She found the eviction letter beneath a loaf of bread, written in the hand of the man who had whispered love in her ear the night before. Eleanor Vance left carrying a child he would not know existed for six years — until the blight brought him to her door.

PART 4

Six years passed.

Eleanor built a life in Haven’s End. She saved every penny she could, investing in a small plot of land on the edge of the village. She built a greenhouse with her own hands, using materials scavenged from shipwrecks and old buildings. She grew flowers and herbs and vegetables, selling them at market and to the local apothecary.

And she taught herself everything there was to know about plant diseases.

It started as a hobby — a way to keep her mind active during the long winter months. But it quickly became an obsession. She read every book she could find, wrote letters to botanists across the country, conducted experiments in her greenhouse that sometimes failed and sometimes succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

The blight-resistant rose was her greatest achievement. It took four years of careful breeding, selecting only the strongest specimens, crossing varieties that had never been crossed before. She called it Lily’s Hope — after her daughter, not Alexander.

Never again would she name anything after a man who had not deserved it.

Lily grew into a curious, bright, fiercely independent child. She had her mother’s love of growing things and her father’s sharp intelligence. She could identify every plant in the greenhouse by the time she was four. By five, she was helping Eleanor with the simple tasks — watering, weeding, checking for signs of disease. She also had an uncanny ability to notice details that others missed. A subtle change in leaf color. A tiny insect hiding beneath a petal. A customer at the market who said one thing but meant another.

“Mama,” she said one evening as they sat together in the greenhouse. “Why don’t I have a father like the other children?”

Eleanor’s hands stilled over the seedlings she was transplanting. She had known this question would come eventually. She had rehearsed the answer a hundred times. But now that the moment was here, she found herself struggling to find the right words.

“Come here, my darling,” she said, patting the ground beside her.

Lily settled next to her, her small body warm against Eleanor’s side. She smelled of sunshine and soil and the lavender soap Eleanor made herself.

“You do have a father,” Eleanor said carefully. “Everyone has a father. But your father does not live with us. He lives far away, in a grand house on a hill.”

“Why doesn’t he live with us?”

Eleanor took a deep breath. She had decided long ago that she would never lie to her daughter. But she would not poison the child’s heart with bitterness either. There had to be a middle ground — a way to tell the truth without teaching hatred.

“Your father is a duke. That means he has many responsibilities. Many people who depend on him. When I knew him, he was trying very hard to protect his family’s legacy — to save the lands and the people who lived there.”

“Did he love you?”

The question hit Eleanor like a physical blow. She had asked herself that same question a thousand times over the years. Had he loved her? She believed he had, in his own way. But his love had not been strong enough to overcome his fear. His love had not been brave enough to choose her.

“I think he did,” she said finally. “But sometimes love is not enough. Sometimes people are too afraid to be brave.”

Lily was quiet for a long moment, processing this information. Then she looked up at Eleanor with those storm-cloud eyes — so like her father’s — and said, “I’m glad I have you, Mama. Even if I don’t have him.”

Eleanor pulled her daughter close, pressing a kiss to the top of her head.

“And I’m glad I have you, my darling. More than you will ever know.”

The blight appeared in early spring. It started in the southern fields of the Ashworth estate, where the tenants grew the wheat that provided most of the estate’s income. At first it was just a few plants, their leaves spotted with brown, their stalks weak and stunted. The farmers thought it was nothing — a minor problem that would pass with the season.

But within weeks, the blight had spread. It swept through the fields like a plague, leaving destruction in its wake. Entire crops withered and died, their roots rotting in the ground. The tenants could only watch in horror as their livelihoods crumbled before their eyes.

Alexander called in every agricultural expert he could find. He spent money he did not have on treatments and remedies. Nothing worked. The blight was too aggressive, too resistant to every known method of control.

“We’re going to lose everything,” his steward told him one grim afternoon. “The harvest is destroyed. The tenants can’t pay their rents. The creditors are already circling. If we don’t find a solution soon, the estate will be bankrupt by winter.”

Alexander sat at his desk, his head in his hands. This was it. The final failure. The end of everything his family had built over seven generations.

“Is there truly nothing?” he asked, his voice hollow.

The steward hesitated. “There is something. A rumor, really. Perhaps nothing.”

“What rumor?”

“They say there’s a woman in a coastal village. A botanist. She’s spent years breeding disease-resistant roses, and word is she’s developed a treatment for this very strain of blight — some manner of soil preparation drawn from her breeding work. They say she’s already saved a neighboring farmer’s turnip crop with it. Her methods are unconventional, but her results are undeniable.”

Alexander’s heart stopped.

A botanist in a coastal village who had developed a treatment for the very blight destroying his fields.

“What is her name?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

The steward shrugged. “No one seems to know. She’s just called the garden witch of Haven’s End.”