In 1875, Cassandra Beaumont lived in a city where every street was choked with soot and the sky was never truly blue. The relentless clang of trolley bells and the shouts of peddlers below her boarding house window made her long for quiet, for sunlight, for a patch of earth that remembered its own color.After her parents passed, Cassandra had worked her way through a queue of ever-dreary seamstress jobs, keeping her head down and her hands busy, but the money was never enough to buy her more than scraps of fabric or keep her from the landlord's frown.On the rare Sunday morning when she wandered past city gardens-tiny, fenced-in squares tucked between brick buildings-she would linger, fingers wrapped around the iron bars, watching little children chase butterflies among the weeds.She imagined herself one day tending a garden of her own, with everything bright and untamed: Golden sunflowers, red poppies, and white daisies growing together without anyone telling them not to. Her longing was so fierce it made her ribs ache.
