Lily within a mandala on a thigh

The lilies came up in the walled garden the week after the frost, all at once, as if they had agreed among themselves. Mr Pryce has laid out the beds at Carrow Castle the way his grandfather did, in rings around a central bed, each ring cut into points like the petals of a sun. I stood in the middle this morning with the trowel in my hand and could not decide which way to look. The dark outer rings are edged with box and dotted all over with white gravel, so from the tower window it must look like lace pressed into the earth.

The tiger lily at the centre is the one Mr Pryce cares about. He brought the bulbs back from a nursery in Bath in a tin that once held biscuits, and he will not let anyone touch the stamens, which he says are the only honest part of the plant. Each petal is freckled with dark spots, and when the light falls low across the ruins the freckles look like someone has flicked ink at them. I told him it was too grey for a flower and he said that was the point, that a thing seen in the evening is only ever half a colour.

Last night the bell in the chapel rang on its own, and Mr Pryce went out in his nightshirt with a lamp. He came back an hour later with a stem he had snapped off the centre bed and laid it on the kitchen table without a word. I have pressed it between the pages of the herbal, where you will find it when you come up at Whitsun.

Yours in haste, Margaret