Almost all of The Lending happens in a single room. Theta can’t bring herself to open its door for three weeks; when she finally does, everything turns.

Gertie called it the conjuring room. On an ordinary working day, with herbs to grind and a fire to tend, it was simply the workshop. But beneath both names sits an older one, humbler yet, that you may never have heard.

It’s a still room.

In old English houses, the still room was where the quiet work of the household was done: not distilling spirits, though that too, but making cordials and preserves, drying herbs, brewing tonics, mixing the remedies that kept a family well back when a doctor was a day’s walk and a fortune away. It took its name from the “still,” the distilling apparatus, and it was, more often than not, the woman’s domain. Every still room had its book, a handwritten household ledger of cures and recipes handed down through the family. If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s Gertie’s book, and one day it will be Theta’s.

So when Theta steps into the conjuring room, she is stepping into a still room, a wise woman’s version of a room that once stood in houses all across the country.

I know that room by heart. The pestle and mortar waiting on the worktable. Two worn ladder-back chairs by the fire, one hers and one Gertie’s. Wriggles’ basket by the hearth, and the French doors opening onto the herb garden.

I had to know all of it, down to which chair was whose and where the light fell, so that when Theta moved through the room, she moved through a real place and not a stage set. A story only feels solid if the writer can walk through it in the dark.

Which brings me to someone I’d like you to meet.

My husband Richard is my editor, and an architect by trade, so of course he drew the cottage. A proper plan of the ground floor, every room and doorway and window in its place, so the two of us could keep the world straight. Here it is:

There’s the still room, the parlor beside it, the kitchen across the way. That still room is where Theta reaches for the light.

Be luminous,

Ann