The Fair Botanists

by Sara Sheridan

Genres: General Fiction; Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction; Historical Romance

Synopsis

The Fair Botanists is a bewitching and immersive story for fans of Jessie Burton, Sarah Perry and The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock.

Could one rare plant hold the key to a thousand riches?

It's the summer of 1822 and Edinburgh is abuzz with rumours of King George IV's impending visit. In botanical circles, however, a different kind of excitement has gripped the city. In the newly-installed Botanic Garden, the Agave Americana plant looks set to flower - an event that only occurs once every few decades.

When newly widowed Elizabeth arrives in Edinburgh to live with her late husband's aunt Clementina, she's determined to put her unhappy past in London behind her. As she settles into her new home, she becomes fascinated by the beautiful Botanic Garden which borders the grand house and offers her services as an artist to record the rare plant's impending bloom. In this pursuit, she meets Belle Brodie, a vivacious young woman with a passion for botany and the lucrative, dark art of perfume creation.

Belle is determined to keep both her real identity and the reason for her interest the Garden secret from her new friend. But as Elizabeth and Belle are about to discover, secrets don't last long in this Enlightenment city . . .

And when they are revealed, they can carry the greatest of consequences.

(P) 2021 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Release date: April 29, 2021

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

Acknowledgements



The kindness of all at RBGE but especially Paula Bushell, Leonie Paterson, Graham Hardy, Fiona Inches, Emma Nicolson, David Affleck, David Rae, Amy Porteous at Inverleith House, Laura Gallagher and Henry Noltie.

At the National Galleries of Scotland, Grainne Rice and Imogen Gibbon helped with tips for female artists and also tried valiantly to find a pictorial representation of the trees moving through the streets of Edinburgh. Ladies, we have to hope some brave soul makes a movie for history this time has let us down.

Jane Anderson, a fellow historical writer who told me the story of Christina Robertson, a Scottish painter who became famous in St Petersburg in the era. I mention her only in passing but Jane is currently engaged in writing a novel based on her story. One for my To Be Read pile.

Sutherland Forsyth who at the time I spoke to him worked at Holyrood Palace. Sutherland was fun, patient and helpful – thank you for all your help. Deborah Clarke also from the palace, who generously gave me hints and tips about George’s visit and the geography and uses of buildings in the King’s Park of 1822.

Also Rachel McCormack, whose periodic historical food and wine tips always make my ears prick up; Val McDermid (ever the inspiration); Jenny Brown (a great agent and a great friend); Deborah Anne Reid, whose PhD thesis is full of amazing female gardeners of the period (and beyond). I bumped into Deborah quite by chance at an advance screening of Sue Kemp’s excellent feminist documentary about the Edinburgh Seven and she generously chatted to me for ages as I fangirled her doctorate. Thanks are also due to Leslie Hills (always) who read an early draft of the book and gave brilliant historical feedback. Also thanks to the many who encouraged me on twitter – a quick shoutout in particular to Andrew Morton and Andy Arthur, who both sent maps I hadn’t seen before when I needed them. You stars.

To Emma Herdman who commissioned the book and Kate Howard and Lily Cooper at Hodder who brought it to publication, thank you for championing this project over the difficulties of the Covid-19 crisis and the changeover of editorial oversight that occurred when Emma got her dream job and Kate went on maternity leave. Lily burned the midnight oil working through the edits and the final draft of the book is better for it. I didn’t get to meet the other editors who tirelessly corrected my need to spell realise with an s and not capitalize His Majesty (cos I’m a republican) – thank you for ironing out my cracks!

Lastly to my family. This book was mostly written during the Coronavirus lockdown, when I foraged through the real history of Edinburgh’s streets outside of the archive – in my imagination and on deserted afternoon walks – latterly, with Dotty the miniature wire-haired dachsund, a lockdown addition to our household. In that, this book was a saving grace – I loved flinging myself into it. I needed to. But it also made me difficult to be around at a time that was fraught with other difficulties for writing historical novels is an immersive venture. Thanks for supporting me always – Alan, Molly and Jon – the best non-conformist, creative posse a locked-in writer ever had. Persevere et esse felix. You lot are the only reasons I do anything at all.

Author’s Historical Note:



Late in 2019 I met an editor in Contini’s restaurant at 103 George Street in Edinburgh. It was a chance encounter – my agent texted me from a booth in the front of the dining room saying she was with an editor who she thought I ought to meet. I texted by return to say I was up at the back. The editor, Emma Herdman, was tremendously patient as I gabbled about women’s history during the tail end of the Enlightenment in the city – about the female artists, scientists, salonnières, writers, philosophers and sex workers whose legacy has been consistently underplayed. I ranted about the injustice of the fact that outside the window behind our table there were only statues of men (many of whom had lesser legacies and made fewer positive contributions than some of the women I mentioned.) We also discussed the move of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh from its site on Leith Walk to Inverleith (which took place between 1820 and 1823) and the visit of George IV to the city in August 1822. The Garden, which was founded in 1670 was about to celebrate its 350th anniversary. Then, reader, in an act of faith, Emma commissioned this story – literally on a couple of paragraphs that I had jotted down. It was to be light-hearted, she said, but catch the spirit of the city at this fascinating time in its history. I promised to do my best.

We met several times after that – in Edinburgh and in London – and talked over the phone as well as emailing back and forth. During the Covid-19 lockdown we FaceTimed like gossipy Enlightenment schoolgirls. Whatever the medium, our interactions often had the synchronicity of that first meeting – at one point (out of lockdown) when I was staying in my daughter’s flat in Highgate it turned out Emma lived less than a mile away and we could hook up for meetings in a convenient coffee shop nearby. This felt very Enlightenment.

I had written both fiction and non-fiction books set in the period 1819–1845 but I had never set one in my hometown. I can honestly say that every day of writing this book was an absolute pleasure for lots of reasons, among them the fact that it turns out I was ready to channel my passion for the city where I live (and its history) into a novel.

For me an historical novel is a time machine that takes a reader back to where they come from. It casts light on the modern world. I slid the fiction of this story right up against the real history of the summer of 1822. Many characters in this book existed in real life and some of the fictional ones have real roots. I hope I have not horrified anybody by employing this technique which was the best way I could think of, of bringing to life the spirit of the New Town and Inverleith in the run up to George IV’s visit and the many extraordinary residents of this extraordinary town at that time. The melding of fact and fiction, I hope, serves to engage the imagination.

For clarity, however: the Rocheid family did live in Inverleith House, and James was real – by all accounts a flamboyant gentleman about town. The new site of the Garden was purchased in 1820 from him and he continued to live in Inverleith House on what then became the western edge of the Garden. Today, Inverleith House is a treasured exhibition space with an artistic programme that amplifies the Garden’s environmental work.

I concocted both Clementina and Elizabeth Rocheid for my own ends. I named Clementina after Clementina Sobieska, the love of James Francis Edward Stuart’s life and a Jacobite heroine, for I fancied the Rocheids had been Jacobites in the century prior to this story, when Clementina would have been born.

Belle Brodie is also fictional though I concocted her from tantalising glimpses of sex workers in the city who appeared in court, and others who are immortalized in records in London and in passing in the poetry of the era . . .

Ah, poets. Or for the purposes of this book – The Poet. Robert Burns fathered several illegitimate children and to my mind, it is unlikely that we know about all of them, so Duncan Tennent was an easy fictional addition to the story, as was Mhairi MacDonald who I created in memory of the thousands – literally – of women who brewed and distilled in the era. I like that she is someone who prospers despite her disability and is a Gael making good, when, sadly, so many 18th and 19th century Highlanders were subject to the grim genocide that was the Highland Clearances. It is a bugbear of mine that in most historical fiction working-class people exist in the story only in relation to their employers – often painted in two dimensional terms (good if they don’t betray their masters, bad if they do). I wanted to make sure that my working-class characters had lives of their own – secrets, dreams and beliefs. So, alongside Duncan and Mhairi, Nellie Patterson, Belle Brodie’s not-so-faithful maid, is a girl who loves music and longs for more of it in her life. She creates her own moral universe, as all the best people do.

Real-life characters William McNab and Robert Graham are both well documented. In his time, Graham was considered an ingenious and successful horticultural transplanter, and as a medical doctor, he co-founded the Botanical Society of Edinburgh and went on to establish the Garden’s tropical Palm House. Under his supervision, like in the story, McNab invented a transplanting machine and transported mature trees across the city with the help of 12 horses. McNab himself was, by all accounts, an inspiring gardener, talented plantsman and excellent teacher. There is also real correspondence which documents McNab’s mission to elicit the promised pay rise for his work at the Garden. He was not alone in being chronically underpaid. Beside the long hours committed to working in the Garden, several of the gardeners had side-jobs, including ones as far from the botanical world as Customs Officers. I always wonder (though there is nothing specific that leads me to this – only a novelist’s spider sense) if Graham was really on McNab’s side. Records show that in real life, McNab and Graham worked well together, and given all this, it seems to me Graham, who earned a thousand pounds a year in the Keeper’s post could have pushed harder earlier on to support McNab’s work. McNab certainly wasn’t asking for anything unwarranted and in the book, I give him the helping hand of some fictional scandalous information to forward his case.

In the Royal Botanic Garden archive, I found letters where McNab was swapping seeds and botanical samples and specimens in return for food for his family. I also noted an instance of candles bought for the new Garden being put through on expenses that I suspect were ordered to augment the stingy ‘candle and hearth’ allowance given to McNab to run his home – the Botanic Cottage which has now been re-sited at Inverleith and is open to the public. This gave rise to the fictional sale of the seeds to Mrs Dickson (also real), a step further into the illicit than I found in real life. But it is no fiction that life for the McNab family (which consisted of McNab, his wife, Elizabeth Whiteman, and their nine children – five sons and four daughters) was financially challenging. Catherine McNab – only just into double digits when we meet her in the story – would later go on to write a book about the Botany of the Bible, having been bequeathed, alongside her sisters, all her father’s inheritance because, as he put it in his will, in life he had dedicated the entirety of his financial resources to educating his sons. Catherine’s brother, James, whose childhood botanical drawings are today held in the archive at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, would go on to scheme his way into the Head Gardener’s post at the second big garden to be established at Inverleith (by the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society – a plan alluded to by Belle in this story). As an adult, James McNab also undertook botanical expeditions abroad, contributed botanical artwork which engravers and lithographers used to produce botanical plates in journals, and contributed to several horticultural magazines and the general Edinburgh press as well as Scottish botanical and general science journals. I found myself immensely fond of the McNabs as I read the material relating to their real lives – I hope that comes across in the story.

There is also evidence which suggests that the real-life Robert Graham was quite the host. In 1826 when the naturalist and painter John James Audubon visited Edinburgh, he dined with the Grahams at 62 Great King Street and commented in a letter to a friend that the evening was ‘embarrassing’ by which he likely meant, ‘extraordinarily lavish’. It is this letter that led me to cast the Grahams as hosts with an eye to social advancement and also had me writing into the emotional gap of insecurity that might have existed for Graham. It’s this opening which, in the book, Belle Brodie takes advantage of, and the vanity of which leads him into his affair with Nellie. That being said, I have likely painted Graham as worse than he really was, for there is nothing to suggest that he was actually unfaithful, and he is fondly remembered in the Garden’s archive as a well-loved Regius Keeper, who held the position between 1820-1845, when he died relatively young from a tumour.

One of my earlier novels, The Secret Mandarin, follows the 1840s career of Berwickshire gardener and botanist, Robert Fortune (one of the most stone-cold ambitious people I’ve ever found in the archive), who apprenticed at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in the 1830s. When I started writing this book it was in part knowing Fortune’s story that meant this was a familiar world to me. I also discovered an intriguing and delightful connection when I was halfway through writing The Fair Botanists. I had already written another historical novel about Maria Graham, who travelled extensively in South America during the 1820s. Maria’s first husband was Robert Graham’s distant cousin. My novel, On Starlit Seas, features other female members of the Dundas/Graham clan (who were by all accounts quite snobbish, to be frank.) Maria remains one of my favourite historical characters of the period but, as she bears no other connection to Edinburgh apart from this one, I was unable to get her into this story except when Robert compares himself to ‘his cousin’ Thomas who is ‘the adventuring sort’. Sadly, Thomas has already died by this time in Valparaiso, Chile, though the news has not yet made it home. All of these links demonstrate the wonderfully rich texture of late Georgian and early Victorian life and the interconnectedness of that world.

The competition with Kew Garden suggested in the book has its genesis in an article I found in a botanical journal of the 1830s which talked about how much better things were between Kew and its many sister institutions, since the changes made in the running of the institution focused more on the good of science and the country than that of private individuals. I suspect Sir Joseph Banks, while extraordinary, was not a generous man – certainly not to people who he may have considered merely of functional interest (gardeners and plant hunters alike).

Johann von Streitz is entirely fictional and came to me one afternoon in January 2020 while I was travelling by train to Glasgow. He is a concrete product of the Rocheid family’s genuine historical connection to Germany and that of the Hanoverian elite. The character I came up with looks like an historical version of the well-dressed young man who was sitting opposite me on the journey. He reminded me of a modern-day Beau Brummell in understated and immaculate Doc Martens and a Norwegian jacket. I hope I didn’t stare too much – I had to take it all in when I could. He was tremendously handsome.

Likewise, many ideas for storylines and backdrops emanated from real-life, though I have adapted them. McNab did move trees (the highest one a forty-three-foot alder) through the streets of Edinburgh. He would later write extensively about this extraordinary process. The last public flogging in the city did take place in the summer of 1822. There was a huge distillery just over the city boundary at the Water of Leith and there was a riot there in the late 1700s when the contingent delivering grain to the distillery was attacked by a working-class mob who were starving due to localised famine. The floor of a house on Picardy Place did fall in but not until two years later. ‘Love potions’ were a genuine focus of interest. Two Edinburgh shop boys were found guilty of trying to create one with which they literally poisoned a young woman – the key ingredient was ‘Spanish fly’ – in 1824. The father of the girl was a courier who lived on Thistle Street (like Edzel McBain’s fictional and more drunken dad). While what the lads were attempting sounds more like a ‘rhohypnol’ incident than an actual attempt to make somebody fall in love, this in part, inspired Belle’s idea to make her magical perfume. In other inspiration, strawberries (or as we know them, fragaria x ananassa) had only been available for a couple of years in the early 1820s, though they did not engender the heady excitement of pineapple cultivation (most likely because anyone rich or poor could grow them whereas pineapples required heated greenhouses – a luxury beyond the reach of most). The smell of strawberries is sometimes pumped at a low level into gymnasiums as it enhances the physical performance of men (as Belle discovers). Of the other scents that Belle uses to manipulate those around her, many are used by retail outlets and in the hospitality industry today to encourage certain behaviours. The encouraging of behaviour by smell is a dark art. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

The glorious Lady Liston was a real-life character too, one of Scotland’s many botanical women, some of whose books I tip in the text. I took a liberty with her – she was born in Antigua and in real life never visited Bermuda. I wrote a short story about Lady Liston’s return from Constantinople and her first encounter with Belle Brodie for the National Library of Scotland (where her papers are held). It is available online on the library’s site, should a reader wish to hear more about her. She was extraordinary. In fact many such women whose legacies I greatly admire appear only as asides in the book. Clementina’s ‘poor, dear Mrs Brunton’, whose novels I would contend are as good if not better than Jane Austen’s (try them) and her husband Alexander, who never fully gets over his bereavement (though he tries to in fiction by engaging Belle). As in the story, Alexander did become Moderator of the Church of Scotland in 1823. Also, the allusion by Clementina to Burns’ poem to the ‘Ferrier lasses’, the eldest of whom, Jane, went on to make a valuable historical record of Stirling Castle that is treasured today and the youngest, Susan, who wrote novels that Sir Walter Scott claimed were better than his own. There is a strong case to be made that Sir Walter was right.

Sir Walter Scott is real, of course. He sat on the committee that was appointed to organize the king’s jaunt to Scotland and quickly took over the organization of events with his extraordinary vision and indeed, sense of propaganda and contributed to the Victorian romanticization of Scottish history that so frustrates Scottish historians today. I like a lot about Sir Walter – he supported many women writers and good causes (including helping to found the Edinburgh Academy, just as it says in the text) although he made some dreadful misjudgements, among them not fully supporting the abolition of the slave trade. The idea that crosses his mind in Chapter Twelve is the building of the Radical Road around Arthur’s Seat, a plan to keep dangerous radicals in employment that he put into action in real life after the king’s visit.

In passing in the book we also catch glimpses of other real-life male Enlightenment figures Adam Smith and David Hume through the agency of Clementina’s memory. It is a sadness to me that I have not managed to include Sir John Sinclair (of the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society) who looks furious at his Highland garb in the contemporary portrait of him painted to celebrate the king’s visit. There simply was no way to shoehorn him in, but it is a brilliant portrait in which he clearly wishes he was not wearing tartan (and a huge sporran). It’s worth searching out.

This brings me to the greatest liberty I have taken with the actual history, which is the timeframe of the royal visit. Poor Sir Walter and the rest of the committee were literally given only three weeks to make the arrangements. George IV (as he appears in the book and in life) was mercurial and expected his court to jump at every whim. Here I have given Sir Walter (and Scotland) an inkling that the king might be on his way, earlier than anyone would have had one, and certainly earlier than Scott could have made concrete plans. But for the purposes of the story (and the creation of Johann von Streitz) I went with that. The king was always going to leave London during August to go somewhere (he visited Dublin in 1821) so it’s not unreasonable to think some of his close courtiers might have suspected he would be on the move northwards. Conversely, I denied Sir Walter his full three weeks’ notice and allowed him only ten days or so to firm up the royal arrangements.

It should also be noted that the Agave americana is not these days considered an aloe at all, though it was referred to in the period as the Great Aloe. If you are a botanist I hope this doesn’t drive you too crazy while reading, but I have stayed consistent with the terms used in the 1820s. Likewise, the word ‘hothouse’ isn’t used any longer at the Botanic Garden where there are now ‘glasshouses’, though in the 1820s both terms were used, as in the text.

I would also like to add a short note about use of Scots. I have used quite a few Scots words during the course of the book, especially where working-class people are speaking. Clementina inserts Scots into her (largely English) patter as a matter of course. In her generation it was the lingua franca of all Scotland, though English was beginning to dominate by the time we get to 1822 at the end of her life. I have been asked in the past to remove Scots from manuscripts but in this case, the editors were understanding and appreciated that it provides a real flavour of speech at this time. I was glad to be able to do that though in real life, please note, there would have been more of it!

Lastly, I want to say for clarity that the Edinburgh I have written about in this book (the New Town of the city, that is) was built on the back of the Atlantic Slave Trade with all its horrors. This is a part of our history that Scotland is only just coming to terms with (not only in our capital city but across the country). This story is set in 1822 and though slave trading was abolished in the British Empire in 1807, slavery in British Colonies was not abolished until 1833. Legal cases in England and Scotland established that a slave could not be held in either country (except of course for the enslaved native salters who were not freed until the end of the century). Thus, the trade was still underway internationally and it was backed by many wealthy Scots whose families benefitted financially from the enslavement of others. Though this is not the main content of this book (if any publisher would like to commission a novel where this is the main storyline, please get in touch) I could not ignore it. So, I have mentioned that Belle’s father owns a plantation and has ‘taken advantage’ of one of his female Black slaves (a move that Belle sees through). While the Black community living in Scotland was small in this era I wanted to represent their hidden history as much as I could so I also gave Belle a Black neighbour (who was born in Scotland for we tend to forget that there was a Black community here over many centuries, albeit a small one). The fictional characters of Jane and Anne Melville, the purchasers of Belle’s perfume are relatives of the notorious Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, an MP known contemptuously as the King of Scotland, whose work in the House of Commons delayed the abolition of slavery by over a decade. One historical argument makes the case that this was the best way to get the act through parliament but there is another view that Dundas did so in bad faith, allowing slave owners to continue to import African slaves and instigate breeding programmes on their plantations, thus circumnavigating the need for the transatlantic slave trade. Certainly, Dundas’s ally William Pitt commented that the delay was the worst of all possible routes to abolition. Whatever Dundas’s reasons, his actions at Westminster resulted in hundreds of thousands more Black people entering into chattel slavery than had slavery been made illegal more quickly. It is a shocking and horrible part of our history and my own view is that we need to own it properly. I hope we can find the courage to do so. While a plaque explaining Henry Dundas’s involvement in the slave trade adorns his monument on St Andrew Square today it is my own view that the plaque should remain, but the monument be removed. Henry is Edinburgh’s true Disgrace, rather than the monument on Calton Hill and we have, after all, very many extraordinary women who could be honoured in that prominent public space. I feel my fictional character Anne Melville would agree (though for entirely different reasons).

It was a pleasure and an honour to be commissioned to write this book. I have been visiting the Garden since I was a child and have fond memories of feeding the squirrels there with my younger brothers. The Royal Botanic Garden is such a resource for the people of Edinburgh. However, although I was aware of some of the Garden’s history, I was delighted when diving into the archive to find such a rich and evocative part of our city’s story of which I was unaware. It felt as if I was putting together a jigsaw puzzle that precursed my own memories – a link back to the previous residents of the city. 

Thank you for reading and I hope, enjoying my foray into the daft days of the summer of 1822. Please forgive any lapses and mistakes I have made in writing about this rambunctious and exciting period. I hope Elizabeth and Belle and their adventures stay with you, an echo of our foremothers and the lives they might have lived, for history is endlessly complicated and full of secrets, and in my view is as much herstory as his one.

Chapter Eight



At last there is time to change. Elizabeth rushes upstairs and swaps her mud-spattered attire for clean, thinking that for Glenzen it is much easier. Currant Bun is in a lather as she fixes her mistress’s hair.

‘I can see it in his face, ma’am. Not that I ever met Mr Burns, but Cook has a copy of his anthology and there is an engraving of his likeness on the leaf. Who’d have thought it? Duncan looks very like him. Cook says it’ll be all over town – in the Review and that.’

‘Margaret,’ Elizabeth lays down the law, ‘Duncan himself does not wish to speak of it. This tittletattle is most unbecoming.’

In the reflection of the mirror, Elizabeth can see the shock on Currant Bun’s face at the idea of not discussing this, the most fascinating and glamorous piece of news ever to arrive at Inverleith House. In fairness Clementina is clearly going to be just as bad.

‘Yes ma’am,’ the maid says unconvincingly.

Elizabeth runs a palm over her hair and directs the girl to take down her watercolour palette, three brushes, charcoal sticks and lead from her drawing box and the thin sheaf of paper from her leather portfolio.

‘Put it in the music room,’ she says. ‘And my painting smock.’ When leaving the old house, she had debated whether or not to bring her stained linen apron but now she’s glad she did. ‘And see if there might be a board somewhere. I will need one to lean upon.’ She wonders if she might be able to buy more paper at the Exchange and if there are botanical volumes in the library that will be of use. But there is no time to check.

Outside, Clementina is already in the carriage. Calum stands to the rear like a footman, but not up to the snuff of the suave servants that perched on the back of Mr Rocheid’s carriage. Above, Duncan sits on the box with the reins in his hands, his expression no softer than it was in the drawing room. The boy opens the door and helps Elizabeth up.

The ride into town is bumpier than she remembers on her arrival. Up Pitt Street she peers out of the window at the sandstone terraces on either side of the road and the stick-thin trees newly planted behind the railings in the gardens that are being laid out at Heriot Row. It looks, she thinks, warmer than the stuccoed streets of Belgravia on account of the honey coloured stone. Shop boys bustle to and from George Street where the carriage has to wait at the junction, so busy is the city’s main thoroughfare. Elizabeth notices two women pointing at the carriage, or, more specifically, she realizes, at Duncan. They move off, giggling, one bursting into a song that Elizabeth assumes was penned by Mr Burns. At the foot of Hanover Street, as the carriage crosses towards the slope of the Mound, Clementina sighs.

‘They drained the loch,’ she says sadly as they climb and Elizabeth takes in the view of the New Town from the south. Ahead, the buildings are taller and blacker with tiny windows like dark pockmarks. The laneways feel like rookeries. Ragged children beg on the streets. In a doorway, a woman is sat with a tattered grey shawl around her shoulders, drunk. Her face is filthy and her eyes are closed as she mutters under her breath. This surely is an entirely different city from the one they have just come from. Clementina, it seems, is nostalgic for it and entirely at home in this part of town.

‘I was brought up in Germany, but I visited Edinburgh three times as a child. The Rocheids have always owned land at Broomlaw but my father also kept a house near the palace,’ she says fondly. ‘Further down. I returned as a young woman. To come ou