Libby looked down at the pixie of a woman. “You weren’t raised here?”
“Oh no.” The lady laughed again. “I was born and raised in Essex. It was my husband I took a fancy to first, when he was in London for the Season. That was . . . my, more years ago than I care to count. More than seventy-five! I was seventeen that spring, and he was the handsomest thing, with those snapping eyes as dark as midnight.”
Her dreamy sigh made a grin tickle Libby’s lips. She’d never been much for romantic fancies herself, but she couldn’t deny the charm of hearing a woman in her nineties still sigh so over her husband. “And so you married him and he brought you here?”
“Quite so. I was uncertain at first, I admit it, when he said he meant for us to stay here. I thought it impossible that I could survive on such a small island.” Another magical laugh, and Mamm-wynn tugged her toward a branch in the path that led away from the Australian plants. “But then we got here, and I stood on the hill overlooking Bryher and the sea. And I knew.” She closed her eyes and drew in a long breath. “You know the value of names, don’t you, dearest?”
“Hm?” The abrupt shift made her blink. “I . . . names?” Was this a rebuke for not giving Mr. Menna her full name, complete with honorary title? Had she somehow found her out?
But Mamm-wynn indicated her notebook. “You’ve written down the Latin names, haven’t you?”
“Oh! Yes. Precise nomenclature is how we can identify and separate one species from another. When something is given a unique name, it’s . . . well, it’s like a tip of the hat, in a way, isn’t it? It’s us acknowledging that it is unlike anything else previously named. It is something unique.”
Had she delivered that little speech to her own grandmother, she’d have gotten an owlish blink and then a stiff reminder that such talk wasn’t likely to win a young lady a husband.
Mamm-wynn, however, nodded, sending a wisp of silver hair dancing on the breeze. “Exactly so. And it’s the same with people. Names . . . they matter to us. They shape our souls in ways I’ve never fully understood. But have you pondered the power of them? That the angels instructed parents in what to name the children of promise—John the Baptizer and Jesus, just to name the obvious two. The Lord renamed Abram. Sarai. Jacob. Simon Peter. Saul of Tarsus. Why?”
Libby let her gaze wander the path Mamm-wynn had put them on. “The Long Walk,” Mr. Menna had called it in his introductory speech inside the Lodge that morning. Dozens of plants vied for her admiration—palms, aloes, gum trees, cacti, dracœnas. And she’d always much preferred thinking about them than theology.
But no one had ever put a biblical question to her in such a way. She let it roll about in her mind as they walked at a pace faster than she’d have expected Mamm-wynn to be comfortable with. “I suppose . . . I suppose because the Lord recognized an evolution in them.” She darted a glance at her companion to see if she’d object to the choice of word like Mama would have. But her wrinkled face remained happy, so she pressed on. “They began as one creature—Abram or Sarai or Jacob or Simon or Saul. But through the events of their life, they became something else altogether. Abraham, Sarah, Israel, Peter, Paul.”
Mamm-wynn nodded. “And that evolution couldn’t go unnamed. Because the naming itself is crucial. Part of the change, don’t you think?”
“Part of the acknowledgment of it, at the least.”
“With a plant, to be sure. But people have an awareness that plants don’t—they need to know their name.” The lady splayed a hand over her heart and looked out along the Long Walk as if it took her through the years and not just the Gardens. “I needed to know mine. And I didn’t, not fully, until I married my Edgar and came here, when I realized I hadn’t just taken on his name. I’d truly taken on my own for the first time. And I could hear it in the whisper of the sea breezes.”
She sent Libby another smile. “I always say that there are some born here. Some who visit. Some who leave. Others who stay. And it isn’t because of circumstances or opportunities. When we stay, it’s because the islands know our names, and they whisper them to us on the wind. But others—others keep their names locked away, held secret from the Scillies. And because they won’t let the islands know them, they can never really know the islands. They can never love them.”
As fanciful, certainly, as one might expect of a fairy. But a fairy who likened ideas to the Bible, so perhaps it wasn’t just fancy. Perhaps it was something else entirely.
Taking in another sweet-scented breath, Libby tilted her head. Listened to the wind whispering through branches. “Do they know my name, do you think?”
Another pat of a featherlight hand on her arm. “How could they not, when you show them that sweet heart of yours?”
The thought made her lips curve in a way she couldn’t ever recall them doing before, and she followed Mamm-wynn’s gentle guiding toward another offshoot of a path. Perhaps she was only spending a summer here, but all the same she relished the idea that she could belong. By virtue of simply knowing and being known. Of loving it.
If that were truly how one knew when one was home, then it was no wonder she’d never felt so secure in London, where she felt the need to guard her true self at every step, every word, every introduction. And even Telford Hall . . . she’d always known it wasn’t meant to be where she stayed forever. How could a daughter not know it, when from the time she was old enough to carry on a conversation, her elders spoke always of family alliances and good marriages and making a match that would benefit them all? They might as well have shouted, “Your role is to leave us as quickly as possible!”
How could one feel truly at home in a place always ready to foist one away?
“Here we are.” Mamm-wynn drew her to a halt in front of a weathered slab of granite with two holes in it, one directly above the other. They were near the walled edge of the garden now, it seemed. Just beyond it was a building—a church, from the look of it. Which meant St. Nicholas’s. Where Oliver Tremayne could be even now.
Libby focused again on the moss-kissed stone. “Where, exactly?” She’d seen similar stones around St. Mary’s, sort of. Granite ones, certainly, and roughly the same rectangular shape, though this was by far the largest she’d beheld. Those others had only one hole though. And while most were simply garden decorations at this point, a few still had cords tied to the holes, the other end of which extended to the roofs. Anchoring the thatch, Mabena had said, to keep it from blowing away in the first good storm.
Mamm-wynn giggled and gave her arm a playful nudge with her shoulder. “As if you don’t know.”
Had Mr. Menna mentioned the stone that morning? Libby tried to recall, but she hadn’t noted anything about a large slab of granite.
But the lady didn’t seem to notice her silence. She let loose a happy little sigh and leaned into Libby’s arm as if they were old friends. “I always loved hearing the tales of the Betrothal Stone. They’re probably more fiction than fact, but even so. I wove a few of my own for my children. And when my dear boy proposed to his darling right here, I think I was every bit as pleased by it as Theresa was. And now you have your own story to tell!”