Magenta flower with black swirling vine

The mason's boy came up from the lower terraces this morning with his hands full of dark mud and told me the Queen's gardens have gone wild again. I went down expecting the usual: bindweed through the marble steps, the fountain choked with leaves. Instead I found the old wall of Carrowmere covered in vine, black as ink in the early light, curling back on itself as if someone had been writing in a hurry. And in the middle, where the cracked sundial sits, a single bloom had opened. Five petals, plum-bright, shaded at the edges like the inside of a plum just split.

Nobody has planted anything in that bed since your mother's time. The gardeners swear the vine was not there at dusk. Brother Tobin says it is the kingdom remembering itself, then laughed at his own words and went back to his peas.

I have spent the afternoon with a knife and a pair of shears, cutting back the little dotted buds that keep appearing along the stems like seeds of old rain. Each one I cut, another forms a hand's width further along. I have stopped trying. Instead I sat on the sundial's rim and watched the swirls unwind toward the gate, slow as a sleeper turning over, and I thought of the day you left with your bundle and your cross-stitched hood.

Come home before the frost. The flower will not survive the cold, and I would rather see it with you than alone. Bring the blue ink from the river town. I want to write down what the vine says when the wind moves through it, and I think you will know the words better than I do.

Yours in the pale hours, Maren