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At the third attempt, the stem slowly lifted against her finger.

Elizabeth took her hand away. It remained upright.

She waited. There was no new leaf, no lengthening branch, nothing creeping across the bench.

Mrs. Reynolds bent to look more closely.

“That is enough,” she said.

Elizabeth had wanted to touch the other stems. She clasped her hands behind her instead.

For several minutes they stood over a small pot which looked very little different from the one Carr had left for them. Elizabeth had never been so pleased by such an unremarkable sight.

They returned on Tuesday before breakfast. Sally knew where Mrs. Reynolds would be if she was wanted; Elizabeth had finished mending her cuff with an ordinary needle the evening before. Both precautions seemed to deserve a peaceful morning.

The thyme remained upright. Elizabeth was examining it when a brown hen squeezed beneath the gate at the far end of the enclosure and began scratching among Carr’s newly planted seedlings.

“Come out of there,” Elizabeth said.

The hen looked at her and scratched again.

Elizabeth crouched beside the path. She had no corn, and no wish to run through the beds after a bird. She held out her hand, thinking how much easier it would be if the creature merely came when it was called.

“Here. Come here.”

The brown hen ran toward her.

So did a second hen. Three more pushed beneath the gate behind it.

Elizabeth straightened. The birds hurried after her as she took a step backward. One pecked the toe of her shoe. Another tried to look beneath her skirt.

Mrs. Reynolds covered her mouth.

“Do not laugh,” Elizabeth said. “I have nothing to give them.”

“Then I should not continue to invite them.”

“I have stopped!”

The birds had not. They clustered round her feet, quarrelling over an expectation of food which she could not satisfy. Elizabeth stepped carefully onto the path. The hens followed, trampling two of the little plants at its edge.

Carr’s boy appeared at the gate carrying a watering can. He stared at the procession, then at Elizabeth’s empty hands.

“Have you been feeding them, miss?”

“No.”

“They think you have.”

“That is becoming very plain.”

The boy set down the can. At Mrs. Reynolds’s request he fetched a little corn from the poultry yard, shook it in a pan, and walked ahead of the birds. Elizabeth followed until they had all passed back through the proper gate. Only when the corn was scattered did they abandon her shoes.

Carr arrived while they were examining the damage. Elizabeth told him she had drawn the hens into the beds and ought to have called for help before attempting to remove them herself.

“It’s that gap under the gate, miss. They have found it before.”

“Then I have made very poor use of an opportunity to learn from them.”