No question about it, Edwina had grown her own, and it didn't stop at herbs for all occasions. However, at the moment, herbs were the subject under consideration.
Specifically: which one to take to fix Edwina's present malaise? It wasn't going to be an easy choice, not by a long shot. Peppermint tea was good for an upset tummy, though ginger was better, but valerian was calming and chamomile was the ticket if you were having trouble getting to sleep. Then again, green tea was rich in antioxidants, which were simply unsurpassed when it came to maintaining one's overall health, and ginseng was a marvelous source of all sorts of energy, while gingko biloba—
Edwina sighed and stared at the multicolored array of boxes in the little closet sacred to her tea things. It was built into the wall beside the fireplace in her office, though "office" wasn't quite the right word to describe the room Edwina used for transacting most of her business. "Office" conjured up visions of sleek, sterile twenty-first century furnishings, pricey pieces with surfaces made of wood, stainless steel, brushed aluminum, and name-brand plastics, garnished with a liberal sprinkling of high-tech trappings.
While Edwina did command enough bells-and-whistles machinery to satisfy even the nerdiest of technogeeks, she chose not to show them off. Discretion was her watchword, in both her personal life and her business dealings. It was enough for her to rejoice privately in the fact that she owned a very special kind of fax machine (to put it mildly); she didn't need to put it out on a marble pedestal so that visitors might ooh and ah over it in green-eyed envy.
Like so much else in her life—from technotoys to tea—the fax machine was tucked away, out of sight but never out of mind, in one of the many hidey-holes that riddled her