Page 89 of The Dravenhearst Brides
Margot wrinkled her nose in distaste.
Evangeline guided her forward. “I’ll give you a quick tour, shall I? Let’s start with my purple lovelies—larkspur, foxglove, my dearest poppies.” She pointed to each, tweaking the poppy with particular fondness. As her fingers drifted away, the flower heads bent, stalks twisting and stretching—unnaturally—toward Evangeline. As if she were the sun.
Margot’s eyes widened, but Evangeline just laughed.
“See how well they listen, sugar? We reap what we sow. Now see here, a small crop of hellebore. Just a smidge, plenty more down at Ruth’s cottage. Monkshood—careful not to brush up against that one. It’ll stop your heart. Oh, and of course, my Witches’ Bells. Beautiful, aren’t they?”
Margot leaned close to examine the tilted heads, heavy and dome-shaped.
Evangeline pointed. “The greens are the ones you have to watch for, easy to mistake for innocent. Poison ivy—leaves of three, let them be. Belladonna, also called deadly nightshade, identified by the star-shaped pattern of the crown.” She lifted a stalk, bending the five-pointed leaf toward Margot, a dark berry at its center. “A subtherapeutic ingestion causes hallucinations. A high dose is deadly.” She dropped it and moved on.
Margot backtracked, pointed. “Why isn’t the nightshade with your purples?”
“Clever girl. Because belladonna berries only turn this nice, bruising hue this time of year.” She smiled. “Now be a dear and pluck a few hellebore petals, will you? And then, right by the gate, there’s a bit of garlic from the summer harvest. Pull a few up for me.”
Margot hurried to do as instructed. Once finished, Evangeline met her at the gate, her own fingers filled with purple flora.
Monkshood, Margot suspected.
They traipsed back to the gardening shed, where a single hanging bulb illuminated the dim space. A moth beat against it, plinking softly. The shed smelled of cedar and thyme with just a hint of something more darkly pungent. Perhaps turpentine?
Evangeline busied herself with a mortar and pestle, grinding up the harvested hellebore. She peeled back the garlic next, plucked out a few rotted cloves, then tossed two bulbs into a water-filled Erlenmeyer flask.
“I always have garlic percolating,” she explained, grabbing another flask whose fluid was tinged yellow, two swollen garlic heads bobbing in situ. “We’ll use these today.”
It was fascinating to watch Evangeline, a mad scientist at work. Her wild gray hair shone silver beneath the dusky lightbulb. Her knobby fingers moved with precision, using pipettes to combine elements with accuracy. Four drops here, seven there. A single drop—that was of distilled monkshood. And all the while, Evangeline muttered softly under her breath.
“Is it a secret recipe?” Margot asked as they neared the end. Evangeline was bottling the finished solution now, oddly harmless looking. Near-translucent in its final form, just the barest tinge of yellow. Death disguised as innocence.
“Everything around here is a secret,” Evangeline replied, giving a closed-lip smile. “Haven’t you figured that out?”
Margot leaned in the doorway. “Will you share one with me?”
Her smile faltered at the edges. “Depends what you want to know.”
“Why don’t you ever go inside the manor?”
Evangeline’s smile disappeared. Her face darkened. “Because it’s a den of vipers in there, that’s why. A pit of pestilence. Rotting, moldering legacies will cling to you like feral ivy, if you let them.” She snorted. “Nothing natural, nothinggood,survives in that house. You need to be careful, Margot. That woman has claws like you’ve never seen.”
“What woman?”
“Babette.” Evangeline’s eyes narrowed.
“What did you think of her, when she was alive?”
Evangeline put the pesticide on her workbench. She made a great show of attaching an atomizer to the top of the glass bottle.
“She was the most beguiling witch I’ve ever seen,” she finally said. She knotted her hands around the neck of the bottle, staring through the smallwindow overlooking the manor. The glass was peppered with hairline fractures that rippled outward like spiderwebs.
“She could enchant a man with a single look. Women too. Babette didn’t discriminate…she could make anyone fall in love in a heartbeat. She had the kind of charm that can’t be bottled”—Evangeline shook her pesticide solution—“but was just as deadly. And she did it for her own amusement, the way a cat plays with a mouse before devouring it.” At this, she cut her eyes to Margot. “That kind of power without conscience…it’s lethal. She deserved what she got, in the end. You reap what you sow.” She rapped the bottle twice against her workbench, nodding. “That witch had it coming.”
“She killed herself,” Margot replied uneasily.
“Oh, sugar.” Evangeline’s eyes sparked, conspiratorial. “I’ve never believed that, not for one moment. That woman was far too conceited to kill herself.”
“Then what happened?”
“Eleanor’s ghost remains here because she’s grieving—yes, I know all about Eleanor,” she said, taking in Margot’s widening eyes. “She’s a danger to others because she’s a true threat to herself, consumed with heartache. Babette remains because she’s vengeful. She’s a danger to others because, even now, she enjoys breaking hearts. And she simply can’t bear the thought that someone broke hers. Broke it beyond repair when they stopped it from beating.”
