Page 47 of Miss Wolcott’s Ghost

More than one native guide wished woman and cat would fall in and was tempted to help that along. But the more they got to know her, the more remarkable she seemed. She’d join them in the evenings around the campfires, learning their language. Unlike the men they lugged through the forests and jungles, who saw them as simply two-legged beasts of burden, this woman carried her own load. She asked intelligent questions. Asked advice. Listened to the replies. Respected the elders, the healers, the shamans. Wrote things down in the notebook she guarded as diligently as she guarded the cat.

Daisy Wolcott returned to England with a wealth of plants, and unlike her male counterparts, she knew how they should be used.

When she returned to London, she gave a talk at the Royal Society of Botanists. It was sparsely attended, and those who did left shaking their heads.

“Impudence,” said a Senior Fellow of the Society. “She said some of her wretched plants should be steeped in teas.”

“Some made into poultices,” said another. “Imagine spreading that on your body?”

“But the best was the one that should be dried and lit. The smoke inhaled and wafted over a person—”

“—to release evil spirits.” They were still laughing when they entered their private club. “She’d clearly gone native.”

“She was unbalanced even before she left,” said the Fellow. “I blame her father. Rose above his station. That can’t be good for a feeble child.”

Daisy Wolcott kept trying, telling anyone who’d listen about her finds, especially her favorite. An astonishingly ugly weed she’d found on a remote mountainside, where it was being dug up in strip mining and in danger of disappearing.

It was prickly, with a seed that looked demonic. She brought back bags of it and planted it in her own garden. Soon it looked like nature had overtaken her beds. Which it had. Bees and butterflies abounded. Miss Wolcott issued strict instructions to her gardeners and wardens not to poison the wasps or shoot the hedgehogs or badgers or any creature. They too were welcome. Everyone, everything, was welcome.

Eventually her inattention to her properties, the expense of her expeditions, her profligate spending on estates from Constantinople to Marrakech to Cape Town to protect native plants, her funding of university wings to create schools of botany, all meant that by the time she returned to England permanently in the early 1900s, she was broke.

Living alone in her now dilapidated estate, she’d taken to wearing her father’s tweed suits, made by a tailor in Savile Row. So much easier to work in.

Neighbors dropping by would often mistake her for a man. The gardener. The only gardener now on the vast estate.

They’d sometimes take pity on her and invite old Miss Wolcott over for a meal. Some, it was true, did it because she was a curiosity. Like inviting a giraffe to tea.

But even knowing this, Miss Wolcott would always accept the invitation and show up wearing a long, long-outdated Victorian dress, though the old queen was dead and buried by then. Or, more distressingly, she’d appear wearing her father’s tweed suits. She’d stick food from the buffet into her moth-eaten purse or a pocket and wander their gardens by moonlight, while other guests watched and smiled knowingly.

At her death, at the age of sixty-five, her home was sold to pay her debts. The land was torn up, the gardens destroyed. Her collection of papers and seeds, deemed worthless, was burned. Though some of her papers had already been donated to several of the universities she’d funded, to sit forgotten in the basement archives. Far away from the light.

Decades later, upon doing an inventory, one of the learned institutions found the containers and, concluding that there was better use for the space, had the contents auctioned off.

The items were listed in the catalog as The Collection of William Wolcott.

Shortly after her death, her neighbors began to notice that a strange plant had appeared in their tame and disciplined perennial beds. Among the hybrid tea roses, dahlias, the phlox, a tall, grey, spindly, prickly thistle-like plant was not just growing. It was spreading.

With some alarm, they had it pulled out and burned. Until nothing was left.

Not a seed, not a seedling. Not a cutting. No vestige of it remained. Except the name they’d given the unwelcome guest.

Miss Wolcott’s Ghost.

CHAPTER 20

Armand Gamache stared. He’d have been slack-jawed, had he not been aware that could happen and made sure his mouth was shut.

Still, he was metaphorically open-mouthed.

Dr. Lagacé stared out of the laptop at those around the table. Everyone was silent, everyone was staring. At her.

“How did the plant get into the neighbors’ gardens?” Isabelle Lacoste asked.

“No one knows for sure, but it’s thought Miss Wolcott wore those long Victorian dresses and her father’s suits because they allowed her to hide sacks of seeds in the skirts and trouser legs.”

“As she walked around the gardens, she released them,” said Isabelle.

When she perfected her time machine, she was putting Daisy Wolcott on her list of people to meet. As well as the housemaid Daisy, who sounded equally extraordinary.