Rootbound — The Winter Trowel, Page 7
By Suha · Published
Log in to see this page
Page 7 of The Winter Trowel is for signed-in readers. Logging in brings you straight back here — and an account is free if you do not have one.
Transcript
Scene: inside the cottage, Ida Thorpe, small and frail in a bottle-green cardigan, turns the old trowel in her liver-spotted hands at the lamp-lit kitchen table, her locket showing at her throat. She says: "That's Ruth Millard's trowel." Looking up warm and a little sad: "Joss was your gran's little brother." Fern: "Great-uncle, then."
Image description
At the lamp-lit cottage table, Fern shows the old trowel to Ida Thorpe, who recognizes it and Joss's name.
About this chapter
While raking the Compost Yard at night, Fern hears a name in the steam. The ghost of Joss Millard, her great-uncle who died in the yard in the hard winter of 1963, waits for one unfinished errand: he never buried his mother's trowel under the old apple tree as he promised before the frost took him. Fern searches, finds the trowel nicked at the corner with a fern stamped near the tang, and learns through Ida why Joss still lingers. When she buries it, the old apple breaks into impossible blossom and Joss fades. In the root pit he reveals the trowel's buried secret, opening the next numbered-location mystery at the Rose Bed arches.