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A glasshouse is the best place in England to grow a rare and delicate thing. It's also the best place to lose one.

This week Cora and August visit Marle Court, a great house gone to seed, and the orchid collector who loved one white flower more than he ever loved his wife. There's a sealed stove house, a fumigation night, a door that wouldn't open — and a bloom that survived a night which killed its master, when nothing so fragile should have. Plus: why you open the vents in the morning, and the one witness who couldn't be moved out of the room in time.

The heat does half the work. Someone has to do the rest.

Twelve people ate the wild mushroom fricassee. Eleven of them were perfectly well in the morning.

This week we're out to supper in the village of Lower Bramwell, where the vicar's wife set the finest table for miles and kept the best mushrooms back, specially, for one particular guest. Cora and August pour a generous claret and explain why a well-fed table never watches its own plate — and how the one thing a woman couldn't say in her defence was the very thing she'd taught the whole Women's Institute. Plus: how to spot a death cap, and why feeling better is the worst sign there is.

You never really know what's in the fricassee.

The lady of the house keeps the key to the caddy. She measures the leaf. She makes the cup. And it would be terribly rude not to drink it.

We're staying in this week. Over the rain, Cora and August visit an Edwardian spa town and the fine house on the Crescent, where a delicate widow was only ever ill at home — and her devoted companion of twelve years bought rather a lot of flypapers for a woman with no flies. Plus: growing your own tisanes, the correct cup for an invalid, and the one small habit that hanged a very careful woman.

Arsenic hasn't a taste, you know. If anything, it's a touch sweet.

Mrs. Edeline Prewitt of Nether Codsall grew the finest foxgloves for nine miles. She also, over one otherwise lovely spring, fed her husband roughly forty of them.

In our very first turn round the border, Cora and August pour a first-flush Darjeeling and tell the story of a devoted widow, a disappointing man, a slow heart, and a silver rose bowl won four years running. Plus: why you should always wear gloves with your foxglove, the correct tea for a funeral, and how the loveliest garden in the village finally gave a poisoner away.

Braised right down. So it wouldn't taste of anything but supper.