Page 11 of Holly & Hemlock
“I’m allergic,” I tell him. It’s almost a joke.
He snorts, and I find myself enjoying making him laugh.
At the end of the path, where the trees part and the ground drops away toward the river, Lane stops. He looks at me, really looks, and I’m suddenly aware of the space between us—charged, uncertain, not altogether hostile.
“You’ll want to go back soon,” he says. “Storm coming.”
I look up at the sky. The cloud cover is thickening, bruised and convulsive. There’s the sharp tang of ozone in the air.
“Will it be bad?” I ask.
“First of winter’s always bad.” His eyes linger on my face, then shift to my hands, as if making sure the poisonous plant hadn’t eaten them away.
I nod, unsure what else to do. “See you around?”
He shrugs, but the corners of his mouth turn up, just slightly.
I walk for another fifteen minutes, meandering by the river, and back up a tree-lined path toward the house. I can almost feel his gaze on me the entire time, but acknowledge that’s impossible.
When I reach the vestibule, the lantern is dead. I close the door behind me and lean against it, letting the warmth seep back into my skin.
My hands don’t look any different, but I keep them balled tight in my pockets, just in case.
The second timeI see Lane, it’s not by accident. I’m not sure if that’s his doing or mine. After the encounter at the hemlock border, I retreat to the house and haunt its rooms in silence, moving from the parlor to the upper corridors and back again, always keeping an ear out for the sounds of the living. Instead, I find only the ticking of unseen clocks, the rattle of radiators, the muffled heartbeat of an old house in retreat.
I try the library, but the memory of Larkin—his green eyes, his precise, cunning wit—has rendered the space temporarily uninhabitable. I try the kitchen, but Mrs. Whitby is in conference with another woman, both of them bent over a ledger, their voices too low and secretive to risk interruption. I climb the stairs, pause outside a locked door that gives off a whiff of lavender and camphor, and find myself, inevitably, peering through the windows toward the garden.
The grounds are empty at first glance. But then I see the slow, deliberate movement at the far end of the terrace—Lane, stooping over a wooden wheelbarrow, loading it with what looks like a body bag, but is just a shroud of root balls and dead stalks. He lifts the barrow by its battered handles and trundles it toward a copse of skeletal hawthorns. The gesture is so unhurried, so essentially deliberate, that I can’t look away.
I hesitate at the threshold, then yank the door open and let the cold slap my face. Down the steps, over the same crusted gravel, boots biting at the ice. I tell myself I’m just curious, that I want to see the garden again in brighter daylight, but the truth is less noble. I want to see him.
Lane doesn’t look up until I’m almost on top of him. The barrow is already tipped, its cargo of rootstock laid out in a careful row along the edge of the path. He’s wearing the same work jacket as before, and his hair is longer than I remembered, stray strands curled behind his ears. His hands are bare, even in this cold.
“Morning,” he says, as if we’ve done this every day for years.
I nod, feeling strangely shy. “I thought you’d have moved on to something else by now.”
He grunts, straightening. “There’s always something left to do.” He gestures at the wheelbarrow, the roots, the half-excavated bed beside us.
I wait for him to return to his work, but instead he surprises me by speaking again.
“You want to see the real garden?”
I try for indifference, but it comes out as something closer to gratitude. “Lead the way.”
He moves ahead, not bothering to check if I follow. The paths are narrower here, the boxwood walls rising on either side like the railings of a green labyrinth. Lane navigates them with the confidence of a man who’s walked these lines for years. I hurry to keep pace, glancing at the shards of broken frost on the stones, the beads of meltwater clinging to every bare twig.
He pauses at a tangle of what I first take for brambles. On closer inspection, it’s a mass of thorn apple—datura, if I remember my university botany. The seed pods are desiccated and gray, their spikes turned inward like closed fists. Lane cups one in his palm, rolling it gently between his thumb and forefinger.
“Devil’s apple,” he says. “Toxic as hell, but beautiful whenit blooms.” He glances sideways. “That’s how most things grow here.”
I bend closer, careful not to touch. “Was this your idea?”
He laughs, the sound low and humorless. “Long before my time. They say Lord Harold planted the first one, for his wife. She put it in tea and nearly finished him.” He flicks the pod onto the path, where it bursts in a tiny star of powder. “Guess she didn’t use enough.”
There’s a rhythm to our walk: Lane points out a plant or a ruin, tells a story or a name, and I listen, letting his voice fill in the spaces the cold leaves behind. He knows every genus, every hybrid, every failed experiment and every survivor. The estate, in his mouth, becomes a legend of spite and hunger and inadvertent beauty.
At the center of the maze, we arrive at a clearing. Someone—Lane, almost certainly—has swept the leaves into rough, concentric circles, exposing the pattern of stones beneath. In the middle stands a bare magnolia, its branches scarred by wind and age but already swollen with emerging buds.Interesting.
