmental. Critical. She disrupted my thoughts. My privacy. I avoided her when she worked in The Garden. I saved my deepest connections for moments of solitude.

My bedroom mirror, the one reflective refuge Sarah rarely monitored, was where I could practice the techniques Cedra gave me without Sarah analyzing each ripple and fluctuation.

“Your mirror-sight seems to be intensifying,” Sarah observed one morning, noting how the hallway mirror rippled as I passed.

Sarah’s surveillance added to my fractured identity.

I asked myself, was I, Stella, Sarah’s daughter, a scientific subject? Was I Ruth Ann, the abandoned child with unexplained abilities? Was I someone else entirely? My heightened awareness of adoption made for a perfect storm of identity confusion. If Sarah, who had raised me from infancy, needed to document me like a rare botanical specimen, how weird and different must I be, I wondered. Unanswered questions about my origins were pressing. Bewildering.

Helen noticed my withdrawal. “Your mother loves you,” she said one afternoon in the Hidden Library. “She’s trying to understand in the only way she knows how.”

“By treating me like an experiment?” I asked, more bitterness in my voice than I intended.

“By creating structure around what frightens her,” Helen corrected.

“The unknown terrifies a scientific mind—naming and categorizing is how Sarah creates safety.”

But understanding Sarah’s motivation didn’t diminish its effect on me.

The constant scrutiny reinforced my sense of “otherness.” I was neither human in the way Sarah was, nor was I something else.

In the weeks following Sarah’s discovery of Elizabeth’s note, a subtle shift occurred in the rhythms of our daily life. Sarah’s documentation continued, but with less urgency. Her casual observations now felt like loving attention rather than scientific scrutiny. She didn’t startle when I paused to listen to conversations that only I could hear.

“The Garden has its wisdom,” became her explanation when Helen questioned the unusual botanical responses around me. “Elizabeth designed it that way.”

Sarah focused on what felt manageable: teaching me the practical applications of the herbs Elizabeth had so carefully positioned, sharing Helen’s Celtic stories that provided context for my experiences without frightening explanations, and documenting my development with the patient care of a gardener tending something precious.

The basement Archives held their secrets—both Elizabeth’s letter about therapeutic garden design and my adoption papers with their mysterious circumstances—while upstairs, life settled into patterns that felt almost normal. Almost.

I practiced early mirrorwork with Cedra in The Cedar Grove, learning to anchor my sight without losing myself in reflections. Helen told stories that matched my experiences, as if she somehow knew exactly which Celtic tales would help me understand my nature.

Sarah brewed tea from The Garden’s inner circles when my abilities felt overwhelming; her choices guided by Elizabeth’s wisdom, even if she couldn’t yet share that knowledge directly. We were a family learning to accommodate magic in our everyday life, with homework, garden chores, botanical research, and fairy sight.

Mine was an ordinary childhood punctuated by extraordinary moments when the boundaries between worlds grew thin. Looking back, this was the last period of pure wonder before questions of identity and belonging began to complicate the magic. The last time being different felt like a gift rather than a burden.

Reverie
My questions would change and evolve with the seasons, and I sensed that answers waited just beyond my reach:

Why did certain plants respond to my touch? Why did reflective surfaces sometimes show more than they should? Why did I feel drawn to the cedar forest when others found it forbidding?

As summer waned, I worked beside Sarah in The Garden. We cut back and divided perennials, trimmed herbs for drying. Charlie’s crew did heavy work, like stone replenishment, wall repair, mulching, and fall pruning.

The Estate was like an extension of the campus, as close as it was to the college, an educational environment itself. Sarah, Helen, James, Margaret, and Charles each had their special talents and education. I learned Science, History, Research, Math, Horticulture, and Ecology. My questions flourished. Sarah couldn’t keep my story hidden forever.

Sapphire Morning Glories opened one glorious fall day, weeks before my thirteenth birthday. From being outgoing and chatty in childhood, I’d grown introspective as an adolescent. What I’d accepted as a younger child, like why certain plants responded to my touch, why reflective surfaces showed more than they should, and why I felt drawn to The Cedar Grove and Cedra’s advice, now demanded deeper consideration. Questions that had sprouted in childhood, growing beneath others like roots deep in the soil, had surfaced and become urgent:

What is her name? Names are important. When you’re adopted, you lose your name. When Sarah calls my name, I go to her. But she is not my first mother. Who else knows my name? I should find out who they are. What is my first mother’s name?

The Morning Glory vine sprawled along the top of the Iron Bench where I sat mulling over these questions. I was meeting Sarah for breakfast before starting in The Garden. We enjoyed those relaxed moments, our backs to the Yew Hedge. Sarah had given me the name Stella, Star, a beautiful name that felt like me. But somewhere, someone gave me my first name. What made me think that?

The Blue Book
My Fox Terrier, Winston, came bounding toward the Yew Hedge. Sarah carried down a market basket that held a flask of tea, two mugs, Helen’s freshly baked scones, and a jam jar. It was such a cheery sight that I didn’t mind that my reverie was interrupted.

Only, where would my answers come from?

As we finished breakfast, Winston, who had been nosing around at the roots of one of the hedge yews, stood stock still and stared at me for a signal. “What is it, Boy? What have you got there?” Winston clasped his find between his teeth and trotted toward us. Instead of dropping his discovery at my feet, like he usually did, he turned to Sarah, wagged his tail, and placed the object in her open hands.

The compact book had a gold-stitched binding and an ancient-looking blue cloth cover with gold lettering that glowed. “Thank you, Winston.”

Sarah said. “What is this?” I pressed against her arm. My impulse was to touch it—both warm and cool, and damp.

“I wonder how long it’s been under the hedge in all weather,” Sarah asked. “We should treat it carefully. It could be valuable.” Her archaeological mind had gotten to work. “We should show it to Helen and James.”

Sarah opened the book on her lap, and we both read:

From The Fae Who Know You Well
For the daughter of Ellen,
Named for her grandmother,
Ruth, who saw the truth,
and for her Aunt Ann
whose garden healed.
Ruth Ann, first in love,
Stella, Starlight, and Seeker,
Thirdly, she is named
by those who watch her.

“It’s me! It’s my book!”

What followed was just as surprising:

“It’s a list of medieval physic garden herbs, with antispasmodic properties,” noted Sarah. The old names whispered through the ages as she read aloud from the elegant handwriting:

Ann’s garden remedies for those whose sight is too difficult
Valerian root, for easing the sight. Its tiny white flowers glow like starlight, reaching deeply into long-remembered soil.
Lobelia, for peaceful thoughts, the blue-flowered Indian Tobacco.
Skullcap stems bend in graceful acceptance, growing in quiet corners.
Sweet Melissa, the Lemon Balm, releases an air of breezy calm.
Passiflora, Passionflower vines weave patterns of protection.
Chamomile, its blooming tiny suns, ground and calm.

And on the following page:

Between two worlds,
I stand divided,
Half in shadow, half in light.
In gardens fair, my heart is guided,
Through dark mirrors,
I claim my sight.
Blood of Earth and blood of Star
With three names, I am complete.
Near yet far, known yet hidden,
Morning sun and moonlight meet.

“This is fascinating from a botanical history perspective,” Sarah said. “These are folkloric medicinal herbal properties. Helen and Margaret will be fascinated by this find.”

Sarah did not comment on the name embedded in gold, Ellen, the name I had longed to learn. Ellen must be my birth mother, and Sarah did not say her name. Has she known all along?

Sarah praised Winston for his discovery, and he settled at my feet; his eyes were fixed on the book as if he understood its significance—and my heavy heart.

“I’d like to hold it. To keep looking through it.”

Sarah didn’t look up from the page; her curiosity was engaged. “Of course,” she said absently. “This could provide valuable insights into The Estate’s herbal history. I wonder how old it is...”

My heart sank. Sarah was examining the book as a botanical artifact, rather than my first major clue: my birth mother’s name in gold lettering, only herbal history, and academic value. It was a chance finding she needed to protect and would take the Blue Fairy Book to her study. I carried the market basket to Helen in the kitchen, Winston at my side.

That night, Sarah was engrossed in her references to medieval herbal remedies. The mysterious book on her desk cross-checked the herbal list against her garden notes and didn’t notice me in the doorway.

“Vervain for stabilizing sight,” she murmured. “Morning Glory seeds to induce controllable visions. Cedar bark to anchor wandering perception.”

Her fingers traced the page to “Ellen.” Sarah had been recording anomalies that someone named “Aunt Ann” had treated.

She hadn’t seen me in the doorway. When she looked up, her expression held both revelation and regret. “Stella,” she said softly, “I want to tell you more about the morning I found you—soon.”

My nod had a weight of disappointment as we said goodnight.

But would it be a true story?

I opened my bedroom window, breathing the cedar-scented night air.

Sarah’s willingness was meaningful, but was I ready to hear her truth?

I was more confused than ever about my identity and the paths that were opening between separate worlds.

My dresser mirror ripples my reflection and possibilities, caught between something and something I can’t name. Between whom I have been and who I am becoming. I close my eyes and dream of a copper-haired woman tending a garden, of mirrors that are new doorways, of morning glories that bloom in every season, and the paths they mark. Ruth Ann. Stella. Seeker. Past. Present. Future.

© All rights reserved
Mary Ellen Gambutti

Sarah’s Research
Mom seemed distracted from her routine tasks. I noticed her furrowed brow. She didn’t smile as she used to. I wanted to make her feel better, but she was less playful, spending more time in her office.

Sarah was authorized to access the full Archives, yet had misgivings about unlocking the “specialty” cabinet that held the most perishable and fragile documents and specimens when James wasn’t working there.

Late one evening, she decided to open that particular cabinet to review Elizabeth’s original Garden plans. Their watercolors and drawn details, preserved for a century, now benefited from up-to-date climate control and acid-free storage paper and boxes.

Sarah smoothed the first architectural drawing on the viewing table, and her eyes went right to the features she’d looked at time and again. But had she seen them? There was, of course, the concentricity of circles—the Fairy Ring. She mused: In the Fairy Ring, start with gentle constitutional strengtheners in the outer ring, progress to the focusing herbs in the middle circle, and retreat to the calming plants in the inner sanctuary when needed...

She now conceded that the herbs might have been arranged in a therapeutic progression. Moreover, she now could concur with Helen that the astronomical alignments that honored medieval tradition might optimize aromatic release in daily and seasonal cycles. Then why, she wondered, had she not internalized Elizabeth’s intentions after years of following her work?

Elizabeth’s Annotations

Matricaria chamomilla: Thought to benefit visitors who suffer from nervous overstimulation. Particularly effective when positioned to catch morning sun, releasing therapeutic compounds during hours when such distress appears most acute.

Lavandula angustifolia: Remarkable calming properties observed in individuals whose perceptions seem to exceed ordinary ranges. Garden placement allows evening fragrance release to coincide with periods of heightened sensitivity.

Valeriana officinalis: Root preparations show promise in treating episodes of overwhelming awareness. Medieval manuscripts suggest similar applications for what they termed ‘seeing sickness.’

Sarah’s breath caught. These weren’t general horticultural observations. Elizabeth seems to have been treating visitors who were troubled by uncomfortable or unusual perceptions, or intense reactions to environmental stimuli. On page after page, she read entries that could have described me:

Individuals who perceive patterns others cannot detect often benefit from grounding aromatics. Rosmarinus officinalis, when properly positioned, appears to stabilize excessive perceptual activity. Those prone to episodes of heightened visual phenomena respond well to carefully regulated exposure to Melissa officinalis. Observed reduction in distressing episodes when subjects spend extended periods within the herb’s natural fragrance range.

Sarah’s Journal Entry: Margaret brews chamomile tea when Stella has difficult episodes. She encourages Stella to linger in the Rosemary beds when mirrors overwhelm her. The scent of Lavender calms her on restless nights. Are Margaret’s choices intuitive? Herbal lore? Or are they guided by Elizabeth’s planting design; had she positioned herbs for optimal potency? For their remedial effects? Does Margaret understand this about Elizabeth’s Garden?

Startled, Sarah straightened. Has The Garden been teaching me how to help Stella right from the start?

Below, like a postscript, or a disclaimer, undated, and penned in a different ink by Elizabeth:

Ongoing study is recommended. The design is a framework and proper use and treatment requires the guidance of one more knowledgeable than I. I entrust this Garden with all its challenges and opportunities, and benefits to future caretakers who may be more enlightened than those of my generation. E.S.

And there was more; another lead, a clue, a breadcrumb, perhaps: A folded sheet of stationery monogrammed with “E.S.”

To Future Curators Spring Equinox, 1892
Dear Friends,

You have known me for some time, so you understand that this Garden is more than a strict arrangement of plants. It is a sanctuary.

I have chosen these herbs as one might choose companions; by nature, each may offer a degree of kindness and comfort. I’ve kept careful records. The lists, plants, and The Garden as a whole shall be in your safekeeping, for your gentle, guided use.

Fondly,
Elizabeth S.

Sarah sank into Elizabeth’s Victorian armchair, suddenly exhausted.
How could I, Elizabeth’s intellectual protégée, not have grasped that The Garden wasn’t designed to impress donors or simply to echo the past, but to fill the human need to comfort and be comforted in return? It was designed to research, treat, and heal, to support the special abilities she might not have fully understood. I must have known this! Why haven’t I made the relevant connection to my child?

Sarah pondered until her head grew heavy, and her bed called. Had Elizabeth known? Had she somehow foreseen that a child with unusual sight would one day require sanctuary here? Impossible! She gathered Elizabeth’s materials and locked them away. Like a spell, waiting to be released, was a promise of help, the potential for good. But could it harm? Have I reached beyond convention to something taboo?

Before she slept, Sarah wrote:
Where have I seen these words? “What seems like mere historical curiosity today may prove essential understanding tomorrow.” Perhaps it’s time to stop hiding knowledge and start sharing it. To trust, as Elizabeth trusted, that some truths are worth preserving even when they challenge what we believe, what we understand about the world.

Sarah’s Soil Analysis, Silverton Estate—September

As curator, Sarah collected soil samples periodically to test the acid and alkaline balance and determine the availability of critical nutrients. Following her research in the Archives the night before, she felt the need to confirm the soil condition, especially in the apothecary beds, and in locations where Black Roses sprouted. Morning Glories grew virtually everywhere, so she decided it was less critical to trace their requirements.

Samples collected from perennial borders and quadrant beds.

*Mineral composition consistent; trace elements not typical of regional geology.

*Moisture retention good despite recent drought.

*Mycorrhizal networks denser than control plots.

*Recommend long-term storage and comparison.

“The Garden has wisdom,” she murmured as she capped and labelled the vials. She would do the pH tests and send the rest to the University Horticulture lab. She wrote the next morning: I dreamed of roots twining underground, carrying memory like blood.

The Mirrors Misbehave (Age 10)
Sarah’s recent foray into the Archives shifted her feelings about my mirror episodes. She wasn’t covering the hall mirror. She seemed to think about my reactions to reflections as harmless hereditary traits. She seemed less controlling and more understanding, and objective. She had been redirecting my attention from mirrors that “misbehaved,” and now was documenting mirror “incidents” in detail.

“The bathroom mirror clouded again this morning,” I reported over breakfast, no longer hiding these occurrences but not yet understanding their significance.

“For how long?” Sarah asked, her tone curious rather than concerned.

“Just a few seconds. It showed the Garden, but it was covered in snow.” I paused, considering. “It felt like a memory, but not mine.”

Sarah made margin notes like she was witnessing something important.

Elizabeth’s letter had come as a warning to her to pay attention to patterns rather than dismissing them or worse, raising alarm.

“The house has a long history,” she said thoughtfully. “Perhaps you’re seeing glimpses of its past.”

Her acceptance permitted me to report other incidents without fear: reflections that showed different seasons, glimpses of people in period clothing, waters that rippled without wind. Each occurrence became a small exploration rather than a worry, building my confidence while teaching me to observe rather than merely react. How Sarah responded helped me to accept that being different wasn’t wrong.

Memory Tricks
I tried to explain memories to Cedra, like fragments of light through leaves, or sounds like singing when no one was around, and she would say, Memory plays tricks.

One early morning, around my tenth birthday, I sat upright in bed, awakened from a vivid dream. Bluebells and morning glories surrounded a familiar-looking woman who sat humming softly while she wove a bracelet of blue Forget-me-nots.

In my mirror—it might be a trick of the light—lifting my right hand; my reflection lifts its left. When I blink, it smiles. Is the slight point to my ears my imagination? And the woman’s Forget-me-not bracelet is on my wrist!

Below my bedroom window I saw Sarah walking out to The Garden, wearing her favorite cardigan and the cargo pants with large pockets for seeds and plant snips. She had left her garden notebook on my dresser. I grabbed it and ran downstairs in my bare feet, Winston my fox terrier, right behind me, his tail wagging all the way. We caught up with her.

“Mom, you left your notebook...” Breathless, I held it up.

She thanked me; her brow furrowed to see me in pajamas and bare feet on a chilly fall morning.

“Sleep well?”

My reply wasn’t what I expected:

“The mirrors are getting clearer!”

She paused. The Garden leaned in, and the breeze stirred through the Yew Hedge. I saw Mom the way the fae must have: a scholar open to wonder, a gardener who understood the nature of plants; that they sometimes grew unexpectedly.

“Clearer? How?” She asked with only slight concern in her voice. I sat on the Iron Bench, and she sat, too, giving me her full attention.

The Black Roses brightened; their late-season blooms catching the morning light like dark garnets. Winston panted, pressing against my legs.

“I saw my face as a baby, my usual face, and my face...a little different," I explained. “And this pretty flower bracelet was on my wrist...” But the bracelet was gone, leaving only a trace of perfume. Winston moaned. I sighed.

Sarah studied my face, weighing my words against what she was learning from The Garden’s mysteries. Like me, she was trying to put puzzle pieces in their right places.

She stood up and placed her hands on my shoulders, gently, but firmly, directing me, “Come. I want to show you something.” I stood with her and we entered the Monastery Garden through the open gate in the Yew Hedge. Winston trotted cheerfully alongside us.

“These herbs don’t just grow randomly,” she said, gesturing to the rows in the raised beds. “They were planted with intention. They protect, they strengthen, they remember.” She pointed to the rosemary, thyme, and lavender, the plants I’d helped tend since I could walk. “Elizabeth Silverton chose each one for specific properties.”

“And The Ring,” I whispered, the words rising unbidden from a deep place of certainty.

“Yes, and The Fairy Ring, too,” Sarah nodded. “This Garden has been waiting for us both to recognize it properly. To see what it is.” I remembered how, as a toddler, I liked to curl up in the center of the concentric circular Fairy Ring for comfort.

“Momma, why don’t my eyes see things the same as other people?” I asked in a small voice.

“Because you’re learning to see all that truly is—what could become,” Sarah said, reaching into one of her many pockets. It was a tender way of telling me that I was sorting facts from fiction, using discretion, and powers of reason. She withdrew a small iron key pendant on a silver chain. “I’ve been saving this for when you are ready. I found it in a drawer in my study when we first moved in. We can call it a talisman for protection and clarity.”

She fastened the chain around my neck, and the pendant was both cool and warm against my skin. I knew it was important, but not why.

“What do you know about me, Mom? How did I get here?”

Sarah said what she thought she could. “I know that this Garden recognized you the moment I found you. I know that Morning Glories bloomed in the snow to welcome you, and that Black Roses appeared to announce that you are someone special. And I know that you belong here, with us, growing into whatever you’re meant to become.” It was a kind, motherly, albeit myth-laden response, and it satisfied me in that moment.

We saw the herbs lean toward us, and the rising golden sunlight spilled across the quadrants as she spoke, “The Garden isn’t ordinary, Stella. And neither are you. But that’s not something to fear; it’s something to celebrate.”

I felt a deep sense of rightness, of being exactly where I belonged.

“We’ll figure it out together,” Sarah promised. “You, me, Grandma Helen, and everyone who cares about you. That’s what families do; they help each other grow.”

On the way back to the house for breakfast with Helen, I was buoyant and bouncy, like Winston. I noticed I was still in my pajamas.

Heart-to-Heart
In the weeks that followed, I was drawn to reflective surfaces rather than avoiding them. The mirrors were showing me something about myself that explained so much: why certain plants responded to my touch, why I could hear whispers in the Cedar Grove that others couldn’t, why I sometimes glimpsed movements at the corners of my vision that disappeared when I turned to look directly.

I wasn’t broken or strange. I was something else; something the mirrors recognized even when I didn’t fully understand it myself.

One afternoon, I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the antique mirror in the upstairs hallway, the one Sarah had nearly removed several times because of my complicated relationship with reflective surfaces.

Today felt different, though. Not a moment of fear but one deliberate connection.

“Everything all right?” Sarah asked, pausing in the doorway.

I didn’t turn immediately. “I was asking it questions.”

“The mirror?” Her tone remained neutral, but I recognized the scientific skepticism she was trying to hide.

I turned to reply, “Mirrors remember things ordinary glass forgets.”

Sarah sat beside me on the hall runner, careful not to position herself within the mirror’s reflection. “What sort of things do they remember?”

“People who stood where we were sitting. Words were spoken in this house before we came. Sometimes...” I hesitated, studying Sarah’s face for signs of disbelief, “Sometimes places that exist somewhere else.”

The conversation had entered territory where Sarah would likely redirect toward more rational explanations. Perhaps it was her collection of documented anomalies in her research journals that caused her to pause instead of dismissing my perspective and listen to what resisted conventional explanation. Perhaps it was Helen’s gentle reminder that the world contained more knowledge systems than those recognized by Western science.

“That must be... challenging,” Sarah said tactfully, “seeing things others don’t.”

Her words, though unexpected, relaxed me, and I replied, “It’s not always scary. Sometimes it’s like having extra windows in a room where other people only see walls.”

My words surprised me and Mom. “And these windows—they show you different places?”

“Or the same place differently,” I said, “like how you see The Garden as plants and weather patterns, and growth cycles. I see that too, but... more.”

Sarah felt a familiar tension between science and her instinct to validate my experience. “Does it bother you that I don’t see what you see?”

“Not really,” I said, with a child’s innocence and forthrightness.

“People see things in different ways. Charles sees which plants need attention before they wilt. Margaret knows when it will rain without checking the forecasts. James finds patterns in old books that tell stories other people miss.”

Sarah was struck by the wisdom of my observation. Each person I named, indeed, did approach the world through separate ways of understanding; frameworks no less valid for being different from her method.

“Besides,” I continued, “you’re starting to see more than you used to.”

“Am I?” Sarah asked, surprised.

“You didn’t pull me away from the mirror this time, like you have been doing. When the black rose popped up in the herb garden yesterday, you watched it instead of writing in your notebook.”

Sarah laughed, “You noticed that did you?”

“The roses noticed, too. That’s why more of them are blooming now.”

In a matter-of-fact tone, I had made an ordinary observation, the way Charles often did.

Sarah sighed. She realized she was up against a reality she’d been gradually accepting in her research journals but had hesitated to fully articulate: that The Garden was unpredictable, and her training hadn’t equipped her to fully comprehend how that could be true.

“I don’t always understand what happens in this Garden,” Sarah admitted, the confession both difficult and freeing for her, and possibly for me, as well. “Or why certain things happen around you.”

“That’s okay.” I placed my hand over Mom’s. “Understanding isn’t the same as accepting. You can accept things first and understand them later. That’s what Charles says about difficult plants—you nurture them before you fully understand their needs.”

“When did you get so wise?” Sarah asked with a smile that contained both pride and wistfulness.

“Maybe I remember things from before, like the mirrors do,” I said.

Once again, I surprised myself with my growing awareness of the mystery around my origins. The statement wasn’t meant to challenge Sarah’s role, but to acknowledge what neither of us understood. Sarah, once again, didn’t feel the need to redirect toward more rational explanations.

“Perhaps you do,” she said. “And perhaps those memories are as much a part of you as the ones we’ve made together.”

I leaned against Sarah’s shoulder, and my gaze returned to the mirror, where both our reflections, mother and daughter with different genetic heritages, but an undeniable connection, shared a loving silence.

“The Garden helped you find me,” I said after a moment. “That’s what the morning glories told me.”

Sarah considered the unlikely sequence of events that had led her to The Ring that winter solstice morning—her uncharacteristic decision to walk The Garden before sunrise, the impossible blooms that had caught her attention, the path that seemed to open before her.

“Perhaps it did,” she acknowledged, putting her arm around my shoulders. “In which case, I owe it a debt I can never fully repay.”

Looking back on that moment, a door had been opened to possibilities with Sarah’s acknowledgment that some bonds were formed through unlikely and impossible circumstances. When we’re lucky, it is a bond formed by love.

Thanks for being here! Next Wednesday, when we continue Part Two: Stella,
Sarah witnesses something impossible in the Garden, and Stella asks the question that’s been waiting since the beginning: “Where are the papers?”

---

Share

Sarah and Helen discovered it long before I came to The Estate. After a long day of unpacking, they explored the remote ground-floor wing of the manor. Like two young girls sneaking through dimly lit hallways, whispering imagined unknowns in shadows, behind closed doors, or in the statue nooks. When they came to a dusty, draped hanging, like a medieval tapestry, Sarah whisked it aside to reveal a room with walls lined with bookshelves.

“We’ve found the best part of the house!” Helen exclaimed when Elizabeth Silverton’s Library came into view, her personal enclave of leather-bound books and stacks of parchments and folios.

I gripped Helen’s hand as she walked me there for the first time. “We’re going to a secret storyland where centuries of learning lives.” When she drew aside the tapestry that concealed the entry, she mirrored my excited gasp, and said, “It’s time you knew about this place!”

So, it was Grandma Helen who introduced me to the magic of books. She nurtured me with stories and ancient myths of unseen forces. She enticed me with tales that prepared me for what I did not know but would one day need. Her voice was the magic that fed my imagination and helped me to understand who I am. The Hidden Library became a sanctuary of ways of knowing.

While Sarah documented my growth and development, Helen taught me through fairy tales, reflections, thresholds, and both the magic of nature and the unnatural. She eased me into the knowledge of passages; how to be between worlds. I was beginning to understand.

Antique volumes told of gods and goddesses, battles and love, philosophy, literature, and lore. The wisdom and weight of time and knowledge, heroes, monsters, villains, and fabled realms of questions and wonder.

Candlelight would have danced in the leaded windows in Elizabeth’s time casting shadows like symbols from Celtic, Norse, Germanic, Roman, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese mythology. She would have gathered with colleagues and friends to read, recite, discuss, and ponder. And Sarah and Helen would return through the years to rustle pages, imagining the scratching of quills, and life in old parchment.

Helen selected stories about mirrors: “Reflections were once believed to be glimpses into other worlds,” she explained one afternoon, showing me illustrations in a book of Celtic mythology. “The mirror might reveal what existed on the other side of a boundary.”

Secure in my bedroom that evening, I stared at my mirror and asked what was behind the glass, and it rippled in reply. Sarah would later document my experiences with reflective surfaces as “anomalous reflective phenomena.” Helen called it “the sight.”

“Grandma, tell me about the girl who could see through water,” One gray March afternoon in the parlor, I pressed against Helen’s warmth in the wingback chair, a bright, cozy fire in the hearth.

“Ah, Muirenn of the Three Wells,” she said, once again transforming an ordinary moment into a timeless memory. “She lived between two worlds, belonged fully to neither, but was welcomed by both. In the misty hills of ancient Ireland, lived three sisters who guarded three sacred wells. The first well, positioned to catch the morning light, was the Well of Memory, its waters revealing forgotten knowledge of one’s past. The second, nestled in a stone circle that caught the midday sun, was the Well of Present Sight, granting clear vision of things as they truly are. The third, catching the last rays of sunset, was the Well of Becoming, showing glimpses of possible futures. The sisters warned all who came: ‘Look into the waters, but do not lean too closely. Those with untrained sight may fall between what is and what seems to be.’ For water reflections are thresholds that can be crossed by those with the blood, but without proper training, one might become lost between worlds.”

The story frightened me, but it felt familiar. The way Muirenn saw faces in still water that others dismissed as tricks of light. How she learned to anchor herself with iron and cedar before looking too deeply into reflective surfaces. The warnings that water reflections hold even more danger than those of glass or crystal.

“Grandma,” I interrupted, “these aren’t really fairy tales, are they?”

Helen’s gray eyes met mine with something that might have been a relief.

“What do you think, dear one?”

“I think they’re for children like me.”

Helen hugged me to her. “Very wise. The best stories are both entertainment and guidance.”

Her stories wove magical narratives with annotations, like margin notes to explain practical applications, Her folklore blended wisdom embedded in legend and fantastical plots. Her mirror stories showed both reflections and possibilities.

The Reflection Pool

I was fascinated by the circular water feature, a mystical element woven into Elizabeth Silverton’s original design. Encircled by an array of blooming plants, it replicated the meditation, reflection pools of medieval monks. Sarah was delighted with my interest, seeing it as scientific curiosity, edged with art and fantasy.

“The water shows different pictures,” I told Charles when I was six while he worked on the filter one day. He didn’t seem surprised.

“Reflections can be tricky,” he said. “Best to look at them from a safe distance.”

Later that week, Sarah found that The Garden paths leading to the pond had subtly shifted, resulting in a roundabout route, preventing me from approaching the water directly. She documented the apparent change, at the same time forming a rational explanation:

“I must have misremembered” or “seasonal growth must have changed my perspective” of The Garden’s layout.

Eleris manifests, her form shimmering near the water.

She’s drawn to reflective surfaces already, she says to Cedra and Selwyn. The mirror-sight awakens earlier in her than in previous generations.

Too soon for direct training, Cedra says, but not too soon for our protection.

Eleris replies, I have diverted the water’s invitation, to create safer reflections until she is ready for deeper seeing.

Sarah saw that the water lilies had bloomed overnight, and she recorded it as an anomaly. What she didn’t see was that lily pads broke the surface into reflective fragments that interrupted images. It was my Guardians who had set up protection, so I would be shielded from what I was not prepared to visualize.

Dream Seeds

Sarah journaled her memory of my dreamscape. I wondered: Where do dreams begin, and where do they end? :

By eight, Stella had begun to show unusual botanical intuition. Plants thrived under her care; seeds germinated more quickly when she planted them, and the garden responded to her emotional states in ways I struggled to explain. I couldn’t record her dreams, but Mom and I worked out that they held consistent patterns that visited her three nights each month, always coinciding with specific lunar phases. She described such dreams later to me, as having wandered through gardens that resembled the Silverton Estate, but its plantings didn’t belong together. She told me that she received wordless instructions about which herbs could be safely combined, and which must never touch.

Stella would arrange her breakfast fruits in patterns like ancient protective symbols…Or was it my imagination? One morning, Charles came in with a basket of vegetables from his kitchen garden and set them on the kitchen countertop, when Stella was having breakfast at the table.

Charles remarked, “The patterns speak.”

Stella easily replied, “Yes, they help me remember my dreams.”

Charles said in his enigmatic way, which Stella had always been comfortable with, “Dreams plant important seeds, although, what grows from them may not appear until seasons later.”

Together, Selwyn, Cedra, and Eleris were a reliable resource on botanical properties. They knew what plants could stabilize or disrupt mirror-sight, and the remedies for threshold-crossing confusion. They knew which plants would strengthen boundaries between worlds.

Mirror Games
One fall evening when I was eight, while helping Charles collect seeds, I was startled by the water reflection in the Iron Fountain. The face I saw seemed like other. I gasped. Charles said nothing, but I noticed he tapped the fountain as he passed it. That night I dreamt of blue Canterbury Bells and wind chimes, and I woke up with the faint scent of flowers on my pillow.

Sarah didn’t see the faces in my reflections, but noted in her journal:

Unusual light patterns in fountain water...

They weren’t always clear enough to frighten me, but I sensed that mirrors contained more for me than for her: Glimpses of copper hair, green and amber eyes like mine, and of faint figures beyond the glass.

The mirror doesn’t show what it should. My reflection is broken into playing in The Garden, a baby wrapped in a pink blanket, and some woman I don’t recognize. The glass ripples like water, like images breathing.

The fae keep their distance, allowing me to sense the mirror-sight awakening without overwhelming me with full visions. Eleris monitors my perceptions, making sure that I am only seeing particles, for now.

Cedra said, Mirror games help us practice.

“Why does it matter how we look at reflections?”

Cedra replied, People can get lost in what they see. They forget to stay anchored in the world around them.

Observing me from a distance, Sarah didn’t see Cedra. She thought I was pretending, as I looked around; here and there.

When the bathroom mirror fogged and there was no steam; opaque before clearing, Sarah told me it was because sudden temperature change caused condensation. I assumed the mirror had noticed my growing self-awareness. “The mirrors are waking up,” I told my stuffed animals that night, arranging them in a protective circle around my bed. “They know I can see them now.”

My Guardians observe with measured approval.
She perceives the thresholds earlier than expected, Selwyn says.
The scientist provides structure and anchoring, says Eleris.
Sarah’s documentation creates stability even as she denies what she records, Cedra added.

Fae influence was still subtle; arranging situations, rather than teaching, and creating safe opportunities for my independent discovery.

To be continued next Wednesday: Sarah uncovers Elizabeth’s design. The Garden kept secrets for a reason.

Thanks for reading!
With love,
Mel and Islay

Leave a comment

PART TWO: Stella

Garden Observations

Sarah recorded:

Morning glories climb the trellises as naturally as Stella’s growth spirals and blossoms.

Mom balanced scholarly discipline with a growing sense of the Garden’s mysteries. One journal recorded botanical observations, while the other chronicled unusual phenomena like flowers blooming out of season, paths shifting under the moonlight, and how the Garden responded to human sensation and emotions. She was awakening our awareness that diverse views can be true.

Sarah’s personal entries gave way to astonishment:

Stella’s first clear responses to the Garden came with the crocuses. Her laughter matched the rhythm of the opening blooms.

Her professional notes strayed into poetry rich with wonder:

Ebony rose petals harbor visions from three epochs. From my study windows, the garden changes centuries like light caught in glass. The nursery is filled with moments between moments: morning fog rising from the herb beds in dancing shapes.

Moon Terror
Sarah’s compassion for a motherless infant gave me a stable home and family, albeit an unconventional one. I have no doubt I was loved. But was I a curiosity? Enjoyed because of my feral nature? Or adored in spite of it?

The misunderstanding of my assumed, uncertain origin was wrapped inside my adoptive mother’s sensitivity; her insecurities. Thus, the seeds of secrecy were sown in protection.

I recall one strange bedtime when I was three. After my bath, when I was in my warm pajamas, Sarah carried me down to the front porch and held me to see the full moon, and she sang my “twinkling” song. My “Stella song.”

A punctuation of stars was hanging in the pin oak, but what should be lovely, I rejected. I couldn’t bear the immediacy, terrified to tumble up into space, into unfathomable, vast emptiness.

“No! I don’t want to see it!” I twisted away to flee her arms, to turn from the black depth and distance.

Mom chided me gently and carried me back upstairs to my safe bed. Two luminaries, the streetlight on Cedar Road and the moon, rested between the tilted window blinds. I drifted, floating fearlessly among the yellow wallpaper flowers, chasing a repetition of dreams.

Sarah wrote:

S.’s extreme fear reaction to the open night sky…

Mom planted Morning Glories that climbed toward my bedroom window. Was it her maternal instinct to link my human need to be grounded with my halfling heritage that pulled me toward infinity?

I knew nothing of gravity. My terror of the night sky would stay with me for a few years. Sarah’s arms had been safe, until they exposed me to an endless void. I was both afraid of falling up, and capable of floating dreamlike in my bed.

Years later, Cedra would explain to me that these were reactions to Sarah’s close protection: confinement versus my inherent limitlessness. I was too young to form questions about my dual identity. I wasn’t broken, Cedra would tell me, but as a Half-Fae healing from maternal severance, I inhabited two worlds.

Enclosures were all around me. The Medieval Garden’s raised beds, and brick and stone walls, the Yew Hedge, Iron Gate, Fairy Ring, the Perennial Borders, and our warm, quirky home all provided safe boundaries. The Cedar Forest was a liminal space, and in time, there would be new thresholds and portals to negotiate.

The Garden’s mysteries intensified when I noticed unsettling glimpses in reflective surfaces. At first, mere tricks of light and shadow, these visions grew more vivid, revealing fragments of faces I didn’t recognize.

June 28: Reflective phenomena increasing. S. spoke to someone in the parlor mirror this morning. When questioned, she described “the lady with flowers in her hair” who “lives on the other side.” Temperature dropped 5 degrees in the immediate vicinity.

These observations might have remained academic curiosities if not for what happened on fourth Summer Solstice. Sarah found me standing before the tall mirror in the upstairs hallway, my little palm pressed against the glass. The surface showed not the hallway behind Mom, but the cedar grove at the estate’s edge.

I turned to Mom, my eyes filled with wonder, not fear.

“The trees are singing, Mommy. Can you hear them?”

“Honey, the trees don’t actually sing, they...”

“These do, Mom!”

Spinning
I was four, in a glorious summer of exploration and natural freedom bordering on ecstasy.
Sarah noted as she watched me on the lawn outside the Yew Hedge:

“S.’s spontaneous spinning mirrors the Garden’s spiral patterns.”

Momma shows me how to pierce the succulent stems of sweet white and rose clover into chains, to twist and twine them into necklaces with wild grass, white field daisies, shaggy golden dandelions. A soft carpet of chamomile under my bare feet. I have no cares, only pick flowers, and sing and twirl. My song comes to me in pieces, a tune of time, love, and a happy heart, a song no one knows but me. Spinning my story, my story spins me. My copper hair is pinned back in barrettes, falls on my shoulders in waves, ringlets, curls, spirals, corkscrews. Spiraling on the sunny grass, I stumble, and drop, dizzy I jump up giddy, whirling round and around in the breeze. Under the sapphire blue sky. a whisper, a song that no one knows.

It would be years before I realized that the song I sang that seemed to come from nowhere was an old fae lullaby. That day, I knew the joy of chamomile beneath my feet and clover chains around my neck. I knew I was part of the Garden, as much a part as the sunshine.

Sarah watched over me, while my fae guardians watched from thresholds---the spaces between waking and dreaming, between the Garden and the forest, between one world and another, although I wasn’t directly aware of their presence. I would later learn to recognize their patterns. In their own ways, in my early childhood, they protected boundaries I would someday have to cross. The faes’ vigilance never wavered. Sarah’s journal was a catalog of observations that straddled science and maternal anxiety.

Cedar Grove
Sarah walked with me to the Cedar Grove for the first time on my fifth birthday, the Autumnal Equinox,

“I’m curious to find Cedra’s sod roofed hut. James once said he thinks it’s in the second grove,” Sarah said.

“She works in the greenhouse and garden most days. You’d like to see her home, too, wouldn’t you, Stella?” I nodded, because I knew Cedra as a quiet, constant presence, and I hadn’t yet been to the interior of the woodland.

“Yes, I want to see the gardener’s home.”

We strolled down the first soft-needled path, but there was no sign of a hut.

Sarah said, “Oh, well. Someone will guide us to Cedra’s home another day,” and we returned to a clearing at the edge of the woods.

Sarah called as though from a distance, “Please stay where I can see you, Stella.”

I was mesmerized by branch shadows, or maybe by the shapes, or textures on the forest floor.

“I’m here, Momma.”

I’m far smaller than the sentinel cedar above me, as I sit cross-legged on the forest floor, selecting soft, young twigs to twist into spirals. I whisper secrets to the tree that protects me. My guardian between moments of the Equinox twilight. The trees trust me with their secrets, as I trust them with mine.

I said louder, “I’m here playing with cones and twigs, Mom!”

Sarah leaned against an ancient tree to sketch, satisfied I was safe.

The patterns around me could have been copied from Mom’s notebook… A flash of silver, a shifting in the grove. I hear a soft voice above a whisper, not Sarah’s. Is it Cedra’s voice? Does Cedra know my story?

Suddenly, Sarah was there. She took my hand and we turned back toward the Garden. We didn’t speak of shadows or about my speaking to trees, or how the whispers in the cedars were like goodbyes.

Mom’s research journal entry that evening was brief and precise:

First exploration of remnant cedar grove with S. Notable specimens est. 500+ years. Traditional medicinal uses: bark infusions for fever, needle tea for vitamin C. Further investigation is needed regarding folklore connections to ancient protection rites.

Sarah’s personal note:
S. stood perfectly still for 15 minutes, watching something I couldn’t see in the cedar shadows. When I asked what she was looking at, she said, ‘The trees Momma. They remember everything.’
The air felt different. More research is needed.

Helen’s Stories
Grandma Helen’s stories were a warm hug on rainy afternoons. She would take me into the main floor library, and gather me onto the velvet, plush sofa.

“Long ago,” she would begin in a rhythm and expression that captured my attention, “when the world was younger and the boundaries between realms were thinner, there lived people who could see what others could not.”

I remember her tale, about a girl who discovered a fairy ring in her garden, where morning glories bloomed in winter to mark safe paths, and how black roses appeared to warn of dangers. The tale sounded familiar; resonating in a way I couldn’t articulate.

“Did the girl talk to the flowers?” I asked.

“Some say she did,” Helen replied, her eyes twinkling. “The old stories tell us that certain children are born with the ability to see beyond ordinary sight.”

These afternoon story sessions continued through my early years. Helen nurtured my growth through tales of Celtic seers, monastery gardens, and ancient protections against unseen forces, while Sarah documented my physical development with clinical precision.

Adoption Whispers
When I was six, Sarah told me I was adopted, and gently punctured my world view. The great pin oak pressed against the window to hear the story that I was not only Sarah’s, but someone else’s, too.

We were in her study, but she wasn’t at her desk. She patted the settee for me to sit. “Do you know you’re adopted, Honey? Do you know that I adopted you? Do you know what that means?” I remember her words were tender, urgent, pleading.

I ask, “Am I lost?”

“No, you’re not lost, you’re just where you need to be. You’re here with me and Grandma. And no one is going away.”

The furniture shifts like puzzle pieces in a tilted box. “Adopted” is a whisper. A make-believe. Something in Stella’s heart is a song, something that makes her wonder about ones she never thought of before. Missing ones. Sarah protects me. Keeps me safe. “I chose you out of all the children.” I’m her girl, no one else’s. I don’t know how to ask her who they are, the lost ones. Who took me? Did the lost ones leave me? I must keep the questions inside me.

Mythmaking
I was helping Sarah with flower pictures at the table in the archives, when I was seven. I asked, “Where are my baby pictures, like Margaret has of James when he was tiny?”

Sarah’s hands stilled. “You have baby pictures, Sweetheart. Just not from when you were brand new.”

My questions were inevitable. More and more precise. I was old enough to notice patterns and innocent enough to be direct.

“Why aren’t there pictures of when you first got me?”

Sarah put aside her work and turned to face me fully. It was a threshold moment. “Babies come to their families in different ways. You came to me on a very special morning. You were a surprise to me, but the whole world was waiting for you.”

Sarah told me nothing about where I came from. “Why doesn’t anyone look like me?”

“You’re not like other children. You’re only like you, my only child. I chose you to be with me and Grandma.”

I don’t like to be different. I want to be like someone. I want to see my lost ones and know they are safe. In the fairytale, the mirror talks to the evil queen. Hansel and Gretel wander from their home, or maybe their mother left them in a dark forest. They went to a witch’s house. Must stay away from the forest where the witch lives! Sarah would never hurt me. She would never hide anything from me.

“Babies come to their families in different ways. You came to me on a very special morning.”

“Did the Garden choose me?” I thought the Garden had a life like we did.

She replied, “We must have chosen each other, don’t you think so, Stella?”

The morning glories at the windowsill turned to listen for an answer to her sweet story.

I said, “Yes,” because I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t yet know about Myth.

With adoption on my mind, I was drawn to the Garden in the morning light. The story of myself was unclear. Only the dew on the Rosemary remained constant, tiny, reflecting fragments of sky, earth, and my uncertain face.

Am I changed? I wondered to myself.

Cedra, the herbalist and rose grower, appeared beside me like I’d never seen her before; cedarbark patterns like scales beneath her skin.

All reflections hold truth, she answered my unspoken question.

Even broken truths? Broken reflections? I didn’t know how to ask her, so stayed quiet.

Cedra twirls the Rosemary sprig, showing me dewdrops in mirrored patterns. Especially those. Wholeness isn’t found in a single reflection, but in understanding how the fragments connect.

Leave a comment

Part Two of Stella’s Story Continues Next Wednesday with No. 5 in series.

Thanks so much for following!
Mel and Islay

Subscribe now

The Waiting
Sarah retreated to her upstairs office with a tea tray. There, she would spend the rest of the afternoon trying to process what had happened that morning. She needed to compose herself to write the Official Estate Report. She took up a pen and her journal from the papers and books on her desk, but her thoughts were like a whirling blizzard as she tried to articulate the inexplicable.

Setting her journal aside, she pulled a stationery pad from the top drawer, telling herself: Must stay objective, even when science fails to explain my observations.

Dawn, December 22, 19- (Winter Solstice)
To: Dean of the Department of Medieval Studies
Re: Unusual Occurrence at Silverton Manor Medieval Gardens

At the Winter Solstice, just after dawn, I discovered an infant in the central garden feature (fairy ring). Female, approximately three months old.

Dawn temperature upon leaving the house: 32°F. Temperature within the fairy ring: 68°F. Surrounding garden: 32°F.

Noted unusual botanical activity: morning glory (Ipomoea tricolor) and Rosa varieties bloom despite the season. Geometric patterns in frost formation. A distinctive blue light preceded discovery. I can only speculate on its relationship to the notable rising soil temperature.

Requires research into possible precedents for foundlings in (this or other) medieval gardens.

Signed,
Sarah J. Caldwell
Resident Curator

Sarah exhaled and closed her eyes, feeling drained. But she continued to note in her personal journal:

Ice crystals write cryptic messages on my window. What other form of record-keeping is available to document, comprehend what happened today on the Silverton Estate? Will I see Ruth Ann again?

Sarah navigated through her anxious thoughts that she might not be selected to mother the baby who had brought her joy for a fleeting moment. She found herself seeking solace in the herb garden, where the scents and textures transported her from longing to hope. In her thoughts, there had been something unique about me. She had decided we were meant to be a family. Sometimes, she was taken aback by her thoughts.

She awoke in tears from a dream she recounted to Helen in the morning:
“By the edge of the fairy ring, a woman cradled a baby, smiled at me, and whispered, ‘mother, mother, mother…”

“It’s a sign. A strong sign.” Helen was convinced.

The police were still investigating. Sarah asked, “Was it a kidnapping, abduction, or abandonment?”

“No one has come forward. No leads,” the superintendent was apologetic.

“I haven’t given up, though,” Sarah said. She persisted with her calls while continuing to gather references for the adoption agency, to keep hope alive. She understood there was no way to speed up the process.

The agency advised Sarah to remain patient, as it could take up to six months from the time the case was entered into the system until a decision was made. Those first weeks were difficult for her, as she imagined me in the care of strangers.

Sarah’s anxiety was not unfounded. I spent long hours alone in a foster care crib, or bottle fed with formula and milk with the bottle propped up against the rail in a receiving blanket. Yet, instead of waiting or, even worse, defeat, she kept herself occupied around the Estate.

Sarah’s Journal Entries

January
The adoption process is moving along. No biological relatives have come forward.

The fairy ring remains warm, snow melting in a perfect circle. Lights, like the Aurora, dance above. The iron fountain plays unfamiliar lullabies. Like a dream, my plans fade, or transform like The Garden at twilight. As I move through the herb garden, Cedra is nearby, chanting in an unfamiliar, ancient key. The morning glories sway. My thoughts are always with Ruth Ann.

February
More of the unexpected in The Garden: Science failing to explain most critical observations. Ruth Ann turns five months old.

Traditional infant-care herbs appear: Chamomile clustering in Margaret’s garden, Lavender sprouting along walking paths, Fennel and dill self-sow in the formal beds. Garden patterns reorganizing for infant care.

March 5
The strictness of the monastic medieval beds and walks appears to soften. Lavender and rosemary weave their stems ahead of purple and blue spikes, forming a gentle, protective barrier in the physic garden.

The final home visit from social services approaches.

March 15
Early spring warms The Garden in anticipation of the Vernal Equinox. The Manor House is alive and ready for the baby to return to us. The waiting will soon be over.

The Archives

While Sarah waited over the long winter she immersed herself in research and writing. The giant oil-burning furnace that lived near the cellar door where coal deliveries were once made, could keep the work room at a tolerable temperature, if she wore a sweater, except on the coldest days.

From the manor’s upper floor bedrooms and her office, Sarah had easy access to The Estate’s labyrinthian Archives, two flights down the back staircase in the basement of the Tudor Manor.

From mid-morning until noon, Sarah worked by natural light at the massive oak table, its surface worn smooth by the elbows of academics in woolen blazers. She might be found reading in the afternoon or evening in the overstuffed Victorian armchair under one of several wall sconces that Charles had converted from gas to electric fixtures in the fifties.

As might be expected of an antique home, it lacked sufficient insulation and weather stripping, although the University had made attempts to control temperature and humidity in The Archives to preserve its treasures. Newer windows in the conference room, though not state-of-the-art, were a step up from former drafty casements.

A complex fragrance of aged paper, leather bindings, cedar wood cabinetry, and dried botanical specimens was present in the network of storage halls, lab, reading, and conference room, like a perfume of preserved knowledge.

A tall oak, glass-fronted cabinet displayed a curious collection of Elizabeth’s found objects, natural artifacts, and archaic finds unearthed during excavation, showing The Estate was not the original habitat.

A stack of flat drawers held part of an extensive collection of pressed botanicals, the Herbarium. Sarah photographed the specimens, while James assisted by adjusting the lighting and holding the acid-free supports to protect the fragile archaic pages.

“The Latin is standard taxonomy for the period,” Sarah said, “but these marginal notations are in another...”

Helen, working on the far end of the table, raised her head, and asked, “May I see?”

She put aside cataloguing folklore texts to stand next to her daughter, and Sarah accommodated Helen by adjusting the lighting. Helen eyed the notation for a moment, then turned to a set of shelves opposite the table, and took down a slender bound volume, opening it on the table to a medieval manuscript facsimile.

“I thought so!” Helen said, returning her reading glasses to her forehead. Sarah and James joined her, and she said, “These aren’t botanical classifications. They’re references to the Physicians of Myddfai.”

“Who?” James asked.

“They were Welsh herbal healers from the 13th century, James. Their manuscripts contained one of the earliest systems of plant medicine in Britain, combining empirical observation with folk practices that recognized plant properties.”

Sarah leaned closer to compare the notations. “You’re right. Elizabeth wasn’t only using plant taxonomy to identify these plants, she was cross-referencing their traditional medicinal applications.”

“Not just medicinal,” Helen said, as she motioned to James to bring the volume over to the herbarium pages. “The Physicians of Myddfai classified plants according to their relationships to states of being: physical health, emotional conditions, spiritual transitions, and human relationships.”

Sarah’s skepticism surfaced. “That seems rather esoteric for someone creating a historically accurate monastery garden.”

“Not if you consider the whole purpose of monastery gardens,” Helen said. “Medieval monks grew herbs to treat physical ailments, yes. And they believed in the interconnection of body, mind, and soul.”

“Yes, that’s right, Mom.” Sarah referred to another open volume beside her on the table, a folio of monastery garden layouts. “See how herbs were grouped in physic gardens? Plants were by their therapeutic purposes. Those treating melancholy would be placed where they received morning light. Those for fever reduction would be near water features.”

James seemed intensely interested, and the three fell into their collegial rhythm: Sarah identified herbarium specimens, pointing to their on-site locations which James then documented. Helen translated marginal notations that she said revealed Elizabeth’s interpretations of plant properties.

Elizabeth’s formal Bequest stipulated the care and preservation of The Garden as a botanical contemplative space, a refuge for world-weary academics. As Sarah and Helen cataloged herbarium specimens, they came across a note tucked among pressed samples:

To Future Guardians of the Garden
Spring Equinox, 1892

The whole of my garden serves purposes beyond what is stated in the official Bequest document. While presenting my work publicly as an historical recreation of a contemplative garden, here, I’d like to disclose the deeper intentions behind my design.

The concentric herb beds follow principles found in manuscripts from the Physicians of Myddfai and other medieval healing traditions. I have arranged the plants not merely by botanical family, but according to their documented therapeutic properties for those seeking peace, clarity, and restoration of spirit.

The innermost circle contains herbs traditionally used for calming anxiety and promoting restful sleep: chamomile, lavender, and lemon balm. The middle ring holds herbs that medieval monks used to sharpen mental clarity during contemplation: rosemary, sage, and mint. The outer ring provides herbs known to strengthen the constitution and support general wellness: echinacea, calendula and thyme.

I have yet to mention my intentional placement of the Medieval Garden between the Cedar Forest and lesser cultivated, wilder grounds; the meadow and pond, for the optimal benefits of wildflowers and the Cedars’ aroma.

I humbly trust that your enlightened care will preserve this contemplative and therapeutic purpose for scholars and visitors to benefit this place as sanctuary for the mind to rest, the spirit to heal, and for the body, as for those who tend it, a vital medicine, that it may continue to offer solace and restoration.

With Devotion to the Arts and to Science
Elizabeth Silverton

No specific conditions were mentioned, but of harvest times, preparation methods, and observed effects showed a systematic approach to something beyond mere historical recreation. “She developed an alternative healing system,” said Helen.

Sarah was intrigued despite her skepticism, but was content for the moment with her own speculation.

The Structure

This discovery led Sarah to look deeper. Before long, her neat annotations marked plant species and growth patterns on a transfer copy of the detailed architectural drawing. This was a bird’s-eye view of the medieval monastery garden that showed the formal quadrant structure with the central fountain, arbor, terrace, aviary, and obelisk.

The next time they were together, Sarah traced the quadrant structure, and said, “The layout incorporates elements of traditional monastery gardens. What do the positions of the obelisk, fountain, and arbor tell us?”

James nodded, his expression thoughtful as he examined the plans. “The proportions must be intentional.”

“May I?” Asked Helen, her eyes widening. “These aren’t just aesthetic choices,” she said. “They’re astronomical alignments. See how the path from the fountain to the obelisk aligns with the winter solstice sunrise when viewed from the terrace arbor?” Could it be that the positions of these Garden features ensure visitors derive the Apothecary’s benefits at optimal times? For example, morning light warms herbs, bringing clarity so the mind is fresh for study. Perhaps, the moist evening shadows release calming scents when rest is needed.”

James leaned closer. “And this line from the arbor to the aviary...”

“Summer solstice sunset!” Helen was enthusiastic. “Elizabeth embedded calendrical markers into The Garden’s structure! Her precise astronomical alignments suggest she tested specific variables. She wasn’t just following precedent.”

Sarah looked intrigued, but said, “That seems... speculative.”

Helen smiled, recognizing her daughter’s skepticism. “Give me a moment.” She recalled a reference book, and returned with her well-worn volume. “This is a study of sacred geometry across Britain. The geometric relationships between standing stones at places like Callanish and Avebury follow similar patterns to Elizabeth’s, except they used megaliths, and she uses garden features.”

Sarah was adapting to her mother’s unconventional perspective: “So, are you suggesting that Elizabeth was not only recreating a medieval aesthetic, but that she also aimed to synthesize multiple traditions?”

“Yes, precisely. The terrace arbor provides the viewing point for these alignments. The quadrant beds correspond to the four elements in alchemical tradition.”

And so, the conversation around the colleagues’ research and discovery would continue for months and years.

March 20
Tomorrow, the social worker will conduct her final home inspection. We’re hoping that in the following few days, the paperwork will be completed by the agency and the lawyer. Mom and I are ready to bring Ruth Ann home!

The next day:
“I’ve set up the nursery on the second floor, east wing,” Sarah said to Ms. Turnbuckle from the adoption agency. She and Helen couldn’t help but show excitement and pride in their preparations for the baby, but Sarah kept her composure, despite her nerves. She led the way into the bright, freshly-painted and wallpapered nursery on the second floor. Sarah credited Helen for her loving contributions, saying, “Mom picked the colors. The blues and yellows are so cheery in this perfect morning light.” She stood by the window, pointing to the sweeping vista. “Ruth Ann’s room overlooks the front lawns and trees, and the long view toward the central Gardens...”

Ms. Turnbuckle stopped at the crib and highlighted a specific line from Sarah’s one-year-old agency application. “You wanted a child aged seven to nine. Are you certain about adopting an infant now? You’re sure you haven’t changed your mind?”

“At the time, I assumed...” Sarah hesitated, her heart pounding, “That, given my age and profession... Well, I was informed that getting approval for an infant would be challenging, so I applied to foster an older child.”

Ms. Turnbuckle didn’t reply, but admired the large, braided rug in various shades of blue. “It’s perfect for playing on the floor, learning to crawl, and taking those first steps.”

Sarah thought she heard a faint chime from the Garden and redirected, saying, “The room will evolve as the baby grows, starting with the maple wood crib to a toddler bed and beyond...”

Ms. Turnbuckle’s eyes met Sarah’s, “You know, in my twenty years of child placement work, I’ve learned that the universe has better plans than any of us.”

The day Sarah had dreamed of for months had arrived. James Hawthorn drove Sarah and Helen to pick up six-month-old me from the foster care nursery. The adoption agency had secured my birth mother’s release. It was a joyful day for Sarah and Helen, as new Mom and Grandma. They attributed my rosy cheeks to the crisp spring air after having spent three months in foster care. Although my basic needs had been met there, separated from my natural mother, I longed for the primal closeness; a closeness that might never be replaced.

March 25
Age: Six months. Last evening, while Mom and I sat by the fire, the baby slept between us on the sofa. I felt so peaceful, approaching euphoria. Mom said, “The house has been waiting for someone to grasp its meaning,” and I nodded in agreement. Just a few months ago, the scientist in me would have brushed off such notions. But the Manor has, indeed, been more alive.

The Naming Ceremony

During the Vernal Equinox, when the Garden was awakening, the adoption process had concluded.

Sarah was dissatisfied with the lean documentation about me, and the name “Ruth Ann.” She wondered who gave me the name? Was it from foster care? Like a Baby Jane Doe? She didn’t know the loss that my first mother and I suffered was our unspoken bond; a shared wound that time could not mend.

Helen suggested the ceremony be held on the terrace in the medieval garden, and Charles and James set up a large white canopy there by the iron fountain where the iron’s protective properties made it an ideal boundary for important transitions, ”according to the Celtic tradition,” Helen said.

Charles and Margaret arranged herbs in pottery bowls at the four cardinal points: rosemary to the north for protection, thyme to the east for courage, lavender to the south for peace, and sage to the west for wisdom.

Sarah placed an antique silver bowl on a linen-draped table under the canopy. The bowl’s rim bore intricate Celtic knot-work that caught the light as Helen poured fountain water mixed with morning dew. The water rippled in the bowl, then settled into a reflection of the faces gathered around it---including my own.

“In Celtic tradition, a child receives their name when the world is in balance so they may walk between realms.” Helen placed cedar sprigs and morning glory blossoms which shouldn’t have bloomed until summer---in a circle around the silver bowl.

“On this day of perfect balance,” Helen said the traditional words, “when light and dark stand as equals, we gather to name this child.”

She dipped her finger in the bowl and placed a single drop of water on my forehead. “We name you Stella, given in love and protection.”

“May you grow in wisdom between worlds,” Sarah added, words rising unbidden to her lips though they hadn’t been part of the planned ceremony.

As if responding to an unseen signal, morning glory vines along the garden wall bloomed on the Vernal Equinox, their blue-purple blossoms turning toward the terrace like attentive witnesses to unacknowledged magic from somewhere beyond the spring morning.

“Well now,” Charles said softly, exchanging a glance with Margaret that held decades of shared understanding, “the estate recognizes its newest guardian.”

Sarah made her Journal entries that evening:

For the Pediatrician: Six months: Mastered sitting up, showing good core strength and balance. Reached for toys, showing good eye-hand coordination.

New Mother’s Journal: Stella chose the herb garden as her favorite spot for sitting practice. She balances there, reaching for shadow dancers that move between rosemary and thyme. Today, she reached for morning glory reflections in the fountain. Flowers bloomed in response to her presence. She is becoming part of the Garden’s magic, and it is part of her.

I write at twilight, in enchantment, my thoughts leaning to the baby girl’s presence, a voice like sky, her touch, cloudlike. I compose a rhapsody, a response to garden magic, to the ceremonial blessing of the infant’s name, and spring. Flowers fluctuate in hues that defy the color wheel, in illuminated splinters, the mirrored borders, the bedding plants’ primary colors bounce against their complementary reflections; they seize pastels, the edges overflow their vignettes. The metamorphosis of moonlight adheres, accumulates like quicksilver in the fairy circle. Morning glories gleam like sapphires. Petals of ebony roses harbor visions from multiple epochs. My study windows capture changes, like centuries of light caught in crystal. The nursery is filled with moments between moments. Only the infant asleep in her crib notices if fairies watch. Evening fog rises from the herb beds in shapes that dance. Stella is here to stay.

Sarah closed her journal, and a melody drifted through the quiet house. It wasn’t the mechanical lullaby of the music box. It was more ethereal, like distant bells or wind through ancient leaves.

I was sleeping peacefully in my crib, the quilt rising and falling with my breath. Around the crib, three shadows glided as one, watching over me, the child who bridged their world and Sarah’s.

Sarah whispered into the stillness, “Thank you for entrusting her to me,” to the room that was no longer empty.

To be continued
next Wednesday, when we step into The Garden with Stella in Growing Seasons.

Thank you!

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading and supporting my work! Please subscribe.

Subscribe now

This second installment brings us to the Tudor Manor, the pathways, and the raised herb beds that waited for Sarah. We step from myth into enchantment and the long memory of Elizabeth Silverton's Medieval Garden.

Introduction

Silverton Foundations

The green valleys, rolling hills, and silvery morning haze reminded travelers of their beloved homeland glens. On this rich landscape in their adopted new land, they built a pretty village and set it like a Celtic knot in a deep curve of the northern bank of a fork in the Primrose River. In time, English ivy would clamber over the white stucco walls of their timber-framed houses, and horse hooves and wagon wheels would smooth the meandering cobblestone streets.

Elizabeth Silverton was born in 1832 to the daughter of a German publisher and a British industrialist. After a Fine Arts and Botany education in Britain, she chose academia over marriage and emigrated from England to North America. In 1867, her dream to create a botanical sanctuary became possible, and she purchased a partially deforested property on the Primrose River in New England. In partnership with her brother, she founded Silverton University, and they incorporated the Village of Silverton.

At the Silverton Estate, recent history overlaid ancient traditions, as exemplified in the School of Landscape Architecture and the Department of Medieval Studies. Across the red arched footbridge from the campus, the conservation-minded and creative visionary, Elizabeth, merged botanical science and a deep study of European medieval monasteries. She brought to bear her fine arts education, extensive travel in Celtic regions, and a penchant for landscape and garden design in consultation with artisan builders and professional landscape gardeners. The sprawling Tudor-style manor house, medieval-style monastery garden, the cottages, expansive lawns, ponds, waterways, and remaining cedar groves would thrive. In turn, the Estate would come under the protection and care of the Department of Medieval Studies.

Sarah

Sarah Caldwell’s Bachelor of Science in Botany and Master’s in Medieval Studies from Silverton University shaped her distinctive scholarly approach. Her PhD dissertation, “Healing and Holiness: The Medicinal Codex of Medieval Monastery Gardens,” investigated how medieval healers embedded comprehensive medical knowledge within garden layouts, using systems that unified body and spirit.

Across the front of the property on Cedar Lane, a brick wall ended in piers that supported a heavy Iron Gate. On the icy mid-winter morning that Dr. Sarah J. Caldwell approached the Silverton Estate for an eleven o’clock appointment, her scholarly aspirations intertwined with enchantment. The gate latch stuck, and a thorny whip of a rebellious rose clambering over the brick piers lashed out in gentle fury, snagging her jacket.

Undeterred, Sarah shouldered into the gate, its hinges groaning as it gave way onto the shoveled path. As she crossed the threshold, the rose, though dormant, bloomed black.

James

“Careful of the thorns,” James Hawthorn, the Estate’s archivist, warned a bit late, but he was on time for his meeting with Sarah, and extended a wool-clad hand.

“Great to meet you, James,” Sarah said, accepting his handshake. He was dressed in corduroy slacks, a down parka, and sturdy snow boots. At thirty, he was five years younger than Sarah.

“I see you’re prepared for the tour,” James said, noting Sarah’s knee high footwear. “You’ll get a look at the Garden’s bones, if not their blooms. I think the designers call it ‘structure.’”

Sarah replied, “Indeed!”

James was not a designer, nor a horticulturist, but he was somewhat familiar with the Garden’s layout and features, having grown up on the Estate; the son of the groundskeeper. “I understand you’re in the thick of your book research. I’m at your service,” James said with a slight bow.

Early in her academic career, Sarah had held the Elizabeth Silverton Fellowship, and continued research into the Medicinal Codex of Gardens: A Medieval Monastic Pharmacopeia.

Sarah replied, “Thank you, James. I’ve studied the drawings, and I’m familiar with the garden’s evolution.”

A giant yew hedge, having first obscured her view, she squints against the morning glare down to the glistening gardens, her breath a frosty vapor against the vista. She discerns the Garden’s geometry, the tight, low boxwood edge forming neat quadrants, now dark green, and frost-glazed, the sandstone paths bisecting the quadrants with warm earth tones.

Amidst the wide winter landscape, she visualizes the herbary in its season of color, its shapes, and textures, purple and lavender spikes contrasting with lemon balm’s green, tall stalks of Echinacea, the Coneflower’s violet purple, and vibrant pink petals against the darker hues. Beds dedicated for types of herbs and flowers, their healing properties are marked with wooden signs, meticulously organized. A Germander border contains rollicking herbs, and again, more architecture, texture, structure, and purpose in Elizabeth Silverton’s garden.

She asks, “What is that aura, or aroma---like pine---like Rosemary?”

“Oh! You’ve picked up the scent of the ancient Cedars at the far reaches of the Estate, the remnants of a storied, vast primeval forest that emerged after the Ice Age. We’ve done our best to protect the fragment that Elizabeth Silverton willed to the University. Much wilderness was lost to speculators before she acquired and preserved the meadows, ponds, creeks, and trees, and built the Tudor Mansion.”

James continued as they walked, “The University contracts with a small squad of conservationists. ‘Old Cedra,’ as she is known, guides their choices and ways of protection. She’s been here forever in her primitive hut back in one of the Cedar Groves. Elizabeth was a master herbalist, and Cedra was an intellectual protégé of hers, I guess you could say ...”

Sarah’s mind wanders to a melodic murmur, like whispered secrets across snowy tranquility, a gentle buzzing and whirring of wings, both near and echoed. She visualizes ancient healing powers of apothecary herbs, the concentrically circular beds, from the outermost layer of Rosemary, to the medicinal herbs, and at its heart, the Inner Sanctum. Along the parterre paths, she encounters a bare-stemmed Black Rose in bloom, protected by the stone wall on which it climbs. She lifts a blossom to her face, the heady perfume of its deeply hued, reflective petals...

Sarah strolled like it was summer back to the Cedar Gate where James stood swinging his arms and shuffling to keep warm. She said dreamily, “This is the perfect place for me to work on my book.”

As they crossed the Cedar Gate threshold under the Yew Hedge, James said, “The Estate has quite a history. But you’re familiar...”

Her somewhat detached reply was, “I see that the herbal Fairy Ring is thriving!”

James smiled at Sarah’s enthusiasm. “Elizabeth prized roses as symbols of love and devotion. A stone wall encloses her Rose Garden, over a hundred varieties. It’s way at the back of the property, next to what was once Elizabeth’s private cottage. It’s now in disrepair, no funding for upkeep. My father, Charles, does keep the roses pruned, though. He’s the groundskeeper.”

Sarah again escapes the frozen landscape to revel in early alpine spring bulbs: crocuses, fritillaria, species tulips, jonquilla hybrids. As they pass the wide double borders, it’s summer, and the long, wide, Gertrude Jekyll-style borders are in bloom, tangled with old-fashioned hollyhocks, delphiniums, and foxgloves, edged in lady’s mantle, Dianthus, and Aquilegia...

“It’s wonderful the Estate keeps up these traditional plantings. Tell me all you know, James.”

James continued, “Dad has a small crew to help with weeding and deadheading in the perennial borders, and with upkeep around the Estate. There’s plenty to explore when the weather warms.”

Charles

Wearing a green flannel jacket and brown overalls with thickly padded knees, he emerged with an aluminum snow shovel from behind the sprawling bare twigs of a bridal wreath Spirea. A fringe of snow sprouted from the back edge of his plaid wool cap, and his frame was a bit bent.

James’s father introduced himself: “I’m Charles Hawthorn, and you’re a medievalist.”

Not a question ... Sarah accepted his bare handshake, rough with age and from tending the earth. “Hello, yes, I’m Sarah Caldwell. Pleased to meet you, Charles.”

“The garden’s been waiting for you,” he said by way of welcome.

Sarah raised an eyebrow as the Groundskeeper continued, “We’re in the Keeper’s Cottage. Margaret and I have been here all our married life.

And you’ve met James, so you know he works for the University, too.

You’re always welcome to stop by our home if you need anything. You do know the Manor House is empty ...”

Again, not a question. Somewhat bemused, Sarah answered, “I’ve heard that.”

“The administration wants it occupied,” Charles said. “This old Estate needs a resident curator again.”

Although her interest was piqued, Sarah preferred nonchalance in response to Charles’s amiable but forward approach.

James piped up, “Most residents have been scholars, and many were connected to the Silverton family, though Miss Silverton ... well, you must know ...”

Sensing Sarah’s unease, James redirected, “Well, thank you for coming, Sarah. We’ll speak again soon.”

“Thanks for the lovely tour, James. And thank you, Charles.”

Charles saluted his reply.

“Well, I’m looking forward to making a start,” Sarah said privately to James, as he assisted her in clearing the gate and its unruly Black Rose.

“Bye!” She smiled as she pivoted right, toward the Red Arched footbridge over the Primrose to the campus. Born and raised in Silverton, Sarah had lived in a Village apartment for the past four years.

That afternoon she would stop at her childhood home, several blocks from the campus, to visit her mother, Helen Caldwell, to weigh the benefits against the difficulties of living in a grand old Tudor-style home. She thought she heard The Estate call to her.

“Residency would enhance my position as curator. Living amidst the gardens and history of the Silverton Estate while I’m on sabbatical to write my book, I’d have access to the Silverton archives.”

Sarah was captivated by the cultural symbols in the Medieval Monastic Gardens, the early texts, and mystical and pragmatic medieval botany. Another project was “Translating and Annotating a 13th-century Herbal Manuscript.” The Silverton gardens would be a living laboratory for Sarah.

“Indeed, what a great opportunity!” Helen supported her daughter’s decision. The two were at a turning point. Helen’s husband, Robert Caldwell, a local architect, had passed away a year earlier. She and Sarah grappled with grief. Sarah, too, was faced both with decisions about her career advancement and her mother’s well-being. Helen was thinking about selling their family home, possibly renting an apartment near the campus. Suddenly, Sarah’s career path was clearer, and she could be persuasive.

“Mom, would you consider moving to the manor with me? I’d apply to the realtor who handles the estate, and maybe we can move in March. We both could find healing there.” The Estate on Cedar Lane presented the possibility of mutual renewal. “When Professor Winters suggested me for the curator position, I didn’t realize the house was unoccupied. It feels like the ideal arrangement for both of us.”

Helen agreed with Sarah, that she’d been spending too much time alone in their 1930s white Colonial home behind the picket fence, and was excited for an enlivening adventure.

The Move

The inconvenience of packing and boxing was overshadowed by the excitement of moving across the Primrose River into the Silverton Manor.

“What great timing!” Helen said, arranging her folkloric research volumes. “My house sold three weeks after you were offered the curatorship.”

Charles Hawthorn voiced his approval of their move to the Estate, The house has a special draw to artists and scholars. Elizabeth had certain stones shipped from a Welsh quarry to build one of the walls,” he told Helen, who, as a folklorist, was keenly interested.

Charmed by the Tudor’s quirky blend of elegance and eccentricity, Helen and Sarah planned to gently edge the grand main floor rooms of the spinster’s residence into an eclectic modern style by adding their furnishings to Elizabeth’s remaining Victoriana.

As Sarah planned, they were in at the start of spring, and took to the rhythms of the estate. Even the house seemed to unfold around them, its spaces inviting new purposes.

One morning, Sarah paused in the doorway of an upstairs room that had a long view out to the gardens. “I considered placing our reference books here, but ...” She trailed off, and Helen, observing her daughter’s dreamy expression, asked, “What do you think it should be used for?”

Sarah surprised herself with the words: “Maybe a child’s room ...”

Over breakfast, Sarah’s thoughts crystallized. “The local adoption agency has a waiting list for foster parents,” she said, admitting she’d inquired. “I could be eligible to care for a child aged six to nine. Fostering an older child or two, I could continue researching and writing. They’d thrive in the open spaces, learning about plants and gardens. And you’d have a ready audience for your stories, Mom.”

Possibilities flew back and forth across the breakfast table. Helen said, “You’ve always enjoyed taking on challenges.” She easily embraced the idea of a child in her life again.

Sarah replied, “I think I’m ready.” She contacted the agency, taking the first steps in the process of becoming a foster parent. There were forms and hard questions for the single, middle-aged prospective parent who expressed her earnest desire to provide a loving and caring home for a child. She was added to a waiting list.

Sarah’s new routine balanced her plant curator duties with her book research into Elizabeth Silverton’s garden design and practical uses.

Years ago, as Elizabeth had stipulated, the University transferred what remained of Elizabeth’s archives back to the Estate. As its current archivist, James handled materials few others had: her herbarium, garden plans in watercolor and ink, personal correspondence, receipts, and architectural drawings. Now he welcomed Sarah’s botanical knowledge, and Helen’s expertise. While Sarah traced the garden’s evolution into the present, Helen pursued folkloric parallels, and James stitched their findings to the Estate’s historical record.

“Elizabeth’s bequest required that her papers stay with the gardens,” James said, unlocking and opening a wood and glass case on a conference room wall. He lifted out a framed letter. “Here it is, the document establishing the Estate as University property, and Elizabeth’s intentions for the gardens. Her vision.”

Sarah leaned closer and began to read aloud:

From the Bequest of Elizabeth Silverton
Spring Equinox, 1892

To the Board of Trustees
Silverton University
Department of Medieval Studies

Dear Colleagues,

It is with careful thought that I bequeath my Estate and Gardens to Silverton University, with the charge that they be maintained as a faithful recreation of Medieval Monastery Gardens. I intend these grounds to be a place of peace and contemplation, as the monks of old designed them, while preserving the rare botanical specimens I have gathered throughout my life.

The Garden’s design follows historical precedent in its quadrant structure, drawing from manuscripts of European Monastic Gardens. I ask that its integrity be preserved in perpetuity: the Concentric Herb Beds arranged according to apothecary principle, propagating the collection of uncommon plants.

My hope is that the Gardens continue to serve both scholarship and solace, as a living document for students of history and botany, and a contemplative refuge for future generations.

I further request that all plans, drawings, and catalogues remain housed in the Manor’s Archives, for proximity to the Gardens, so that future curators may have recourse to the original records.

The accompanying endowment shall provide for the ongoing care, study, and preservation of this rare work.

With scholarly devotion,
Elizabeth Silverton

Sarah’s voice faded to a whisper, and James, respecting the moment’s stillness, said, “The Silverton Legacy. Sarah, with your background in Medieval Botany and Garden Design, you were well placed to continue Elizabeth’s work as Curator.”

“It’s an honor to be part of this Garden family,” Sarah replied, acknowledging her weighty commission.

Summer Walk

On a hot, bright afternoon, Sarah and Helen meandered down the brick pathway that bordered the perennial beds. “I’ve been looking over Elizabeth’s notes on medicinal properties,” Sarah explained. “I want to bring some of her approaches into my own methodology. Previous curators respected most of Elizabeth’s original plantings. I want to do more; to restore her botanical legacy.”

The towering ancient Yew Hedge marked the boundary between formal and informal spaces. Its topmost feathery foliage, where pruning shears seldom ventured, captured the midsummer’s sparkle. Helen ran her hand along the hedge’s tightly sheared profile, stopping at the rough-sawn cedar board gate with a high arch set snugly within the hedge.

At the start of his career as groundskeeper, Charles had replicated Elizabeth’s Celtic gate, replacing the original by request of the University. It was kept safe in the archive’s storeroom with the aviary, also long out of commission.

“Perfectly maintained,” said Helen of the Yew Hedge, “yet Charles said it requires minimal trimming, as if ...”

“As if it maintains itself?” Sarah completed her mother’s thought with a hint of skepticism. Yet, Sarah admitted she’d observed a few botanical oddities, “ ...plants blooming out of season, unusual growth patterns ...”

Helen smiled at her daughter’s cautious phrasing. “It seems that Elizabeth had an unconventional approach to horticulture. In her private social gatherings in the Manor House, she was quoted (off the record) that the Garden responded to more than soil chemistry and light conditions.”

Through the portal and onto the terrace, both women felt a shift in ambient temperature. The hedge, the brick wall on three sides, the warm sandstone paving, and the murmur of cooling water made a pleasant microclimate. The sheltered, cloister-style raised beds in quadrants that held precisely planted herbs, was a highly structured yet aesthetically satisfying botanical display. It contrasted with the naturalistic perennial borders, wide meadow, marshes, ponds, streams, and forest. At the Garden’s central axis, the three-tiered iron fountain heightened the afternoon’s dazzle with its arched spray, and reflecting pool’s ripples and rainbows.

Helen and Sarah were relaxed, steeped in the magic of the afternoon, and pleased with their decision to accept the Estate’s challenges and enjoy its comforts. Heading back toward the House, Sarah mused, “Tomorrow I’ll revisit Elizabeth’s planting schemes and cycles, the living rhythms of the garden, what stirs beneath the soil. To explore, even embrace her intentions and her purposes, beyond her official documentation.” Helen smiled in reply.

The last of the boxes could wait; Elizabeth Silverton’s Garden legacy had taken precedence. By the end of their first summer on the Estate, Helen and Sarah were well settled. Sarah was immersed in research and discovery in the garden. Helen had taken up baking bread and cooking in the once-forbidding AGA cooker, at first enlisting the aid of affable Margaret Hawthorn to demonstrate the fundamentals of the imposing combination gas and wood oven. Helen enjoyed walks in green and paved spaces. She thought about her husband, Robert, who had some acquaintance with the Silverton history, though not a Medievalist. Helen felt sure he would have been pleased that she and Sarah were living in an aesthetic environment with plenty of opportunites to research.

The Estate’s Arteries

The first heavy rains revealed aspects of Elizabeth’s design not apparent in the summer, so Sarah, James, and Helen donned ponchos and wellies, ventured onto the sodden lawns and gardens to witness the Estate’s water workings; the irrigation network extending from the Primrose River underground and out through the property.

At the windy northwest corner of the Medieval Garden, a series of carved stone gargoyles, the size of five-gallon jugs had come to life, spouting rainwater from garish open mouths into a communal trough, draining discreetly into an intricate system of rills.

“This is a unified water management system,” Sarah explained, leaning where the stone channel disappeared under the greenhouse.

James produced a sketch of the original blueprints from his pocket to show Sarah and Helen. The trio eyed the damp paper, their umbrellas joined against the drizzle.

“According to these plans, there are seven main waterways running beneath the medieval garden, with thirty-two secondary veins branching off through the quadrants and perennial beds.”

Sarah’s blonde bangs clung damp to her forehead, and she separated the fringe, saying, “Perfect moisture balance, mostly gravity-fed.”

Helen examined the stone edge of the rill that trickled liquid life to the perennials. She traced the smooth, carved symbols: spirals, knots, and stylized eyes with her index finger. “They are similar to those in monastic water systems throughout medieval Europe in Celtic regions. Water, a threshold element, connects the visible and invisible worlds.”

Sarah noted, “Elizabeth documented certain plant species thriving regardless of conditions. She classified plants not only by sunlight and soil preferences, but by their relationship to the water flow here, some, marked as threshold, positioned where water emerges or disappears.”

The three colleagues followed the main rill to the central fountain, where water burbled up through stone basins before flowing outward along four channels aligned with the cardinal directions. The fountain featured carved Celtic knots intertwined with Elizabeth’s herbarium motifs.

Sarah noted that the fountain water level stayed even despite rainfall accumulation. “It’s a regulating system. Overflow is channeled and redirected to drought-sensitive areas or out to the lawns.”

From the lip of the bottom basin, water spilled into four discrete channels. Helen said they represent the four rivers of paradise.

“Remarkable precision,” Sarah’s voice held a trace of awe, “when you observe Iris and water mint arranging themselves in the channels, adjusting their growth patterns to seasonal water flow.”

As the rain intensified, James said, “Dad mentioned his predecessor instructed him against tampering with the water channels, even if they seemed to malfunction. ‘The garden corrects itself.’”

“I’d have dismissed such a statement, except for what I’ve seen. Elizabeth seems to have designed a responsive arterial system where the garden’s structure reacts to subtle changes in environment with organic intelligence.” With her next breath, Sarah murmured, “Water as medium between worlds.”

Helen replied, “Elizabeth surely knew that the monks made use of water as the life of their gardens, and that if properly channeled, it is more than hydration for plants. It is communication.”

Sarah’s journal entry that evening was a nod to new awareness”

Water system functioning with remarkable efficiency during heavy rainfall. Plant response continues to defy conventional explanation.
Notable: morning glories appearing at junctures where water emerges from underground channels. Helen’s interpretation of symbolic carvings suggests deliberate integration of water as threshold element. Consider: Elizabeth’s water system may serve functions beyond irrigation---possibly creating conditions for what she termed in her notes “permeability between states.”

Sarah’s botanical expertise could not have prepared her for events three months later at midwinter.

Thanks for reading!
Next Wednesday, we continue with Part One: Ruth Ann, through the days and weeks after The Finding.

PROLOGUE

The Foretelling

Under the stark flicker of fluorescent lights, white moths flutter cryptic scripts: What does Virgo portend? The prophecy of place and time, the raison d’être? She, the child of changing seasons, was pushed into the Autumn Equinox, delivered in sorrow on the first day of fall under a sapphire sky, on the cusp of Libra, the Just.

The bus ticket vibrates in Ellen’s coat pocket, her choice like the weight of lead: an escape, a remedy, but not a salvation. She trembles as she sets the baby basket behind the farthest bench, out of the cold gusts of wind that rush across the concrete platform.

She pins her plea, penned in loss and stained by tears, to the Mercy Shelter baby blanket: Protect Ruth Ann, Sweeten her life. She places a memory, a kiss like honey and salt on the infant’s forehead.

The Taking

Three elvish figures, wearing sparkling silver and green, emerge through the ticket-booth surveillance mirror, luminous and clear in their purpose.

Ellen shudders at their chiming voices. Familiar and foreboding, they stand full height around her baby. She knows them from shiny surfaces, reflections, in the shelter where they cajoled her until, distraught, she acquiesces to their coaxing in the twilight.

Your baby will be safe, she’ll be found, assures Eleris. In the ancient garden, she’ll come into her heritage, predicts Cedra. Under the human’s care, under our vigilance, she shall blossom. She’ll bridge worlds, promises Selwyn.

Accepting she is flawed and cannot be a proper mother, Ellen turns to board the waiting bus.

Hurry! Harmful fumes! They shriek, they shape shift, they shrink. They lift the baby in her basket, disappear into the reflective portal, and float on the Winter Solstice breeze to the Garden where blue morning glories bloom in the snow.

                                                      PART ONE: Ruth Ann

  “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” --- W.B. Yeats

                                                             THE GIFT

The Finding

Sarah rose at dawn to record frost patterns in the monastery garden and observe solstice alignments. Her boots crunched through hardened snow as she approached the concentric rings with her spiral notebook and camera. What she saw in the half-light stopped her mid-stride. Past the first ring, the sentinel border of rosemary, across the second ring of medicinal herbs, the innermost circle was free of snow. A misty vapor rose from what should have been icy ground, and it emanated a gentle warmth into the winter morning.

Heated utility pipe? Geothermal phenomenon?

The scene before Sarah appeared surreal. There, within the lush, aromatic tangle of rosemary, in a wicker Moses basket, she found an infant swaddled in a pink blanket.

I recall the whispered promises of the fae who carried me through mirrors and placed me in the fairy ring. At three months of age, I had a primal awareness of cold that isn’t cold. Blue flowers that bloom in winter.

Sarah broad-jumped across the triple herbal boundary, landing in the center of the Inner Sanctum. She crouched next to my basket, touching my cheek with her bare fingertips. I was warm and alert despite the freezing temperature.

Nothing in Sarah’s scientific background could explain the morning glories that flowered through frost, nor the black rose that appeared on the garden wall as she lifted me into her arms.

“Hello, little one, how did you get here? Where did you come from?”

As the woman’s eyes adapted to the broadening daylight, my eyes also had to adjust to the new day.

I don’t know this woman. Her hair is light, not like Momma’s. I’m not crying. Not afraid. Who is she, talking to me, smiling at me? I reached toward her face.

Sarah opened the safety pin to remove the note from my blanket. The unsigned note was written in sparkling blue ink:

Please protect my Ruth Ann. Born on the Autumnal Equinox. Sweeten her life. Preserve my memory.

I was dressed for the temperature in the circle, about 68°F, and didn’t feel cold. Sarah’s academic instincts prompted careful documentation, but her nurturing heart told her to get help.

Charles was clearing the walks in the Medieval Garden and responded to Sarah’s urgent call. “Miss Caldwell? Is everything---” His eyes widened when he saw Sarah talking on her cell phone while holding an infant.

“Yes, Officer,” Sarah’s voice was controlled despite her racing heartbeat. “In my Garden, yes ... three months old, if the note is accurate. Maybe born in Mercy Shelter... named Ruth Ann. I’ll bring her into my home, the Manor at Silverton Estate ... Entrance on Cedar Lane---black iron gate ...”

“Charles, please help me get her inside. It’s a miracle she’s not frozen.” During the phone call, the Moses basket became encircled by twining blue morning glories. Did Charles see them, too? Sarah dared not ask, but replaced me in the carrier.

Charles’s one-horse sleigh was nearby. Sarah carried me over the ring of herbs, observing once more how the circle emitted gentle warmth, like a small pocket of spring preserved in the Inner Sanctum. Charles took the reins and turned the pony toward the Manor House.

As we passed the medieval garden, Sarah spotted a single black rose on the wall, just as she had seen it the day she visited the Garden with James. Charles helped us from the sleigh, and Sarah carried me into the house, unaware that this moment would alter the course of her carefully structured life. Breathless, she burst into the kitchen. “It’s a baby, Mom! I found her in the Garden! The police will be here soon!”

Helen hurried to put the kettle on for tea. The air shimmered with steam as Sarah’s thoughts swirled. Helen poured with steady hands.

Would the morning glories still be blooming? Or would their impossible blue have faded to ordinary winter brown before the police evidence could be documented? I should have photographed the scene! Sarah’s mind raced.

Helen replied to Sarah’s silent thoughts: “Perhaps we can assist, dear. We’ll do our best.” The doorbell rang, and Helen hurried to the foyer to lead the police officer and Child Protection Services woman into the kitchen, where Sarah sat with me on her lap.

“Good morning, once again, Dr. Caldwell,” said the reporting officer. “Let’s go over what you told me in your phone call earlier, okay?”

“It is hard to believe,” Sarah said, “but she was just there in front of me, in her carrier. She looked so serene lying there ... Yes, in the fairy ring, rather, the circular bed. Why was I out there? I was doing my morning Garden check ... No, I didn’t hear anything unusual during the night ... Yes, I’m certain there were no cars in the driveway or on the street. Everything was silent, calm. As I left the house, the sky was beginning to lighten. The Garden was empty except for Charles, our groundskeeper, the baby, and me. I’m sure Charles would be willing to provide a statement. What will happen to her?” Sarah’s voice caught as protectiveness surged within her.

“She’ll be taken to the hospital for assessment and monitoring. Depending on her condition, we’ll arrange temporary care for her. Finding her mother is a priority. We’re handling this as a likely abduction,” the officer explained, “possibly an abandonment.”

Sarah surprised herself with the calmness in her voice when she said, “I’ll take her.” Helen, raising an eyebrow, supported her, adding, “We have ample space in the Manor, and we’ve both cleared our University background checks.”

The social worker responded, “I’m sorry, it doesn’t work that way. There will be an investigation with procedures and assessments.”

“I understand,” Sarah replied, “but I found her and took her in. I want to be considered for adoption during that process.” The social worker jotted a note.

In a heartbeat, I was in custody and taken away. Feeling forlorn, Sarah held up her empty arms, palms facing upward.

After brief questioning in the foyer, Charles appeared at the kitchen doorway. “The Garden was waiting,” he said in his characteristic manner. The twinkle in his eyes was meant to reassure both Sarah and Helen.

“We’ll get Ruth Ann back, Sarah. We’ll bring her home,” said Helen.

to be continued…

Hope you enjoyed this first taste of my Novella. Come back next Wednesday for the 2nd Installment: Silverton Foundations, and the Continuation of Part One: Ruth Ann,

Thank you — Mel and Islay

Subscribe now