Just realised – the water pipes. For water coming in. The kitchen, the downstairs bathroom, the one up here. All with those wooden pipes that look like tendrils or tree-roots. Three of them. Three places.

That recipe or magic-spell or whatever it was in that viner-codex book in the kitchen – about a ‘pumpe for a single household’. She’d written ‘three’ for the bit about ‘number for the hydra’. Three. Three snakes. Three water-pipes?

There’s no well here. No mains water-supply. And the water was barely flowing at all down there in the kitchen, in the existing pipe.

So is that what she was doing? The water-system was getting old, so she was planning to replace it, by growing a new one?

My god. The plumbers would go crazy if they heard about that…