Backstory
Harriet Fairbourne was a vicar's wife in Dorset for eight years, which taught her to read a drawing room the way Cecily reads a specimen. She runs the Thornhill household with methodical warmth that makes it easy to mistake her for a supporting role: she plans the field seasons, pays the pressing-paper suppliers, decides which letters go out and which burn. She is also a working botanist trained alongside Cecily and keeps a herbarium that Cecily will freely admit is more organized than her own. Her Dorset heathland papers exist and have not been submitted; she has not yet decided under which name to submit them, or whether submitting them at all would change something about the partnership she has built. Her flaw is that her care for Cecily can slide into protection — handling things Cecily would have wanted to handle herself — and she has done it long enough that she does not always notice when it happens.
